Today is the "official" (Monday) Columbus Day holiday. Someone has posted an anti-Columbus video featuring good-looking young non-white people talking about the heinous crimes of Christopher Columbus (meaning, of course, all white Europeans, and that means you and the horse you rode in on too if you are not a "person of color") — not actually specifying the crimes, of course, just referring to them. They want an indigenous people's holiday.
My Cherokee ancestors might appreciate an indigenous people's holiday. However, remember they were fighting other indigenous people when the Europeans came. The Caribs that Columbus met were fighting and eating each other, but the cannibalism is justified by today'spoliticized anthropologists as a spiritual practice. Whatever Columbus did is not forgiven as culturally justified.
The earliest Ohio mound builders disappeared and we don't know why — did a later tribe wipe them out? Or did they just fade away?
On an indigenous people or native American or first nations holiday, we would have to remember all the pre-Columbian crimes too, but unfortunately ... those people didn't develop writing.
Would we rather have writing, oh, and by the way, the wheel, along with our criminals, than have — or be — criminals without?
One anthropologist said the early peoples of this continent didn't invent the wheel because they didn't need it, as if that was an explanation.
As for "native American" (or even indigenous people), I am a "native" American because I was born here and my forebears of European ancestry have been here at least 250 years; my Cherokee (and other) ancestors were here longer, but less memorably because they had no means of recording their history. It's not possible to trace a genealogy very far back on the Cherokee side.
This lack of recorded history means it's very easy to romanticize or idealize the vanished tribes, while being very clear about the crimes of Europeans.
The earliest Americans apparently didn't need writing.
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