The second Monday of October is traditionally known as Columbus Day, but the Native American Student Organization wanted to show an alternative celebration that everyone could enjoy Monday.

“One of the big things that we wanted to accomplish with the Native American Students association was to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day,” psychology professor Pamela Mulder said. “Because he didn’t discover anything, people were already here.”

The name change has been occurring across the United States. Some of the biggest examples are Seattle, Minneapolis and Albuquerque.

The event took place at the Memorial Student Center plaza, where the Native American Student Organization set up a food station with fry bread and corn soup.

“The food represents the rations that we were provided by the government, which was almost nothing at all because they wanted everyone to be farmers, even if they were hunters before.” Autumn Lee, president of the Native American Student Organization, said. “The people didn’t know how to cook with these rations because they never used them before, so we created fry bread.”

After the event had begun and people had gathered, the guest speaker, Guy Jones, spoke about the problems occurring in North Dakota with the underground pipeline cutting through land that belongs to the indigenous people and the protests that are happening because of it.

“Festivals like this is something that needs to happen in all campuses,” Jones said. “Because so many of the issues in today’s society is we forget about the diversities and contributions of all people.”

After Jones finished speaking, Autumn Lee performed a traditional song known as the water song. This song is meant to honor water and all the life it brings to the Earth.

After the commencement of the water song, Lee performed the smoke dance, which was a traditional way to elevate the smoke out of the longhouses. Lee then encouraged people in the crowd to join her in performing the dance a second time.

The festival was one of the first events to come from the Native American Student Organization. The month of November is Native American Heritage Month and the organization will be having guest speakers every Tuesday and a movie night every Thursday of the month.

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