Change is in the air this autumn. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House, and the Washington “Commanders” are seriously considering reviving their identity as “Redskins.”
As they are quick to tell you, our friends on the left have much to mourn this Thanksgiving, not the least of which is the very possible turning point in the history of identity politics.
For these last several decades, leftists have been looking forward to autumn. This one season gives them two opportunities – Columbus Day and Thanksgiving – for public self-flagellation.
Well, not really “self.” Here at the end stage of the identity politics era, virtually everyone on the left has found a niche that immunizes them.
Identifying themselves as black, brown, green, gay, female, Asian, or, better yet, Native American, they cooly distance themselves from what Stephanie Fryberg calls the “celebration of the exploitation and genocide of Native American people.”
Fryberg’s opinion is something of a norm on the left, and that’s a problem. For the last few decades, holding such opinions has made many a career, Fryberg’s included.
Described by Wikipedia as a “Tulalip psychologist who received her Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Stanford University,” Fryberg was inducted into the “Multicultural Hall of Fame” in 2011.
Amusingly enough, Fryberg’s thesis is titled “Really? You don’t look like an American Indian: Social representations and social group identities.”
In fact, the attractive, European-featured Fryberg – not your everyday Tulalip name – looks no more like an Indian than Natalie Wood did in John Ford’s classic “The Searchers.”
Nevertheless, Fryberg has been able to make a good living by attacking that likely very high percentage of her European ancestors who allegedly oppressed her innocent Tulalip ancestors.
This whole career track, however, is based on the premise that “Native Americans” are actually native to America. They are not.
In the many heated anthropological debates about the origins of Native Americans, the one consensus is that they came from somewhere else and not that long ago. There are no indigenous Americans, not in the U.S., not in Canada, not in Central America, not in South America.
The only people deserving the designation “native American” are the people that were born here. “Indian” is a much more honest generic term for those descended from our earliest immigrants.
Typically, leftists champion immigrants. They deny members of groups like the Daughters of the Revolution or the Mayflower Society any special standing for the length of their family’s tenure in America. That said, they celebrate American Indians for having been here longer.
In his essential book “Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World,” historian John Paul-Flynn deconstructs the slapdash methodology that has allowed the left to sell America’s schoolchildren an intentionally corrupted view of their own history.
For the 10,000 or so years before the first Europeans arrived in America, the various tribes beat up on each other. As with most hunter-gatherer societies, warfare was a near constant.
When Indians built complex civilization as they did in Mexico and Peru, some of those civilizations were as brutally genocidal as Nazi Germany.
Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes could not have overthrown the vast Aztec empire with his 500-man army had not the Aztecs so ruthlessly oppressed the neighboring tribes.
Curiously, in the perverse parlor game of identity politics, the descendants of those conquistadors are not subject to the same abuse as are the descendants of the Pilgrims. They, too, get to play victim.
The Mayflower descendants don’t. They are stuck with the oppressor label. And yet as Paul-Flynn makes clear, the relationship between the Indians and the new Mayflower arrivals was impressively peaceful and worthy of commemoration.
In North America, there were no Corteses, no Pizarros. There were instead thousands of encounters between the new arrivals and the old guard, most of them peaceful.
Human nature being what it is, some of them were not. Given the fondness of many tribes for recreational torture, it is really amazing that there was no genocide, nothing like it.
The new arrivals did not steal America. For the most part they bought it in small increments. True, the U.S. government could get a bit too aggressive with their land purchases, but last I looked, the liberals on the Supreme Court championed eminent domain.
In any case, none of us alive today lost a parent or a grandparent to an Indian massacre or a U.S. Cavalry gone berserk. This thanksgiving we all have much to celebrate.
Indians get it, even if their liberal champions do not. In November, 17 counties with majority-Indian populations swung toward Trump by 10 or more percentage points.
Now let’s bring back those Redskins.
