Greetings, Dear Reader,

I grew up in an Italian household. My stepfather was 100%. To Italians, you’re 100% or you’re not Italian. Yonkers, New York, Long Island. Trays of baked ziti. Miles of it. Four loud women in the kitchen. Two of them are rotund. No meat without pasta. No pasta without sauce. Cheese. Chains. Crosses. Guinea tees. Hairy arms. Sweaty shirts. Mikey. Nicky. Tommy. John John. Junior. Angela. Five Maries. At least one Mary.

So you can guess two things from here: One, there will be no SOTD for Columbus Day. Don’t expect me to be inboxing you. I’ll see you on Tuesday.

And two …

COLUMBUS

Slavery in America started long before 1619.

Also slaughter, ritual sacrifice, ritual torture, massacres, wanton murder of women and children, forced assimilation, forced adoption.

I’m not a historian. It took me about ten minutes of searching scholarly work this morning to find significant primary evidence of all these among the indigenous tribes prior to European colonization. It’s in their oral tradition! They spoke about it themselves! I haven’t even read it all yet, but it’s there. Evidence of full-blown torture spanning days. Child slave trades. Even the trump card of human evil: genocide.

Yes, free of European influence, native Indian tribes attempted to wipe each other off the map.

You rarely hear about any of this because the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement that ascended to the heights of culture over the past 20 years memory-holed it in favor of a deranged, ironically exclusionary, Howard Zinnian approach to history. But it’s still there if you want to read about it.

The introduction of European settlers rapidly intensified the intertribal competition,........

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