Although Indigenous People’s Day (IPD) fell on Oct. 14 this year, SPA held their IPD assembly with speakers Jennifer White and Juleana Enright on Oct. 22 and ran an advisory debrief on Oct. 23 to help lead into Native American Heritage Month in November.

To sophomore Stella Hunter, Indigenous People’s Day matters because: “It’s really important in normalizing Native people and educating more people about Native peoples,” Hunter said.

Hunter’s mother is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota (Lake Traverse Reservation) and Tlingit (Southeast Alaskan Native); her dad is Ojibwe (White Earth Reservation) and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska).

Hunter hoped that the Intercultural Club would have more history about Indigenous people in their assembly. Still, she said they do a pretty good job for not “necessarily being of Native history themselves.”

Talking about the history of IPD, Hunter said, “The change From Columbus Day to IPD is still pretty recent, and a lot of people still think of it as Columbus Day… thinking that Columbus ‘discovered’ America is not a good thing.”

Senior Deling Chen, a leader of SPA’s intercultural club, said that in addition to putting up IPD posters all around the school, the intercultural club put information out in assemblies and newsletters to give people updates. This was SPA’s fourth IPD assembly, and Chen described why the Intercultural Club is taking the holiday seriously. “SPA has been around for centuries and we don’t want it to seem like we’re just tokenizing the Indigenous experience; just doing IPD to check something off the box, but [we] actually engage and support and appreciate native culture,” she said.

In addition to bringing in Jennifer White, an Arikara Native American painter who has created a gallery of both Native and non-Native pieces, and Juleana Enright, a Lower Brule Lakota curator and theater artist, the Intercultural Club is also planning different activities for students throughout the fall and second semester to learn about Indigenous culture.

SPA is growing in its inclusion of Native culture through its new history elective for seniors: Native American Studies, which upper-school history teacher Sushmita Hodges teaches to first-semester students, and there are also ideas and wonderings about an official land acknowledgment because SPA is on former Native land.

The second Monday of Oct. is Indigenous People’s Day. Up until 1992, it was known as Christopher Columbus Day. 2024 is only the second time Minnesota has celebrated IPD, ever since passing the law establishing IPD as a state holiday in Feb. of 2023. Also, Indigenous People’s Day is now more known and accepted, especially since President Biden became the first U.S. president to honor Indigenous People’s Day three years ago.