Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day Is a Step Toward Climate Justice

For Indigenous people, climate change is an existential crisis

Young activists protest the approval of permits to build the Dakota Access Pipeline on the steps of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. on August 26, 2016. Photo: Pacific Press/Getty Images

Today marks Columbus Day in most places in the United States, but a growing number of states (eight, plus D.C.) are choosing to officially recognize it as Indigenous Peoples Day instead. First proposed in 1977, the holiday is meant to honor the histories and cultures of Indigenous people across the Americas and act as a counter-celebration to Columbus Day, which critics say glorifies Europeans’ violent colonization of the Western hemisphere.

Indigenous Peoples Day is especially meaningful this year, not only because of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matters protests, which have laid bare the unequal treatment of people of color in the United States, but also because the climate crisis — and the racist policies that drive it — has reached new and terrifying heights.

As wildfires raze California and sea ice dwindles, the role of humans in climate change becomes impossible to ignore. Yet, as writer Jenni Monet points out in Indigenously today, new oil and gas projects continue to pop up in the United States — smack in the middle of Indigenous land.

Remi Bald Eagle, a Cheyenne River Sioux politician, is throwing his hat in the ring for a seat…