Why Should We Celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day?

I was going to write a story about Indigenous People’s Day except I knew that if I published it yesterday nobody would read it because everyone was celebrating this holiday and thinking about how we have screwed over all those indigenous peoples by going to the mall, buying some crap we don’t need and then walking into 110 Grill to eat lunch.

So here it comes today.

We are told, in a publication no less authoritative than Time Magazine, that we shouldn’t be thinking about how White people from England successfully transformed America into a settled, colonial zone, but rather we should consider how the people already living in that region fought against the arrival and development of post-colonial space from the ‘conquest’ of Hispaniola in 1492, up to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.

According to the author, who happens to hold a Chair in American History at Oxford University, “a multitude of Native nations fought fiercely to keep their territories intact and their cultures untainted, frustrating the imperial pretensions of France, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, and eventually the United States.”

The real history of the reaction of indigenous Americans to the arrival of the British and European invaders is characterized by the Oxford University scholar as a series of ‘rebellions’…