History — Noozify Original — October 12, 2026

Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day: One Monday, Two Holidays

By Adam Canissario

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The federal government and a good part of the country are observing two different holidays today. On October 7th, President Trump proclaimed October 12, 2026, as Columbus Day, calling the explorer "one of history's greatest heroes" and promising that his legacy would never be "erased by radical extremists." The proclamation does not mention Indigenous people. In March, a replica of the Columbus statue that protesters pulled down in Baltimore in 2020 and threw into the Inner Harbor was installed on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 17 states, the District of Columbia, and more than 200 cities and towns mark the same Monday as Indigenous Peoples' Day, by the count in a Senate resolution introduced last month. The split looks like a product of the last few years. It is much older than that, and so is the politics behind it.

Columbus reached the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, and the first American celebration of the date came three centuries later, when New York's Columbian Order, better known as Tammany Hall, marked the 300th anniversary in 1792. Through the 19th century the day belonged mostly to Italian American and Catholic communities, who held parades in Columbus's honor. What turned it into a national holiday was a lynching. In October 1890, New Orleans' police chief, David Hennessy, was shot dead, allegedly over a feud between two Italian families, the Matrangas and the Provenzanos, over the work of unloading ships at the city's docks. Local newspapers blamed the Mafia, though a federal investigation found no evidence tying the men to a Sicilian secret society. On March 14, 1891, after a jury failed to convict Italian immigrants accused of the murder, a mob stormed the parish prison and killed 11 men, some of whom had never been tried. Italy broke off diplomatic relations and recalled its ambassador, and the next spring the Harrison administration agreed to pay a $25,000 indemnity. With Italian American communities already planning the 400th anniversary, and a rematch against Grover Cleveland coming that fall, Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a one-time national holiday on July 21, 1892. It fell on October 21, 1892, the landing date converted to the modern calendar, and Harrison asked that schools be "the center of the day's demonstration." The program printed for those school ceremonies is what first gave wide publicity to Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance.

The Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal order, spent the following decades lobbying for a permanent holiday. In April 1934 Congress asked the president to designate October 12th each year as Columbus Day, and Franklin Roosevelt did so in a proclamation that September. The holiday took its current shape when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved it to the second Monday in October, beginning in 1971.

The alternative grew out of the same anniversary arithmetic. With the 500th anniversary approaching, the First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance, held in Quito, Ecuador, in 1990, inspired Native American groups in Northern California to propose a counter-holiday, and South Dakota began observing Native American Day that same year. In Berkeley, a coalition called Resistance 500 formed to oppose a planned quincentenary jubilee, and the city council voted to replace Columbus Day outright, holding the first official Indigenous Peoples' Day on October 12, 1992. "We tried to turn it into something different, something positive," the organizer John Curl later said.

For two decades the idea spread slowly. Then it took off. Minneapolis adopted it in 2014, and Seattle's council followed unanimously that fall. Maine, New Mexico, and Vermont replaced Columbus Day in 2019. In 2021 Joe Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples' Day, and in a separate Columbus Day proclamation the same day he acknowledged "the painful history of wrongs and atrocities" that European explorers had inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities.

What never changed was the law. Columbus Day has been a federal holiday by statute since 1968, and no president can rename it. Biden added a second proclamation rather than replacing the first, and Trump has gone back to one. His 2025 proclamation called Columbus "a true American hero" and, like this year's, made no mention of Indigenous Peoples' Day.

The states have gone their own way. By the Pew Research Center's count, six states give a paid holiday for both observances, four (Maine, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Vermont) give a paid holiday only for the Indigenous one, and seven recognize it without a day off. The Senate resolution, introduced on September 24th by Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico with 14 cosponsors, supports making Indigenous Peoples' Day an official federal holiday. It is nonbinding, and it was referred to the Committee on Indian Affairs.

Harrison's holiday was meant to tell one group of Americans that they belonged, months after a mob had told them otherwise. A hundred and thirty-four years later, the second Monday in October is still an argument about belonging, and which name is on the calendar depends mostly on which state you live in.