History echoes itself, and the echoes are often full of suffering. Marginalized people on every continent have carried the weight of systemic hate and old injustice. The brutal colonization of Indigenous people in the Americas and the centuries-long oppression of Dalits and Shudras in India follow a familiar pattern: people are treated as less than human because of who they are, where they were born, or the work they do. Schoolbooks still call Christopher Columbus a discoverer. The land he reached was already home to the Taíno and many other Indigenous nations who had deep ecological knowledge and complex social orders. Columbus brought genocide and slavery, and his arrival began one of the largest collapses of Indigenous populations in human history. Even the word “Indian” comes from his mistake, because he believed he had landed in India. That error put two very different peoples under one colonial gaze, both exoticized, both exploited, both stripped of control over their own lives. Many Native Americans are still called “Indians” today, a reminder that their names, lands, and lives were never respected on their own terms.
In India, a different and equally cruel system has lasted for thousands of years: caste. Dalits and Shudras have been pushed to the edges of society and denied basic rights, dignity, and representation. Caste is a hierarchy built on humiliation, where people are born into a role society calls impure, untouchable, or disposable. Manual scavenging, where people, mostly Dalits, are made to clean human waste by hand without proper tools or protection, still happens in parts of India even though it is banned. Nobody should have to clean someone else’s excrement with their bare hands. It’s unsafe, it’s unhygienic, and above all it’s inhumane, and it carries on behind slogans about a developing nation and tidy statistics. Columbus oppressed with the sword, and caste oppressed with scripture.
Oppression changes its shape and keeps doing the same work. It thrives on the people we choose to ignore, grows in the corners we leave alone, and festers in every history we refuse to acknowledge and every textbook that hides the truth. History is also remembered and rewritten by people who rise from the margins again and again: the Cherokee who walked the Trail of Tears, the Dalit women who write poetry in Ambedkar’s name, the Indigenous elders protecting their land, the sanitation workers demanding dignity. To honor them, we have to name the pain, confront the systems that made this cruelty possible, and admit that it is still happening. Oppression may begin in history, and it has to be undone in the present.
