The Week Ahead: The first frontier

Alaska leads the U.S. in celebrating North America’s first inhabitants, rather than the arrival of a European in 1492.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day has, in one form or other, been held in an official manner in the United States since 1989, when South Dakota moved to establish a day for recognizing the first residents of what many Native groups prefer to call Turtle Island. Held concurrently with Columbus Day, this year on October 8, or replacing it entirely, the day is a counterpoint to celebrations of the arrival in North America of Europeans, millennia after the first inhabitants arrived.