Books on my TBR for Indigenous People’s Day  

Indigenous People’s Day was created as a counter-celebration to Columbus Day. However, it “should not be observed on the day meant to recognize Columbus. He raped, stole from and murdered Indigenous people. Having colonized people share a day of remembrance with their colonizer is nonsensical; all are forced to share a day with someone who incited torture and sickness upon their ancestors” (El Paisano).

Timeline and Origin

1977: The idea is first proposed at the International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas held in Geneva, Switzerland, under the auspices of the United Nations.

1990: South Dakota becomes the first U.S. state to officially celebrate the day, designating it as “Native Americans’ Day” and observing it in place of Columbus Day.

1992: Berkeley, California, becomes the first city to officially replace Columbus Day with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

1994: The United Nations separately establishes International Indigenous Peoples’ Day on August 9th to honor global indigenous groups.

2021: President Joe Biden issues the first-ever presidential proclamation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, officially recognizing it at the federal level on the same date as Columbus Day.

Present: Numerous states, tribal nations, school districts, and cities across the United States observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day either in place of or alongside Columbus Day.

(Resources: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; History.com; NPR)

1. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard

In this book, historian David E. Stannard argues that the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus’s fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. Sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate (Synopsis borrowed from Goodreads).

2. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus, he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe (Synopsis borrowed from Goodreads).

This book was banned by military dictatorships in Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Argentina during the 1970s.

3. Los mitos que nos dieron traumas (The Myths That Traumatized Us) por Juan Miguel Zunzunegui

Zunzunegui is a Mexican author who reinterprets the “official” history of Mexico taught in schools and questions the foundational myths of the country. These myths include: 1) the myth of our indigenous past and idealized vision of a Pre-Columbian Mexico; 2) the Spanish Conquest; 3) the myth of the War of Independence and 4) the myth of the Mexican Revolution. The history of Mexico has been interpreted, the author says, as the history of the defeated; of the victim, and we need to change our worldview in order to get past our afflictions and tendency to blame others for those afflictions.