If you are anti-slavery — Happy Columbus Day!!
- Europeans eventually brought an end to slavery.
- Left alone with no European influence would slavery and tribal atrocities not be “indigenous” still?
Michael Graham writing at The Federalist:
Why ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ Is Far Worse Than Columbus Day
If we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day.’
Excerpt:
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.
Black Slaves-Indian Masters
Barbara Krauthamer. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
via UNC Press:
From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes’ removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.
via Native American Indian Facts:
The Mohawk were a particularly violent tribe. They commonly fought with the Algonquin, the Wabanaki, Ojibway, and the Mohican bands.
That is just one North American tribe. Need we mention the Aztecs and Incas. They were humanists alright, if you are talking diet. And as far as the promotion of the idea of the noble peaceful savage in commune with nature, consider these books, both from noted archeologists:
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (excerpt from publisher)
Lawrence Keeley’s groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as “the pacification of the past”).
Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (excerpt from publisher)
With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the “noble savage” living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in ecological balance with nature.
