International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is celebrated annually on August 9. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a holiday that celebrates and honors Native American peoples and commemorates their histories and cultures. We honor and respect the heritage and the many cultural and economic contributions of our American Indian tribes and people.
What does it mean to be an Indigenous person?
Indigenous peoples are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live.
Does Indigenous mean Native American?
Indigenous itself means the original inhabitants of a given land or region. Indigenous peoples of America have the same general meaning as Native Americans, but many prefer this term’s inclusivity. The term Indigenous clarifies that they occupied the land first, without assigning the American nationality.
Native Americans (as defined by the United States Census) are Indigenous tribes originally from the contiguous United States, along with Alaska Natives. Indigenous peoples of the United States who are not American Indian or Alaska Native include Native Hawaiians, Samoans, and Chamorros.
Below are a few of the contributions made by Indigenous peoples to today’s society as we know it:
ECOLOGY: People of today have just begun to think about this. Indigenous peoples have always had a deep respect for the land. There was a love of every form of life. Indigenous peoples did not kill anything they could not use. They never killed an animal or a fish for the sport of it. Fishing and hunting were a way to survive. Indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature and did not abuse the natural world, and were ecologists long before this term was ever used.
FOODS: Indigenous peoples learned how to successfully grow food across our Nation’s landscape, carving the pathway to modern-day farming. Many Americans today may not have considered that a wide variety of the foods they eat every day first came from Indigenous peoples: potatoes, beans, corn, peanuts, pumpkins, tomatoes, squash, peppers, nuts, melons, and sunflower seeds. They also helped the European settlers survive in the New World by sharing their farming methods with them.
GAMES: Many of the games we play today are derived from Indigenous peoples’ cultures. Canoeing, snowshoeing, tobogganing, lacrosse, relay races, tugs-of-war, and ball games are just a few of the games early Indigenous peoples played and still enjoy today. Many youth groups such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Campfire and YMCA Guides have programs based mainly on Indigenous peoples’ crafts and lore.
GOVERNMENT: The idea for the U.S. government was modeled by Indigenous peoples. Benjamin Franklin said that the concept of the federal government, in which certain powers are given to a central government and all other powers are reserved for the states, was borrowed from the system of government used by the Iroquoian League of Nations.
The International Day observance will take place online on Tuesday, 9 August 2022 from 9:00 am to 11:00 am Eastern Standard Time (EST). This year’s theme is The Role of Indigenous Women in the Preservation and Transmission of Traditional Knowledge