Why History and Truth Matter

As Trump and his cronies in Congress continued a maddening government shutdown, Vice President JD Vance made this statement at a Turning Point event at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss. on October 29, 2025: “When the settlers came to the new world they found very widespread child sacrifice…. There’s a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world and it’s one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.”

This is why we need a complete and thorough study of history, economics, science, and politics–what the Trump Administration has been working on removing or undermining in our schools.

Vance’s statement is an outrageous lie. It falsely claims the moral superiority of Christian/Judeo values. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these values, especially if they’re yours. But anytime someone places their beliefs over other beliefs, it becomes something else. In the context of our common historical heritage, it becomes racist.

Here’s why. There was no widespread child sacrifice in the area now known as the United States among Indigenous peoples. What was found among the archaeological record is some suspected child sacrifice in Peru and parts of MesoAmerica (Mexico and Central America). But it was not widespread. And it was found to have stopped way before the Spanish arrived as conquerors. In other words, whatever ritual sacrifices existed, things evolved among those peoples to end or modify such practices. And still the vast majority of Indigenous people never had “child” or any other human sacrifice.

Yet this lie helped perpetuate a deliberate and systemic genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Alleged “human sacrifice” became a major justification for the Spanish to allow disease to run rampant among Indigenous people, to the slaughter of men, women, and children, including the forced conversion into Christianity that included inquisitions, burnings at the stake, maimings, slavery, and death. But they didn’t need any justification. For example, Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez in 1519 massacred 10,000 to 30,000 people in Cholula when he accused them of plotting against him. The next year, his second in command Pedro de Alvarado massacred up to 1,000 unarmed Mexicas (so-called Aztecs) during the celebration of the Feast of Toxcatl to obtain the gold they brought to the ceremony.

In the United States, military excursions into Indigenous lands up to the late 1800s led to many massacres, such as the Wounded Knee slaughter of some 300 men, women, and children in 1890. In California during the 1849 “Gold Rush” and beyond, laws and bounties were enacted to kill as many Indigneous peoples as possible, leading to the greatest genocide of native peoples in U.S. history.

All these were perpetrated by “Christians.”

The overall toll of the Spanish and other Europeans conquests and colonization led to the greatest “human sacrifice” in history–whereby in most areas 90 to 95 percent of major Indigenous populations were gone within fifty years of European’s arrival. Most under the cloak of “saving souls.”

In the United States and Canada, Indigenous eradication policies by both governments pushed original peoples into reservations or reserves. After various wars, and incidents like the “Trail of Tears” involving the “five civilized tribes” and the Dine/Navajo “Long Walk,” the population dwindled significantly. Then the forcing of children into boarding schools, run by Christian societies or the government, led to more erasure of culture, language, and lives. In the U.S. alone, 3,000 children are believed to have died in these boarding schools. Mass graves were found in many of the schools’ grounds.

Talk about “child sacrifice.”

In my lifetime, millions of men, women, and children were killed by the U.S. military in Vietnam and Cambodia from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Then millions more in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretexts during the first twenty years of the 21st century. Even today with U.S miliary support of Israel in their genocide against Palestinians, including the murder of 80,000 people in Gaza in two years, a place where close to 50 percent of the population are children.

This is not even including the horrific destruction of men, women, and children during the African TransAtlantic slave trade, and the chattel slavery in the U.S. Or the 5,000 or more lynchings of Blacks from the end of Reconstruction to the 1950s. Again, all justified by self-professed Christians.

And in more recent times, the big churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, have been rocked with pedophile and other child abuse scandals.

I’m aware there are Catholics and other Christians who have fought against this, who have brought many changes in their churches. I know there are decent priests, nuns, pastors, and other church officials who are remedying centuries-long abuses. I admire the efforts and teachings of the late Pope Francis and the current Pope Leo. I know many Christians taking on the bigotry and hypocrisy of their own institutions. I’m also aware that other religions also have had their own struggles to reform and refine their practices.

Just the same, JD Vance’s statements were inane and erroneous. He even made a case that his wife Usha, who was raised Hindu, should convert to Christianity. Now that’s a personal issue between them. But he made it public to keep pressing the “superiority” of his faith.

I call things as I see them. This is racist.

The fact is Indigenous people have had, and continue to have, complicated, sophisticated, and powerful spiritual practices, way before Christianity became a thing. They were quite fine and moral in their own cosmovision and teachings. Now if they wanted to convert to Christianity, okay. But they didn’t need to. This is important to understand: nobody needed to be “saved.”

Indigenous peoples in the so-called Americas, including the Mexicas, Mayas, and Inca traditions, had customs and understandings different than the European ones brought to their shores. These were aligned to nature and what they understood of the cosmos (for example, that “God’s” blueprint is readily accessible inside and outside of human beings, not in “books”). They were connected to all life, all beings, and to celestial bodies.

Yes, there are no perfect peoples or cultures. But from my own relations to elders among the Dine (Navajo), Lakota, Mexica (in the U.S. and Mexico), Maya (from Mexico and Guatemala), Raramuri (of Mexico), Pipil (of El Salvador), and Quechua (of Peru) over the past thirty years, as well as my own readings and study, I’ve learned Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere didn’t carry on the devastating wars, plunders, and disseminations of people that Europe had for hundred of years before coming here.

Indigenous peoples didn’t have developed weapons like the Spanish and Portuguese (and later English, Dutch, and French) because that wasn’t their emphasis. They did have highly developed irrigation systems, agricultural systems, as well as architectural marvels. They had deep knowledge of stars and planetary systems. While Egypt had hundreds of pyramids, temples, and other structures, in Mesoamerica there were thousands. The Mayan and Mexica calendar systems were the most developed of any calendar system.

And Indigenous peoples had no prisons, no homelessness, no marginalized peoples (“two-spirited” people were welcomed and considered special). They had ritualized means to resolve tensions, disagreements, and conflicts.

This is why Trump and his minions want to erase our real history—to remove anything that disproves “whites,” or “Christians” or heterosexual males are “God’s” children. Indigenous peoples understand we are all sacred. We all belong regardless of borders, skin color, sex, or sexual orientation.

If you’re Christian, please stand up and fight for Christ’s true teachings. If not, remember that any “God” worthy of our humanity should never “judge” or condemn you for what you believe. Being Hindi, Muslim, Buddhist, a Indigenous spiritual practitioner, or atheist are all valid and personal to each person.

And I will add, regardless of your spiritual practices, or lack thereof, everyone should be about how you walk and talk in this world–with truth, beauty, decency, and grace.

No religion, including Christianity, has a monopoly on any of this.