Updated: October 11, 2010
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Updated: October 11, 2010 |
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| Below are a few Thoughts I wrote as a response an American Indian's exhortation for us to "Rethink Columbus Day." October 11, 2010.
A post of Facebook by one of our American Indian friends asked us to “Rethink Columbus Day” and shared link about that topic. American Indians often feel like Columbus’s Discovery of America was the beginning of something bad, rather than the beginning of something good.
Some of my ancestors were American Indians, and many of my present day relatives are as well. We have a very multi-cultural and multi-racial family. I don’t often use the term Native American, because it implies something that is not true. It implies that the rest of the Americans are not really native to this soil. Although various ancestors arrived by different routes and at different times, that does not make the earlier immigrants any more “native” than the others.
Notwithstanding many atrocities by some settlers and some “natives” throughout the centuries, the overall development of this country has been good for the whole world – including the American Indians themselves.
Some of our dear Indian relatives like to travel great distances on super-highways to attend various pow-wows and cultural shows. The indigenous people of most third world countries also enjoy their cultural shows, but they do not use freeways to get there! They do not have many things that are readily available to almost all people here in the United States.
We have spent many years in Papua New Guinea, and I can assure you that all Americans, regardless of race, have much to be thankful for. Americans of every race take many blessings for granted – blessings that are not even dreamed of by most of the world’s population.
It was not wrong for Europeans to be exploring the oceans in 1492. Columbus certainly cannot be held accountable for the mis-treatment that many later gold-seekers brought upon the native people (the people who were already there then). He is not responsible for the twisted perversions of Christianity which mixed with the native religions and failed to transform lives.
However imperfect Christopher Columbus may have been, his discovery lead to many more in the coming decades, and the immigration of many thousands seeking religious freedom from the tyrants of Europe. Probably all the world today has benefited from the concepts of Liberty that the founders of this country later wrote into our Founding Documents. Our first Congress appropriated money for Christian education of our Indian peoples.
We are in a fallen world. Some men are wicked tyrants, and even the best of men, whether red, or yellow, black, or white, are imperfect. All would be evil except for the Grace of God.
No matter who we descended from, we are better off here in the United States of America than the indigenous people are in almost any other part of the world. So let’s bury our hatchets, including this “new racism,” and work together to overcome our failures and shortcoming through the TRUTH of God, and principles which made our country great in the first place.
A Native for Jesus,
David Hersman
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