True Left

Rick Santorum proves he is not an American, but a Western occupier and a believer in Manifest Destiny:

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/rick-santorum-native-american-culture-181043531.html

Rick Santorum Says 'Nothing' Was In America Before White Colonizers Arrived
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“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here,” Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, told students during remarks at a Young America’s Foundation event. “I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
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Santorum’s remarks, first flagged by Media Matters for America, are as offensive as they are inaccurate.

Indigenous peoples had been living in America thousands of years before European explorers showed up in the late 1400s and 1500s. They had their own rich cultures and traditions. European settlers tried to erase all of that by forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands, slaughtering them, infecting them with new diseases, rounding them up and putting them on reservations, breaking treaties with them and taking their children from them and putting them into boarding schools to try to assimilate them into white culture.
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all kinds of aspects of Native American culture ― sports, food, dance, art, languages, spiritual practices― are very much a part of American culture today, even if Santorum may not be aware of it.

Something else he may not be aware of: His own birthplace, Winchester, Virginia, was a Shawnee Indian camping ground.

The former Republican senator’s comments sparked outrage on Twitter, where at least one notable member of Congress responded.

“Indigenous peoples are more American than Rick Santorum,” tweeted Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.), chair of the House subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States.

In a fiery statement to HuffPost, National Congress of American Indians President Fawn Sharp said Santorum is an “unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN” and called on the media outlet to fire him.
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        Make your choice. Do you stand with White Supremacists justifying Native American genocide, or do you stand with Native Americans?

    To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign Tribal Nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development. Over millennia, they bred, cultivated and showed the world how to utilize such plants as cotton, rubber, chocolate, corn, potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco. Imagine the history of the United States without the economic contributions of cotton and tobacco alone. It’s inconceivable.

Crystal Echo Hawk, the executive director of IllumiNative, a nonprofit focused on combating the erasure of Native Americans, also called on CNN to fire Santorum.

“American history that does not include Native peoples is a lie, and Rick Santorum is fueling white supremacy by erasing the history of Native peoples,” said Echo Hawk. “CNN must do more to include Indigenous and diverse voices in its programming and fire Rick Santorum.”

A request for comment from CNN was not immediately returned.