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Black and Native Senate nominee slams Trump’s Columbus revival: ‘It’s still Indigenous Peoples’ Day’
The two credit unions that I'm a member of, said we will be closed Monday in observance of Indigenous People's Day,not Columbus Day?!!
N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas says Trump's celebration of Christopher Columbus whitewashes Indigenous history and calls on Black and Native communities to unite against shared inequities.
Every year, the federal holiday of Columbus Day brings significant tension in the United States. The day intended to honor Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer who is often falsely credited with discovering the United States, has been met with resistance from Native Americans and others who say honoring Columbus disregards his true history of violence, terror, and enslavement.
"They're just trying to showcase all the 'good things' that they have done, without trying to take accountability for all the bad that has also happened within the past 250 years," said N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, of the conservative resurgence of celebrating Columbus.
Thomas, who has Black, Native American and white ancestry, told theGrio that recent actions taken by President Donald Trump to preserve the misrepresented history of Christopher Columbus—who never set foot on land that is present-day United States—are part of a larger goal of upholding white supremacist ideology and culture in the United States.
"It's white supremacy," said Thomas, who is a citizen of Oklahoma's Chickasaw Nation.
Columbus first encountered the "New World" in 1492 in the Caribbean, specifically the present-day Bahamas, and later expanded to Hispaniola, now present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It set off an era of European colonization, enslavement, and violent rule by settlers throughout North America, South America, and the Caribbean islands. An estimated 90-95% of indigenous people in the U.S. were displaced, murdered, or died of diseases brought by Europeans.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/black-native-senate-nominee-slams-204720842.html
