As a paid speaker at the extreme rightwing Young America’s Foundation’s recent summit, former US senator, current CNN commentator, and ignorant racist POS Rick Santorum declared:
“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here”.
Upon hearing this, Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) released a statement:
“Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform”.
Sharp continues:
CNN giving someone with Santorum’s views on First Nations’ genocide a platform “is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust”.
“Make your choice. Do you stand with White Supremacists justifying Native American genocide, or do you stand with Native Americans”?
Adding a little bit of History:
The posted maps illustrate but an outline of the lands inhabited by First Nations peoples; much of the history is far more detailed than these maps teach us.
Even so, to racists like the CNN commentator and his summit audience, the maps do attach the stench of one’s own inherent ignorance, and, of course, plain stupidity.
The larger map, on the right, show lands of First Nations peoples in the Americas with modern-day borders outlined. In the area of the Pacific Northwest, from present day Oregon to present day British Columbia, many diverse Nations inhabited the land. They were primarily fishing peoples, obviously.
But not so obvious to deniers of indigenous cultures is that within those marked lands of the Pacific Northwest 121 languages were spoken. They got along (mostly), traded, and developed a fully functioning economic system; long, long, long before Europeans set foot on their lands.
Within the Arctic Culture Area, the lands marked in the larger map is an older illustration, naming the peoples of the area as Eskimo. While some still use that name, the lands are the ancestral home of the Inuit peoples. In much of the world, including Canada, only Inuit is the proper name.
Still at the Pacific Northwest, another bit of ‘history’…
A story passed down from one generation to the next among many of the area peoples, and considered nothing but a myth by European ‘explorers’ and ‘historians’, was proven to have its historic foundation about twenty years ago.
Once a year, every year, a great fish was seen swimming up the coast for many miles. It was a cause for great celebration; but also for a little sadness because the great fish would swim into the land and disappear.
Researchers, however, would find why that great fish would swim into the land. They found deep in the ocean, under the land, a cave which held the bones of many whales. It was proven to be a birthing place for whales.
The bones were dated as old as 30,000 years.
