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This week, we celebrate the 530th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Western Hemisphere. Oct. 12, 2022, will commemorate the day the Italian explorer united the Old World and the New World, forever changing the course of human history. Until about 1992, this was a national holiday and a day to celebrate Italian American heritage.
Columbus Statue BeheadedOct. 12 has since become a day to scorn Western civilization, as the American Left and “multiculturalist” academics, through various Native American front groups, have used the occasion to recite various atrocity stories and criticisms of the settlement and conquest of the Americas by Europeans.
GIVEN THEIR HISTORY OF SLAVERY AND CONQUEST, WE SHOULD END INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY
Native Americans are portrayed by the legacy media, elitist Hollywood types, pundits, politicians, and the tendentious intelligentsia as victims. They are presented as noble, peaceful people, kind and generous, who were living in a paradise but were betrayed and murdered by vicious, greedy, white, Christian men. But this is not the whole truth. Let us never forget that Native Americans massacred their illegal immigrants, beginning with Columbus’s initial voyage in 1492 and the first English settlements in North America.
Tales of enslavement of the indigenous people, sometimes true but often not true, were disseminated by the gullible news media, by vapid entertainers, in sensationalized fiction, and in tendentious academic monographs. Recitations of massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide committed by Spanish, English, French, and other European settlers were instituted in school curricula across America without any broader context — namely, the massacres, ethnic cleansing, genocides, and slavery that preceded Europeans’ arrival in the hemisphere.
Recently, militants from such groups as antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other leftist groups have staged riots to topple statues of Christopher Columbus in cities across America and Europe.
As the Italian conservative leader Giorgia Meloni said during her speech in Spain, only the Taliban topple statues. She will not accept this barbaric behavior by the Left — nor should any American or European accept this attempt to bowdlerize Western history.
But since the Left is so intent on talking about the history of the European settlement in the Western Hemisphere, we should talk about the entire history. This includes the dark side of Native American history, once well-known but now often deliberately obscured by many on the Left.
Consider the first voyage of Columbus. Initially, the explorer was repelled by indigenous tribes from landing on the northern coast of Hispaniola and forced to later land on what is now Santo Domingo in 1492. One year later, in 1493, Taino warriors, led by their ‘Cacique’ Caonabo, attacked and destroyed Columbus’s settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola, killing the sailors Columbus left there while he returned to Spain.
The history of Europeans’ treatment of Native Americans is well-documented. However, the massacres that these tribes committed against their own people and the European explorers and settlers does not receive the same kind of scrutiny and attention. It was a phenomenon repeated for centuries until the last tribes were subjugated in the American West. Here are just a few of the atrocities that we actually know about:
1609 Orapax Massacre 33 English colonists killed by Powhatans in Virginia
1622 Jamestown Massacre 347 English colonists killed by Powhatans in Virginia
1680 New Mexico 422 Spaniards killed
1694 Oyster River 104 English killed by Wabanakis in New Hampshire
1757 Fort William Henry Massacre 180 British killed
1778 Wyoming Valley Massacre 340 Pennsylvania colonists killed by Iroquois
1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre 140 settlers killed by Paiutes in Utah
1862 Dakota Wars 800 settlers killed by Sioux
1865 Bloody Point Massacre 65 white people in a wagon train killed by Modocs in Oregon
1911 Last Massacre four ranchers and one police officer killed by Shosones in Nevada
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The notion that massacres and genocide are uniquely American or European is ridiculous — a claim made by people who care nothing about justice but are merely intent on destroying Western civilization. It is blatant racism disguised as a grievance — a tactic to discredit republicanism and capitalism. It is designed to create resentment, hate, and chaos among people who never experienced these traumatic events, decades or centuries after they happened.
This practice of perverting Columbus and the legacy of European settlement in the Americas underscores the need for conservatives to learn about their heritage, ensure that the correct history is taught to their descendants, and preserve and protect their culture. Activism to protect your heritage and culture is no vice.
