What they don't mean by Indigenous People's Day

Don't get me wrong.  I'm an indigenous person.  A native America.  Born and raised here  Generations of family who have done the same. I consider myself quite the indigenous Native.  Except I'm the type that most on the Left don't care about.

When the Left says this, they mean a fairy tale version of the broad term of Indians, American Indians, or most recently, Native Americans.  Those various civilizations and cultures that inhabited the entire Western Hemisphere before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

This view, which found its greatest expression in the film Dances With Wolves, almost verges on blasphemous against the most simplistic understanding of history.  The movie was so bad on the accuracy scale that even other Native Americans, those whose ancestors suffered under the Sioux nation, objected.

But it's hardly unique.  Multi-Cultural education, which exonerates all sin done outside of the Christian West, frequently portrays the cultures of old in the most idyllic way imaginable.  So Native Americans, or American Indians as my wife prefers, are portrayed in an almost laughably worshipful manner.

Many American Indians are happy to comply, preferring to portray their ancestors in the most pure and noble way, dismissing or ignoring any negatives, and portraying their people in a way that would shame the most pro-American WWII propaganda poster.

It is that faux fairy tale version that our enlightened politicians and scholars and activists mean when they say 'Indigenous People's Day.'  They don't mean the human sacrifice, the matricide, patricide, infanticide and genocide that was far from uncommon.  They don't mean the Machiavellian politics that could exist between tribes, or the wars of conquest and land acquisition that happened between the two.  They certainly don't mean those cases where Indians attacked and slaughtered isolated settlements of Europeans, or each other.

They mean more of a myth and a lie than the most stereotypical portrayal of a Christopher Columbus lesson from the 1950s.  In fact, once again, the myth that Americans worshiped all Americans and America and denied any wrong doing is just that, a myth.  And yet it is exactly what is done by those who throw down the old heroes and replace them with a mythical, fanciful version of the new heroes in a way no American in the 19th century would have imagined.