BEST OF TST - Una Gente in Dios (10/15/24)

BEST OF TST: Columbus Day is October 14, and is always a guarantee that there will be arguments and political posturing about how either Christopher Columbus was some great hero who discovered America, but thought it was India and so called the people Indians, or about how we was a white monster who slaughtered innocent red people who he stumbled upon randomly. Neither narrative holds up to scrutiny. Columbus was married into the family of Henry Sinclair, who ventured to the Americas from Scotland in 1398. Others like Leif Erikson came hundreds of years before that, sometime around 1000 AD. Columbus certainly didn’t mistake the people he found for the population of India because that place then was called Hindustan, meaning people who lived on land beyond the Indus River. Instead he wrote of them as Indios, or “una gente in Dios,” meaning “a people in God.” The only problem was they didn’t believe in the same God necessarily, and though the people generally wanted to trade and have friendship, they did not want to be forcibly converted to another religion. But this is the case for every group of people, not just Indians supposedly oppressed by Europeans. Part of the narrative includes the myths of smallpox blankets, blind murder of all heathens, and theft of all their land and resources. Yet there is only one case of potential bio-warfare at Fort Pitt, as a result of Indians refusing peace terms, and we know that Columbus himself saw the people as ready to be converted so they certainly were not heathens having already been designated "indios." Furthermore, the romanticizing of Indians as believing no-one could own the land or private property is a malicious lie, considering that most tribes had a sophisticated understanding of the previous - not to mention the Iroquois Confederacy was instrumental in forming the US Constitution many hundreds of years later. The idea that Europeans ripped Natives off, which suggest they were dumb, which they weren’t, is another malicious lie. In fact, Indians and Europeans traded largely in peace, with the latter prizing the former’s goods, something that may have lead to sickness spreading among tribes. Most conflicts arose from non-Indian land speculators and fur traders, but also from Indians who saw Europeans as barbarians. Today we have politicians wanting to rename Columbus Day and instead call it Indigenous Peoples Day. The problem is “indigenous” means originating from a specific place, and in the case of Indians they certainly didn’t originate in the Americas. In fact, by chronology, in a sense, Erikson and Sinclair were more Native American than the Arawak greeted by Columbus. Not to mention Richard Marsh found white Indians in Panama. Recent research has also found that Australian Aboriginal DNA is within Brazilian Indians.

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