Indigenous People Day is supposed to be a national holiday, celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day, October 14th.

“Indigenous People”?  Who are they?

If they are those we call the American Indians, which ones are “indigenous”?  

America has been called the “Land of Immigrants”.  Our ancestors all came to the Americas from somewhere else.  None of us is more “indigenous” than anyone else.  

There are at least four different groups of Asians that migrated to the Americas.  

Some were people more related to Europeans than to other Asians.  Their ancestors left Africa and headed north before splitting into two groups:  one group spread westwards into Europe, and the other spread eastward into northern Asia.  During the Ice Ages, the ocean levels were so low that a land bridge fifty miles wide made it possible for them to walk from Asia into North America, following the animals they hunted.

Another group’s ancestors left Africa, migrating along the shores of the Indian Ocean, settling in India, Australia, the Philippines, and coastal China.  They became Humanity’s first boat-builders and ocean navigators.  Later, those on the China coast were driven out by the ancestors of the people now living in China.  Using their boats, some journeyed away from their attackers up the east Asian coast and down the west coast of the Americas.  Some settled in the American Southwest, and there is arguable evidence that some settled in South America.

Another off-shoot of the boat-builders spread out among the tropical Polynesian Islands, again, probably reaching South America.  About 500 years ago – the time that Columbus and the others sailed to the Americas from Europe, those Polynesians first settled on the Hawaiian Islands.

About five thousand years ago, those we call “Eskimos” began hunting along the Arctic coastlines of North America.

Which group is “indigenous”?  Which groups are to be insulted by being labelled not indigenous?  Can all four groups sensibly be labelled “indigenous”, but the rest of us who were born here are somehow not indigenous?

If there is an “Indigenous Peoples Day”, is that not an insult to all the rest of us?  Or does it include us?

We are rightly concerned about the potential criminals also crossing into the U.S., but in a time when so many people are immigrating across America’s border with Mexico, Is not “Indigenous Peoples Day” a slap in their face?

We all have ancestors who struggled to reach America – or are America’s immigrants ourselves.

The inscription at the base of the Status of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

If those words have any meaning, then “indigenous Peoples Day” is disgusting.  

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