“Civilization” As Cover Story: Fact-Checking JD Vance’s Claim About Native “Child Sacrifice”

When JD Vance told a crowd that European settlers arrived in the Americas, “found widespread child sacrifice,” and that “Christian civilization ended the practice,” he wasn’t giving a history lesson. He was dusting off one of the oldest colonial talking points on earth: We were brutal, but they were savages, so it was justified.

Let’s walk through what the evidence actually shows and what it doesn’t.

What Vance is really saying

Vance’s claim does two things at once:

1. Paints Indigenous peoples as barbaric, suggesting that killing Native children was basically an upgrade from whatever horrors they were supposedly committing themselves.

2. Casts Christian colonizers as the heroes, erasing the mass death, land theft, and cultural destruction that followed.

That narrative isn’t new. Europeans have been telling some version of “we had to civilize the child-killing heathens” since the 1500s. Historians of colonial rhetoric have shown how accusations of cannibalism and human sacrifice were routinely exaggerated or invented to justify conquest, forced conversion, and slavery.

So how does Vance’s story hold up against the record?

What the archaeology actually shows

Here’s the honest version.

• Some societies in Mesoamerica – like the Mexica (Aztecs) – did practice ritual human sacrifice, including the killing of children in specific religious ceremonies. Excavations at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City have uncovered child remains that were likely offerings to the rain god Tlaloc.

• That evidence is geographically and culturally specific. It applies to particular cities and empires in what is now Mexico, not to “the New World” as a single block and certainly not to all Indigenous nations from Canada to Patagonia.

• For First Nations and many Native nations north of Mexico, the picture is completely different. Archaeologists and historians describe a huge diversity of spiritual practices, kinship systems, and political structures – but there is no evidence of anything like “widespread child sacrifice” as a defining feature of North American Indigenous life. When human sacrifice appears at all in the record, it is rare, localized, and nothing like the sweeping caricature Vance describes.

In other words: you can talk about specific archaeological sites, specific rituals, and specific empires. You cannot honestly claim that European settlers stumbled onto a continent unified by “widespread child sacrifice” and heroically shut it down.

That leap from “some ritual killings in some places” to “this is who they were as a people” is not science. It is propaganda.

What Christian “civilization” actually did to Indigenous children

Even if Vance’s first sentence were accurate (it isn’t), his second is worse.

European Christian powers did not arrive, outlaw child murder, and then peacefully coexist. They built systems that targeted Indigenous children on a scale the pre-contact world had never seen.

• In the United States and Canada, church-run and government-backed boarding schools forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families for over a century. The goal was explicit: “kill the Indian, save the man.” Recent investigations have documented thousands of deaths from disease, malnutrition, abuse, and neglect in these schools alone.

• These schools were not a side note. They were central tools of Christian colonization, designed to erase languages, religions, and cultures and to break the line between elders and the next generation.

• Beyond the schools, colonization brought epidemic disease, land dispossession, forced marches, massacres, and legal regimes that stripped Native nations of children, territory, and political power.

So when Vance says “Christian civilization ended the practice,” he is asking Americans to forget the very real, heavily documented fact that Christian governments and churches presided over the mass death of Indigenous children for centuries – not as a glitch, but as policy.

The historical record does not show Christian civilization protecting Indigenous children. It shows Christian governments building systems that disappeared them.

Why this rhetoric is dangerous now

If this were just one bad paragraph in a college essay, it would still be offensive. But coming from a major national figure, it is something else: permission-giving rhetoric.

• It tells his audience that Indigenous people were so barbaric that anything done to them counts as progress.

• It implies that modern policies that harm Native communities are part of a civilizing legacy, not a continuation of injustice.

• And it signals that historical truth is negotiable if a cleaner myth serves today’s political agenda.

We’ve watched this move before. Politicians rewrite the past, scrub out the bodies, and use that sanitized history to justify whatever they want to do in the present – whether that is attacking tribal sovereignty, rolling back land protections, or dismissing Indigenous resistance as ungrateful and “anti-Western.”

What the record really demands from us

None of this means every Indigenous society was peaceful, perfect, or free from violence. No human society is. It means something simpler and more uncomfortable:

• The Americas were full of complex nations with laws, trade, diplomacy, and spirituality of their own.

• European conquest did not end “savagery.” It introduced industrial-scale death to people who had never seen anything like it.

• And today’s leaders have a choice: tell the truth about that history, or recycle old colonial talking points to make themselves look heroic.

JD Vance chose the second option.

The work now belongs to the rest of us – historians, journalists, Indigenous communities, and anyone who cares about reality – to choose the first.

Because if we let leaders rewrite the past into a story where genocide equals rescue and erasure equals salvation, there is no limit to what they will justify next.

References

Carrasco, D. (2012). Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and ceremonial centers (2nd ed.). Waveland Press.

López Luján, L., & López Austin, A. (2020). Recent archaeological investigations at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan. Ancient Mesoamerica, 31(3), 1–19.

Kiernan, V. G. (1995). The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes toward the Outside World in the Imperial Age. Serif.

Schmidt, S. J. (2007). Cannibals: The construction of the cannibal in the literary discourse of the British Empire. (Master’s thesis). University of Vienna.

The Associated Press. (2024). Biden designates site of former Native American boarding school as national monument.

Le Monde. (2024). Plus de 3 100 enfants amérindiens sont morts dans des pensionnats aux Etats-Unis.

Kassie, E., & Brave NoiseCat, J. (Directors). (2024). Sugarcane [Documentary]. National Geographic.

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