From “Columbus Day now Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Cambridge” (Boston Globe):
The Cambridge City Council has voted unanimously to change Christopher Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Councilor Nadeem Mazen, who proposed the idea, said it is important to reclaim the day for Native Americans, thousands of whom were killed under Columbus’s leadership when he came to the New World.
…
At the end of the discussion and vote Monday night, Mayor E. Denise Simmons had a simple message for the council: “This is a very important day in Cambridge.”
The official city notice says
In June 2016, the Cambridge City Council adopted Policy Order #164 noting that the Council go on the record to state that the second Monday of October henceforth be commemorated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Cambridge, in recognition of the indigenous people of America’s position as native to these lands, and the suffering they faced following European conquest of their land.
It doesn’t seem that anyone proposed building houses or apartments in Cambridge in which Native Americans might live. Census Data show that, as of 2010, there were at most 0.2 percent “American Indians” among the city’s population (the Census Bureau is apparently lagging in the political correctness department).
Does Elizabeth Warren live in Cambridge? There’s your .2% right there.
That reminds me, when I was a research assistant at HMS/BethIsrael, I met my first Native American. She was a technician for one of the postdocs. So there was my experience with the .2%.
@Jack Can’t Elizabeth Warren just do a 23andme and be done with it? According to them I am 1.2% Native South American. That means something like 6 generations ago (1/2^6) or 150 years if you guess average generation time was 25 years old between conceptions. This question is easily solvable for Elizabeth.
The main story with aboriginal americans is they were genetically and culturally subsumed, not oppressed and slaughtered. There was mass die-off from Columbian contact diseases in the 1500s. The NW European whites in NA in the 1600s found an amazingly lightly inhabited land, with most populations reduced to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The Vikings had previously had to clear about because they were forced out.
There was some armed conflict for sure, but there just isn’t some indian mass slaughter demographic tale. The indians mostly wound up assimilated to white society. There were just so few of them relative to the fecund whites and white immigration waves that their modern genetic signature is weak. This of course raises the question of whether racial and ethnic miscegenation is a form of oppression. Ask your liberal friends!
So when with the Peabody Museum display again the shrunken heads and other native people artifacts that they have hidden in their basement.