In the calendar for Harvard University, today has two names: Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Harvard currently is the only Ivy League institution that acknowledges Columbus Day was ever a thing in their formal calendar. Others call it Fall Weekend if there is a school holiday coinciding with the second Monday of October; an increasing number choose to recognize the many peoples who see Christopher Columbus as a harbinger of death by calling it Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Native Americans represent 1.2% of the United States population, but Ivy League enrollment hovers over .5%. While many of these universities host events, build support networks, and participate in land recognition, progress is slow. As universal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day moves forward; support in academics, admissions, and student life is unequally distributed. An op-ed in The Daily Princetonian remarks that amongst the Ivy League has the least number of these supports even though Princeton the city recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ Day (but the school calls the weekend Fall Break).
I’m not sure whether that information dump by itself was valuable, but even secular holidays can serve as important jumping off points for national identity and conversation. (I can’t think of any other reason people still defend Columbus Day.) But while I am writing this, you should know Ithaca, where Cornell stands, was founded on Cayuga land, Cayuga being part of the Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee. Harvard says they stand on the lands of the Massachusett, after whom the state is named. Most of Rhode Island was owned by the Narragansett, and Brown University works with them and the Wampanoag — though a couple years back they conflicted with the Pokanoket in Bristol. It should be noted the land Providence stands on was bought from the Narragansett. New Haven is in the territory of the Quinnipiac, but Yale works with several other tribes (and give pronunciation guides for all eight). But the Lenape own the land under three universities, Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Rev. Samson Occom, a Mohegan who played a part in the early days of Dartmouth College
I couldn’t find a reliable source regarding Dartmouth, which was founded in part with Native Americans in mind, but in general Hanover, NH, stands within the territory of the Western Abenaki.
Stay Classy, Dartmouth Review
Speaking of Dartmouth, the Dartmouth Review cannot stop talking about that time people wanted to end their publication. Nor can I it appears. After Blake Neff was fired from Fox News for objectionable online comments, Dartmouth alumni called for the college to disaffiliate from the Review for its history of objectionable articles. Line-by-line, the conservative outlet may be in the technical right. Dartmouth is free to denounce whatever the Review publishes in official statements, and depending on their policies and what would have to be very severe behavior, they could censure students involved in the Review. (To not attract the attention of FIRE, severe behavior would be, say, outing someone’s sexual identity in an article, or publishing a piece that was part of a separate harassment campaign.) But many independent papers keep the name of their college or university on their masthead. What else would you call The Dartmouth?
However, most people in their situation have the good sense to stay silent. Nothing seemed to come of the petition. There was no need, from a PR perspective, to respond further. Yet, they did, because their last response was “incomplete,” in their words. I understand the impulse — a technical win can still feel unclean. And it is good that the Review’s current staff is reportedly more diverse than before. But the Review tries to distance themselves from the “truly objectionable” articles from the 1980s, saying that as a student organization, they should be allowed to improve as Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Party did. Yes, they used those examples.
This argument is rich when, on the same day they published the second response, The Dartmouth Review published an article criticizing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the Center of Immigration Studies as a hate group. In general, the critique is in line with an anti-anti-Trump stance that conservatives to take down the libs while sidestepping policies they would otherwise have no choice but to condemn. One wonders why the Center of Immigration Studies doesn’t suffer louder criticism for their support of limiting the Optional Practice Training Program when many in the Review’s staff are “international students, from countries including China, Turkey, South Africa, Venezuela, and Brazil.” Or perhaps rhetoric that encourages extreme vetting for majority-Muslim countries? But something tells me that two things can be true at once: that the Review is a wonderful opportunity for conservatives of all backgrounds to get media experience, and that it is institutionally committed to an end of the Overton window that everyone would like closed.
None of that matters in the technical victory — Dartmouth likely can’t do anything about the Review. But continuing to harp about that time you theoretically could have lost but were in no danger of losing smacks of the so-called victimization politics that conservatives hate so much.
Even on holidays, this newsletter can be very dour.