You may think that today is Columbus Day, which it is; but it is also Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And as you may know, it is now customary at many woke colleges and universities to acknowledge regularly that all proceedings are taking place on “stolen land.” Now this year for the first time, a U.S. President has recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day with a Proclamation. Here are a few of the stirring words:
Since time immemorial, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians have built vibrant and diverse cultures — safeguarding land, language, spirit, knowledge, and tradition across the generations. On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples. . . .
Over at NPR, you can feel the excitement. And they helpfully provide some tips, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, for how to celebrate appropriately:
There are no set rules on how one should appreciate the day, said [Mandy] Van Heuvelen [the cultural interpreter coordinator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian], a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe from South Dakota. It's all about reflection, recognition, celebration and an education. "It can be a day of reflection of our history in the United States, the role Native people have played in it, the impacts that history has had on native people and communities, and also a day to gain some understanding of the diversity of Indigenous peoples," she said.
Here at Manhattan Contrarian, as my contribution to “reflection, recognition, celebration, and education” on the role of Indigenous Peoples, I thought I would find a few choice passages from one of my favorite history books, France and England in North America. This multi-thousand-page opus was written by Harvard historian Francis Parkman over the course of several decades in the nineteenth century. Among many other things, It contains several hundred pages sourced from accounts written by French Jesuit missionaries about their experiences in the first half of the seventeenth century, upon encountering and living among the native tribes of what are now upstate New York and Eastern Canada.
The salient fact is that the tribes were engaged in ongoing and endless wars of extermination against each other, waged in the most brutal possible way with the weapons available. The following passage appears at pages 572-73 of the 1983 Library of America edition of Parkman’s work:
A band of Algonquins, late in the autumn of 1641, set forth from Three Rivers [then a tiny French outpost in what is now Quebec] on their winter hunt, and, fearful of the Iroquois, made their way far northward, into the depths of the forests that border the Ottawa. Here they thought themselves safe, built their lodges, and began to hunt the moose and beaver. But a large party of their enemies, with a persistent ferocity that is truly astonishing, had penetrated even here, found the traces of the snow-shoes, followed up their human prey, and hid at nightfall among the rocks and thickets around the encampment. At midnight, their yells and the blows of their war-clubs awakened their sleeping victims. In a few minutes all were in their power. They bound the prisoners hand and foot, rekindled the fire, slung the kettles, cut the bodies of the slain to pieces, and boiled and devoured them before the eyes of the wretched survivors.
The survivors, including men, women, and children, were all taken prisoner. The Iroquois with their captives then began a march home of well over a hundred miles. Here’s an account of one event along the way:
[A]fter a short rest, [the conquerors] began their march homeward with their prisoners. Among these were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.
Several days later, the war party arrived triumphantly at its home village. From page 574-75:
[T]hey entered the town, leading the captive Algonquins, fast bound, and surrounded by a crowd of men, women, and children, all singing at the top of their throats. . . . On the following morning, [the prisoners] were placed on a large scaffold, in sight of the whole population. It was a gala-day. Young and old were gathered from far and near. Some mounted the scaffold, and scorched them with torches and firebrands; while the children, standing beneath the bark platform, applied fire to the feet of the prisoners between the crevices. The Algonquin women were told to burn their husbands and companions; and one of them obeyed, vainly thinking to appease her tormentors. The stoicism of one of the warriors enraged his captors beyond measure. “Scream! why don’t you scream?” they cried, thrusting their burning brands at his naked body. “Look at me,” he answered; “you cannot make me wince. If you were in my place, you would screech like babies.” At this they fell upon him with redoubled fury, till their knives and firebrands left in him no semblance of humanity. He was defiant to the last, and when death came to his relief, they tore out his heart and devoured it; then hacked him in pieces, and made their feast of triumph on his mangled limbs.
It goes on and on from there, but you get the picture.
I don’t mean by this “reflection” to indicate that the Indigenous Peoples of North America were just unadulterated pure evil. However, the current hysteria of uncritical celebration of the “noble savages,” accompanied by unalloyed hatred of the United States and Western civilization, borders on the ridiculous.
One of my nieces is currently taking some courses at American University in Washington, and she sends along an email distributed today by the university on the occasion of this Indigenous Peoples’ Day thing. Excerpt:
Today is Indigenous People’s [sic] Day and we want to challenge you to not only acknowledge the totality of this day but why it is so important. The first step within that is acknowledging the fact that we, as American University students, teachers and staff occupy sacred Nacotchtank, Anacostan and Piscataway land. This is not our land and it is due to being on this land that we are afforded the opportunity to attend AU.
Here’s my question: Did any one of the Nacotchtank, Anacostan or Piscataway tribes ever recognize for a minute the right of any of the other tribes to own or occupy any particular piece of land? And for that matter, did any indigenous tribe anywhere in North America ever recognize the right of any other tribe to occupy any particular piece of land? Of course not. The whole idea is completely contrary to everything we know about the life of the indigenous people prior to and shortly after arrival of the Europeans. So why exactly is it now so important for us current occupants to recognize rights in land that the Indians themselves never recognized?
Don’t try to make any sense of this. It’s all about some deep need to feel guilty for no particular reason. Spoiled rich kids and lefty college professors in modern America take some kind of twisted satisfaction from this.
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