If we really want to commemorate horrifying,
unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect
holiday: ‘Indigenous Peoples' Day.’
Los Angeles and Austin, Texas have now joined the list of
liberal-run cities that have eradicated Columbus Day from their calendars and
replaced it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” In LA, the desire to dis the
European discoverer was so strong that they rejected a compromise proposal to
keep Columbus Day and add “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” elsewhere.
“We need to dismantle a state-sponsored celebration of genocide of
indigenous peoples,” said Chrissie Castro of the LA Native American Indian
Commission. “To make us celebrate on any other day would be further injustice.”
Most Americans don’t agree. A new Marist poll finds 56 percent of
Americans admire Columbus and support Columbus Day. They reject the idea that
it’s a holiday about slaughter and enslavement. However, if we really want to
commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas,
I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”
“Long before
the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the
Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman
in the book “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A
History Forgotten.” “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off,
each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the
village, which was burned.”
Less Pocahontas and More
Blood Sacrifice
When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in
the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From
the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before
Columbus arrived.
For all the
talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that
pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to “Slavery
and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to
1865,” by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form
of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery
into North America.”
“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that
could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle.
Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running
away.”
Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found
that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced
labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”
That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you
were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned
out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a
scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”
Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas,
for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either
executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed
children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of “The Last Days of the Incas.”
The Aztecs,
on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to
ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of
Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of
an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.
Also Widespread Torture
and Cannibalism
According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at
work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father
Barthelemy Vimont’s “The Jesuit Relations”—captives had their fingers cut off,
were forced to set each other on fire, had their skinned stripped off and, in
one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night,
building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing
sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they
had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”
Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New
World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the
name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist
Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed
their prisoners as “marching meat.”
The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping
was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the
Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the
size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough
to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often
dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.
There Are No Pure
Peoples in History
Slavery,
torture, and cannibalism—tell me why we’re celebrating “Indigenous People’s
Day” again? And we’re getting rid of Columbus Day to protest—what? The fact
that one group of slavery-practicing violent people conquered another group of
violent, blood-thirsty slavers? That’s a precis of the history of the
Americas before Columbus arrived.
This has always been the fatal flaw of the Left’s politics of race
guilt: Name the race that’s not “guilty”? Racism, violence, and conquest are
part of the human condition, not the European one.
There is, however, one key difference between the European
Conquistadors and the Incas, Aztecs, and Iroquois who conquered the Americas
before them: In addition to violence and greed, the Europeans also brought
literacy, liberalism, and the scientific method, all of which would transform
America into the greatest champion of human freedom the world has never known.
Do the anti-Columbus activists who claim Europe’s conquest of America
is a sin really want to live in a world where it never happened? Where America
is an illiterate, technological backwater of tribal violence and ritual human
sacrifice? Of course not. The only reason their ideological idiocy has free
rein today is because Europeans showed up in 1492.
Happy Columbus Day!
Michael
Graham hosts the "Michael In the Morning" podcast at Ricochet.com.
Follow him on Twitter at @IAmMGraham.