What's good, y'all?

You listening to Coatswitch?

I'm Jean Demby.

And this month, 10 states and more than 100 cities around the country observed indigenous

peoples day.

That commemoration keeps picking up steam, both from officials and in the broader culture

as counter-programming to celebrating the colonization of this land.

Or maybe it makes more sense to call it a reclamation of this country's historical identity, a call

to action for the people who were colonized and who are still here and still struggling

against that colonization.

That's what a conference of native people in Northern California had in mind when they

declared October 12th, 1992, the International Day of Solidarity with indigenous peoples.

That date is not an accident.

It was exactly 500 years after Columbus first landed in the Caribbean.

Now, the fight over what we call this day is more than about who gets to author the stories

we tell about ourselves and our history.

It's about something more tangible about who gets to claim to the stuff of the past,

the land, the artifacts, and in some cases, the bodies are nursed from it.

So today, we're going to dig in the crates a little bit.

This is an episode from Kumari Devarajan, one of the producers on our team Heriko's

language.

It's about history and inheritance in the most literal sense who gets to own what the

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