At least five universities promoted the idea of “decolonizing Thanksgiving.”
Cal Tech’s Center for Inclusion & Diversity stated on November 26 that “‘Decolonizing Thanksgiving’ is a call to action, urging us to rethink, relearn, and evolve our understanding of Thanksgiving traditions.” Through “advocacy and allyship, we can genuinely honor Indigenous and Native communities, acknowledge their contributions, and reflect on the true history of Thanksgiving.”
Cal Tech also urged students to “recognize the National Day of Mourning, and learn about the land we reside on.” This implies that we reside on stolen land, and indicates that Thanksgiving is a day not to celebrate but to mourn America’s history.
On Nov. 21, the University at Buffalo — a state university in New York — held an event on “Decolonizing Thanksgiving.” At the event, UB’s Intercultural and Diversity Center urged students to ask “Is it right to celebrate Thanksgiving and America’s history of settler colonialism?” and “What can we do to honor this day of mourning for Native communities?” “We can redefine the meaning of Thanksgiving to remember and respect indigenous peoples’ histories,” it stated.
The University of Maine held an hour-long discussion about “the decolonization of Thanksgiving” in its multicultural student center.
Washington University urged students to question “the history and narrative of Thanksgiving from an indigenous perspective” in an event last Friday. It urged students to “transform traditions to be more inclusive.” It incorporated “presentations from various cultural perspectives and a sample of traditional Thanksgiving foods from different cultures.”
Some progressives seek to decolonize not just Thanksgiving, but the United States as a whole. Advocates of such “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.
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.
