Who are the Real Indigenous People?

Who are the Real Indigenous People?

By Rolf Lindgren

This article will debunk liberal narratives regarding indigenous people and colonizers.

For the purposes of this article, I will define “indigenous people” as those people who settled an area in ancient times, and were already there when the Europeans first arrived. Ancient times means before 500 A.D. and before the Middle Ages.

THE VIKINGS AND THE ESKIMOS

The Dorset people (an ancient native American people) discovered and settled Greenland around 800 B.C. The Vikings led by Eric the Red discovered and settled Greenland in 982 A.D. The Vikings were aided by global warming and settled in southern Greenland and up the west coast where the gulf stream hit. The Dorset people generally lived north of the Viking areas.

So that settles it? The Eskimos are the indigenous people and the Vikings were invaders?

Wrong! The Dorset people aren’t the Eskimos.

The Thule people were a distinct people, different from the Dorset people. The Thule came along to Greenland in around 1200 A.D. and exterminated the Dorset people, while the Vikings were still in southern Greenland. The Thule people are also known as the Inuit and/or the Eskimos. By the 1300s the Dorset people were gone. Modern DNA testing shows that there was no interbreeding between the Thule and Dorset people. This proves the Dorset people were exterminated. The Vikings left Greenland by the mid-1400s because of global cooling.

The Thule people originally came from Asia and swept across northern Canada after 1000 A.D.

In other words, Eskimos are not indigenous to Greenland or Canada.

INDIA

The Mughal empire in India is often depicted as an indigenous empire that was conquered by the British. But this isn’t exactly correct.

In 1526 the Mughals led by Babur invaded India from the Northwest and established a great empire. Babur was a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, neither of whom were from India. By 1700 the Mughals controlled most of India.

But the Portuguese had already set up a colony in 1503 on the western coast of India. Prior to 1526 the Porteguese established seven colonies in India, most of them on the western coast.

Although the Mughals and Portuguese didn’t overlap that much, as the Mughals tended to be more to the north, east or inland, it’s ridiculous to claim the Mughals are indigenous, unless you’re prepared to claim the Portuguese are indigenous to India, too.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

When Columbus explored the central and western side of Cuba in 1494, he noted that his native Indian translators couldn’t understand the local people at all. That’s because the people living there were called the Ciboney (central) and the Guanahatabey (west). They were pre-ceramic, archaic hunter-gatherer and cave-dwelling populations. They lived without permanent towns or large-scale agriculture, subsisting instead on shellfish, foraging, fish, small game, and turtles. Basically, the Ciboney and Guanahatabey were remnants the real indigenous people of the Caribbean islands.

BASIC OUTLINE OF PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICA IN THE CARIBBEAN

In ancient times, an Indian group known as the Arawak and/or the Taino entered the Caribbean Sea area from what is now Venezuela, pushing the unrelated Ciboney and Guanahatabey into remote areas.

The Taino were the people Columbus first encountered.

But from around 1200 to 1400 A.D. another group of Indians called the Caribs had invaded the southern Caribbean and were in the process of aggressively displacing the Taino. The Caribs killed off Taino men and took their women as wives. In the time of Columbus, there were documented villages where the men spoke one language and the women spoke another language! The Caribbean Sea is named after the Carib Indians.

So another way to frame it, is to say that Columbus was interrupting a slow-moving, low-level genocide.

These facts complicate the liberal narrative. Instead of saying Columbus exploited the Indians, it’s more accurate to say the Taino exploited the Ciboney & Guanahatabey, the Caribs exploited the Taino, and Columbus exploited the Caribs & Taino.

The liberal narrative gets complicated all over the world when you look closer to the facts.

Rolf Lindgren is the Pints & Politics Director of the Republican Party of Dane County. He is also a singer known as Wisco Rolf and his website is WiscoRolf.com – The Badger State’s Musical Maverick & Liberty’s Voice