The Oakland University in Michigan is “giving some of its land back to Native Americans.” They claim that “stealing” native land “contributed to high rates of diabetes, malnourishment, poor access to dental care and more issues Native communities face today.” Why is that?
There’s a long history of settlers in this country deciding what’s good for Native people and forcing that upon them
You mean like forcing them to use your preferred pronouns? (insert eyeroll here)
Over the course of a century, Native children were taken by U.S. government agents and sent to schools hundreds of miles away from their families. At these schools, they experienced physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse and torture…These were schools meant to, in overtly violent ways, assimilate them to a white society,
So grooming DOES happen in schools. At least we can agree on that. Then the real gobbledygook begins:
A problem with measuring success, Peiser says, is that metrics of counting are about power, while Indigenous communities place value on keeping balance — such as balanced and healthy relationships between humans, animals, plants, and the planet.
So measuring things is about power. Wait, there is more:
While the land offers the community a place to perform activities they could not otherwise, Peiser says more could be done — including getting Native students free tuition to OU, as was promised in the 1855 Treaty of Detroit, and hiring more Native faculty.
“For your Native faculty, you need to hire somebody native to that place, which means your application pool will not come from all over the country,” Peiser said. “It will come from your backyard. And you need to be willing to hire knowledge keepers that won’t have Ph.D.s because we learn our Indigenous practices from our communities, not from colonialist institutions.”
So hire faculty who is unqualified to teach, and don’t give grades or award degrees. That would be a white tradition. I am betting you that the opposition that these faculty members have to measuring things won’t apply to their paychecks, another white tradition.