The gigantic Foxwoods casino and resort complex, in the hills of eastern Connecticut. It’s owned by people at least partly descended from members of the Pequot tribe living in the area when the English move into it in the 17th Century.
— Photo by Elfenbeinturm
Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic on May 26, 1637, from John Underhill’s Newes from America, London, 1638
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Student performance, and even attendance, in Connecticut's public schools are crashing, but not to worry. With Gov. Ned Lamont presiding, the state Education Department and the state's five officially recognized Indian tribes announced the other day that they will create a model curriculum in Native American studies. The curriculum will be offered to the schools, where, if it is used, may crowd out basic academic teaching, as "social-emotional learning" already is doing.
Indeed, the Native American studies curriculum may be especially useful for distracting from the crash of public education. Everyone in authority can keep looking busy while carefully avoiding relevance to the disaster.
Of course if students ever managed to read at grade level, it would be great to have a more accurate and comprehensive account of the country's history, overcoming what kids pick up from cowboys-and-Indians theater. But such an account is not likely to emerge from anything assembled by the Education Department and the Indian tribes. The curriculum probably will be constructed to rationalize perpetual grievance, victimhood and privilege. After all, legislation to create the curriculum was proposed by state Sen. Cathy Osten (D-Sprague, or maybe more accurately, D-Foxwoods).
A news report about the curriculum suggested that the history of the Indian tribes and the European settlers who founded Connecticut is such a sensitive subject that it will be uncomfortable to relate, apparently because some think that assigning guilt will be necessary.
Nonsense. For the Connecticut history to be taught here is only the history of mankind -- tribalism and the struggle to overcome it, with the peculiarly American denouement whereby, as society began to overcome it, tribalism was seen as an excellent mechanism for delivering political patronage and so was restored and embedded in law for perpetuity.
In early Connecticut there were more than two tribes, the Europeans and Indians. There were multiple Indian tribes with shifting alliances, and the peace was broken as much as by the Indians as the Europeans. The Pequots, whose remote descendants today claim entitlement to perpetual victimhood because of the tribe's near-extermination by English colonists in a battle in Mystic in 1637, oppressed other Indian tribes and so were hated by them. The name "Pequot" meant "destroyer."
So the Mohegans, Narragansetts and Niantics joined the Europeans to destroy the Pequots themselves -- men, women and children alike, an atrocity far greater than the atrocities that had been inflicted by the Pequots on their enemies, atrocities that had prompted the war.
The Pequot chief Sassacus, who was away with a raiding party at the time of the Mystic massacre, fled to the west and was killed not by the English but by the Mohawks, who sent his severed head and hands to the colonists in Hartford as an offering of friendship.
Of course, the extermination of most of the Pequots was not quickly followed by an age of equality, light and happy assimilation. Indian lands were bought or expropriated, more easily because the Indians did not share the Europeans' concept of private property. Hewing to its old ways, Indian culture faded under the burden of discrimination.
But over the decades intermarriage and vast new immigration to what became the United States hastened assimilation of Connecticut's ethnicities, and eventually, though only a half century ago, full equality under the law, if not quite in actual living conditions, was established. Now the descendants of the old tribes and the various ethnicities were trying to make a living more or less in the same culture.
Whereupon government, in its endless thirst for revenue, contrived to dress up casino gambling as a form of ethnic reparations for ancient wrongs that lacked surviving victims. In southeastern Connecticut certain people who lived in raised ranches and worked at Electric Boat like everybody else suddenly could claim to be oppressed on behalf of their distant ancestors. In the name of this ancestry state government gave them a casino duopoly and thus perpetual wealth to be inherited by their descendants at the expense of the rest of society.
Almost as quickly as it had arrived in Connecticut, equality under the law was undone. As a political matter this new ethnic privilege will require perpetuating the false impression of victimhood. Hence the Education Department's new curriculum.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
