Never having been a great fan of Columbus Day, I don’t much care about it, but the reasoning for changing the name of it at Fort Lewis College seems to be more of the typical leftist “hate America” stuff, rather than a move to portray actual history.

First, let’s say that historically the term “Native Americans” is an open question. It appears that there were other people (perhaps proto-Melanesians) living in some parts of the Americas before the influx of proto-Asians who became our “Native Americans.” Probably, most of those early settlers were killed off by the spreading proto-Asians, so “genocide” might be something worth considering after all. To be fair, there are some remnant Amazonian tribes whose DNA indicates there might still be some descendants of the very first American dwellers still extant.

In terms of Columbus, he wasn’t the first. Not only is there evidence of Vikings visiting North America, but there has recently been some finds indicating that the Romans actually may have been in North America.

Some Indian tribes were victims of genocide. The Iroquois wiped out the Huron, the Erie and others. The Sioux nearly succeeded in their attempt to kill all the Pawnee. The Sioux themselves likely would have been exterminated by the Ojibwa if they had not fled from the forests to the Great Plains. So it is not unreasonable to link the word “genocide” with American Indian tribes.

Guns were often barred from many Indian tribes because they would use them to go kill neighboring tribes that were traditional enemies. Our southwestern cliff-dwellers disappeared but are represented by the Hopi and Zuni tribes on postage-size reservations surrounded by Navajo. Think about all of those historical things and quit the destructive anti-white-American stuff that is so widely taught by liberal educators.

Mike Sigman

Durango