The ACLU of Virginia has called on people to “decolonize” Thanksgiving. Advocates of “decolonization” believe that the descendants of settlers should return land to the indigenous peoples who once lived on the land, claiming that the land was all stolen. In reality, much of the land transferred by Native Americans to whites was purchased by whites, not taken by force.
The Native American population was so depleted by disease in the 17th Century that Indian tribes could afford to sell some of their land to whites, because they weren’t using most of it. Selling land they didn’t need made sense — they could use the money they got for the land to buy firearms or metal-tipped arrows to defend themselves against hostile tribes, and to buy other useful things, like pots and pans, cotton and wool cloth, and metal tools needed to improve their agricultural output. Transfers of land were often entirely voluntary. Legal historian Stuart Banner’s book “How the Indians Lost Their Land” explains this.
But the ACLU has implied that the entire United States is stolen land. In an August 7 post, the ACLU approvingly featured an image with the message “Abolish Prisons,” “Abolish White Supremacy” and “No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land,” accompanied by a tweet agreeing with this sign, and saying “That’s right, NO ONE.” The ACLU’s statements echo the communist activist Angela Davis, who advocated abolishing prisons in the U.S., while supporting the incarceration of political prisoners in totalitarian communist regimes overseas. The ACLU of Virginia has touted Angela Davis’s stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet quoting Davis decrying the existence of prisons.
Other progressives have called for replacing Thanksgiving with a “national day of mourning,” based on the historically false claim that Thanksgiving commemorates a massacre of Indians by the Pilgrims of Plymouth colony. They claim the “first official Thanksgiving Day commemorated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies.” They cite a non-existent professor for this false claim, someone they falsely claim “was head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, whose faculty cannot recall him at all. When the department was founded in 1971, [the man alleged to have been a professor] was 79 years old.”
One genuine lesson of Thanksgiving is the failure of central planning, which is at the heart of socialism. “Today is Thanksgiving, and there is much to be thankful. One lesson of the holiday that we should try not to forget is how the Pilgrims were saved from starvation and misery by adopting a system of private property rights,” wrote law professor Ilya Somin in the Washington Post.
The Pilgrims’ reversal of fortune is described by economist Benjamin Powell:
Many people believe that after suffering through a severe winter, the Pilgrims’ food shortages were resolved the following spring when the Native Americans taught them to plant corn and a Thanksgiving celebration resulted. In fact, the pilgrims continued to face chronic food shortages for three years until the harvest of 1623. Bad weather or lack of farming knowledge did not cause the pilgrims’ shortages. Bad economic incentives did.
In 1620 Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights. Food and supplies were held in common and then distributed based on equality and need as determined by Plantation officials. People received the same rations whether or not they contributed to producing the food, and residents were forbidden from producing their own food. Governor William Bradford, in his 1647 history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote that this system was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. The problem was that “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Because of the poor incentives, little food was produced.
Faced with potential starvation in the spring of 1623, the colony decided to implement a new economic system. Every family was assigned a private parcel of land. They could then keep all they grew for themselves….
This change, Bradford wrote, had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. Giving people economic incentives changed their behavior….
Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years.
A 1999 article by the Hoover Institution’s Tom Bethell provides a more detailed account.
Some “decolonization” advocates believe it is acceptable for indigenous peoples to massacre settlers’ descendants to reclaim the land.
But even in situations where white settlers took land by force, that does not necessarily mean that today’s white inhabitants should be “decolonized” and driven from that land. Native Americans routinely displaced or exterminated other tribes, so Indians who occupied the land when whites first encountered them may only have been on that land for a few generations — they may have been “colonizers” just as much as the whites who followed them. And tribes driven from their land by whites in some cases ceased to exist, as disease or hostile encounters with other tribes resulted in the tribe ceasing to exist. If a tribe does not exist, its former lands cannot be returned to it.
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