Americans Celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day

Lookups for indigenous rose sharply on October 14th during Indigenous Peoples' Day, an alternative to Columbus Day.

Replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, she said, felt like the start of a long overdue recognition of the indigenous people who lived in the U.S. for thousands of years before Europeans like Columbus sailed across the Atlantic.
—Ben Kesslen, NBC News (nbcnews.com), 14 Oct. 2019 

Indigenous may mean either “produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment,” or “innate, inborn." It comes to English from the Late Latin indigenus, which is from a Latin noun for “native” (indigena). The word has been in use since the early 17th century; our earliest evidence comes from Michael Stanhope’s 1632 work, Cures Without Care.

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