Though the first Indigenous Peoples’ Day was celebrated in the early 1990s, the idea took shape many years earlier. According to the book’s curator John Curl, the first seeds of the idea to commemorate the histories and cultures of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas in lieu of Columbus Day were planted in 1977, in Geneva, at the first International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas. The conference included “the first, the widest and most united representation of indigenous nations” in modern history, Curl writes. By the conclusion of the conference, a list of recommendations were drafted, outlining a course of action to support indigenous peoples right to self-determination. And there in Article 1 of the Geneva Resolution was the foremost contention of the conference: a rebuttal to the doctrine of discovery. The conference attendees stated their intention “to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.”
Yet the idea remained dormant for years. Then, in 1984, President Reagan appointed the U.S. Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission “to plan, encourage, coordinate, and conduct the commemoration of the voyages of Christopher Columbus.” Reagan’s uncritical acceptance of the discovery narrative was clearly demonstrated two years later in his Columbus Day Proclamation when he stated, “This great explorer won a place in history and in the hearts of all Americans because he challenged the unknown and thereby found a New World.”
As Reagan’s romanticism of the 1492 event suggest, the Columbus Quincentennial was to be an international jubilee. Spain agreed to create replicas of Columbus’ three ships and sail them to Miami, to arrive in February 1992. The ships would set anchor in various cities along the east coast and arrive in the Boston Harbor in August, after which barges would tow them to Panama and then up the west coast.
It was amid that planning that the first Continental Conference on Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Resistance was held in 1990 in Quito, Ecuador. Curl notes that the representatives at the conference were unambiguous in their opposition to the forthcoming event. “[We affirm] our emphatic rejection of the Quincentennial celebration,” they wrote in the Quito Declaration, “and the firm promise that we will turn that date into an occasion to strengthen our process of continental unity and struggle towards our liberation.”
The following year the All-Natives Conference held at D-Q University in Davis, Calif., the first tribal college in the U.S., and the All Peoples Network Conference at Laney College in Oakland, Calif., led to the creation of the Resistance 500 Coalition, which organized the first Indigenous Peoples Day on Oct. 10, 1992.