Indigenous Ingrates

I celebrated Columbus Day by traveling for an extended weekend holiday. Got back to discover the anklebiting I knew was waiting for me. An Amerind professor at UNC-Chapel Hill is offered for my fisking.

Here’s the TL;DR on America’s indigenous peoples: they are ungrateful losers. They got a gold-plated opportunity to be part of the greatest nation ever in human history and instead of trading tepees for indoor plumbing, whined that their literally Stone Age non-civilization is no more. We gave them horses; no thanks. Metal goods; no thanks. Free, dual citizenship; no thanks. Christianity; ooh, they’re still hissy about that one. And when all that wasn’t enough, we gave them Indian casinos. Zero thanks.

Now, they want Christopher Columbus’ metaphorical scalp.

Why more places are abandoning Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day

https://theconversation.com/why-more-places-are-abandoning-columbus-day-in-favor-of-indigenous-peoples-day-124481

By Malinda Maynor Lowery, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

No surprise that the university leading the charge (heh) to tear down Southern memorials believes that book-burning the 1860s is not enough. Although the real credit for starting this cultural arson probably belongs to my California. I’ll guess Berkeley just because reputation.

Increasingly, Columbus Day is giving people pause.

More and more towns and cities across the country are electing to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day as an alternative to . or in addition to . the day intended to honor Columbus. voyages.

Critics of the change see it as just another example of political correctness run amok . another flash point of the culture wars.

As a scholar of Native American history . and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina . I know the story is more complex than that.

The growing recognition and celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day actually represents the fruits of a concerted, decades-long effort to recognize the role of indigenous people in the nation’s history.

Which is it, Malinda (correct name: Melinda)? Do you want to celebrate your people or do you want to remove Columbus from prominence? These don’t have to be exclusive goals. Had you declared Tuesday to be “Indigenous People Day” while keeping Monday “Columbus Day” then I wouldn’t care enough to fisk your article.

There’s room for both of us to have a day in the sun… unless you’re obsessed with identity politics and religiously committed to zero-sum methodologies, in which case you can’t boost “your people” without slandering and silencing “my people”.

That being the case, I opened up with my “ungrateful loser” broadside. Your rules are stupid, Malinda, but you run society and I don’t. These are the rules you wrote; feel free to have second thoughts.

Why Columbus?

Columbus Day is a relatively new federal holiday.

If we should get rid of Columbus Day because it’s relatively new then say goodbye to Indignant Parasites Day.

In 1892, a joint congressional resolution prompted President Benjamin Harrison to mark the “discovery of America by Columbus,. in part because of “the devout faith of the discoverer and for the divine care and guidance which has directed our history and so abundantly blessed our people..

You may have already noted that 1892 is the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage. That might be another part of the motivation for this pronouncement.

I give Malinda credit for providing many links in this article. Let’s follow this one down memory lane, to when our leaders were trustworthy servants of men and God.

Proclamation on the 400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America by Columbus

Whereas by a joint resolution approved June 29, 1892, it was resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled.

That the President of the United States be authorized and directed to issue a proclamation recommending to the people the observance in all their localities of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, on the 21st of October, 1892, by public demonstrations and by suitable exercises in their schools and other places of assembly.

Not actually enforced until 1934.

Now, therefore, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21, 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, as a general holiday for the people of the United States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.

Not uniquely of Columbus, then. I hadn’t known that.

Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.

Universal education… you’re losing me, President Harrison. WAS there ever a time when politicians were trustworthy servants of men and God?

In the churches and in the other places of assembly of the people let there be expressions of gratitude to Divine Providence for the devout faith of the discoverer and for the divine care and guidance which has directed our history and so abundantly blessed our people.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this 21st day of July, A.D. 1892, and of the Independence of the United States the one hundred and seventeenth.

Back to main article.

Europeans invoked God’s will to impose their will on indigenous people. So it seemed logical to call on God when establishing a holiday celebrating that conquest, too.

It was indeed God’s will to impose Christian morality upon you, both to rescue your souls and end your loathsome immoralities. You’re welcome. But if Christ had wanted you conquered and enslaved, your history in USA would have been much, MUCH different.

Of course, not all Americans considered themselves blessed in 1892. That same year, a lynching forced black journalist Ida B. Wells to flee her home town of Memphis.

A feminist agitator and pioneer of false rape accusations, to judge from her wikipedia profile. Even today, I have zero sympathy or patience for outspoken black women complaining about white man’s brutality. They all get treated worse by their boyfriends and love it.

And while Ellis Island had opened in January of that year, welcoming European immigrants, Congress had already banned Chinese immigration a decade prior, subjecting Chinese people living in the U.S. to widespread persecution.

Shut your hypocritical mouth, Malinda the Lumbee Tribe Amerind writing this article to justify replacing Columbus with her own people.

And then there was the government’s philosophy towards the country’s Native Americans, which Army Colonel Richard Henry Pratt so unforgettably articulated in 1892: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man..

Who? *Checks wikipedia* Oh, wow. Colonel Pratt was a VERY interesting and relevant figure. Postscript at the end! For now, that quote of Pratt’s was NOT a call for genocide. It was a call for forcibly uplifting Amerinds out of their codependent squalor.

It took another 42 years for Columbus Day to formally become a federal holiday, thanks to a 1934 decree by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He was responding, in part, to a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, a national Catholic charity founded to provide services to Catholic immigrants. Over time, its agenda expanded to include advocacy for Catholic social values and education.

When Italians first arrived in the United States, they were targets of marginalization and discrimination. Officially celebrating Christopher Columbus . an Italian Catholic . became one way to affirm the new racial order that would emerge in the U.S. in the 20th century, one in which the descendants of diverse ethnic European immigrants became “white” Americans.

I sometimes wonder if bringing Catholicism into an openly Protestant nation was an intentional act of destabilization on par with modern immivasion strategies. Glory to Christ, the attempt backfired hard with Joe McCarthy. Prots and Cats might not agree on the best way to run a government but we’re both enemies of the devil.

Indigenous people power

But some Americans started to question why Indigenous people . who.d been in the country all along . didn’t have their own holiday.

They had done nothing to celebrate. No great voyages, no achievements, no insights. We whites are willing to celebrate South American peoples such as the ancient Mayans with their remarkable stonework and mathematics/astronomy. But the Pueblos who painted with mud on the walls of their cave-homes? Not so much.

You want white man’s respect? Then DO SOMETHING.

In the 1980s, Colorado’s American Indian Movement chapter began protesting the celebration of Columbus Day. In 1989, activists in South Dakota persuaded the state to replace Columbus Day with Native American Day. Both states have large Native populations that played active roles in the Red Power Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to make American Indian people more politically visible.

Besides that!

As an aside, check out the official symbol of Red Power: bunny ears!

Or is it the Playboy symbol?

Then, in 1992, at the 500th anniversary of Columbus. first voyage, American Indians in Berkeley, California, organized the first “Indigenous Peoples. Day,. a holiday the city council soon formally adopted. Berkeley has since replaced its commemoration of Columbus with a celebration of indigenous people.

Heh, I wasn’t far wrong with my assumption of Berkeley kicking off this nonsense.

The holiday can also trace its origins to the United Nations. In 1977, indigenous leaders from around the world organized a United Nations conference in Geneva to promote indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Their first recommendation was “to observe October 12, the day of so-called “discovery” of America, as an International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.. It took another 30 years for their work to be formally recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in September 2007.

Oh, look at that. The world government weaponized a pack of dissidents into agitating for what the world government just happened to already want. Viva la Prole!

Unexpected allies

Today, cities with significant native populations, like Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, now celebrate either Native American Day or Indigenous Peoples Day.

That’s a lie. I know from personal history that there are no “significant native populations” in Los Angeles. Malinda is virtue-signaling to her REAL tribe, the International Communists.

And states like Hawaii, Nevada, Minnesota, Alaska and Maine have also formally recognized their Native populations with similar holidays. Many Native governments, like the Cherokee and Osage in Oklahoma, either don’t observe Columbus Day or have replaced it with their own holiday.

Like I said, they’re ingrates. If Europeans had never discovered the New World the Amerinds would be speaking Chinese right now… the ones left after multiple ethnic cleansings. Or perhaps the South Americans would have migrated north to win their hearts and minds.

Just last year, the town of Carrboro, North Carolina…

Near UNC-Chapel Hill, in fact.

…issued a resolution to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. The resolution noted the fact that the town of 21,000 had been built on indigenous land and that it was committed to .protect, respect and fulfill the full range of inherent human rights,. including those of indigenous people.

Shrug, okay. Send in the National Guard to imprison all city aldermen and government officials who ever served in the town government for massive violations of human rights.

Of course, that wasn’t what they meant. Here’s a group photo of the Carrboro, NC alder-“men”:

They’re so obsessed with feelings and care-based morality that they didn’t notice they signed a confession to receiving stolen goods.

While Columbus Day affirms the story of a nation created by Europeans for Europeans, Indigenous Peoples Day emphasizes Native histories and Native people . an important addition to the country’s ever-evolving understanding of what it means to be American.

And that’s what this is all about. Fools like Malinda fantasize about a world in which the United States, and the Christian nations that led to its creation, never existed, and dream of the day when our skulls pave the road to victory for the World Government.

Postscript

Richard Henry Pratt as a lieutenant. Wikipedia gives his history:

At the outbreak of the American Civil War Pratt enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. After his first three-month term expired he re-enlisted as a sergeant with the 2nd Regiment Indiana Cavalry and saw action at the Battle of Chickamauga. While on a recruiting detail in Indiana during the winter of 1863-1864 Pratt met Anna Mason. They were married on April 12, 1864. Eight days later he was commissioned as a first lieutenant with the 11th Regiment Indiana Cavalry. He served in administrative roles for the remainder of the war and was mustered out of the Volunteer Service on May 29, 1865 at the rank of captain. He became a companion of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States – a military society for officers who had served the Union during the Civil War.

Pratt returned to Logansport, Indiana to be reunited with Anna and ran a hardware store. After two years in the hardware business, he re-entered the Army in March 1867 as Second Lieutenant in the 10th United States Cavalry, an African-American regiment composed of black men, including some who were recently freed from slavery famously known as the “Buffalo Soldiers” at Fort Sill in the Oklahoma Territory.

Pratt’s long and active military career included eight years in the great plains, which involved participation in some of the signal conflicts with Native Americans of the southern plains, including the Washita campaign of 1868.1869 and the Red River War of 1874.1875. The winter of 1874-1875 caused many hostiles to surrender to their Indian Agents and Pratt was responsible for gathering testimony for and against the worst offenders. He worked directly with interpreters and prisoners to clear as many charges as possible.

This is the man Malinda quoted as a hate-spewing racist. That’s not just wrong, it’s 180 degrees from right.

After the Indian wars subsided President Grant’s Attorney General concluded that a state of war could not exist between a nation and its wards therefore the prisoners would be sent as prisoners of war for permanent imprisonment at Fort Marion. Pratt was chosen to lead the prisoners because he had much experience with Indians and interpreters from working on their cases. His orders were extremely vague so after he requested further authority over the prisoners he began to experiment with education. In the 1870s at Fort Marion, Florida, he introduced classes in the English language, art, guard duty, and craftsmanship to several dozen prisoners who had been chosen from among those who had surrendered in the Indian Territory at the end of the Red River War.

On November 1, 1879, he founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the first of many nonreservation boarding schools for Native Americans.

His signature achievement.

Pratt’s practice of Americanization of Native Americans by cultural assimilation, which he effected both at Fort Marion and Carlisle, was later regarded by some as a form of cultural genocide. He believed that to claim their rightful place as American citizens, Native Americans needed to renounce their tribal way of life, convert to Christianity, abandon their reservations, and seek education and employment among the “best classes” of Americans. In his writings he described his belief that the government must “kill the Indian…to save the man”.

…Pratt became an outspoken opponent of tribal segregation on reservations. He believed the system as administered and encouraged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was hindering the education and civilization of Native Americans and creating helpless wards of the state. These views led to conflicts with the Indian Bureau and the government officials who supported the reservation system. In May 1904, Pratt denounced the Indian Bureau and the reservation system as a hindrance to the civilization and assimilation of Native Americans. This controversy, coupled with earlier disputes with the government over civil service reform, led to Pratt’s forced retirement as superintendent of the Carlisle School on June 30, 1904.

Analysis: true. It’s always a mistake to create a new government agency with wide-ranging powers, and task it to preserve the status quo forever.

But Pratt was also disastrously wrong. We didn’t owe the Amerinds anything but the opportunity to be Americans. Like Christianity, that isn’t something that can be forced, excuse me, “educated” upon a person.

The races of men are fundamentally different. Pratt’s own Carlisle School gave the proof of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlisle_Indian_Industrial_School

The Carlisle Indian School was a well-spring for the Society of American Indians, the first Indian rights organization created by and for Indians. The Society was a group of about fifty prominent Native American intelligentsia who exchanged views collectively confronting their tribes and gave birth to Pan-Indianism. The organization was influenced by the Carlisle experience and dedicated to self-determination and preserving Native American culture. From 1911 to 1923, the Society was forefront in the fight for Indian citizenship and the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

That Act is what granted automatic dual citizenship for Amerinds. They learned our system then used our system to agitate for gimmiedats.

Carlisle was created with the explicit goal of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream European-American culture. “The goal of acculturation was to be accomplished by “total immersion” in the white man’s world.” Pratt founded Carlisle to immerse Native American children in mainstream culture and teach them English, new skills, and customs. Pratt’s slogan was “to civilize the Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him civilized, let him stay.“[citation needed] Pratt’s approach was harsh but an alternative to the commonly-held goal of extermination of Native Americans. A positive outcome of a Carlisle education was the student’s increased multilingualism.

The boldfaced is the fire in which America burns. We let all these people in and they hang us with our own rope, as predicted by a very evil yet very smart person.

While assimilation was a crucial part of the Carlisle School’s plan, it was also looked at controversially by some Native Americans who felt they were pushed to marry interracially. As Katherine Ellinghaus notes in her book, “There was considerable resistance to the school’s unspoken policy regarding interracial marriage.”

A reasonable complaint. I wouldn’t enjoy that situation, either.

Exterminating the other races is wrong and presuming them to be equals is stupid. It’s a thorny problem that even God pointed out with the metaphor of mixed iron and clay.

All children who attended Carlisle were subjected to “militaristic regimentation and disciplines,” such as cutting of their hair, changing their dress, diets, names, and learning unfamiliar conceptions of space and time. They were also forced to let go of their cultural gender roles, and assimilate to what white men believed they should do in society. Native women traditionally held important political, social and economic power within their communities, as most Native cultures promoted gender equality, and this was disrupted at Carlisle.

News flash, my headdress homies: your gender equality was why you were living in mud huts while we conquered oceans. It’s hard to believe that gender equality was accepted in a society that depended daily on male strength to lift rocks and hunt meat, but the Amerinds handled female inferiority the same way we “Euros” handle it today: by promoting women to the top as quickly as possible:

Some Cherokee women also attained the rank of chief. “They were not, as Euro-Americans imagine, merely chattel, servants to man, wives, and mothers.” It wasn’t uncommon for Native women to be warriors, statesmen, religious leaders, and shamans (the equivalent of doctors). Carlisle instructors forced the women to learn the industrial and domestic skills appropriate to European American gender roles. For many of them, this cultural assault led to confusion, alienation, homesickness and resentment.

They meant “resentment, resentment, resentment and penis envy”. Cultures can vary but Original Sin unites us all.

During the first few weeks at Carlisle, when the Lakota and Dakota greatly outnumbered all other tribes, it was discovered that Cheyennes and Kiowas were learning to speak Lakota and Dakota. After that, English was the only language permitted on the campus. Dormitory rooms held three or four each, and no two students from the same tribe were permitted to room together. The plan helped in the rapid acquisition of English, and although some were hereditary foes, Pratt believed the Indian students to be less inclined to quarrel than most white children. However, there were consequences.

Aww, the entry doesn’t elaborate on those “consequences”. Although we can easily guess at the gaps between “we forced hereditary foes to bunk together” and “they united against us when we gave them the chance”.

It’s funny except these Progressives were honestly surprised at that outcome. To this day, and every day they ever tried, despite every precedent lining up the exact same way like lodestone, they’ve always been surprised to discover that human nature cannot be freely altered by Ivory Tower eggheads and their jackbooted thugs.

Luther Standing Bear was called to the superintendent’s office and asked him if it was a good idea to get some Indian boys from the reservation and put them in school with white boys, expecting that the Indian boys would learn faster by such an association. Luther agreed that it might be a good plan, so a permit was received from Washington. Sixty boys from Pine Ridge were mixed with 60 European-American boys. Teachers had hoped the Indians would learn the English language faster by this arrangement. “But lo and behold, the white boys began learning the Sioux language.” The program was discontinued.

White men lack the “my race right or wrong” gene. That plus enough intelligence to be curious… and self-delusional… can become an existential problem.

Luther Standing Bear got a mixed reception at home on the reservation. Some were proud of his achievements while others did not like that he had “become a white man.”

Even when the State succeeded in reprogramming an individual, that didn’t guarantee a happy life.

Exposure to “white men’s diseases”, especially tuberculosis, was a major health problem on the reservation as well as the East. During the years of operation, hundreds of children died at Carlisle. Most died from infectious diseases common in the early 20th Century that killed many children. More than 180 students were buried in the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery.

Disease is another reason to not race-mix. Only by grace of God has there not yet been a super-plague in this era of aviation.

Beginning in the early 1900s, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School began to diminish in relevance. With growth of more localized private and government reservation schools in the West, children no longer needed to travel to a distant Eastern school in Pennsylvania. … In 1914, a Congressional investigation focused on management at the School and the out-sized role played by athletics.

Some things never change.

On the morning of September 1, 1918, a transfer ceremony took place. The American flag was lowered for the last time at the Carlisle Indian School and presented to Major A.C. Backmeyer, who raised it again over the new U.S. Army Base Hospital Number 31.

Today, instead of enjoying the choice of living in self-sufficient communities or being participants in the United States, the welfare-dependent Amerinds work the system Pratt taught them to use for all it’s worth… hating us for all the good we ever did them.

Particularly their women, who hated being taught to respect and honor men.

Which explains Malinda’s disgust for the Colonel who gave her people the keys to the kingdom.