Indigenous Peoples' Day | Stories of Resistance

The Real News Podcast · Oct 13, 2025 · 17m

It was once called Columbus Day, and it still is in many parts. A day to celebrate the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who supposedly “discovered” America. But America was there long before Columbus came. And so were millions of people up and down the continent. Experts estimate that there were anywhere from 60–90 million people in the Americas at the time. Possibly even more people in the Americas than in Europe at the time.

But disease and successive wars by waves of invading Europeans decimated the local Indigenous populations. Over the next century, roughly 90% of Indigenous…