For one morning each October, Phillips Avenue in downtown Sioux Falls stops being a thoroughfare and becomes a stage. The Native American Day Parade rolls north through the heart of the city on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026, closing Phillips between 6th and 13th Streets. A pre-parade fun run precedes the parade, which steps off at 11 a.m. It is free, open to anyone, and requires no ticket — just a spot along the curb.
The event is younger than the holiday it celebrates, and the gap between the two tells a story about South Dakota. Native American Day has been an official state holiday since 1990, when South Dakota adopted October 12 as a state holiday called Native American Day, effectively eliminating Columbus Day as a holiday. The change did not come from the governor's office or the state's big newspapers. It came from Tim Giago, the Oglala Lakota journalist who founded the Lakota Times — the only independent, Indian-owned weekly newspaper in the state — and who used its pages to demand that the state drop Columbus Day. Giago found a partner in Republican Gov. George S. Mickelson, and in January 1990 the Legislature made it law. The same year, Mickelson proclaimed a Year of Reconciliation to mark the centennial of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children were killed in 1890.
For nearly three decades after that, the holiday existed mostly on paper. Schools and state offices closed, but there was no civic gathering in the state's largest city to mark it. That changed in 2018, when the first Sioux Falls Native American Day Parade took to the streets. The organizer was Richie Richards, who told the Argus Leader that the parade was meant to show off the diversity of the city's Indigenous communities. "Just within a few hours you have several sovereign nations that are also a part of the Sioux Falls community," he said. "So we want Sioux Falls to recognize the beautiful culture and our beautiful people."
That first parade was a substantial undertaking. All nine of South Dakota's federally recognized tribes were expected to be represented, with as many as 100 entries and up to 40 volunteers stationed along the route to explain to onlookers what they were seeing — the meaning behind the traditional regalia, the dances, and the songs. Richards also made a point of including floats representing incarcerated Native Americans and their families, an idea that came to him at a prison powwow. "I wanted their families, children and grandchildren to be a part of the parade on their behalf," he said.
The parade has since become an annual fixture and a school-community tradition. By 2024, the seventh annual edition, students from Garfield, Laura Wilder, Rosa Parks, and Terry Redlin elementary schools, plus Edison, George McGovern, Memorial, and Whittier middle schools and Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington high schools, all marched with visible school groups. For many Sioux Falls students, Native American Day is a day off from class — and a chance to spend it celebrating rather than resting. Rhayn Medrano, a ten-year-old at Rosa Parks Elementary and the daughter of Dawn Marie Johnson, the first Indigenous woman on the Sioux Falls school board, told the Argus Leader it felt good to walk with her Indigenous peers. Adrianna Miller and Mianna Mousseaux, Whittier Middle School students, carried their school's Očhéthi Šakówiŋ sign.
The day is more than a procession. In recent years it has begun with an opening prayer at 9 a.m. at Lyon Park, at 600 South Phillips Avenue, before the fun run and the parade. The event's organizers describe its purpose on the parade's Facebook page as a hope for "continued healthy dialogue on conversations surrounding the health and well-being of Native Americans & Sioux Falls community through truth, reconciliation, and self-representation." That language of truth and reconciliation reaches directly back to Mickelson's 1990 proclamation — the parade is, in a sense, the public ritual that the holiday lacked for its first quarter-century.
For spectators, the practical details are simple. Staging-area road closures begin at 9:30 a.m., and closures along the parade route start around 10:15 a.m. Phillips Avenue will be shut between 6th and 13th Streets. The Sioux Falls Police Department, which publishes a map of the route and staging areas each year, encourages attendees to park in downtown public lots and garages and walk to the route rather than hunting for street parking. Downtown traffic will be affected through the late morning.
The parade's route has shifted over the years — the 2018 debut began at 14th Street and Phillips and headed north along the city's traditional parade route, while the current route runs the stretch between 6th and 13th. What has not changed is the premise: a few hours on a Monday morning when the sovereign nations that make up Sioux Falls' Indigenous community take the city's main street, in regalia and ribbon skirts and jingle dresses, and the rest of the city is invited to watch. No tickets, no capacity limit, no admission. Just show up on Phillips Avenue.