A progressive event featuring University of Minnesota professors called for “the destruction of the United States as we know it,” reports The College Fix.
The Red Nation, which is “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism,” administered the event, which was titled “From Minnesota to Palestine.”
American Indian Studies Professor Melanie Yazzie, a co-founder of The Red Nation, told the audience “I hope that you seek to dismantle the United States.” Alpha News quoted her saying, “The United States, also built on stolen land like the settler nation of Israel, does not have the authority to speak in this place and on this land. It is the Indigenous people, who belong to Indigenous nations that predate the advent of the United States and that will be here after the United States is gone, that have the authority.”
She said that the U.S. giving land back to American Indians is “non-negotiable” and “is going to happen.”
“[I]t’s our responsibility as people who are within the United States to go as hard as possible to decolonize this place because that will reverberate all across the world, because the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed.”
“The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States,” said Yazzie, who specializes in “Indigenous feminist and queer studies.”
University of Minnesota professor Nick Estes, a founder of The Red Nation who studies “decolonization, U.S. imperialism, environmental justice, and anti-capitalism,” said the “default” attitude of America toward American Indians and Palestinians is “hate.” “Everywhere we turn in this settler colonial state we see genocide and we see the celebration of genociders,” Estes told those attending the event.
The Red Nation member Justine Tiba said that the United States “does not have a right to exist. Israel does not have a right to exist. Australia, New Zealand, all of these settler colonial projects do not have a right to exist.”
“The Red Nation is a ‘queer- and femme-led'” socialist organization, reports Alpha News. The Red Nation’s avowed “Principles” state, “We are anti-capitalist…We are Indigenous feminists who believe in radical relationality.”
The former chairman of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s state representative campaign, David Gilbert Pederson, also spoke at the event, Alpha News reports. He praised the burning of a police station “to the ground,” and praised the actions of “the people of Palestine on Oct. 7.” “Oct. 7 was the day Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, slaughtering innocent women and children,” notes Alpha News.
The Red Nation’s belief that the United States should be dismantled and its land returned to Native Americans is now shared by a growing proportion of Young Democrats. For example, the Twin Cities chapter of Democratic Socialists of America has called for “rematriation of land” from its current owners in both America and Israel. It did so in calling for the eradication of Israel “From the River, to the Sea” (Israel consists of most of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea). The Democratic Socialists refer to America as “Turtle Island.” The Lenape Indian tribe that once inhabited Manhattan called the mainland of America “Turtle Island,” even though it is a continent, not an island. Democratic socialists now refer to America as “Turtle Island” as a way of delegitimizing America and its non-Indian inhabitants, and paving the way for America’s “decolonization.”
As the Center of the American Experiment notes, “To the Twin Cities DSA, both Minnesota and Israel are ‘stolen land’ that needs to be ‘decolonized.’” Three city council members in Minneapolis are members of the Twin Cities DSA, including two who are also elected Democratic politicians.
It has also become common on college campuses to refer to the United States as “Turtle Island” to lend support to movements that seek to reclaim America and Israel from their current inhabitants. For example, student groups whose members comprise much of Columbia University’s student body recently formed an anti-Israel, anti-American group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which seeks to abolish capitalism, police, and prisons, and decolonize “Turtle Island” and Israel. It also peddles the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that America’s police are trained mostly by Israel’s IDF, which is complete nonsense.
The Columbia University Apartheid Divest group claims,
All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine … Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, … Hawai’i … Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.
We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization…We do not believe that prisons, police, profit over people, militarism, war, colonialism, or imperialism will keep us safe….We reject the violence of the Israel Defense Forces-trained, police-industrial complex that chokes our communities and disproportionately enacts brutality against people of color. ….We believe in … Land Back, and the Right of Return, from Palestine to Turtle Island.
Most of Columbia’s student body belong to the groups that form the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition. The coalition includes many student groups, including those with large memberships, such as the Black Students Organization, Asian American Alliance, Student Workers of Columbia (the union for teaching and research assistants at Columbia), Amnesty International, Young Democratic Socialists of America, Caribbean Students Association, Columbia Queer Alliance, Columbia Chicanx Caucus, Columbia Vietnamese Students Association, Muslim Students Association, Palestine Students Union, Somali Student Association, African Students Association, Housing Equity Project, White Coats 4 Black Lives, CU Afghan Student Alliance, African Studies Working Group, Columbia University Black Pre-Professional Society, Pakistani Students Association, Barnard Columbia Urban Review, Club Bangla (the group for students from Bangladesh), Take Back The Night, Native American Council, Mujeres (women), The Columbia Review, Student Organization of Latines, and Columbia Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association.
The coalition’s desire to “decolonize” Israel of its Jews and make them return to their “home” countries ignores the fact that Jewish inhabitants of Israel are not “colonists” and Israel is their home country and the original home of the Jewish people. Most Israeli Jews were born in Israel, rather than being immigrants. And for most of the past 3,000 years, there have been substantial numbers of Jews in Israel. Indeed, Jews appear to be descended from the original Canaanite inhabitants of the region, who lived there thousands of years ago, while Arabs did not live in the region at all until the Seventh Century AD.
As economist Lyman Stone notes, “Of the last 3,000 years, Jews have been the largest religion in Palestine for about 1250, Muslims around 900, Christians around 600, and various pagan religions the rest. Muslim domination corresponded with extremely low population, which is why Jewish immigration worked” in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Advocates of “decolonization” believe that Americans should return their 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.
Some “decolonization” advocates believe it is acceptable for indigenous peoples to massacre settlers’ descendants (such as white Americans) to reclaim the land.
