The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a longer association with the indigenous inhabitants of what is now the United States than almost any other state. This year, a group calling itself Indigenous People’s Day Massachusetts is supporting a bill in the state legislature that would replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day statewide.

Supporters of the measure say the effort is twofold: to no longer observe Columbus Day, since it honors a man who exploited, tortured, killed and ultimately committed genocide against all the native peoples he came in contact with; and secondly, to replace it with the commemoration of this country’s first inhabitants, who have mostly been erased in the modern mind, but who still live on throughout the country.