More municipalities are trading out observation of Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples Day on the second Monday of October.
The Daily Beast reports that “business in the entire state of Alaska, however, will be closed for Indigenous Peoples Day, after Gov. Bill Walker renamed the holiday last year. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will also celebrate its first Indigenous Peoples’ Day, after the City Council voted unanimously in June to change the name of a holiday whose namesake, they decided, was not worthy of celebrating.”
Berkeley, California has been honoring those native populations since 1992, when the city celebrated its first Indigenous Peoples Day. Seattle has celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day since 2014, the same year that Minneapolis decided to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day (there is, as the New York Times noted last year, some disagreement about whether and where an apostrophe belongs in the renamed holiday).
As of last year, the second Monday of October in Portland and Albuquerque is known as Indigenous Peoples Day, and as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the cities of Carrboro, North Carolina and San Fernando, California. Brown University, which had called the holiday Fall Weekend since 2009, will celebrate its first Indigenous People’s Day this year.