Mark Small

In an appeal to the racist part of his base - i.e. his base - trump last month spoke 2 a nearly all white crowd in Minnesota about how they have good genes. A consistent trump theme over the yrs? “I have great genes & all that stuff, which I'm a believer in" Mississippi, 2016 1/9

Today is a Federal holiday: Columbus Day. On October 12, 1492, Columbus landed on a beach in the Bahamas, greeted by Arawak indigenous people. He wrote in his log: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” 2/9

This arrogance of white people sprang from their belief they were superior to the “Indians” they encountered. And that’s ironic - the indigenous Arawak people never had been to India, but were called “Indians” out of Columbus’s (erroneous) belief that he’d made it to India. 3/9

“So various were the peoples of the Americas that continent-wide generalizations are risky to the point of folly.” Mann, “1491,” 2011 ed., p. 160. One generalization we can make: Europeans wiped out the indigenous peoples. 4/9

Columbus was wrong about other things, such as gold in the Bahamas. A priest and early settler, Bartolome las Casas, described in his “History of the Indies” how the people here were enslaved and worked until they died. Women killed their newborns to spare them. 5/9

We should understand the anger of indigenous peoples - especially anger over their being used as mascots for sports teams. Washington’s NFL team searches for a new nickname. Part of the genocide: British military officials paid a bounty for each “red” skin produced. 6/9