This is one of the most uniformed pieces I've read. 1 Columbus wasn't a brave explorer. He was a guy who thought Earth was shaped like a pear with a nipple on top. The reason no one would fund him was they knew the size and shape of Earth and wo land a super ocean was uncrossable
2 he never even sat foot on our mainland, and he was almost 500 years after Lief Erickson and his sister Freydis (often left out even though she's a bad bitch). He apparently wasn't smart enough to bring someone familiar enough with the Indies to realize this wasn't it.
He and his crew raped women and children and sold girls as young as 9 into sex slavery (per his own journal). It was so bad native women killed their own children then themselves when they heard the Spanish were coming.
They committed genocide, enslaved the natives after remarking they were so peaceful that it'd be simple to do so. If you didn't get enough gold, they cut your hands off. They fed natives to dogs, hunted them like animals, and killed babies/children in front of parents
So horrific Bartolomé de las Casa wrote, "I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see." so even then it was recognized that he and his ppl were horrific and even faced punishment by the Spanish crown, who in the end chose profit over humanity
Plus, unlike some historical conquers, the effects of Columbus' and other settlers/conquers are ongoing. Native ppl here still are forced on reservations constantly attacked by policy or as in SA are losing lands forced to migrate into a more and more crammed part of the Amazon.
Reservations are left with no access to clean or running water. No power. Not enough resources. Even with things like gaming money, think what a usual county or state budget is. Reservations don't get that much when you consider the budget needed for infrastructure & services.
Native treaty rights are treated like nothing but concessions of convenience, broken the minute it's no longer so. Multiple pipelines, attempts to put toxic waste dumps on reserve land, mining dereg threatening wild rice, + so much more.
Native people are treated like playthings my modern society. Native costumes are compared to Viking ones. The Viking Age ended around a millennia ago. So we're compared to a culture that has is extinct. Even though Scandinavian culture isn't, the Viking Age certainly is.
Sacrilege of Native sacred items and traditions is still treated like a right by #settlerlogic like since day one. Native graves and artifacts are treated like tribes have less rights to them than people who want to put them on a shelf as a curio. Often #NAGPRA is ignored.
So no, there's no historical context where #ColumbusDay isn't honoring a horrific, and placing something in historical context only matters when it's actual history abandoned by progress, but this isn't history, just the 1st chapter of a story still ongoing. #IndigenousPeoplesDay
