OPINION: Fetishizing 'Indigenous Peoples' Has Bred

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Yesterday was Columbus Day, a holiday in honor of an important man who did something important. However, under Joe Biden’s misrule, it has been rebranded into a travesty called “Indigenous People’s Day.” No one is sure what the day is about. Most Americans ignore it while the left enters into a bacchanalia of America-bashing and virtue signaling.

I have a great deal of problems with this new commemorative day because I can’t really figure out what we are honoring with that celebration. The contributions made by the aboriginal peoples of North America to American or world culture are exceedingly small. A handful of words — canoe, moccasin, squaw, etc. — have passed into common usage. There are a modest number of burial mounds and some rock glyphs to record their passing. None of the American Indian tribes had developed metallurgy or the wheel. Mathematics and even a rudimentary means of writing were unknown for the most part. Warfare was endemic and brutal. and frequently had the objective of genocide. Slavery was part of the culture of most Indian tribes, as was ritualized torture, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. In short, I find very little admirable about American Indian culture — the documented variety, not the maudlin, Dances With Wolves fake culture the left imagines existed — and can’t think of any reason Americans, of all ancestries, have to be sorry that it is a thing of the past.

The fate of the American Indian is a tale as old as mankind.

There is nothing new or particularly notable about the fate of American Indian tribes in their conflict with Europeans that is different from any other primitive culture facing a more advanced one other than the fact that the victors, adhering to Christian values, stopped short of slaughtering or forcibly assimilating the survivors and, in a singular act of charity, allowed them “sovereign status” on reservations where they have their own governments and institutions sustained by federal largess and casinos. If you want to be proud of your American Indian heritage, that’s your business and you’re welcome to it, just don’t expect most of the country to agree that you’re owed anything that hasn’t already been paid in full.

Indigenous People’s Day is just another assault on America by people who hate the country. Yesterday’s statement by Kamala Harris is a prime example of the left and a large number of the America First crowd fetishizing anyone the US has bested economically or militarily.

Yep, Europeans destroyed Stone Age tribal societies mired in superstition and bloodletting and built the greatest nation on Earth. We won, you lost, deal with it.

Historically, and especially from the national identity and unity perspective, Indigenous People’s Day makes much less sense than Antebellum South Day.

If it was just leftist midwits talking Marxist trash, that wouldn’t be of concern. Where this conscious development of an identity that is not primarily American does become a concern is when contempt for America becomes an element of its practice and that contempt is encouraged by the federal government.

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This video is from the “Black Hills Pow Wow” held on October 11-13 of this year. The video is cued to the relevant part.

1. There are people in military uniform prancing around. I don’t know if they are real or cosplaying, but my working assumption is that they are National Guard members. The spectacle of American soldiers reveling in a defeat of the US Army while showing disrespect for the American flag (see point #3 below) should be punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

2. The cavalry guidon being used as a mop is a replica of brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer’s personal guidon from the Civil War. He had a personal guidon because he was a general officer. I’m somewhat unclear on why this is being done, as at Little Big Horn Custer was a lieutenant colonel, and his personal guidon was in his study at Fort Abraham Lincoln, North Dakota. Perhaps the participants were a little squeamish using a 7th Cavalry guidon.

3. The American flag is dipped in submission. This is not done.

4. The flag that remains upright is that of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. This is another one of those anomalies that demonstrate just how fake this stuff is. American Indians never had the industry to make flags, and they didn’t use flags, so this is just cultural appropriation. The irony of the victory ceremony being conducted in American English, Custer’s native tongue, can’t be overlooked.

There was no need to include the gratuitous celebration of a minor victory over countrymen and an insult to the national flag in a cultural event. There was no reason for what I’m assuming to be members of the US Armed Forces to demean their uniform and their country by behaving like this.

If we use the same standards to evaluate Custer’s defeat as is used to critique America’s expansion, there really isn’t much to brag about. Custer was outnumbered by at least 2:1; the Indians had superior firepower (single-shot trapdoor Springfield rifles versus a variety of lever-action repeating rifles). One cavalry trooper is thought to have been taken prisoner, and he was tortured to death. The dead, except Custer, were mutilated beyond recognition. On that day in June 1876, Custer’s command was outnumbered, outgunned, and slaughtered. Beaten by a team with a 1-497 record (I’m making that number up in case the fact-checkers are prowling around), playing on its home field.

Ethnic pride is great, but it can’t be at the sake of an American identity. If that is where you are headed, trust me when I tell you that you aren’t going to like where the path you are following is going to take you.