Columbus, Cuts, and the Continued Erasure of Indigenous America

Trump wants to resurrect a conqueror. Meanwhile, the state continues to disappear Indigenous people through budget cuts, historical amnesia, and cultural theft.

On April 28, Donald Trump stood before a crowd and declared he would “bring Columbus Day back from the ashes.” He spoke as if a national tragedy had occurred, not the centuries of violence that followed 1492, but the perceived loss of a holiday. For many Americans, it sounded like red-meat rhetoric, a nod to patriotic nostalgia. But for Indigenous commu…