While speaking at the National Congress of American Indians’ 78th Annual Convention in Portland, Oregon, Vice President Kamala Harris stated her commitment to addressing the “shameful past” of European exploration. Harris said Europeans “ushered in a wave of destruction” for Native Americans.
Of course, Harris, like every Democrat, seems blissfully unaware that Native Americans were destroying Native Americans long before any European arrived on the continent.
“Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas,” Harris said. “But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations, perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease.”
This is all true, but such violence and land theft were going on long before European settlers arrived. What’s more, unless she is inferring that 16th-century European explorers unleashed their version of biological warfare, it is also disingenuous to blame them for spreading diseases to which Native Americans, not having domesticated most animals, were extremely susceptible.
Harris also said that the U.S. “must not shy away from this shameful past” and must “shed light” on the explorers’ genocide. This claim is as authentic as her new YouTube television show. Our country has been teaching for years about Europeans’ conquest of Native Americans and the injustices involved. The only thing our country “shies away from” is teaching the brutality that dominated pre-Columbian North America.
In an interview with Smithsonian magazine, distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn portrayed pre-Columbian America as “not a terribly peaceful world. They were always involved in warfare.” Bailyn explained that many Native American tribes sought to exploit Europeans for their own benefits and self-interest because they saw them as useful against other Native American tribes.
“The Indians had the view they wanted to use [the Europeans],” he writes. “They wanted the English there on the fringe so they would have the benefit of their treasure, their goods, even their advanced weapons. They wanted that, but under their control.” Most people don’t know this part of history, because the U.S. has “shied away” from teaching it.
Bailyn is hardly the only scholar to address the brutality of pre-Columbian America. Harvard scholar Steven Pinker detailed how these societies were “far more violent than our own.” Pinker listed anthropological evidence of “prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads, or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men.”
Additionally, Pinker highlighted the frequency of tribal violence, noting that “the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.” Moreover, things are so horrific that “population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times.” Comparatively speaking, “if the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”
There are numerous other examples, yet Harris thoughtlessly joins so many other liberals who would revise history to fit the false narrative of the grievance-obsessed. There’s no denying the crimes against Native Americans, but the idea that pre-Columbian America was idyllic and peaceful until the white man arrived is just plain false — a whimsical fabrication that we ought to shy away from.
