Posted on 10/13/2014 10:43:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It was either Francis Parkman or Frederick Jackson Turner or the composer of the theme from F Troop who first laid down an essential truth about the American experience: In the end, Paleface and Redskin both turn chicken.
Now the same white male power structure that made Black History Month the shortest month in the calendar and sabotaged the Susan B. Anthony dollar by making it indistinguishable from a quarter is at it again. And the oppression is coming from the supposedly sympathetic, progressive side: The city of Seattle, Washington, has designated an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” on the second Monday of October — a day already reserved for the federal Columbus Day holiday.
Seattle’s City Council unanimously passed the proposal for a non-official city holiday earlier this week. Mayor Ed Murray will sign Indigenous Peoples’ Day into law Monday, and he noted to local media that the day is only an homage that has no municipal weight (no parking relief). The legislation “will honor local Native-American tribes,” the Seattle Times reports. Murray claims Indigenous Peoples’ Day will “add new significance to the date without replacing the Columbus Day tradition,” according to the paper.
Of course, to displace Columbus Day you would actually have to believe in something: the perfectly defensible point that the arrival of late-medieval Europeans in the Americas was a catastrophe for native inhabitants so awful that it should not be celebrated. But making that decision would require a point of view, and half-assed gestures like Seattle’s are the negation of even the idea of having a point of view.
The emptiness of the gesture is there right in the name of the day: It’s not Tecumseh Day or Ira Hayes Day or Sacagawea Day or Russell Means Day. Those were actual people with actual legacies. By honoring them or not honoring them you are making a judgment about what their reputations mean. You are, in the jargon of post-colonial theory, granting them agency. That’s why “Martin Luther King Day” has a resonance that “Black People Day” would not.
No sooner said than done, local Italian Americans are claiming offense on behalf of 250,000 Seattleites of Italian descent. But even they can’t get beyond a general condemnation of “political correctness” to the real Genoa-is-more-than-just-a-salami heart of the matter. “We empathize with the death and destruction of the Native Americans,” gun-control activist Ralph Fascitelli told reporters Thursday during a conference at an Italian restaurant. And that is pretty much the extent of what Indigenous Peoples’ Day will honor — a vague offense against a blob of people so undifferentiated we can’t even bother to single out any one of them. The saddest part of the I.P.D. controversy is that it reminds us that this kind of sleepyheaded nod of half-attention has already been enshrined at the federal level. In October 2008, at the height of the financial market crash, President Bush took time out to sign Congressman Joe Baca’s (D., California) “Native American Heritage Day Act of 2008,” which set a holiday for the day after Thanksgiving. It’s not clear what part of the heritage we’re honoring, or even if the holiday continued after 2008, because the act could have been more fairly titled the “We Don’t Really Care Act.”
Could it be that the Emerald City just doesn’t have candidates worth a day of celebration? The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the current population of the overwhelmingly white city at 652,405, with American Indians and Alaska Natives making up just 0.8 percent of the total. Still, that’s 5,200 people. Couldn’t Murray just give some local Indian the key to the city?
Maybe it would be easier if there were a particular Indian the city could laud, perhaps a revered peacemaker steeped in both history and myth, a chief even, with a name like Chief . . . Seattle. No, that would be too easy.
According to Libs the Humans in Norte and South America didn’t evolve here .. they evolved in Africa, and them went of the bering land bridge during the last ice age... so they are in fact INVADERS of pristine NATURE!!!!!
“Native Americans” the first Colonizers that Raped the Earth of the pristine nature of the Americas....
How many animals and plants went extinct because of the so called “Native Americans” colonizing the Americas?
Typical commie lib potheads. They preach to us day in and day out that immigrants built America and then celebrate the people who didn’t. That’s some weird thinking right there.
I escaped from Seattle 30 years ago. They’ve got more nutbags than Planters.
Being in a place first and getting your ass kicked later is very old news on this planet.
Bumper Sticker I want: ‘It’s my fault, I’m a white guy’
If they are upset that February has only 28 days, they should complain to the man responsible, the emperor Augustus, who had a day taken from February so that August would be as long as July. Of course he was a white male but a very farseeing one to plot to make Black History Month the shortest month.
The first peoples on the North American continent are thougth to have come over the Bearing Strait from Asia. That would mean that the people who were in North America when Europeans arrived had driven South the people who were living in South America. By the logic of “indigeneous peoples day” the indians living in NA have no more legitimacy than the Europeans.
All four of my Jewish grandparents arrived here at the turn of the 19th/20th century from Russia and Eastern Europe.
But I was born here and have lived here my whole life.
So I think “Indigenous Peopls’s Day” is a great idea.
There should be a day on which we Indigenous Americans celebrate our native American culture and heritage - from Baseball to jazz to all the inventions and prosperity that our culture has created and bestowed on the rest of the world — as a counter offensive to all the unjustified attention and special privileges bestowed on the illegal aliens who have invaded us over the past several decades.
So here’s to “Indigenous People’s Day.” I hope it catches on nationwide next year, as a way of reclaiming our true American heritage.
I’ll start the celebration with a nice cold bottle of Sam Adams. How will you celebrate?
I should add that display of the Mexican flag ought to be outlawed on Indigenous people’s day, just as the display of the American flag has been outlawed on Sink O’DeMaio.
The mis-named "nobel savages" on the North American continent regularly engaged in torture, ritual murder, infanticide, war and, occasionally, cannibalism. These savages never had the brains to invent the wheel! They routinely used up all local resources and crapped all over the place until their camps had to be abandoned. They would pack their teepees and move away to a new place they could destroy. Sort of sounds like modern Californians.
Here's a nice report about some of their proclivities: How Comanches butchered babies and roasted their enemies
I’m celebrating by going to a pipe club meeting in Baltimore, smoking a bowl of aged Virginia tobacco (a gift to Europeans from indigenous people) and giving a presentation about my calabash pipe collection to the other members. (the calabash is a gift to the rest of the world from Southern Africa.)
Exactly. When people bring up the “native American” title, I always say that anyone born here is a native American, (according to the Supreme Court your mother just has to have one foot in this country during delivery lol).
You forgot to mention that the indigenous people also enslaved other indigenous people.
They’re just getting more and more blatant, aren’t they?
Anything that is seen as a virtue, a good, or something worthy of praise is derided by leftists. They’re getting more and more open about it.
They played one game out of their division and got slaughtered. Get over it. You can always ask for a rematch.
Apparently Juan has trouble distinguishing between a country and a continent. Of course, nobody ever said he got his job because he's smart.....
Can’t believe folks are supporting the indians who displaced and killed Kennewick Man.
When I was a kid we played “Cowboys and Indians”.
I guess that today the kids should play “Brokeback Mountain Cowboys and Indigenous People.”
I think that God should give this planet back to the Dinosaurs.
That was quite a story....thanks for posting it.
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