JD Vance called Native Americans the 'enemy' and Indigenous Peoples Day a 'fake holiday'

23 July 2024

Comments that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) made about Indigenous people have recently resurfaced, and they could cause a headache for former President Donald Trump's campaign among Native American voters.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported Tuesday that when Vance argued last year against renaming the Wayne National Forest in Ohio, he referred to Native Americans as the "enemy." On another occasion, the GOP's 2024 vice presidential nominee called Indigenous People's Day — which some cities celebrate instead of Columbus Day — a "fake holiday."

Wayne National forest is named for Major General Anthony Wayne, who massacred Indigenous people during the Northwest Indian War, most notably during the Battle of Fallen Timbers in present-day Maumee, Ohio. When making his case against changing the name of the forest in spite of requests from Indigenous tribes, Vance wrote that "[Wayne] fought wars and won peace for our government, the government you now serve, and hewed Ohio out of rugged wilderness and occupied enemy territory."

Marin Webster Denning, who is a member of the Oneida tribe, said in an interview with the Journal-Sentinel that Native Americans are "not the enemy."

"There is an occupation, and there are enemies, but revisions of history like this erase us," he said.

"Some people may view [Wayne] as a hero," Oneida activist and Milwaukee, Wisconsin resident Jacob Abrams told the paper. "[B]ut not for us."

Vance's disparaging comments about a holiday celebrating Indigenous culture in 2021 are also being scrutinized in the wake of the Ohio senator's selection as Trump's running mate. ICT Journalist Mary Annette Pember of the Red Cliff Ojibwe Tribal Nation in Wisconsin dug up a tweet from Vance during President Joe Biden's first year in office in which the eventual Ohio seantor wrote: “Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a fake holiday created to sow division. Of course Joe Biden is the first president to pay it any attention."

"A half a millennium ago Columbus used technology developed in Europe to sail across a giant ocean and discover a new continent. Today we celebrate that daring and ingenuity," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "Happy Columbus Day!"

Indigenous People's Day became a substitute for Columbus Day as knowledge of Columbus' brutal enslavement of Indigenous people in the Caribbean broke through into mainstream consciousness. Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied Columbus on several of his expeditions, described some of Columbus' atrocities in his journal.

"[Spaniards acted] like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons," he wrote in 1542. "And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house."

Vance's comments about Native Americans may hurt the Trump campaign's voter outreach efforts, particularly in Arizona. Biden won the Grand Canyon State by roughly 11,000 votes in 2020, largely due to turnout from Indigenous voters in Navajo country.

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