Native people refuse to be erased from America's story

The wrenching transfer of power from hundreds of Indigenous cultures is fundamental to U.S. history. Along the way are remarkable truths of Native survival and grit.

- STEPHEN TRIMBLE

HOSTEEN MUD KID, a Navajo elder. Countless generations have passed down Native traditions.

Stephen Trimble

PRESIDENT TRUMP seems determined to transform America into a straight white Christian nation. He filters our history through this harsh sieve, trapping and discarding every complexity and nuance.

Indigenous people don’t often appear in his increasingly deranged racist rants, but they are suffering the same racial profiling as other brown-skinned American citizens. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can’t contrive a “home country” to assign them for deportation. By definition, these are Native Americans.

Notably — and purposefully — missing from Trump's October Columbus Day proclamation are the people who were already here — at least 50 million Native people in the Americas when Columbus “discovered” the North American continent he never actually set foot in. Trump has Columbus planting “a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion... setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith,” a “noble mission: to ... spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.”

The White House Thanksgiving proclamation also centers on faith and conquest. Not even the old gauzy fictions about the Wampanoags feasting in harmony with colonists, but only praise and gratitude for “the pilgrims who settled our continent” and “the pioneers who tamed the west.”

Trump's only acknowledgments of the complicated consequences of the arrival of Columbus are jabs at the “left-wing arsonists” who remind us that what Trump calls “the ultimate triumph of Western civilization” could also be called genocide. His accusation upends the truth; it’s Trump who is demanding the incineration of history.