NAIDOC Week Shows What Indigenous Peoples’ Day Could Be

Every October, the United States drags Native people back into the same argument over whether the country is willing to tell the truth about itself.

Columbus Day remains a federal holiday, even though the story attached to it depends on erasure. Columbus didn’t “discover” lands already home to Indigenous peoples, nations, governments, trade networks, languages, ceremonies, and cultures. He never set foot on what is now the United States. His voyages reached the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America, while the lands now claimed by the U.S. were already known, held, and governed by Native peoples.

The fight for Indigenous Peoples’ Day isn’t about trading one holiday name for another. It’s about rejecting a myth that celebrates genocide and creates a false beginning for what would become U.S. history. Indigenous Peoples’ Day tells a truer story about survival, sovereignty, resistance, and the peoples of these lands who were never lost, therefore never discovered.

Some cities and states have already made the change to recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day officially. Others recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day alongside Columbus Day. According to Pew Research Center, 17 states and Washington, D.C., had holidays honoring Native Americans or Indigenous peoples on the second Monday in October as of 2025.

Federal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is inconsistent and depends on the POTUS and the administration in power. President Joe Biden issued proclamations for Indigenous Peoples’ Day throughout his presidency. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump refused to acknowledge Indigenous Peoples’ Day and issued a 2025 Columbus Day proclamation, praising Columbus as an “American hero” and directing federal observance of Columbus Day on October 13, 2025.

Australia offers a different model that shows what Indigenous Peoples’ Day could become. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have NAIDOC Week, a national week of celebration, education, organizing, art, ceremony, and public recognition held during the first week of July. In 2026, NAIDOC Week runs from July 5 to July 12 under the theme “50 Years of Deadly.”

“Deadly” is a term of praise in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and Native people in the United States use it in much the same way. It means excellent, powerful, beautiful, and worthy of respect.

While Indigenous Peoples’ Day is still treated as divisive and subject to political mood swings, NAIDOC Week shows what can be gained through the collective reconciliation and acknowledgment of our histories and achievements. After all, both movements began as refusals to celebrate colonization and accept the erasure and whitewashing of our existence and histories.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day traces part of its history to 1977, when Indigenous delegates at a United Nations conference in Geneva proposed replacing Columbus Day with a day honoring Indigenous peoples of the Americas. South Dakota became the first state to replace Columbus Day with Native Americans’ Day as part of its 1990 Year of Reconciliation. Berkeley, California, formally adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992 during the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, turning the quincentennial into a protest against the myth of discovery.

NAIDOC began from the same kind of refusal, only decades earlier. Its history reaches back to Aboriginal rights organizing in the 1920s and the 1938 Day of Mourning, when Aboriginal protestors marched through Sydney on Australia Day and held one of the first major civil rights gatherings in the world. While white Australia celebrated 150 years of British colonization, Aboriginal leaders gathered to demand rights, citizenship, and recognition.

The protest became an annual observance. From 1940 to 1955, it was held on the Sunday before Australia Day as Aborigines Day. In 1955, it was moved to July to distance itself from the celebration of British colonization and to shift focus from a day of mourning to one of celebration and recognition of Indigenous excellence. In 1974, the organizing committee became entirely Aboriginal, and in 1975, the observance expanded into a full week. In 1991, it expanded again to recognize Torres Strait Islander peoples and became NAIDOC, the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.

NAIDOC Week has national infrastructure behind it. The National NAIDOC Committee selects the annual theme, and the NAIDOC Poster Competition brings work from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists across the country. The National NAIDOC Awards recognize Indigenous Elders, artists, youth, athletes, educators, organizers, and community leaders for their achievements.

This year’s official NAIDOC poster, “Paralpi,” was created by Zaachariaha Fielding, a Yankunytjatjara artist and musician from the APY Lands in South Australia, widely known as part of Electric Fields. The 2026 National NAIDOC Lifetime Achievement Award is posthumously awarded to Rhoda Roberts AO, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman from Bundjalung Country whose work changed how First Nations stories reach Australian stages and screens. The 2026 National NAIDOC Awards and 50-Year Celebration will be held in Mparntwe, also known as Alice Springs, on August 15.

NAIDOC didn’t appear out of nowhere or grow to what it has become because a government suddenly decided to support Indigenous peoples. It was built through protest, through communities showing up year after year to fight for it, to educate, and to build solidarity. For those of us in the U.S., we’re still just at the beginning of that fight, and the change that NAIDOC shows is possible and inevitable.

NAIDOC isn’t perfect, and Australia still has a long way to go in reconciling with its brutal history of colonialism. A week of recognition and celebration isn’t, and shouldn’t be, conflated with reparation. It does, however, show what sustained Indigenous-led observance can look like when it is not confined to a single symbolic day.

As we show solidarity across the ocean as NAIDOC is currently in full swing, we’re paying close attention because our struggles and victories as Indigenous Peoples globally are inextricably intertwined.

Different lands, different peoples, but our struggles are all too familiar.

And as familiar as those struggles are, so are our resiliency and heart.

Just as NAIDOC continues to grow, so will the reach of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.