Imagine attending a performance of A Christmas Carol, and the “first act” is a lecture about how the theater sits on “sacred,” stolen Indian land. This is precisely what journalist Kathy Kersten experienced at the Guthrie Theater (shown) in Minneapolis last Friday.
What 19th-century land conflict, a flabbergasted John Hinderaker at Powerline wrote, “has to do with ‘A Christmas Carol,’ God only knows.” Just as tragic, though, is what the “land acknowledgement’s” author apparently doesn’t know: history.
As American Thinker editor-in-chief Thomas Lifson reports, “Minnesota, the state of my birth and upbringing, is famously populated by people renowned for being “nice“ — courteous, self-deprecating, and given to understatement. The North Star State never tolerated slavery and enthusiastically enlisted in the Union cause during the Civil War.”
“Lacking any traces of guilt over slavery, the Left has seized upon the cause of Native Americans, who arrived earlier than white people in the territory constituting the state,” Lifson continues. ”Instead of celebrating the 19th-century spread of a civilization that brought with it longer lifespans and an incomparably higher standard of living to people stuck in a Neolithic stage of civilization, the progs want to instill guilt in the populace over their existence and continually hector them that they should feel guilt.”
(Note: The characteristics Lifson ascribes to Minnesotans — i.e., niceness — are also those of Scandinavians, the main European group that settled Minnesota. This heritage also helps explain why the state smacks of Sweden, which leads the Western World in suicidal cultural self-immolation.)
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The aforementioned “land acknowledgement” is the handiwork, Powerline informs, of a mere handful of activist ne’er-do-wells. It’s the American Indian “version of the 1619 Project — a perverted retelling of American history in which everything is extinguished except racism, slavery and oppression,” the site relates. “Kathy [Kersten], who writes for Center of the American Experiment, exposed the phenomenon here. Thus, one of the activists writes in the Guthrie program: “Colonization, history and racism cast a deep shadow over our perspective of land, life, culture and people. We have been exiled to a place of extinction.”
“‘Colonization’ means you and me,” Hinderaker points out.
But calling this characterization of history “tendentious” would, well, be Scandinavian understatement. After all, the “Guthrie’s land acknowledgement says that ‘we gather on the traditional land of the Dakota People,’ and includes a casual reference to ‘the Ojibwe and other Indigenous nations,’” Powerline further informs.
In truth, though, “the Dakota (Sioux) and Ojibwe (Chippewa) were bitter enemies, and southern Minnesota became a ‘traditional land of the Dakota People’ only recently — the early 18th century — when the Dakota were driven here by the Ojibwe,” the site continues. “Warfare between the Dakota and Ojibwe continued well into the 19th century, and keeping the peace between the warring tribes was one of the missions of the soldiers at Fort Snelling.”
As was the case all over North America, the European settlers were merely joining the Indians in a clash of civilizations, a phenomenon that has ever and always typified man. The only thing they’re guilty of is having been more successful in prosecuting it — at least at one time.
Yet, tragically, the Guthrie propaganda “is far from the first example of overturning the narrative of Minnesota’s founding and development from heroic to shameful,” writes Lifson. ”Beautiful Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis (named for a pro-slavery Southerner because as Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun authorized the U.S. Army to survey the territory and build Fort Snelling, the first outpost of the United States in the region) was renamed the unpronounceable Bde Maka Ska, only to run into a buzz saw of public and judicial opposition. At the moment, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names recognizes the Dakota name, though signage at the lake uses both names.”
Moreover, Powerline also tells us that Fort Snelling itself is now in the crosshairs, with a campaign to rename it “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote” and “transform it into an Auschwitz-style monument to evil (‘colonization’).”
This phenomenon is operative beyond Minnesota, too. An example is how Mt. McKinley in Alaska was renamed “Denali” in 2015.
But selective guilt and victim-status assignment are funny things. Medieval Europe also had its tribes — the Alans, Saxons, Marcomanni, Quadi, Goths, Franks, Vandals, Sarmatians, and Celts, for example, were just a handful. Like the American Indian tribes, in their pre-Christian days these groups often engaged in slavery and savage warfare; sometimes, apparently, practiced human sacrifice; and had little concept of what we consider human rights.
Also like the American Indians, these outrages were ended when they were Christianized and conquered (not necessarily always in that order). Unlike the American Indians, however, the European tribes were subsumed and ceased existing as distinct peoples — meaning, they’re no longer around to complain about their “colonization.” Dead cultures tell no tales.
As for what may be tomorrow’s dead culture, Powerline explains the anti-American activists’ goals: “They want to recast American history — your history and mine, not theirs — as evil. They want to bend the rest of us to their will, by imposing ‘land acknowledgements’ and renaming sites and buildings.”
After all, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” 1984 author George Orwell wrote. Here, now, in America, this is largely a fait accompli. Most youth today have no history, no enduring culture — that is, that they’re proud of and call their own — along with no knowledge of Truth, no fixed morality. It’s no wonder they’re slaves to the here and now, to fashions, and hedonistic desires. That’s all they have.
This problem won’t be remedied, either, until and unless the “silent majority” becomes as passionate about advancing what should be their culture as the destroyers of worlds are about extinguishing it.
