Professor Offers Advice to Students on ‘Decolonizing Your Thanksgiving’
“unlearning some of the myths that we’ve learned about Thanksgiving”
Why is the left so intent on politicizing Thanksgiving? We go through this every single year.
The College Fix reports:
Professor instructs students on ‘decolonizing your Thanksgiving’
An assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania recently talked to students about how to “decolonize” their Thanksgiving, arguing that the traditional pilgrims and Indians story is a false narrative that perpetuates harm and racism.
Professor Abigail Adams argued that “unlearning some of the myths that we’ve learned about Thanksgiving” is important because “they continue to perpetuate harm and misinformation about native people and continue to keep native people of the past… [so that they’re] not seen as real, contemporary people.”
She told students attending the online workshop that while the “Thanksgiving myth” has elements of truth, “we have to be honest about how America has treated indigenous people and we have to acknowledge that indigenous people continue to suffer in internal colonies or reservation systems as we call them in the United States.”
“And,” she added, “we have to acknowledge during Thanksgiving that we have inherited a land that is not rightfully ours because it was never ceded. It was essentially stolen from indigenous people.”
“This isn’t just a conversation about us getting the Thanksgiving story right,” she said. “This is a story about us acknowledging contemporary Native American people and to acknowledge that they also continue to suffer ongoing colonialism.”
Adams, who is also chairperson of the Native American Awareness Council at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, began her “Decolonize Your Thanksgiving” lecture, hosted by the Center for Multicultural Student Leadership and Engagement, with a land acknowledgement.
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Comments
As is normal for progressive intellectuals, the professor appears to have missed a salient detail about the last Thursday in November; it is not Celebrate Pilgrims’ Day.
It is Thanksgiving, a day instituted as a national holiday by their now tottering icon, President Lincoln to offer thanks to God for the victory at Gettysburg.
The Pilgrim and Indians story is a pleasant idea that has generated plenty of school art projects but has virtually nothing to do with the reason Americans gather and feast.
I think SJWs are better off screeching about the whole concept of giving thanks to a merciful God they deny with every fiber of their being; more truthy.
I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the driving impulses of all liberals is a pathological need to tell everyone else they’re wrong.
Thanksgiving is just the excuse du jour.
“We have inherited a land that is not rightfully ours because it was never ceded”?
Name one country that is not the product of war and occupation at some point in time. Britain? Lost to the ancient Britons after Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman invasions plus there’s the whole Viking thing. Japan? Occupied by invaders who pushed the native Ainu to a tiny party of the far north of the country. China? The whole Xiongnu, Mongolian, Manchu invasions likely impacted on the purity of the heartland, and of course they in turn invaded all the various parts of China that their minority peoples live. France? Pfft. The Gauls are long gone – invaded first by the Romans and then by the Franks. Oh wait – Iceland might be okay – an empty land settled by Vikings, but that’s about the sole exception.
Frankly the claim is just another pretext by Leftists to attack the West.
“And,” she added, “we have to acknowledge during Thanksgiving that we have inherited a land that is not rightfully ours because it was never ceded. It was essentially stolen from indigenous people.”
If Professor Adams had the courage of her convictions, she would leave the USA and return to the land of her ancestors.
“Why is the left so intent on politicizing Thanksgiving?”
Because the true story behind it entirely demolishes their cherished worldview.
If the professor needs to decolonize so urgently, I have several powerful and truly unique colonics I can recommend to him.
“We have inherited a land that is not rightfully ours because it was never ceded”
Is the prof self-aware enough to realize this is a formula for never-ending irredentism and revanchism? Land is not something that was created by human labor, and who can possibly say what humans first possessed any particular lands anywhere on Earth?
Even in the Americas, there’s ample evidence that there were multiple migrations across the Bering Strait, yet later migrants presumably found some of the best lands already occupied. Are we to presume they just said, “Well that belongs to others by sacred right; we would never, ever presume to take it from them”?
Does even post-Columbian Native history support claims that Native lands had clearly defined boundaries or that such boundaries as existed were not routinely violated by their Native neighbors pretty much whenever and wherever they could get away with it?
This is, like all utopianism, a comparison of an actual against some hypothetical moral perfection that never has (and likely never will) exist on this planet.
So how, exactly, did American attitudes toward territorial expansion compare with those of the Lakota Sioux? Other than having a more successful outcome, that it.