Our existing and longstanding culture will not yield to invasive transplants who foment discord for personal advantage.
by John Klar
n an ongoing cultural controversy in Vermont, a former House member named Kiah Morris has launched a video attacking Vermonters and their culture as racist. Ms. Morris has employed the empty trope that Vermonters who wish to preserve their traditional culture employ “political tactics [that] are historically consistent in the acceleration of increased discrimination, bias, and hate crimes against ethnic minorities and other marginalized people.” It becomes necessary to expose the absurd toxicity of such rantings.
Ms. Morris’s words reveal that she is not “from” Vermont. Yet this student of “gender studies” proclaims that “[u]nless you are First Nations, you have no right to claim who are real Vermonters. Nativist platforms are the basest level of discourse.” Having immigrated to Vermont, Kiah has decided that she will decide who are real Vermonters. But does calling herself “African” American make her an appropriator of a foreign culture that she has likely never even visited? Is Ms. Morris asserting that those who “identify” themselves as disparate from other Americans because of a distant genetic link to Africa “employ the basest level of political discourse” to establish bias against white, “non-African” Americans?
If Louisiana tried to preserve Mardi Gras, Nevada invited people to gamble, or Missouri challenged people to “show me,” would they be guilty of advancing “base nativist platforms”? In Vermont, a woman from Chicago who self-identifies as “African-American” but is not from Africa is scolding Vermonters for defending the culture into which they were born (that is, to which they are actually native) based solely on their non–American Indian DNA.
This sleight of hand is not so slight. Vermont conflates culture with race in its opioid crisis — blaming higher rates of incarceration of out-of-state (urban) blacks and Hispanics on systemic white nationalism. Ms. Morris further agitates by exerting a novel claim to superiority (of opinion) over the locals, in the process denigrating Vermont’s historic agricultural Green Mountain creed. The city mouse has determined that the country mouse must be silenced, her guns seized, and her rights to an opinion stripped. Who here is the usurper of culture?
The cautions of T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land are evidenced in today’s nihilism. Vermont is now being condemned for seeking to preserve its values by those who patch together their own mutable culture from a world where culture is itself being dissolved. Globalization is a destroyer of culture, as world trade has always been. But there are no new worlds to be colonized — the new oppressors must land on existing shores, plundering from within. Thus, in the name of diversity, Vermont’s schoolbooks are to be rewritten. But after all the other cultures have been integrated, after Vermont country bumpkins have been inculcated into the teachings of the Dalai Lama, the art of hip-hop, and the culture of the ghetto, will Vermont export its culture to Harlem or Tibet in exchange? Will there remain a distinct Vermont culture, like Louisiana, or Maine, or Texas — or must all submit to the imprint and domination of the Kiah Morris conquistadores? Will all cultures then meld into a meaningless “Waste Land,” as Eliot predicted?
Per Ms. Morris and her ilk, only “First Nations” people have authority to override her determination of what constitutes Vermont culture — that is, only people of a certain race. She uses racism to select an extinguished race as authority to dismiss an entire culture as a racist invasion — how convenient, if circuitous. By this logic, America has no claim to culture.
Vermont is a culture of individualism, not government dependency; farming, not commuting; free speech, not stifling autocracy; of seeing all people as equal. This existing and longstanding culture will not yield to invasive transplants who foment discord for personal advantage.
Tragically, many white Vermonters have unwittingly joined this insidious virtue-signaling, revealing their nihilistic disconnect from their own culture. Vermont writer Bill Schubart perorates:
“What to you is a real Vermonter?” The conventional answer I’ve heard and tacitly subscribed to all my life is — a white person, often from an agrarian background, descended from at least three generations of the same.
But Mr. Schubart’s “tacit subscription” is hardly the truth, as all Vermonters know. Throngs of “foreign-born” people have comfortably integrated into Vermont’s culture, even as many native-born opportunists have become exploiters of Vermont’s land, landscape, and culture for financial gain. It is Mr. Schubart who designs to equate culture with race and bloodlines, and he of all people should know just how pernicious and vicious that is.
Mr. Schubart unintentionally reveals his cultural ignorance when he writes of “the memorable Abenaki land ceremony which made so clear that we are all part of a continuum of stewardship … hardly, as we imagine, the beginning of civilization.” Perhaps this gentleman just now learned from Abenakis that all humans are necessarily involved with stewardship — and never read Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, or John Muir. (By his own admission, he only recently learned from children that he is “a white, privileged, cisgendered male.”) But it was he — and not all Vermonters — who apparently imagined himself “the beginning of civilization.” Vermonters have always known that their ancestors were settlers and that they were stewards of forests and farms. As Wendell Berry observes, intergenerational farmers (of any color, not just the white ones maligned by Mr. Schubart) are the best stewards of land.
I was born John Stoddard Klar in Connecticut, after being conceived in Vermont. I am thus a flatlander by birth but a Vermonter by creation! I live off-grid in Vermont on land purchased by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in about 1815. My paternal grandmother was of significant Abenaki blood, and my paternal grandfather was a German Jew. My identity has always been woven into this land and Vermont’s rural, anachronistic culture — not my DNA. When people like Kiah Morris and Bill Schubart employ racism to defame my dozens of forbears, they are calling my mother, grandmothers and grandfathers, cousins, aunts and uncles — and my children — all racists, all invaders with no claim to their own culture. How absurd can these people be? What kind of Vermonter labels all Vermonters, and all white people, as racist? Have they never met any of us, or did they simply gulp down the progressive Kool-Aid in lieu of (native) maple syrup?
Identity politics seems to best serve those who lack identity — Vermonters are already quite aware of their cultural traditions and identity and wish to protect them from carpetbagger vultures (of any color and any birthplace). We are frugal, tied to our land (often for many generations), in the midst of a national society that flips houses, consumes conspicuously, and is highly mobile. As that global disintegration, urbanization, and industrialization of human relationships increases, “real” Vermonters wish to preserve those nurturing traditions and values that have weathered time well. We are trying to reclaim our decaying communities, not denigrate them and their humble histories. We cling without racism to our nativist traditions. And without shame.
The author is a Brookfield best-selling author, lawyer, farmer and pastor.
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Categories: Commentary, Race and Division
Ms. Morris’s insistence that “First Nations” or “indigenous” people are in fact the only people that can claim to be “native” to an area, state, or country reminds me of another late comer who posts statements here that claims that she is just as much of a “native ” as those of us who were born here. Prior to the land bridge that linked Asia and North America there were no humans in North America. Does that mean that humans are not “indigenous” to North America ? Are the ten million migrants that have arrived in this country illegally over the last three plus years “natives” ? They surely are not “indigenous”, and yet someone who comes here from the great flat lands too the south can insist that they are just as “native” to this state as someone who was born here, and has generational connectivity to the people who lie beneath the headstones in the cemeteries of this state. Some people insist on “having their cake, and eating too” and how is it that that supposedly works ?
I am happy to see that you also read the scientific study that proved that Native Americans are not native to North America. I sent this research to the Essex, Westford School District and was ignored.
Thomas Naylor had a really great quote for people like this, but it breaks the VDC posting guidelines. If you don’t know it, just use your imagination. 😄
“People,” being “Ms. Morris,” in case it was unclear. 😉
There’s some other stuff going down to. From this man’s lips to God’s ears.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1790813699655061952
Wanna know why the agri-republicans got the bums rush in the VTGOP?
https://rumble.com/v4vbb5z-ivan-on-ninos-corne.html
Listen to how the GOP “works” they are just as crooked as the other deep state party. Vermont is the perfect outcome they would love to have for every state.
That is why we have what we have.
Sheep or goats, the time is coming soon.
Sorry, Klar – as a lawyer, you know damn well that a US Citizen cannot immigrate within their own country. Freedom of movement from state to state is a Constitutional Right & Vermonters who were born & raised here themselves relocate to other states all. the. time. Are they now invaders and immigrants?
Your premise re: culture though, & Morris’ very own insane racist ramblings are sound – but your own erroneous terminologies only weaken your testimony is all. Stick to facts.
Morris is a BLM instigator, opportunist, race baiter & Communist. You sound plain ridiculous with totally fabricated statements about the true threat to this Union: ACTUAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. But you continue to fight the false demons. And that is a testament to the impression parents and grandparents have on their descendants.
White” Vermonters have been here longer than previous Native American nations who never held land more than a couple of centuries, at most.
“Indigenousness” is relative. Abenaki are more indigenous than the white Europeans who arrived in the post-Columbian era, who are more indigenous than the Asians who came in great numbers in the railroad era. Americans didn’t take California from Indigenous Americans, they took it from the Spanish. Most African Americans who descended from slaves are probably more indigenous than most inhabitants of North America, who descend from much more recent immigration. It is largely irrelevant at this point, as humans have now migrated and homogenized themselves around the globe. What is at play here is that we have allowed some less-than-ideal subcultures like urban gansta culture to take root and despoil a way of life that was once, dare I say, more idyllic, like God forbid Leave it to Beaver or Norman Rockwell might portray. If Kiah Morris wants to believe that the urban, street warfare culture of South Chicago should be an accepted norm to majority-white northern New England, then I will disagree and she can call me a cracker anytime it makes her feel good about herself.
Well said John. It is a wonder that Vermonters can resist racism when people like Ms(?) Morris comes to Vermont and spews HER racist ideas, insinuating that everyone who is white, hate people who are not. Sometimes, free speech empowers people to denigrate others whom they loathe, skirting the fringes of a hate crime, similar to Hitler’s rantings against European Jews in the late 1930’s. Who is she, an outsider, to claim the right to decide who can be a Vermonter and who cannot? In my fifty years of living, working, and raising a family in Vermont, yes I am a transplant, I have known long time Vermont residents who are black folks, and accepted them as Vermonters, hardworking, neighborly people, who as I, had accepted the old style Vermont culture. I can’t imagine real Vermonters, whether home grown or transplants, will pay much attention to such small minded and hateful rhetoric. We are busy living life, working, raising families, trying to share in enriching our communities and not tearing them asunder with hateful ideas.
Nicely said Sandy and John. Ms. Morris and others like her are making a living dividing us. She adds little to making Vermont a better place. She should spend her time trying to get Ben & Jerry’s to return the land their businesses are on, to the indigenous people
While it’s true we should not waste too much time listening to the likes of Morris, and just live our lives, the Woke won’t allow it. To paraphrase the saying about war; you may not be interested in the Woke Racists, but the Woke Racists are interested in you. They control many of the institutions and most of the culture and will continue to badger us and indoctrinate our youth until there is sufficient push back.
The good news is the black communities and hispanic communities are revolting against the big lies and fraud peddled by Kiah Morris and her ilk. Fani “Cash G” Willis is fighting for her career playing the race card to no avail. Letisha James is failing. AOC is finished. All the empty promises, empty platitudes, fraud, increasing poverty, and injustice has manifested into growing backlash – the open borders policy has the natives furious, preparing to fight back, and not backing down. See Chicago for more details – Obama’s old stopping grounds – the communities used and abused for personal gains is awake and they will not be silenced by lies and deception anymore. God Wins!
For those of you who appreciate humor that shows life as it really is, I suggest you watch this short video. It’s relevant to the topic discussed by Mr Klar:
great video….so hair styles must come into play, perhaps a half point with different variations…
In a way there are super oppressors, which he didn’t cover. White men who love their country, add to that heterosexual family man, and the biggest oppressor, that needs to be eradicated at all costs from society!
White Christian male who loves the constitution in a traditional family!!!!!!
(aka White Christian Nationalist)
So, if that is the most oppressive what is the triangle really about? Who fills our heads with doubt, envy, lust, greed? Who makes us afraid? What is your heart filled with? Who sits above all that doubt, envy, lust and greed, but doesn’t want to be seen? That would be Satan. It’s no doubt when we have Satan after school activities but no teachings of Christ.
If we are a child of God, we are filled with Love, Joy and Peace….. If you are following Christ then this pyramid would classify you as the Super predator.
Kind of ironic when Christ came not to judge us but free us from sin, to forgive us, to set us free. He died for us. This is the good news. Which is what the head of this pyramid doesn’t want you to know about.
May the Holy Spirit fill our hearts in Vermont, may we be free.
just to add a bit more thought to this triangle,
who do Marxists despise? What religion? What were Karl Marx thoughts on Christ?
Then for a more contemporary flair…
Who did Saul Alinsky dedicate his book, Rules for Radicals to?
Are they all coincidences?
Perhaps I’m not too far off on this assessment after all.
TGBTG
Correct me if I’m wrong – I find the most devoted and unrelenting followers of Jesus Christ come from the hispanic and black communities. They attend church, put their families first, community oriented, and raise the roofs with praise and glory. I believe their elders are rising up and raising the standard high and mighty – much to the chagrin of the activists trying to keep them down and oppressed.
That video is almost five years old. Klar out there fighting false demons from the past.
Who cares how old the video is. It’s more relevant then ever.
Beautiful.