November 29, 2023

Progressives embrace victimhood to give themselves moral superiority, which often requires grossly distorted narratives instead of historical facts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Nation magazine, where two American Indian “activists” recently “debated” Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving? They agreed that Thanksgiving needed to be “decolonized” and that Thanksgiving needed to refocus on the evil of the colonists.

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That means centering the Indigenous perspective and challenging the colonial narratives around the holiday (and every other day on the calendar). By reclaiming authentic histories and practices, decolonization seeks to honor Indigenous values, identities, and knowledge. This approach is one of constructive evolution: In decolonizing Thanksgiving, we acknowledge this painful past while reimagining our lives in a more truthful manner.

Great. Let’s have that “truthful” conversation.

The big lie behind this “debate” is that colonial era “indigenous culture” was superior to Western culture. Scratch the surface, though, and you see that their complaint is not that the European colonists were evil but that, in the clash of civilizations, the Indian tribes lost.

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The world—and the American Indians today—are far better for colonization. The truth is that all the colonial-era North American Indian tribes were nonliterate, militaristic, brutal, stone-age, and only steps removed from hunter-gatherers. Their decentralized tribal governance was a cause of constant war and bloodshed.

Nonliterate

None of the North American Indian tribes had a written language. They were without books to accumulate and transmit knowledge. They had no recorded histories before those Europeans created after 1492. Outside of adopting European language and writing, the American Indian tribes did not develop alphabets and writing in their native tongues until well into the 19th century.

Militaristic

The single best original source for studying the North American Indians through the colonial period is James Adair’s 1775 book, The History of the American Indians. James was “a trader with the Indians and Resident in their Country for Forty Years,” he married into the Chickasaw tribe and embraced the culture.

Adair states unequivocally that American Indians most valued military prowess. They measured that prowess “by scalps” and by the prisoners that a victorious warrior would bring back to the tribe to be enslaved, ritually executed, or adopted. It was on these measures that the Indians bestowed “all their war-titles, which distinguish them among the brave: and these they hold in as high esteem.”