Vice President Kamala Harris in 2021 slammed Italian explorer Christopher Columbus and other Europeans for acts against the people living in the Americas when Christopher Columbus first arrived.
European explorers like Columbus, who was an Italian-Jew, “ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease” she said.
Harris expanded on her Italophobic and anti-Semitic theories to the National Congress of American Indians, one day after Columbus Day, which the Biden Administration has renamed Indigenous Peoples Day.
She said that Italians spread diseases and implied that they did so intentionally.
“Since 1934, every October the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas,” she said. “But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story.”
Then she went in for the kill shot against Jewish and European immigrants: “Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease,” she said. She went on to talk about how the Covid virus was unfair to indigenous people, whose lives she labeled a “plight.”
Harris ignored the fact that pre-contact indigenous people in the Americas had short lifespans, conducted wars, took slaves, and went through many eras of hardship before Europeans ever arrived and took over the land.
Although the data is not definitive, the average lifespan of a Native American in the year 1500 was between 25 and 35 years. Rarely did American hunter-gatherers live past the age of 50. In 1500 the lifespan of Italians was 69.
According to the National Indian Council on Aging, American Indian and Alaska Native individuals have the lowest life expectancy, at about 72 years, when compared with other races and ethnicities. In 2022, life expectancy was 78.8 years, on average, for white people, 74.8 years for black people, and 81.9 years for Hispanics.
That means that Native Americans now have twice the lifespan they had before contact with Europeans.
“Native Americans are more likely to live in poverty, to be unemployed, and often struggle to get quality health care and to find affordable housing,” Harris said in 2021.
What are Native Americans dying from? According to the Indian Health Service, “American Indians and Alaska Natives continue to die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories, including chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, diabetes mellitus, unintentional injuries, assault/homicide, intentional self-harm/suicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.” The leading cause of chronic lower respiratory disease is smoking.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Defense continued the insult against Italian heritage and history in the Americas by highlighting the day only as Indigenous People’s Day, and ignoring Columbus Day altogether, as it seeks to distance itself from the official holiday that has been celebrated in America since 1792.
“Today, we honor and celebrate the rich cultures, histories and contributions of the Indigenous communities around the world. Together, we can learn, support and uplift Indigenous voices as we work towards a more inclusive future,” The Department of Defense wrote on Twitter/X.
Columbus Day was first celebrated in the United States on Oct. 12, 1792, on the 300th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in America. The first official Columbus Day holiday was established in 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison to mark the 400th anniversary. Then, in response to the lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Columbus Day an annual holiday. The Biden-Harris Administration is working hard to undo the work of President Harrison and FDR.
