The early migrants to America had their flaws

Kyle Smith:
So long, Christopher Columbus. You’ve been canceled.

Some 60 cities and states have stopped celebrating Columbus Day, in many cases replacing it with Indigenous Peoples Day. There’s no doubt Columbus — and the conquistadors who followed — enslaved and slaughtered on a mass scale. But Columbus didn’t bring cruelty to peaceful, benign peoples. The indigenous people were also cruel to one another.

Iroquois Indians were famous for their practice of torturing enemies to death over a period of days. The Kwakiutl Indians in the Pacific Northwest practiced cannibalism. A mass grave dating to the 14th century or 15th century, in what is now South Dakota, turned up 500 murdered, dismembered and scalped bodies of men, women and children. Many tribes scalped their victims alive.

Ritual child sacrifice was common among the Mayans, the Aztecs and many other peoples. The Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan contains the remains of 42 children around age 6 who were murdered to appease the god who made the rains fall. Because the tears of children were required to prime the pump, some of the kids’ fingernails were torn off to make them cry.

The Incas would drug little girls with alcohol and coca leaves, then freeze them, then mummify them. In a spot that today is right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis was a burial site where scores of teen girls were ritually sacrificed. There is a theory that poor people and slaves captured in war were literally fed to rich Aztecs because protein was so scarce. In the 15th century, life was cruel. Columbus didn’t invent cruelty in the Americas.
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The first people Colombus encountered were the Carib who had conquered and eaten the Arawak people who previously occupied the Caribbean Islands.  The encounter wound up introducing new forms of venereal disease to Europe.  Colombus was not on a mission of conquest at the time but was looking for a trade route to India and that is why he called the people he encountered Indians.  These people were not true natives of America, they were descendants of earlier migrants from Asia.  Even calling them native Americans is a misnomer.

This current glorification of the early migrants to America is misplaced.

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