What Is Indigenous Peoples’ Day?

Indigenous Peoples' Day celebrates the history and contributions of Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples. In 2025, the holiday falls on Monday, October 13.

While Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not an official federal holiday, more than a dozen states observe it in place of or in addition to Columbus Day. Dozens of cities and school systems also observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

There has been some effort to formally designate Indigenous Peoples’ Day a federal holiday. “Our country has long failed to recognize and acknowledge its dark history of erasure and harm brought upon the first inhabitants of the Americas,” said California Congresswoman Norma Torres in a 2023 statement. “By designating Indigenous Peoples’ Day a federal holiday, we take a small but important step toward recognizing the injustices in our nation’s history and uplifting the vibrant traditions, history, and culture of all Indigenous communities—an integral part of the cultural fabric of the United States.”

In 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to officially recognize Indigenous Peoples Day on the same date as Columbus Day. As of 2025, 17 states and Washington, D.C. commemorate Indigenous people on the second Monday of October. Included in those tallies are the several states that recognize both Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day.

Among the states where Indigenous Peoples Day is observed or honored are Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, Iowa, North Carolina, California, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Virginia, Oregon, Hawaii, Texas, as well as South Dakota, which celebrates Native Americans’ Day, and Alabama, which celebrates American Indian Heritage Day. Washington, D.C., also recognizes the holiday.

In 2025, President Donald Trump pushed to refocus the holiday on Christopher Columbus when he signed a proclamation declaring the holiday to be Columbus Day to honor the 15th-century explorer's "extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue."

Activists have long argued that holidays, statues and other memorials to Columbus sanitize his actions—which include the enslavement of Native Americans—while giving him credit for “discovering” a place where communities had lived for thousands of years.

“Columbus Day is not just a holiday; it represents the violent history of colonization in the Western hemisphere,” says Leo Killsback, associate professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University. For Indigenous peoples, that traumatic history played out over centuries.

Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, in part because of efforts by Roman Catholic Italian Americans. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, members of the stigmatized ethnic and religious group successfully campaigned to establish a Columbus Day in order to place Catholic Italians, like Christopher Columbus, into American history. In doing so, they edged out people of Anglo-Saxon descent who wanted a federal holiday honoring Leif Erikson as the first European to reach the Americas.

Killsback argues that the question of which European got here “first” is beside the point. “Indigenous Peoples' Day represents a much more honest and fair representation of American values,” writes Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation in southeastern Montana.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day also offers schools an opportunity to highlight Native American history. In a 2015 op-ed, Shannon Speed, director of the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Chickasaw tribal citizen, wrote that “virtually none of my university students has had any education whatsoever in the history of this country’s treatment of the 10 million or so people who lived here before Europeans arrived.”

In her column, Speed wrote of her students’ common belief in the “vanishing Indian,” a term meaning that her students often think of Native Americans as people who lived in the past rather than living people who continue to practice their cultures today.