UPDATE: A previous version of this article, based on an article in The College Fix, listed the incorrect name for the person who presented at the Native American panel. We have removed the name.
In mid-November, UMass Boston students were reportedly told by a presenter on a panel on Native American issues at UMass Boston that they were “genocide beneficiaries.”
As Alexander Pease of The College Fix reports, the panel, titled “Indigenous Commemorative Practices and Community-Building Initiatives in Native New England and Beyond,” was part of a teach-in titled, “Part of the Unbought, Unbossed, Unbroken: Resisting Systemic Oppression Teach-In.” The event described itself as addressing the “theme of being ‘unbroken,’ by focusing on Indigenous resiliency through grassroots commemorative practices and community-building initiatives.”
Pease notes that the teach-in gave “a parade of progressive scholars and other leftwing activists a platform for their ideas … Other panels hosted during last week’s teach-in were ‘White Supremacy at the Ballot Box,’ ‘Sex and Gender: Deconstructing Categories’ and ‘BDS and Palestinian Liberation.'”
A presenter reportedly asked the students, “How can we define systemic oppression?” Pease writes, “As an example, she explained that the erection of early dams by European settlers in Massachusetts rivers served as a ‘system of oppression’ for Native Americans, since the construction of the dams hindered natives from canoe travel.” She also allegedly called native Americans converting to Christianity an aspect of “Stockholm syndrome.”