Today is Indigenous People’s Day, and it was nice to see that the Biden administration is acknowledging it as such. I can’t help to think, though, about the millions of Americans who are rabidly opposed to the repurposing of this holiday because they reject the essential facts regarding the European colonization of the ground we now call the United States of America. I’ve been trying for a very long time to understand their perspective — not necessarily so that I can sympathize with them, but just simply to make sense of it because it is clearly not sane.
There’s an ongoing debate within the left over whether conservative Americans are either ignorant but benign (so we should patiently educated them) or, conversely, informed and evil (so there’s no need for patience or education). I still don’t have a clear answer, but I’m leaning toward a sad combination of the two things — i.e., that they know next to nothing about anything factual, but are fanatically devoted to a relatively small collection of falsehoods. The reason for their devotion seems to stem almost entirely from an intense desire to believe that they’re better than everyone else (supremacist thinking), which I believe to be the essential core of evil.
How do you deal with people who aggressively reject reality just so they can feel superior to others? I don’t have an answer. I’m happy to see, though, that at least in this very small way — declaration of today as Indigenous People’s Day — the truth is making some headway. Going forward, we must continue to couple acknowledgement of the facts with good policy decisions that materially address those facts. In the case of Indigenous People’s Day, that means that something is owed to those people who lived here before colonization and their descendants.