Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Native history of Geneseo
On Oct. 8, 2021, Joe Biden, President of the United States, became the first President in history to acknowledge and recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day in substitution for the day that had been previously known solely as Columbus Day. The original movement to enact the substitution dates back to 1977. This was done through a proclamation put out by the White House affirming the pivotal role Natives have played in the modern-day, with references to the high percentages of work in public service fields along with contributions to the arts, as well the vital importance of observing the land that Americans live on which belonged to the Natives’ ancestors long before any other person stood on this country’s soil.
Some might wonder as to why Indigenous Peoples’ Day is thought appropriate to replace the aforementioned holiday that had previously been celebrated on that second Monday in October, and why 130 cities followed President Biden’s suite in just a year after the proclamation was announced. Native Americans and Native lesions/representatives played a large role in drafting the proclamation alongside the Biden administration and state how they hope this small step can help to alter the whitewashed narrative surrounding the actions of Christopher Columbus and the history surrounding the founding of the United States of America, and use it to showcase the ways in which the mass genocide through violence and disease as well as assimilation efforts did extreme violence physically, mentally, culturally, linguistically, and spiritually to Indigenous populations.
It has been nearly two years since the original proclamation's publication, but still Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not widely recognized as a federal holiday like its counterpart, Columbus Day, is. This fact detracts from the symbolic and progressive desires of the movement away from Columbus Day and with all the controversies and legislation being put in front of a variety of governmental bodies on the state and federal level to try and prevent public education spaces from changing the way we as a country teach U.S History and how we can acknowledge certain identities or hard truths in the classroom sphere, it only feels appropriate to provide some history pertaining to the Indigenous roots of the Geneseo and Livingston County areas.
Through archeological discoveries made in the surrounding area, it is largely accepted that one of the first people to explore the soil of Livingston County was alive nearly 11,000 years ago, realized through the discovery of stone spear tips and the bones of a mastodon. Though, this region, as well as New York as a whole, would become notable for the Iroquois tribes that settled in the area and established one of the first treaties on record in the United States in order to create the Iroquois Confederacy, which included five major tribes that serve as the names for the five Finger Lakes landmark that the Upstate New York region is known for, though in the 1700s there was a sixth tribe added to the Confederacy that is lesser acknowledged, the Tuscarora.
Western New York, and the Livingston County area, was largely settled originally by the Seneca Nation and the very ground of Geneseo itself served as a central pillar in their settlements and was the home to a variety of historical occurrences that would change the configuration of Native land and establish the reservation we see in the United States in the modern-day with the Big Tree Treaty of 1797 having been signed on the land that SUNY Geneseo is built upon. This makes the land of this campus integral to the current state of Native American affairs symbolic and important in ways we could hardly comprehend as we pant our way up Cardiac Hill.
So, we here at The Lamron would just like to attribute a land acknowledgement for the land in which the college benefitted from. It exists due to the efforts against the rights inherent to all peoples that were stripped away from the Native people in favor of possession. We are receiving an education on top of land that was originally attributed to what is now known as the Seneca Nation of Indians and the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, who are now confined to living on eleven different reservations that are spread all throughout the Western New York region.