Indigenous Peoples Day celebrates the indigenous people of North America and South America. People across the United States celebrate the day on the second Monday of October, on the same day on which the U.S. federal holiday of Columbus Day occurs.

The holiday began in 1989 in South Dakota and was fully formed in 1992, in California, at the 500th anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. The idea for such a day to honor not a European explorer but the peoples he "discovered" goes back as far as the late 1970s, and then to a 1990 United Nations-sponsored conference on discrimination against indigenous populations. The 1992 celebrating of Indigenous Peoples Day was done by people in North American and South America. In a related development, in 1994, the United Nations declared August 9 as International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples.

The idea of ignoring Columbus Day and/or replacing it with Indigenous Peoples Day grew throughout the following decades, as more and more U.S. cities made the switch. Several states do not celebrate or even recognize Columbus Day; many of these state celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead.

The number of cities that do not celebrate Columbus Day is in the several dozens. Among those are such large cities as Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and even Ohio's Columbus (named for the explorer).

Columbus Day began as a federal holiday only in 1937 but was celebrated informally on October 12 before that.