Indigenous Peoples Day in Tucson sees first festivities on tribal land

The sun had nearly set when a waila cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” came over a loudspeaker on the field outside of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s Richey Resource Center. Several took to a wide grassy area to dance along.

Dozens of people came to the center Monday afternoon for Tucson’s largest Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebration. By nightfall, the crowd had grown to several hundred.

This was “the best year yet” for the event, said Lourdes Escalante, director of the group that hosts the local Indigenous Peoples Day gathering.

Those who attended said the event serves as a way to revel in the fact that Native people and their cultures have persevered in Southern Arizona over thousands of years.

“The people are beautiful. They’re thriving,” said Daniel Sestiaga, a member of the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe. “We’re celebrating our culture and heritage. We’re still here.”

Tucson’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebration has been held annually for at least 13 years. But this year, Escalante said, is the first that her organization has its nonprofit status. And it’s the first time the celebration was held on tribal land.

“We get to manage all our finances and we don’t have to ask permission to do certain things,”she said. “Now I have direct staff managing each component.”

Escalante, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, added that the group this year also collected baby items and medical supplies as donations for a Yaqui community in Sonora, Mexico, where people have seen a recent uptick in gestational diabetes.

‘Seen & heard’

The group, known for years as Indigenous Alliance Without Borders or Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras, is rebranding itself as Alianza Tecuani.

Though the group has operated for about 15 years, Escalante said, they decided to formally become a nonprofit after other groups asked them for fiscal sponsorships.

The group also strategically chose the Richey Center, which has classrooms, as the site of the event. Instead of having presentations on the main stage, organizers converted them into workshops on different topics held throughout the day.

The local Indigenous Peoples Day was also celebrated in previous years at the Global Justice Center in South Tucson.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day also usually incorporates a space for massages and acupuncture. This year, organizers had an entire gymnasium to set it up in.

Visitors also got to watch live music and dancing and shop among a variety of vendors.

Sestiaga, who was wrangling his nearly four-year-old twin daughters during an interview with the Tucson Sentinel, said Indigenous Peoples Day was a whole day for them to celebrate who they are.

Each of the girls, named Ariyah and AliAna, wore a ribbon skirt with characters from “Bluey,” one of their favorite cartoons.

“They’re beautiful in so many ways,” Sestiaga said of his daughters. “And they get to see their culture represented. They feel seen and heard.”

‘Generations to grow’

Tohono O’odham elder “Aunty” Mary Garcia, who gave opening remarks at the event, recalled that past generations on Native people were much different.

Between 1883 and 1978, the year the Religious Freedom Act was passed, Native people in the United States were often barred from speaking their own languages or having ceremonies in their traditions.

Garcia remembered, as a young child, an elder telling her he was at risk of being jailed for teaching her traditional O’odham dances and songs.

“I remember him crying in his office when the Freedom of Religion Act was passed. He knew he was safe,” she said.

After years of oppression from the federal government, she said, history is still repeating itself. She noted that O’odham tribal lands once encompassed an area stretching from northwest Mexico to Phoenix. Now the Tohono O’odham Nation covers an area the size of Connecticut — considerably smaller than the tribe’s traditional lands.

“What you thought you saw 500 or 600 years ago, it’s happening today,” said Garcia. “We don”t fight. We just move and the development comes.”

Monday, recognized by the Trump administration as Columbus Day, was also the first day contractors working for U.S. Customs and Border Protection had planned to start uprooting saguaros to build a double-border wall that cuts across the Tohono O’odham Nation. The tribe announced that evening that contractors never arrived.

O’odham religious traditions hold saguaros as deeply sacred, viewing them as people or “kindred spirits.” The tribe in 2021 passed a resolution that recognized the spiritual magnitude of the saguaro, or ha:san.

The tribe is currently suing the federal government in an effort to halt the wall’s construction. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon last Thursday rejected the nation’s injunction request to prevent the removal of saguaros and ocotillos.

Garcia likened the bollards of the wall driven into the land to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

“On this Indigenous Peoples Day, it’s a conflict, because we know what’s happening at our border,” she said. “But we still have generations to grow and teach not to hurt and not to hate.”

‘Make it permanent’

Indigenous Peoples Day, though recognized by various city and state governments, was only temporarily observed by the federal government during the administration of President Joe Biden.

Escalante said Alianza still has to request that Pima County and Tucson governments present proclamations in its honor.

“Any municipality ot government entity that has the power to make it permanent, it should become permanent,” she said.

It’s antithetical to the controversial Columbus Day, which current President Donald Trump has declared in both years of his second term.

His 2026 proclamation made no mention of Indigenous people, but credited explorer Christopher Columbus with “paving the way to the birth of the American nation.”

Columbus, whose expedition landed in Hispaniola and never set foot in the area that’s now the United States, is widely criticized by historians for his many brutal abuses of the Native people who he encountered.

Monica Carrasco Denowh, also with Alianza Tecuani, referred to Columbus as “our Hitler.”

“We are not a heritage month. We are living evidence that his project failed,” she said.

Escalante didn’t deny the political atmosphere is hard, even retraumatizing, for some Native people. “But if there’s any kind of darkness, there’s always going to be a light,” she said.

But she hoped Indigenous Peoples Day was an encouragement for participants. She wanted it to remind Native people there they weren’t alone.

“I hope people find another way of bringing joy,” she said. “People can get together. They can be in community.”