Is everybody ready to dump Christopher Columbus over the back of the truck and celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day? If D.C. Council member Anita Bonds has her way, Columbus will be nothing more than road kill on the Beltway. “The story that celebrates Columbus’ so-called discovery of the Americas has long presented a version of history that is woefully incomplete and Eurocentric,” Bonds said. “It fails to acknowledge the brutality to which the indigenous people were subjected by European explorers.”
Point taken, Ms. Bonds. The explorers weren’t the most pleasant of folks, but shall we also dismiss the brutality of these marvelous, kind, and generous indigenous people? It is a pure, unadulterated myth that Native Americans were always living in peace and harmony with each other and the great Mother Earth. It is a narrative that those on the extreme left advance, albeit with a total lack of historical knowledge.
Shocking, I know.
Indians Weren’t All Singing Kumbaya
Anthropologists and archaeologists easily put this absurd myth six feet under with – wait for it – the facts. They looked at materials like burned-out structures and disfigured bones that showed trauma to skulls and arms. There is substantial archaeological evidence that illustrates a long history of Native American violence, way before European explorers or settlers set foot on American soil.
We’re not saying that explorers and frontiersmen were angels, but there are always two sides to a story and America, of late, has been ignoring one for the other. This is not an honest depiction of American history, and at some point, the other side must be illuminated:
“In Georgia near the Oconee River, some Indians reportedly killed and scalped a white woman and black woman on the frontier. The Creek Indians in particular were known to scalp various men and women on the Georgian frontier, as illuminated in this report on the murder and scalping of seven individuals. One small yeoman farmer was found outside his home with a tomahawk sticking out of his skull. Another report in 1794 described a “barbarous massacre” by a group of 12 to 15 Indians where several women and “small children” were killed: “Some scalped and barbarously cut to pieces; some tomahawked very inhumanly, and the poor helpless infants committed to the torturing flames.”
Never Mind the Facts – The Left Doesn’t
Again and again, we find that the extreme left and its minions in the media are unable to see complexity and nuance. Columbus Day is not a holiday because Christopher Columbus was a knight in shining armor. He wasn’t one dimensional and holy. He was a complicated, imperfect man. It is celebrated because of his ability – against mighty odds – to “discover America.” Again, we’re not saying there weren’t other explorers, but Columbus certainly has a place in this dialogue and having a day in his honor is not a national shame.
Oh, by the way, who says Native Americans want this day in their name anyway? Liberty Nation Author Tess Lynne remembers a time when she attended a pow-wow on this very subject. Here’s what she found:
“I talked to a lot of Natives. A lot of them did not like the idea because – why take a holiday originally meant for the man who ‘discovered their land and started the end of their way of life’? Why would they want a day that was originally celebrated for ‘discovering’ this land to be named after them when that is when they lost their land.”
Efforts to rename the holiday or protests at Columbus Day parades will surely continue. Unfortunately, we have become a nation in search of the perfect due to our inability to hold two true thoughts in our collective heads at the same time.
So, before those on the extreme left pick up their markers and poster boards to prepare their protest sign this Columbus Day, they might want to dive into the history books first. Simple answers to complex questions often lead to just plain ignorance.
