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.
11 Comments
It's just Boris · June 4, 2023 at 5:55 am
The push to eliminate metrics is becoming more widespread.
It’s understandable in that, if you don’t have a definition of success, and don’t allow measurement of progress or results, you can keep pouring money into your favorite programs indefinitely with no easy way for your opponents to call you out for ineffectiveness.
Of course this is nothing new. Otherwise the wars on poverty, drugs, etc. would have been terminated a long time ago.
Joe Blow · June 4, 2023 at 6:39 am
Its counter-intuitive… but at this point you need to start wishing for, and hastening the collapse of the system.
If you still think it can be saved, God Bless You! For the rest of us, the goal should be to provide downward force to the spiking momentum driving things into the ground. Crash and burn this motherfucker so bad there aren’t even any ashes to sweep up.
Then we can start over.
May The Pototato Be With You · June 4, 2023 at 7:28 am
Soon they will learn how to count to potato in the glorious peoples republic of Michigan, you put your weed in it at the faculty lounge!
Exile1981 · June 4, 2023 at 7:52 am
The article is so full of lies its not funny. Now i dont know anything about the us residency schools but I have looked into the Canadian ones.
1) Every case of secret mass grave has turned out to be nothing. The ‘bone pit’ in nova scotia was animal bones from the kitchen. Graves in sask; was well known but included people from local town. Only currently unknown because a fire in the 90’s destroyed the grave markers. The catholic church paid the reservation to replace the markers with stones but they embezzelled the money and it never got done. The one in BC found with GPR? The person doing the interpretation of the readings had no training and was an activest. When trained people reviewed the data it turned out to be tree roots. CBC still has articles talking about the 212 ‘graves’ on line but never corrected them to mention they were roots.
2) sexual abuse in the schools did happen and sometimes by the priests or nuns running them, but the majority of it was by the fellow students. Until recently you could still find reports discussing the sexual abuse were it actual mentioned that it was mostly student on student. There used to be a story written by the 1st female inuit lawyer about how at the school she learned to read and write and the punishment was less strict than at home and she was spared the sexual abuse of home.
3) corporal punishment by the nuns – it did happen but mostly no worse than the nuns gave out at regular schools.
4) disease – the death rate among kids from diseases was about twice as high as non native kids, but was nuch less than among natives prior to whites coming to north america.
5) reparations- last year an alberta reservation got a pay out for the decendents of residency school survivors. They got 80k last summer. That money was blown in weeks. The only ones who did well were the drug dealers, pot shops and liquir stores.
Jonathan · June 4, 2023 at 10:11 am
There are more well educated and capable Native Americans than you might expect… Almost all of whom live and work off the reservation and work for outside groups or companies, not the tribe.
But with a local restriction on hiring pool, I doubt any of them would qualify for the positions suggested here (or want them if they did qualify!)
The current US Secretary of the Interior is the first Native cabinet secretary – she is clearly an activist/ populist person who does NOT have a background in land management.
Big Ruckus D · June 4, 2023 at 12:21 pm
All this just further confirms – as though such was necessary – that the typical university is a cess pool of stupidity and degeneracy. They exist not as institutions of higher learning, but as leftist indoctrination centers, employment security programs for leftists who cannot hope to reach such a similar level of income and influence in the private sector, and an excuse for the “students” to get drunk/high and fuck each other (poorly).
Secondary to those are the racketeering operation of big university sports, and the often related offshoot of alumni pouring in donation money to stroke their ego by getting some new facility built with their name on it.
The recent crowning achievement of American academia is harvard giving a position to neegroljuice (a/k/a lori “biggest dick in shitcago” lightfoot, or “The Penguin”) based, I’m certain, on her impeccable qualifications and demonstrated excellence at civic leadership. Ba dum tiss.
Burn the entire muthafucking rotten edifice of universities to the ground. Absolutely nothing of value will be lost.
Scot Irish · June 4, 2023 at 5:03 pm
But, we gotta have da sportsball.
Big Ruckus D · June 4, 2023 at 6:09 pm
(sarcasm duly noted) And have it you (the masses) will. Until shit crashes and burns, and then it will spontaneously go away. Until then, the bread and circuses will continue unabated, just the way the masters of the universe want it.
SiG · June 4, 2023 at 12:28 pm
Ah.. recycling the “Noble Savage” mythology. So much more holistic than reductionist, European, whites! “…Indigenous communities place value on keeping balance — such as balanced and healthy relationships between humans, animals, plants, and the planet.” Why they never over hunted or over fished some area and had to move on! Never!!
“… 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.” Of course we have to eliminate objective evidence of accomplishment because those are just the reductionist measures the white people use! Those don’t mean anything.
It’s so tiring that it’s always the same crap arguments. Can’t they at least be original? Once or twice?
MN Steel · June 4, 2023 at 6:34 pm
Why is my homestate so behind the times?
Life here in glorious Land of Lotsa Puddles, Tubby Tim the Tipsy Teacher and his squaw LT Governator have been trying to gove back 3400 acres and 120 years of continuous research back to the rice-knockers for a while.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/background-intentions-cloquet-forestry-center
You can feel the lube running down your thighs, and the ride hasn’t started speeding up yet…
Jonesy · June 5, 2023 at 8:45 am
Oakland U checking a particular box here. On the intersectionality scale, the native Americans don’t qualify as highly as some of the more woke alphabet groups. Does Oakland know if native Americans care about pronouns, or if they actually believe men can be women? It remains to be seen, yet they are giving away some land. Good for them.
As this is in my extend backyard, I have to laugh at the irony here – look at a map and look at what is adjacent to the land they are talking about…..Katke Cousins golf course. If they really wanted to stick it to whitey, they would claim the land the golf course sits on. See if the local elites would be willing to give it up to feel better about the sins of the past.
Comments are closed.