In early October 2015, 75 Brown University students staged a "die-in" on campus to demand more from the university in relation to Native Americans. The die-in lasted 52 minutes and 30 seconds, according to an online description of the event, and was done “to signify the 523 years of indigenous resistance since Columbus." The event was one of many protests and activism efforts held by students to support changing the name of the holiday Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”

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The protest came at a heated moment on campus. Just the previous week, The Brown Daily Herlad published two op-eds that students deemed racist. According to the Huffington Post, one of the columns "suggested that Native Americans should be thankful for Christopher Columbus, despite his enslaving thousands of natives in North America and sending dogs to hunt and attack people who resisted. The other op-ed argued that marginalization and oppression were linked to human biology." The Herald's editors claimed that the articles were not supposed to have been published and only were because of an "internal error," but they acknowledged that they had "crossed the line" and apologized for their actions.