On Monday, October 12, banks across South Dakota will lock their doors and state offices will go dark. The holiday is Native Americans’ Day, and it has been since 1990. South Dakota put it on the books two years ahead of Berkeley, California, the city that usually gets credit for starting the whole movement.

The version of this story you have probably heard says South Dakota swapped out Columbus Day. According to the Lakota Times, that part never happened, because there was nothing to swap. The state had put Pioneers’ Day on the second Monday in October back in 1971, the same slot most states handed to Columbus. What the 1990 legislature did was take a holiday honoring the settlers and give the date to the people who were already here.

Pioneers’ Day had been a working holiday, carried on the books without closing anything down. Native Americans’ Day came in as a full legal holiday, offices locked and all.

It started with a letter from a Rapid City newsman

Tim Giago sat down in late 1989 and wrote to Governor George Mickelson. Giago was Oglala Lakota, born at Pine Ridge, and he had gone through Holy Rosary Indian Mission school, which he wrote about for the rest of his life. In 1979 the Rapid City Journal hired him, making him the first Native writer at a South Dakota newspaper. Two years later he and his wife Doris started the Lakota Times out of their own pocket, the first independently owned Native newspaper in the country.

His letter proposed reconciliation. Mickelson wrote back on December 19, 1989, and his answer was more personal than most governors would risk putting on letterhead. He pointed out that his own father had wrestled with the same racial tensions while serving as governor in the 1940s, and he said it bothered him that forty years had produced so little improvement.

Mickelson declared 1990 a Year of Reconciliation. The year carried weight on its own, because December would bring the hundredth anniversary of Wounded Knee.

The bill carried two holidays

House Bill 1308 did double duty. It created Native Americans’ Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the same stroke, and most of the nation had already adopted the King holiday by then.

The King holiday had already been voted down in committee. Then a 29-year-old Yankton Sioux woman named Lynn Hart, from rural Rapid City, testified at a public hearing in Pierre on January 17. Terry Woster reported in the Argus Leader that House Republican Leader Jerry Lammers credited her testimony with turning his caucus around.

After that the thing moved. The House passed it 49 to 16 on February 8. The Senate followed 24 to 8 on February 15. Mickelson signed it on February 22.

So two of the people who put this holiday on the calendar had Rapid City addresses. The day has a local return address, and almost nobody mentions it.

What Mickelson said about it

He called the holiday a foundation upon which to build friendship and trust, and he reached back to Standing Bear for the line that stuck: “My hand is not the color of your hand, but if you pierce it, I shall feel the pain.” He called the day a beginning.

He had three years left. On April 19, 1993, the plane carrying Mickelson and seven others went down near Zwingle, Iowa, after engine trouble. Everyone aboard died. He never found out whether the foundation held.

Thirty-six years of Mondays

The holiday sits in state law at SDCL 1-5-1, written as Native Americans’ Day with the apostrophe, a detail that trips up half the people who write about it. South Dakota and Vermont are the only two states that skip the federal Columbus Day holiday entirely.

Other states eventually came along. Tennessee in 1994. Nevada in 1997. California in 1998. Washington in 2014. Berkeley passed its Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992, and the national story usually starts there.

Giago kept writing about the gap between a holiday and a change in how people actually treat each other. He died in 2022 at 88, having founded the Native American Journalists Association along the way and having been inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. He spent his last decades running papers out of Rapid City.

For most people in the Black Hills, Monday means no mail and a shorter list of places to run errands. It was built to ask something of the people living here, by a newspaperman who worked a few blocks from where many of us work now.