I am old enough to remember when it wasn’t controversial and celebrated even in schools.

I have studied the indigenous people of the America’s and their immigration story was actually much more troubling and than the European immigration to the Americas. There were three big waves of immigration from Asia and an unknown number of smaller waves in the 18,000 plus years. Each new wave killed and enslaved the prior immigrants cum indigenous people and replaced them (kind of great replacements). It wasn’t pretty. No reservations or welfare or tax exempt status, just death and enslavement. It seems that what we like to call the “first nations” are really the third nations and their history is so much worse than the European immigrants.

There is another untold story to the indigenous people celebration. Over time the history of what these peaceful indigenous people did to their victims and captives has been cleaned up. Yes we hear that they tortured and mutilated but even as troubling as the stories that have survived are they are cleaned up because the truth would make you puke. So now the poor indigenous generations can make up how “abused” and “innocent” they were and didn’t deserve to be so poorly treated.

I encourage people to actually visit a reservation. You will find a state of the art hospital and a hundred homes built to house the doctors, nurses and staff for that hospital paid for entirely by non-indigenous taxpayers (indigenous people living on the reservation don’t pay taxes). Ditto for the schools. You may bot know that they get welfare checks from cradle to grave. While you work 50 years to retire with a meager SS income which you paid for you are also paying for their lifetime living expenses. I admit you will sometimes see some pretty substandard housing on a reservation because their own leaders steal the money that was given to them for housing AND because the individual prefer to spend their welfare money on trucks, booze and drugs. But feel sorry for these poor people Because we created the stupid reservation system and we perpetuate it.

My wife during her early 20s taught for a school year in an Indian elementary school in the 1960s. She was shocked that the children as a group had abysmally low IQs. The Public Health Service who ran the reservation hospital did IQ tests on all the children on the reservation of a certain age. They were young but she is not sure what age. The tester was an MD she recalls who was doing his military service and apparently going from reservation to reservation, among other similar testers, surveying the IQs because of the dreadfully low academic attainment of reservation Indians despite the fortune being spent on Indian education.

Dan Kurt

P.S. Siberia apparently did not send their best over the land bridge.