JD Vance called Native Americans the 'enemy' and Indigenous Peoples Day a 'fake holiday'

"A half a millennium ago Columbus used technology developed in Europe to sail across a giant ocean and discover a new continent. Today we celebrate that daring and ingenuity," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "Happy Columbus Day!"

Indigenous People's Day became a substitute for Columbus Day as knowledge of Columbus' brutal enslavement of Indigenous people in the Caribbean broke through into mainstream consciousness. Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied Columbus on several of his expeditions, described some of Columbus' atrocities in his journal.

"[Spaniards acted] like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons," he wrote in 1542. "And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house."

JD Vance called Native Americans the 'enemy' and Indigenous Peoples Day a 'fake holiday'

Comments that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) made about Indigenous people have recently resurfaced, and they could cause a headache for former President Donald Trump's campaign among Native American voters.

^{Carl Gibson (Alternet.org)}