Assorting Arrogance

500 B.C.E.

In certain corners of the sandbox, it's taken as gospel that America was stolen from the native/indigenous populations that existed in the Western Hemisphere before the Europeans arrived. It's often declared with a sneer, sometimes coupled with a decrying of colonialism, and frequently groused on or around Columbus Day.

It's become de mode to denounce Columbus and, by extension, all white Europeans on the anniversary of his first arrival in the West, and at least a dozen states have renamed the holiday "Indigenous Peoples Day."

There is subtle irony in that new name.

It's "Peoples," not "People," in recognition that there were many tribes or nations or civilizations across the four thousand years prior to Columbus's arrival and the beginning of the colonial period. They weren't one nation, or even a handful. There have been literally thousands. Today, the US government recognizes 574 Indian tribes across the 48 states plus Alaska, and there are 826 across Latin America and the Caribbean. That's just the present-day snapshot, and doesn't count those that went extinct or were wiped out or were subsumed into others across four millennia of expansion and conflict.

Yes, expansion and conflict. Human history across the planet has been about expansion and conflict, and such continues even today, where all the Earth's land has been claimed and demarcated. Tribes and nations have been warring with each other over property since well before human civilization began, and I doubt there's a square foot of land on this planet, barring perhaps the uninhabitable extremes north and south, that hasn't 'changed hands' time and time again across the last six thousand years.

But, because the pre-Columbians were browner than the Europeans who sailed westward in search of wealth, and because the Europeans "won" that particular interaction, our better-than-thou scolds reject the legitimacy of America and demand stuff be given back. That neither the Europeans nor the indigenes were a monolith is of no relevance to their dudgeon. In fact, I haven't seen much acknowledgment that there were multiple European nations expanding westward, or that there were many native tribes already warring with each other when the "whites" arrived, or that many tribes allied with Europeans against their existing foes, or that there was massive intermingling of the gene pools, especially in Latin America.

None of this was unusual in the slightest. There was nothing unique about the Westward expansion other than the traverse of a much-larger-than-before body of water. The earliest civilizations accreted around the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. In Mesopotamia alone, we witnessed the Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian civilizations. Each has its history of expansionism and conflict. Wars between tribes gave over to wars between city-states, and the ancient civilizations gave way to others. With time and technology, city-states fell to imperial expansions. These regional empires involved expansion and conquests, and as time went on, the big ones came (and went).

The Macedonians subsumed the land from Greece to India, the Romans took all that and went westward to the Atlantic and south across the sea to North Africa. Chinese and Indian dynasties came and went. The Kingdom of Aksum, centered in what is now Ethiopia, took control of the Red Sea around the first century CE. Similar arcs appear in the concurrent history of the Western hemisphere, with the Zapotecs and Mayans. And that's before we get into the last 1500 years. Attila and the Huns sacked Rome, Genghis Khan and the Mongols stretched from central Europe to the Sea of Japan. The timeline of the Middle East is littered with the word "conquest." Ditto for India, and for everywhere else in the world. Europe's borders have been morphing steadily ever since the fall of Rome. China went through thirteen different dynasties, some of them with sub-dynasties, and borders ebbed and flowed there, as they did everywhere else (including Africa and the Western Hemisphere).

To reiterate, the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere was as awash in war as any other part of the world at any time in history.

Europe didn't come to the New World as a cooperative monolith, either. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands all 'went west,' and they didn't exactly kumbaya with each other. The English and French fought four separate wars before the English colonists went rogue and kicked the Brits to the curb. The Spanish, Portuguese. and French duked it out in Latin America. And, as honorable mention, there was the period of the Vikings in North America, which included not one but two Battles of Vinland.

By now you should get the idea.

None of this reality matters to the woke-scolds who bleat about colonizers and stolen lands. That they engage in what Jonah Goldberg dubbed "snapshot geography" is a bit I covered back in 2016, so I won't treat that path again here.

The arrogance I refer to in the title is that of accreting the hundreds of indigenous peoples into one category, as if they were merely one side of a coin. Did they have common purpose, common culture, common governance, and domestic agreement as to the rules of property ownership, as does anything that calls itself a nation?

Not even close.

To collect them into a single "they" is a condescension, just as is conflating Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto-Ricans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Argentinians, Uruguayans, Bolivians, et al, into a monolith called "Latinos." Some do it for political power (hold that thought) but many, the woke included, simply conclude that since they all speak Spanish, they are "kinda the same." Indigenous peoples don't even pass that particular test of inclusion. On the set of Last Of The Mohicans, the actors playing the various Indian characters spoke their native tongues, but since they were of different tribes, none of them understood each other. And, again, across the centuries, they were as at war with each other as Europeans or Asians or Africans were.

This is what makes the "Indigenous People's Day" bit as ironic as it is arrogant. It pretends to a history that wasn't, a "noble savage" era of tranquility, harmony with the land, and "better" existence. That they engaged in the same sort of behavior as the maligned Europeans is an inconvenience best left unmentioned. Ditto for slavery. As has been the case everywhere else, it was not uncommon to take losers of battles and wars as slaves.