Have You Seen the Latest Video about Thanksgiving?

            Parents are concerned about what their children are being taught in public schools. There has been much talk about critical race theory and other Marxist ideas being taught to the children, teens, and young adults. However, there are many other destructive ideas being taught.

            According to Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal received an anonymous tip yesterday about a video that was shown to the students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, before Thanksgiving. The Daily Signal reached out to Walt Whitman High School for comment, but they did not receive a response. “D.C. Public Schools did something similar, issuing a statement to students on how to “decolonize” their Thanksgiving and to acknowledge stolen land at their holiday dinners.” Stepman described the video as follows. 

The video shown to Whitman High students was narrated by activist and former United Nations delegate Larissa FastHorse, whose Thanksgiving message was that “we are all complicit in standing on stolen land.”

The historical tale being told here is nonsensical. It requires one to have a narrow and shallow sense of history, where groups of people are forced into silos to fit modern political notions of oppressors versus oppressed.

In FastHorse’s narrative, the Pilgrim’s only notable traits were that they “robbed graves” and “took land” of people who were living in what is today the United States. The origin of the Pilgrims, their ideas and motivations, are entirely irrelevant in her telling.

There was nothing about the Mayflower Compact or how the Pilgrim tradition was a key element in the formation of the United States as a self-governing society.

Any context for their actions is brushed aside. What matters is that they are portrayed as white European oppressors, who showed up and shattered a presumed utopia, where people did not seize land, spread disease, or brutalize their fellow man.

Were the Pilgrims and Puritans sometimes brutish and unjust in how they dealt with the tribal people they met in the New World? Yes, some certainly were. Were the Pilgrims a uniquely rapacious people, devils in human form who came to terrorize and plunder the people they met in the New World? Hardly.

One could say the same thing about the Native American tribes of the New World, too.

The simplistic story of unique European oppression leaves out how some tribes were eager to enlist European newcomers in their wars to eradicate other Native American tribes in continuation of conflicts that long predated Europeans’ arrivals.

The Wampanoags that partook in the first, famed Pilgrim Thanksgiving wanted a new ally to gain an edge against the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, a rival set of tribes in the Northeast region of what became the United States.

In the 1640s, the Iroquois waged a war of annihilation against the Huron and other tribes in the Great Lakes region in the so-called Beaver Wars. Just as various tribes, kingdoms, and nations went to war with each other in Europe, so too did the various peoples of the New World wage war on, enslave, and obliterate their neighbors.

The settled civilizations of South America, such as the Aztecs, used neighboring tribes as sacrificial cattle. Their downfall at the hands of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes came only with the help of those formerly oppressed tribes that hated the Aztecs more than the newcomers.

The world the Pilgrims arrived in at the Plymouth Colony was both blood-soaked and had changed hands many times long before they arrived.

If we really want to view history as some grand morality tale to find out who the angels and who the devils are, why should Native American Indian tribes get a pass as we condemn the Pilgrims?

The takeaway from the woke Thanksgiving video isn’t a historical one. It’s not created to give students a deeper or more complex understanding of the world or to teach them the details of history. Instead, it’s made entirely to fit a modern political agenda.

            The public and private schools are teaching critical race theory and social justice. These ideas come from Marxism and are destructive to America. The wokeness in America is “corrupting our institutions, eroding merit, and pulling us apart as a people. You can find the referenced video at this site.