Indigenous and Colonial Memory

🇺🇸How does United States mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory? · Columbus Day

Columbus Day is written into the list of legal public holidays at 5 U.S.C. 6103: "Columbus Day, the second Monday in October," alongside New Year's Day, the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was fixed to 12 October until the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 (Public Law 90–363) shifted it to a Monday. A second statute, 36 U.S.C. 107, *requests* that the President issue a proclamation each year designating the day, calling on government officials to fly the flag on all government buildings, and inviting Americans to observe it in schools and churches "with appropriate ceremonies that express the public sentiment befitting the anniversary of the discovery of America." That phrase — the discovery of America — survives from the Act of 30 April 1934 and is still in the code today. The request has been honoured without a break: the most recent Columbus Day proclamation in the Federal Register was signed on 9 October 2025.

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🇺🇸How does United States mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory? · Indigenous Peoples' Day

Indigenous Peoples' Day has no federal statutory existence. Section 6103 has never been amended, and the renaming bills introduced in successive Congresses have never passed. The day grew upward from the states instead. South Dakota legislated first, in 1990: SDCL 1-5-1.2 makes the second Monday in October a legal holiday "to be known as Native Americans' Day," dedicated to the remembrance of the great Native American leaders who contributed so much to the history of the state — and Columbus Day accordingly does not appear anywhere in that state's list of holidays. Maine passed Public Law 59 in 2019, a bill titled *An Act To Change the Name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day*, striking the words out clause by clause; 4 M.R.S. §1051 now reads "Indigenous Peoples Day, the 2nd Monday in October," and no court may sit that day. Alabama keeps both and adds a third: its official state holiday list gives the second Monday in October as "Columbus Day & Fraternal Day & American Indian Heritage Day" — one day, three names, on one line. At the White House the day lasted four years: the Federal Register holds exactly four Indigenous Peoples' Day proclamations, for 2021 through 2024, and each one was signed on the same day as that year's Columbus Day proclamation.

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sdlegislature.gov ↗legislature.maine.gov ↗

🇮🇳How does India mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory?जनजातीय गौरव दिवस

India tied its day to one man. In 2021, during the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav marking seventy-five years of independence, the government declared 15 November Janjatiya Gaurav Divas, the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, whose Ulgulan — the Revolution — was an armed rising against colonial rule, part of a history of Santhal, Tamar, Kol, Bhil, Khasi and Mizo revolts that mainstream accounts long passed over. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs runs it as a policy date rather than a ceremony: the Bhagwan Birsa Munda Memorial Park cum Freedom Fighter Museum opened at Ranchi on the day in 2021, PM-JANMAN for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups was launched at Khunti in Jharkhand on the day in 2023, and 2024 marked the 150th birth anniversary, with Tribal Freedom Fighters' Museums opened across states where tribal communities resisted British rule. For scale: the 2011 census counted a Scheduled Tribe population of 10.42 crore, 8.6 per cent of the country, spread across more than 705 distinct groups.

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🇧🇷How does Brazil mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory?Dia dos Povos Indígenas

Brazil changed the name of this day in 2022. Law 14.402 of 8 July 2022 established 19 April as the Dia dos Povos Indígenas and repealed Decree-Law 5.540 of 2 June 1943, which had created the Dia do Índio — a singular, imported term inherited from colonial vocabulary, replaced by the plural "indigenous peoples." The law reached the statute book the hard way: the President returned it with a full veto, Message 270 of 2022, Congress overrode the veto, and the text was promulgated under Article 66, paragraph 5 of the Constitution and published in a special edition of the official gazette the same day. It is not a holiday. The federal calendar of national holidays and discretionary days off for 2026, set by Ordinance MGI 11.460 of 29 December 2025, does not contain 19 April at all; it contains 21 April, Tiradentes. On that same list, 20 November — the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness — is a full national holiday. Two days of memory, one with leave attached and one without. The agency responsible was renamed too, and is now the Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas.

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🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory? · 原住民族抵抗日

Indigenous Resistance Day only entered Taiwanese law in 2025. Until then the country's commemorative days and holidays rested on an eight-article regulation issued by the Ministry of the Interior, which nonetheless bound every public and private body, school and association in the country; a Legislative Yuan research paper called its legal rank too low for what it did and recommended raising it to a statute. The Act on the Implementation of Commemorative Days and Holidays, promulgated by presidential order on 28 May 2025 in ten articles, writes "Indigenous Resistance Day: 26 June" into Article 3, subparagraph 8. The same article also carries Ethnic Equality Memorial Day on 21 March and Indigenous Peoples' Day on 1 August — three related commemorations in one statute, none of them a day off. What that legislation did change was the ritual leave: indigenous annual rituals went from one day to three.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗ly.gov.tw ↗

🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Indigenous and Colonial Memory? · 原住民族日

In Taiwan the day is a commemoration, not a holiday. Article 3 of the Act on the Implementation of Commemorative Days and Holidays sets 1 August as Indigenous Peoples' Day, but Article 4 limits paid commemorative days to six — Founding Day, Peace Memorial Day, Confucius' Birthday, National Day, Retrocession and Guningtou Victory Day, and Constitution Day — and closes with the sentence "all others are not days off." The date points at a constitutional amendment: on 1 August 1994 the additional articles of the Constitution replaced *shanbao*, "mountain compatriots," a term used for over forty years, with *yuanzhumin*, original inhabitants; the fourth round of amendments in 1997 added the collective form, indigenous peoples. The Executive Yuan fixed the date as Indigenous Peoples' Day when it approved the draft act in 2005, and on 1 August 2016 the President apologised to the indigenous peoples as head of state. The actual leave sits elsewhere. Article 5 of the same act lists indigenous annual rituals among the folk festivals, with dates announced by the Council of Indigenous Peoples after consulting each people's customs and its communities, and Article 6 gives anyone with registered indigenous status three days off chosen according to their own people's calendar — the only leave in Taiwan set by ethnicity and available only to those who hold that status. The Council currently recognises sixteen peoples.

law.moj.gov.tw ↗ey.gov.tw ↗

🇨🇳Does China have Indigenous and Colonial Memory?

China has no official category of "indigenous peoples"; the institution sits elsewhere. The Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy (passed by the Sixth National People's Congress in 1984, amended in 2001) opens its preamble with the sentence "The People's Republic of China is a unitary multi-ethnic state built jointly by the people of all its ethnic groups", and then makes regional ethnic autonomy "a basic political system of the state": autonomous organs exercising powers of self-government in areas where minority nationalities live in compact communities. What corresponds to a commemorative day is not a date but a system of citations. The State Ethnic Affairs Commission's own explanatory note traces it to the "ethnic unity month" campaigns of the 1950s; the State Council convened the first national conference to honour ethnic unity and progress in 1988, and again in 1994, 1999 and 2005, and State Council Order No. 435 turned "carrying out activities that promote ethnic unity and progress, and honouring the units and individuals that make outstanding contributions" into a legal duty of governments at every level. On Taiwan's indigenous peoples, the Commission's page is explicit: "For the minority nationality of Taiwan, our government uses Gaoshan as the official ethnonym, while the Taiwan authorities call them yuanzhumin." The same population, two official names — and in Taiwan the Council of Indigenous Peoples currently recognises sixteen separate peoples.

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🇮🇩Does Indonesia have Indigenous and Colonial Memory?

Indonesia wrote recognition into its constitution but not into its calendar — and not yet into a statute. Article 18B(2) of the 1945 Constitution, from the Second Amendment passed in August 2000, says the state recognises and respects units of adat law community (masyarakat hukum adat) and their traditional rights, so long as they remain alive and are consistent with social development and the principles of the unitary republic, "as regulated by law". The trouble is that last clause: the law meant to implement it has never been passed. The Bill on Adat Law Communities has been on the House's 2024–2029 national legislative programme, and on 11 October 2024 demonstrators stood outside the parliamentary complex demanding it be enacted; it is still waiting. Recognition therefore happens piecemeal, through ministries and localities. The Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries works under Law 27 of 2007 — amended by Law 1 of 2014, which standardised the term to masyarakat hukum adat — and in five years formally recognised and protected twenty-two adat law communities in coastal and small-island areas; Law 31 of 2004 on fisheries already required fisheries management to take account of adat law and local wisdom. Recognitions are issued one at a time. A national day for it does not exist.

kkp.go.id ↗jdih.dpr.go.id ↗

🇯🇵Does Japan have Indigenous and Colonial Memory?

Japan recognised an indigenous people and never gave it a date. On 6 June 2008 both houses of the Diet unanimously adopted the Resolution Calling for the Ainu to be Recognised as an Indigenous People (169th Diet, Resolution No. 1). The text gives its reasons: the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples had been adopted the previous September with Japan voting in favour, the G8 summit that July was to be held in Hokkaido, "the land where the Ainu people were first settled", and the historical fact that during the country's modernisation many Ainu, legally equal citizens, were discriminated against and driven into poverty had to be faced squarely. The 2019 Act on Promoting Measures for the Realisation of a Society in Which the Pride of the Ainu People is Respected (Act No. 16 of 2019, promulgated 26 April) states in Article 1 that the Ainu are "the indigenous people of the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, particularly Hokkaido", and Article 4 forbids anyone from discriminating against them on the ground of being Ainu. The same act creates the Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony at Shiraoi in Hokkaido — a national centre containing the National Ainu Museum, entrusted by the ministers of land and of education to a designated corporation — and lets municipalities draw up local Ainu policy plans for the Prime Minister to certify. A resolution, a statute, a national institution, a budget and a planning mechanism: everything except a day.

shugiin.go.jp ↗sangiin.go.jp ↗