12 October 1492

The Last of the Clan
Thomas Faed
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Uh Sarge, what does 12 October 1492 (the date Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas) have to do with a painting of Scottish Highlanders sometime after the lost battle of Culloden and the failure of the 1745 rebellion against King George II?

Well, your Old AF Sarge always gets a little wrapped around the axle around this time of year. Especially since a group of guilt-ridden white people in some places decided to change the name to Indigenous Peoples Day, or something to that effect.

Those folks in the painting? Yup, indigenous, to Scotland. If I still lived in Scotland, I'd be indigenous. But I don't, so I'm not.

White people guilt also got the name of where I lived changed, from Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, to just Rhode Island. Plantation, according to Merriam Webster, means ...

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Note the delicate wording in definition 3b, "resident labor." I suppose they mean "slaves" which is no longer politically correct to use or say, the preferred term now being "enslaved peoples." Kinda like calling a woman a "birthing person." Odd innit? Or maybe that's just me.

No doubt the same folks who were up in arms about the word "plantation" were also the ones who gave us the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians. I do know a couple of First Peoples type people who preferred the old names for those teams. (First Peoples is a Canadian thing, far more accurate really, what some call "indigenous" didn't actually evolve here, but they did get here first, so First Peoples makes sense on some levels.)

Don't get me started on the word "Indian." Yes, Columbus thought he'd found India, hence that word (indiano or indiana in Italian, indio or india in Spanish, not sure what it would be in Hebrew or Yiddish, if Columbus was actually Jewish. Just kidding, you can look that up, Google Translate has the word in both Hebrew and Yiddish, but I think it means Indian from the subcontinent, not from the New World. Google was not all that clear on that).

All that aside, I remember AIM, the American Indian Movement, native peoples up in arms over the screwing they received from the European settlers of these lands. Well okay, the descendants of the people who got screwed over by the ancestors of modern day settler/colonists.

So here's something to keep in mind, ever since Cain slew Abel, people have been f**king over other people. It seems to be something in our blood, in our DNA if you will. If we don't have something, and can take it easily from someone else, we do. The Americas were not a bunch of peaceful, nature-loving, groovy people just chilling before the Europeans arrived. No, they were like people everywhere, fighting wars, taking stuff from their neighbors and despising the "different from us." (That being one tribe hating another, like the Sioux versus the Crow, or the English against the French. That goes way back.)

Imagine what might happen if we make contact with an intelligent, space-faring species someday. They might wait until we're space-faring, or they might not. Who knows what (if anything) is going on "out there."

Maybe some species from another place is driving others off their worlds and onto other worlds. If they're technologically more advanced and are anything like us, be worried, they're going to take our shit, man, trust me.

Besides which, after the Bering Land Bridge people arrived, the Norsemen were next. Columbus was third, at best.

Why should he get a holiday at all?

Just curious.

As always, YMMV.

/rant

Author's Note: One of my nephews did some digging around in Ancestry.com, seemed to have discovered an "Indian Princess" in the family tree. I wrote about that here. I rather have my doubts about that "finding" as his research completely missed an actual person in the family tree, the one for whom my father was named. This fellow. So I won't be claiming any indigenous cred for this continent any time soon. I'll leave that to the Elizabeth Warrens of the world.