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[Ed note: In observance of the US federal holiday which is observed on Monday October 11, 2021, I am inviting the editorial staff to run stories on a weekend schedule tomorrow. Please join me in thanking them for all their hard work and for the sacrifice of their spare time and energy! --martyb.]
Biden becomes first president to issue proclamation marking Indigenous Peoples' Day:
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation commemorating Indigenous Peoples' Day on Friday, becoming the first US president to do so, the White House said.
"The contributions that Indigenous peoples have made throughout history — in public service, entrepreneurship, scholarship, the arts, and countless other fields — are integral to our Nation, our culture, and our society," Biden wrote in the proclamation Friday. "Today, we acknowledge the significant sacrifices made by Native peoples to this country — and recognize their many ongoing contributions to our Nation."
Biden also marked a change of course from previous administrations in his proclamation marking Columbus Day, which honors the explorer Christopher Columbus. In that proclamation, the President acknowledged the death and destruction wrought on native communities after Columbus journeyed to North America in the late 1500s, ushering in an age of European exploration of the Western Hemisphere.
"Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them," Biden wrote.
More than 100 cities -- including Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco -- and a number of states -- including Minnesota, Alaska, Vermont and Oregon -- have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day, choosing instead to recognize the native populations that were displaced and decimated after Columbus and other European explorers reached the continent. Berkeley, California, was the first city to adopt Indigenous Peoples' Day, in 1992.
Also at Al Jazeera.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @06:21PM (20 children)
How sweet, give them a holiday so we can treat them like shit the rest of the year...
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @06:43PM (2 children)
Yup. And everyone else just gets dumped in the ocean to drown, because there's really nowhere else for them to go. With rare exceptions, they don't belong in Mexico, Canada or other north american locations, and Europe sure as shit doesn't want them, so ...
Yay! It turns out that making an aquarium from fish soup is a lot harder than fish soup from an aquarium! Of course, that hasn't prevented all sorts of racially-based lunatics from demanding racial subdivision of the USA. After all, it just makes sense that BLM would demand the establishment of a new form of apartheid in the USA.
No, wait, that makes no sense at all unless you think that they're all ignorant, stupid and/or malicious.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @07:56PM (1 child)
The indigenous "land back" movement does not seek to ethnically cleanse native lands of the colonizers.
https://globalsolidaritylocalaction.sites.haverford.edu/what-does-land-restitution-mean/ [haverford.edu]
https://landback.org/ [landback.org]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @09:56PM
Fuck off.. you've already got casinos you greedy wagonburners.
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday October 10 2021, @09:16PM (5 children)
I will not go like a buffalo,
Nobody can track me down,
I'll make my stand like a buffalo,
Make my way to higher ground,
People come from far away,
Brought the plow and the will to stay,
They broke ground and their promises,
Now we pray for a brand new day
What would you do for the buffalo?
Sacrifice everything you own?
Give up your life and security
Would you give them back their home?
Don't you pretend they disappeared,
We killed em off with electricity,
But now they're back on a sacred ground,
We celebrate, the spirit is free
~ Ted Nugent
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 11 2021, @01:53AM (4 children)
Yeah, poetic license and all that shit. But electricity had nothing to do with killing off the buffalo. Government paid men to go out, and kill the buffalo. They shot entire herds, and left them rotting under the empty sky. Not one electric light in sight when the sun went down.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday October 11 2021, @02:34AM (3 children)
And before that, the natives ran entire herds off the buffalo jumps, wasting all the but very top layer of the crushed corpses (per archeological excavations of several sites). The usual method before whites generously brought 'em horses and rifles (because no one in their right mind hunts bison with a short bow on foot) was to set fires to drive the herd, which of course did what grassfires do.
Government hunters mostly shot from stands and railway cars, which was a pretty narrow swath. The natives had a much broader effect on the bison population.
This is an interesting read on the topic:
https://fee.org/articles/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america/ [fee.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 11 2021, @02:59AM (1 child)
The truth of the matter is, the US government intentionally slaughtered the buffalo herds, primarily because the buffalo provided sustenance to the native people. The natives lived for tens of thousands of years with the buffalo, and the rest of nature, without destroying nature.
That link has some merit, but lets not get carried away with it. Sure, running a herd of animals off a cliff provides all the meat for your clan, that you can preserve. But it didn't happen 6 times every year, year after year. Burning off new farm land is something that man has done all around the world, since we first mastered fire. And, accidents happen. Again, that didn't happen year after year. When fires are permitted to happen naturally and/or with some intelligent oversight, the litter on the forest floor doesn't accumulate for 20 or 50 years. THAT is our primary problem with fires today.
I'm not one to make saints of the Indians - but it chafes my hide when I hear Europeans bragging that they brought enlightenment to the natives. That's a crock of shit - worse, a crock of shit that's been sitting in the sun for a week. White men came here for their own greedy purposes, and they intended to exterminate any who resisted them. If Indians aren't saints, then the white man sure as hell aren't saints.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 11 2021, @05:56PM
Some tribes depended on the buffalo. Most didn't. Many tribes cultivated the Three Sisters [wikipedia.org], which comprise everybody from the Algonquins of the NE to the Ojibwe in the Dakotas, to the Puebloan peoples of the Southwest. Some of those supplemented with wild edibles like ragweed and wild rice and smaller fauna like deer, ducks, elk, turkeys, etc.
It's also not clear how long those tribes were doing what they were doing. Archaeological estimates vary wildly. Some say 13,000 years ago, others push the arrival of humans in the Americas way back. Among them, some have been around a long time, others, like the Navaho and Apache, are quite recent arrivals (est. 1400 AD).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 11 2021, @02:36PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison [wikipedia.org]
While Wikipedia isn't the be all end all, it's certainly a decent first stab at a topic.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday October 10 2021, @10:27PM (1 child)
So... basically the same idea as with mother's day?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @04:45PM
More like Yo Momma day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @02:38AM
...Lay down the reeking ore
Don't you hear the shrieking in the trees?
Everywhere you touch the earth she's sore
Every time you skin her all things weep
Your money mocks us
Restitution what good can it do?
Kenneled in metered boxes
Red dogs in debt to you...
Joni Mitchell, Lakota
--
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday October 11 2021, @02:57AM (6 children)
Is it symbolic rather than substantive? Absolutely. So was getting rid of the mascots, renaming the Washington DC football team and the Cleveland baseball team, and a bunch of other stuff.
On the other hand, celebrating Columbus is just plain a bad look. The guy was responsible for the robbery, rape and/or death of millions of people. It would be like Cambodia celebrating the legacy of Pol Pot every year. And no, he wasn't a product of his time: A lot of his contemporaries were horrified by his actions.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @05:12AM
To be completely fair, many people are horrified by Bezos and Musk, but you couldn't say they aren't products of their time.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 11 2021, @06:31PM (4 children)
Was he? Did he command that? I wasn't aware that Columbus was equal to or greater than Genghis Khan.
Many other people had a hand in European colonization of the Americas. If you go to the Vatican, the sheer weight of gold and silver in that place that was plundered from the Americas sort of hints that they might have had something to do with it. Neither is it a straight line from the Europeans interacting with native tribes to conquest. When the Dutch started buying beaver pelts from the tribes in the Hudson River valley it was enough to spur the Iroquois to start exterminating the Algonquins around them because they were the competition.
Or, take the Pilgrims' advent in Massachusetts. The local tribes helped them survive because they were desperate to find new allies to help them stave off the Iroquois.
Columbus's voyages helped change the course of history in the Americas and the world, and for that he should be recognized. Yes, it sucked for a lot of the native inhabitants eventually, but on the other hand it was sort of useful to have America as we know be available to help beat back the Nazis later.
Trying to take a Manichaean view of history is usually not very enlightening. History is not a thread, but a fabric.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 11 2021, @08:07PM (3 children)
Yes, yes he did.
Estimates of the number of Taino people living on Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti today) when he arrived was around 2 million. Columbus arrived, and on day 1 noted the gold jewelry some of the welcome committee were wearing and said that he thought it would be really easy to take it from them by force. When it was time to leave, he stole some of their gold and kidnapped a few of them so that he'd have proof that he'd found something worth colonizing. On his subsequent trips back, he set up a permanent colony, and established an absolutely brutal regime that was, according to contemporary accounts by people like Bartolome de la Casas, cutting off their hands for failing to give the Spaniards gold (which mostly happened because the gold didn't exist on the island in the quantities the Spanish were demanding), raping the women and girls (Columbus himself wrote that he preferred them younger than age 13 both for his own use and because they got a better price on slave markets), and in some cases hunting them for sport. And Columbus as far as we can tell was proud of all of this.
It was brutal enough that within a couple of decades, there were no Taino left, and the Spanish monarchy had reacted to the news with "Whoa, dude! Not cool!" and stripped him of his titles and power.
One of my ancestors was part of that crew, and my mother has studied that early colonial history as part of some history work she did under an NEH grant.
The first thing to note here is that the Pilgrims had actually engaged in a borderline mutiny on board the Mayflower to redirect the ship from the Jamestown colony (where most of the people on board thought they were going) to where they landed.
Among the first things the Pilgrims did upon landing on Cape Cod was to go grave-robbing. They were for the most part middle-class tradespeople who had approximately zero clue how to build, fish, farm, or hunt, and they relied on robbing the Wampanoag early on for their food supply before Tesquantum (who you probably got taught about as "Squanto") showed up and saved their butts. And Tesquantum, so we're clear, understood and could speak English because he'd traveled across the Atlantic half a dozen times, sometimes in captivity and sometimes as a free man trying to get home to his family, and been to England during his travels as a free man.
And yes, the Wampanoag probably helped them survive because they needed help protecting themselves, but it wasn't the Iroquois that they were worried about, it was the Narragansetts and Pequots right on their borders in what's now Rhode Island and Connecticut. One of the first military encounters the Plymouth colony had was fighting with the Wampanoags against the Pequots and absolutely shocking the Wampanoags with their brutality. And once they were more established, the Plymouth colony started mistreating the Wampanoags to steal their land and just plain kill them off. So it's not surprising that when Massasoit died, his son Metacomet organized an attack on the now-much-larger Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies that wiped out almost half of their population.
So yeah, also not people to be proud of, really.
I'm of the mindset that genocide isn't OK, period. Because as soon as you say "but on the other hand ..." to a genocide, you're well on your way to saying "their genocides are bad, but our genocides are necessary and therefor justified for some greater good", which is exactly what genocidal monsters use to convince ordinary people to commit genocide.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 12 2021, @02:30PM (1 child)
Columbus showed up with 87 guys, and slaughtered 2 million Taino?
The Taino died because of diseases the Europeans brought. It worked out in the Europeans' favor, to be sure, but blaming Columbus for it doesn't make much sense because they had no idea how diseases worked then.
Being brutal, keeping slaves, rape, and all of those heinous acts were what everyone did to everyone in that day. Seen with modern eyes it's barbaric. Then, it was normal. All of those things, too, were practiced by natives across the Americas. So the idea that Columbus was worse than everyone else in the Americas is incorrect.
The Narragansetts and Pequots were being pressured by the Iroquois to their west [wikipedia.org]. The Iroquois were in an expansionistic phase, and were also exterminating the Neutrals and Hurons to their north and west.
The Wampanoags' strategy of making the Pilgrims allies worked in the short term. The colonists even dubbed Metacomet "King Philip." Long term, they turned on each other and the Wampanoags lost out.
I am of the same mindset. But the term genocide does not apply to European colonization of the New world, unless we're blurring the definition for rhetorical effect. And if you're calling European colonization of the Americas genocide, do you also call European colonization of Africa and South Asia genocide? Because the European colonizers did the same thing the same way wherever they went.
Columbus did not exterminate the peoples of the Americas. He did not exterminate the Taino either. Laying that at his door is incorrect. Disease was the culprit, and could have been the only culprit, because there is no other physical way for a few hundred or thousand colonists to wipe out tens of millions of Native Americans. The European colonists were not even as physically strong or as healthy as the natives they encountered because their diet and lifestyles were worse. And, no, a brace of muskets that are single shot and take a while to reload are not a magic wand to repel warriors adept with bows and atlatls (like de Soto found out).
It is tragic that the vibrant cultures of the Americas came off so badly with their encounters with European nations. Humanity lost a lot. But the narrative, the penchant, of describing the Native Americans as angels and Europeans as devils is inaccurate. History and reality are more complicated than that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 12 2021, @03:28PM
No, it wasn't normal, as evidenced by contemporary reactions to it.
There were numerous very intentional efforts to kill off or expel from a territory large groups of people based on ethnicity. Many cultures that once existed in the Americas no longer do, in large part because of that effort. If that's not genocide, neither is the Holocaust.
And I did not claim the people Columbus exterminated were angels. They were people, some holding political power.
And yes, disease absolutely played a role. And while the people of the 1500's and 1600's didn't know germ theory, they did notice that if they gave blankets to the Natives that had been used by people dying of smallpox, those Natives that used them died of smallpox, so they did quite a bit of that sort of thing as a very primitive form of biological warfare.
In addition to disease, Spanish policy, and later English policy, and later US and Canadian policy all played a role. About the only ones who can't be blamed too much were the French, who were more about trading with the people already in North America rather than taking their stuff, enslaving them, or killing them. And I don't consider it an accident that by the 1700's, most of the native peoples were allied with the French, not the English colonies.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:11PM
So, while I agree with almost everything you have said, I will put forth a small "it was the nature of the times" defense for some of what went on in colonial days. Columbus is no saint, he was point man for the winning team and history (written by the victors) has tried its best to whitewash his legacy. However, if it wasn't one colony ship full of brutal morons landing at Plymouth, it would have been another much the same, maybe a little better, maybe a little worse.
I feel this way most strongly about Hawaii and New Zealand. The indigenous people there were terribly abused, but it was nothing special or specific about the colonizers... In those cases I would argue that alternatives would mostly have been worse. Left uncolonized, another colonial power - less capable and therefore likely more brutal - would have invaded instead. Examples like Vietnam or many places in Africa where the colonizers were eventually expelled aren't exactly tales of sweetness and light.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @07:08PM
Fuck you, dumb bitch. Fuck the Mongolian savages. Whites should have expelled or killed all of them. Monkeys should have been shipped back after the civil war. Lincoln was trying to but the Jews had him killed. Mestizos should be forced to stay in Mexico where they belong. White Mexicans (100% Spanish of real Spanish blood, not moors, sephardi jews, etc) can move to the US if they want.