[imc-st.louis] Happy Indigenous People's Day!

[Elizabeth Hansen]

Greetings!

Happy Indigenous People's Day!  As you know, the United States 
Government recognizes today as Columbus Day.  Some schools and business 
even call it a holiday.  Let's instead celebrate the Indigenous people, 
who really discovered America.

Christopher Columbus was a slave trader and a genocidal murderer.  He 
did not "discover" the Americas, as he is often credited with, but 
rather was the first to effectively exploit them.  His aims were to 
collect gold and slaves for Europe.  He encountered Arawaks in Haiti 
early in his exploits, and enslaved them, forced them to pay him 
tribute in gold and cotton with the threat of mutilation and murder if 
they did not.  He wrote a friend describing how he and the other 
European "explorers" were able to capture and rape native women and 
girls, including those as young as 9 years old.  (see "Lies My Teacher 
Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James 
W. Loewen) Many Native Americans, though first hospitable, learned of 
his murderous ways and fled or killed themselves.  The Arawak 
population of Haiti went from about 8 million to zero because of 
Columbus and his fellow imperialists.  This is genocide.

Let's not celebrate this man.  Instead, let us focus on the people he 
killed.  Let us celebrate the people who are lost to history forever, 
and those who have survived to the present, despite all attempts by the 
US military to kill them off.

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

Peace,
Liz