A growing number of Americans are celebrating Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day Monday. Dickinson College is opening a Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and also honored an indigenous woman with the college’s environmental activism prize.

With us on The Spark Monday was Tara Houska is a citizen of Couchiching First Nation and a tribal attorney, land defender, environmental and Indigenous-rights advocate. Houska is the recipient of this year’s Rose-Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson, who was asked what Indigenous people's Day meant to her, "To me, Indigenous Peoples Day means truth telling. It's recognizing the original peoples of this land and, uh, asking, you know, an entire nation to consider that, to recognize that, to respect that and reflect on that."

Also on the program was Darren Lone Fight, the founding director of Dickinson’s new Center for the Futures of Native Peoples (CFNP) and citizen of the Muscogee Nation and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation), who talked about the Center, "One of the things that I think often happens to Indigenous peoples is that we're historicist, we're sort of trapped in the past tense for non-Indigenous societies. So one of the things that I think is really critical is that we'd be looking towards the visions and dreams of the Indigenous future from the myriad sort of myriad tribes that create those visions. In addition to that, I think that the center is really designed as a forceful retort to the damage that was done by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Carlisle School was intent on through these kind of assimilate of programs. It was functionally a reprograming camp. It was attempting to erase language, the grammar and of a people. It was attempting to erase Indigenous history and Indigenous ways of being in the world. And so in whatever way possible, the center is looking to reconcile with that history and Dickinson's involvement with it and to advocate forcefully for an Indigenous led, Indigenously envisioned future."

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