While Columbus Day has been observed in the United States in one form or another since 1792, a battle over it has emerged over the last several years. Most of the angst stems from modern ideas about “colonization,” which is the extremely over-simplified assertion that all European expansion was evil and counter-productive.
Of course, with Vice President Kamala Harris never meeting a woke cause she didn’t love, it’s no surprise she and President Joe Biden immediately instituted “Indegiouns Peoples Day” as a quasi-replacement for Columbus Day in 2021. Harris’ comments at the time have reemerged, and are going viral after the Trump campaign highlighted them on Monday.
HARRIS: It is an honor, of course, to be with this week, as we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day, as we speak truth about our nation’s history. Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.
With Harris now running for president, her views are under fresh scrutiny, and for good reason. It’s not that the vice president is completely wrong about European exploration in the Americas. They certainly did perpetrate violence and bring disease with them. The problem is that in her comments, Harris did exactly what she accused others of doing in not telling the “whole story.”
The story of European expansion is far more complicated than the “peaceful native” trope pushed by the left. Take Hernándo Cortés as an example. If you just listen to the modern interpretation of his life, it essentially begins and ends with him being an evil murderer who showed up in Mexico to steal land from the harmonious Aztecs. Of course, the “whole story” is far more complicated.
Without giving an extensive history, when Cortés and his small band of conquistadors landed in Mexico, they were initially met with gifts presented on behalf of Moctezuma II. Unsure of what to make of the Spanish, the Aztec emperor sought to appease the new arrivals. That worked for everyone for a while. Cortés did not immediately start warring against Moctezuma II nor did the Aztecs express hostility for a time.
It wasn’t until a series of diplomatic twists and turns, with both sides jockeying for position, that things came to all-out war. That included Cortés and his men escaping what should have been certain death in the capital city of Tenochtitlán before laying siege and conquering the empire.
Now, you might be asking yourself how a few hundred conquistadors managed to topple an empire made up of tens of thousands of hardened warriors. The answer is that they didn’t. That’s where the “whole story” comes in. The Aztec Empire was not “peaceful” in any real sense. Surrounding city-states were extorted into paying “tribute” to the seat of power in Tenochtitlán. Those tributes ranged from crops to slavery to human sacrifices. The only reason Cortés was able to conquer Tenochtitlán and topple the Aztecs is because the other native city-states in the area joined him in the fight, helping him lay siege and wage open warfare.
If you’d like an entertaining explanation of how Cortés ended up victorious, including the alliances he forged with the native peoples, this video is worth the watch.
Does any of this mean the Spanish didn’t do lots of terrible things? Of course, not, but this was a time when almost every group of people on earth practiced various forms of savagery. That context matters, and it’s one that Harris and the rest of the left completely ignore while proclaiming things like Indigenous Peoples Day while finger-wagging at European colonialism.
The Aztecs were also a colonial power in that they established an empire by subjugating those around them. If Columbus Day requires further context, as Harris claims, then shouldn’t the same be said about Indigenous Peoples Day? And the Spanish and Aztecs are just one example of many. When you look at the native tribes in North America, their histories are also ripe with slavery, war, and murder. For every tribe that claimed a piece of land when the Europeans arrived, another tribe had been conquered (and maybe even wiped out) to obtain it.
Then one has to look at the net effects of these historical events. Was the world ultimately made a better place by the proliferation of Western ideals, which eventually ended institutions like slavery and the subjugation of peoples by unelected, often brutal rulers? I think most people would say yes.
I understand this can be a touchy subject because there’s so much nuanced involved when discussing the actions of people from hundreds and hundreds of years ago, many of which did truly awful things. Still, Harris’ comments were over-simplified to the point of being insulting. Further, her feet-first excitement over whatever the woke du jour of the day is exposes how malleable she is. This is not a person who sees anything clearly. Instead, she just parrots whatever the broader left tells her to parrot. That’s not what Americans need as president in times like these.
