Happy Indigenous People’s Day! Today, we celebrate as resistance.
We have much to resist: Brett Kavanaugh, a white man and attempted rapist who has a track record of gutting indigenous rights, environmental protections, and voting rights for people of color, was recently sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice [1]. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican to not vote yes on his confirmation, comes from a state with the highest number of reported rapes in the U.S., where just last month a white man was given a free pass after pleading guilty to kidnapping, strangling, and sexually assaulting a Native Alaskan woman [2]. And Columbus Day is still a federally recognized holiday that honors another white man who did not “discover” America and whose atrocious legacy instead includes colonization, enslaving, raping, and killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people (namely the Taíno) and initiating the African slave trade [3, 4].
We have even more to celebrate. This 9th installment of our #UnlearningWithCoFED series is about Indigenous People’s Day — a holiday that honors Indigenous peoples and cultures and was created to replace Columbus Day.
