INDIGENOUS AMERICAN ACTIVISTS "CELEBRATE THEIR OWN CONQUEST" BY USING EUROPEAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Before the White man arrived, native Americans even lacked an effective way to say "fuck you"

Indigenous American activists have been unwittingly celebrating their own conquest and colonisation by Europeans this "Indigenous People's Day" (held Monday 14th Oct) by sharing a meme in which a "Native American" uses an Italian gesture to show disrespect for the Italian who discovered America, Christopher Columbus.

Columbus, of course, was the explorer who first discovered the Americas, a vast area of land of immense potential that was largely going to waste, thanks to an endless savage cycle of petty tribal wars, resulting in civilian murder, enslavement, torture, and cannibalism. 

The meme was intended to show disrespect for the great Italian navigator and the generally high-functioning societies that followed his arrival, but by using a symbol that Columbus himself was familiar with and may even have introduced to the Americas, the meme merely underlines the cultural and intellectual poverty that existed in the New World before Europeans, with their rich and expressive culture of hand signs, turned up.