Boulder’s Indigenous Peoples Day celebration returns for its sixth year
Annual celebration resumes after being suspended last year due to COVID-19
Boulder, Colo. — In recognition of Boulder’s sixth annual Indigenous Peoples Day, the City has partnered with five local organizations to offer a weekend of Indigenous history, culture and reflection.
Indigenous Peoples Day is a holiday honoring the Native peoples and cultures of the North American continent. It typically falls on the second Monday in October, and in some areas of the U.S., it is observed in addition to (or instead of) Columbus Day.
This year’s celebration—held from October 9-11— featured a blend of online and virtual offerings from local groups Luna Cultura, Junkyard Social Club, Right Relationship Boulder, Creative Nations and Boulder Watershed Collective. All events were free and open to the public.
Saturday and Sunday’s schedule of events included virtual workshops on Ute hand games and Arapaho cooking, language, history and storytelling organized by Right Relationship Boulder, a group dedicated to strengthening relations with the Indigenous peoples of the Boulder Valley.
Participants could also attend Creative Nation’s live performances from Dine’tah Navajo, Cha’Bii’Tu Apache Crown and Wind River dance groups. All the dance performances took place at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center on Walnut St.
The hour-long Arapaho storytelling session featured guest speakers Wayne C’Hair and Maryann Duran, both of the Northern Arapaho tribe, who shared stories they had learned from their family members growing up.
And the Indigenous cooking class, led by Darrah Perez-Good Voice Elk (also Northern Arapaho) led participants through preparing and cooking a pasta dish with a hearty sauce of ground buffalo, vegetables and spices. Good Voice Elk said that buffalo is a traditional food of the Northern Arapaho people—historically, the tribe would follow the herd migrations and use every part of the animal for food, tools, clothing and other purposes.
Jerilyn DeCoteau of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe, co-founder of Right Relationship Boulder, said workshops like these are intended to be educational as well as fun. She hopes participants will come away inspired to learn more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, and that the connection will go beyond this weekend.
“What we want is not a one-time connection [with participants],” said DeCoteau. “We want a relationship that builds over time and gets stronger and better.”
JayCee Beyale, Navajo and co-founder of Creative Nation, expressed a similar desire to bridge the gaps in understanding between Native and non-Native people.
“I want people to gain a perspective on what it is to be Indigenous, what that’s like, and to see the variety of different cultures and traditions [within each tribe],” said Beyale. “We get conglomerated into this one pool. I want them to see that there are differences among who we are as Native people.”
President Biden proclaimed October 11 as Indigenous Peoples Day on Friday, formally establishing the date as a national holiday. But prior to this year, numerous states and cities around the country had already begun honoring Indigenous Peoples Day at a local level—including Boulder, which has observed the holiday on the second Monday of October every year since 2016.
Boulder’s Indigenous Peoples Day Resolution of 2016 marked a commitment by the city to improve relations with Indigenous peoples in the Boulder Valley. The city promised to acknowledge the harm done through colonization, foster understanding and appreciation of Native American cultures, fight prejudice and discrimination against these groups, make public spaces more culturally inclusive, and change educational curricula to more accurately portray Indigenous history and culture.
Clay Fong, the manager of Boulder’s Offices of Human Rights and Community Relations, stressed that the Indigenous Peoples Day celebration offers a way for the public to learn the true history of the peoples who have inhabited the Boulder area for millennia.
“We recognize a lot of the histories that are written by non-Indigenous people may not be the most accurate and can be pretty self-serving,” said Fong.
The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute tribes are most closely associated with the Boulder area, although numerous other groups also have a historical presence here. According to Fong, there’s evidence of Indigenous presence in the Boulder Valley dating back at least 10,000 years. The City of Boulder, established in 1859, is only a century and a half old.
“We want people to know the whole history of Boulder, not just from when Europeans arrived—that’s kind of in the middle of things,” DeCoteau said with a chuckle. “We want them to understand their place in Boulder and their relationship with the land, and understand that there were people here before.”
The Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations will conclude today with a traditional ecological discussion of local watershed issues from 2:30 to 4 p.m., a virtual talk with guest speaker Cinnamon Kills First from 4 to 6 p.m., and a retelling of the story of Boulder’s Fort Chambers from 7 to 8 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. All of these events will be held online; registration details can be found on the event website.
Anyone wishing to further deepen their relationship with Indigenous peoples and cultures is encouraged to connect with Right Relationship Boulder via their Facebook page. A permanent space for Creative Nations will be coming soon at the Dairy Arts Center, and once construction is finished, members of the public are encouraged to visit and attend more of their events.
