UMinn professor wants to ‘dismantle the settler project that is the United States.’

Harvard is in the headlines as Claudine Gay appears as the poster child for everything wrong with academia (including) the Democrat party’s protection for the toxic ideologies taught there, as evidenced by Barack Obama stepping in to save Gay’s job. Harvard is hardly unique. Today’s example is a “teach-in” at the University of Minnesota entitled “From Minneapolis to Palestine: Connection Our Movements for Collective Liberation: An Indigenous Perspective.” It’s as bad as it sounds, with one woman clearly stating the goal: “dismantling” (i.e., erasing) America and Israel.

The speaker is unambiguous, concise—and utterly dishonest:

“Land back is going to happen,” University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie said during a “teach-in” about the Israel-Palestine conflict. “The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.” pic.twitter.com/glgwZpLmmD

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023

And you’re hearing people on social media saying, like “Oh, land back, like genocide. Does this mean genocide?”

 No. But land back is going to happen. That’s going to happen. The indigenous perspective in Turtle Island and how we understand what is also happening in Palestine and what we really want you to take away tonight is, as Anthony said, we’re in the belly of the beast, right?

We’re all indigenous people who come from nations that are under occupation by the United States government. And of course, the US bank rules on the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian land. They’re one and the same really.

And so it’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 US is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed. Right.

And so we want US out of everywhere. We want US out of Palestine. We want US out of turtle. Island, right. And that the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.

“Turtle Island” means the earth itself. Once you understand that, you understand the lie behind her claim that what she’s urging does not mean genocide. It does in every way, shape, and form.

According to the woman, every bit of American land belongs to Native Americans—who were colonizers. Every single tribe lived to destroy nearby tribes. Since America’s indigenous people were completely Stone-Aged, to the point at which they didn’t even have the wheel, one of the best ways to optimize their survival was to kill rival tribes and take their resources. That’s how they lived for centuries.

Of course, even if she denies Native American history, the speaker is fully aware that the only way to “decolonize” America is to kill people. Decolonization (which means colonization by different people) happens with force.

It’s unlikely that the people she wants to kill are the blacks or Hispanics, who are currently “Allies.” She wants to kill whites and probably the Asians and East Asian Indians who are insistently doing well academically and in commerce. Ironically, young, college-educated Asians and East Asian Indians consider themselves Allies, too. They’ll find that, like good, loyal, patriotic German Jews, they’ll be in the gas chamber, too.

The madness goes on with the claim that the U.S. is the “greatest predator empire that has ever existed,” which needs to be erased “everywhere.” Currently, the following is the extent of this “great” U.S. Empire (endnotes omitted):

The United States currently administers three territories in the Caribbean Sea and eleven in the Pacific Ocean. Five territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are permanently inhabited, unincorporated territories; the other nine are small islands, atolls, and reefs with no native (or permanent) population. Of the nine, only one is classified as an incorporated territory (Palmyra Atoll). Two additional territories (Bajo Nuevo Bank and Serranilla Bank) are claimed by the United States but administered by Colombia.

That’s it. In other nations, we have a military presence either because we’re still maintaining stability almost 8 decades after those places went crazy and became “predator empires” or because the nations hosting our military desperately want us (e.g., NATO)—or at least want our money.

We have a cultural presence worldwide because, since WWII, even while disdaining us, most of the world desperately wants to be like us or “us” as we once were: Affluent, safe, and apparently having fun. That’s our “empire.”

The woman’s expressed desire to remove America from the “turtle” means erasing America. That doesn’t happen without bloodshed.

The same genocidal mania is evident in the woman’s demand that America get out of “Palestine.” To the extent America is in Gaza or the West Bank, where the self-styled ‘Palestinian’ people live, she’s there in the form of the uncounted billions she’s sent to the leaders of the PLO (Arafat was worth $10 billion when he died), the Palestinian Authority (Mahmoud Abbas is worth at least $100 million), and Hamas (the three leaders of which are worth a combined $10 billion). Obviously, the speaker doesn’t want the money to stop.

What the speaker wants is for America to stop supporting the State of Israel. She doesn’t care that the Jews are the indigenous people and the Muslims the colonizers. All she knows is that Israel has been associated with the U.S. since the Soviet Union sided with the Arabs in 1967.

What the woman envisions is what Hamas and its fellow travelers in the worldwide “Palestinian Empire” demand: a Muslim nation “from the river to the sea.” And she surely knows that the people calling for that dream, whether in Gaza or elsewhere, are open about the fact that this requires Jewish genocide.

If you’re interested, you can see the whole 2-hour event here, but I think we’ve got the gist of it: Kill Americans, kill Jews, and ignore every other “colonizing” nation in the world, which would be every nation in the world. Our academic institutions are utterly toxic, and they should be destroyed by all legal means available, which means, in practical terms, defunding the heck out of them.

UPDATE: The speaker is Melanie Yazzie, a professor at UMN Liberal Arts. I was so focused on her words that I forgot to mention that fact. Her bio is what you’d expect:

Melanie K. Yazzie is a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state.

Dr. Yazzie has held numerous fellowships. She was a Katrin H. Lamon Residential Scholar at the School for Advanced Research (2018-19), a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-17), an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellow (2015-16), and a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship (2011-14).

She has published over a dozen articles and book reviews in Gender, Place & Culture, Environment & Society, Wicazo Sa Review, Studies in American Indian Literature, American Indian Quarterly, Social Text, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, Society, Native American and Indigenous Studies, New Mexico Historical Quarterly, and American Quarterly. She is coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021) and The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save the Earth (Red Media, 2021). 

In addition to her academic work, she engages in extensive public intellectualism and community organizing and activism. She co-hosts and produces the podcast Red Power Hour and serves as lead editor for the open-access journal Decolonization. She is the advisory board chair for Red Media, an independent press and media project that centers Indigenous intelligence in all its forms. She also organizes with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism.

Image: Twitter screen grab.