US Leftists Are Nuts - Self Report Mental Health Issues - 17 Aug 2020

 

Pew Research Center data which has found almost half of self-reported “White Liberals” (and the majority of White Liberal females) aged 18 to 29 had been diagnosed with a mental illness. Moderates were more mentally stable than Liberals but less so than Conservatives. This is only one analysis, and of course there is a replication crisis in social science. But a new study by Danish social scientist Emil Kirkegaard (right) has replicated the Pew Research findings with a vengeance, revealing that, in a huge dataset and on multiple different measures, being Left-wing predicts being mentally i ll while being Right-wing is associated with sound mental health [Mental Illness and the Left, by Emil Kirkegaard, Mankind Quarterly, 2020].

Kirkegaard begins by showing that many studies have found that self-identified liberals are more likely to have poor mental health than are self-identified conservatives and also that traditional religiousness, which strongly crosses-over with conservatism, correlates with mental health, while atheism is associated with the opposite.

Kirkegaard also discusses the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey—with a sample of 8000—which found a clear linear relationship between political viewpoint and mental health. Of those who were classified, based on their views, as the most “far Left,” 32% had been formally diagnosed with either depression, bipolar disorder is schizophrenia. Of those who were the most “far Right,” only 11.8% had been formally diagnosed with one of these conditions. (Strikingly, this result was in fact the lowest for all the ten political classifications).

However, Kirkegaard allows that this survey may not be representative, as it was taken by followers of a particular blog, who are likely to be highly educated and intelligent. Accordingly, Kirkegaard chose to use America’s General Social Survey (GSS), which has questioned representative samples of Americans between 1972 and 2018, and has surveyed over 64,000 Americans in total. Subsamples of between 1,053 and 11,338 were asked questions about mental health such that they could be correlated with political viewpoint.

Kirkegaard’s results—especially considering the current influence of far-Left groups such as Black Lives Matter—are sobering.

On every single measure of mental health, mental health seems to get worse the more Leftist you are. And among the far Left, mental health is perilous. For example, Kirkegaard finds that 45% of “extremely liberal” females have “ever had a mental health problem” (as opposed around 18% for “extremely liberal” males). Among “liberal” females, this falls to just 15% and among “extremely conservative” females, it is less than 10%.

As the emotionally incontinent BLM marches attest—with young white girls lying on the ground in submission to the New Multicultural Cult—extremely liberal females have serious mental health problems.

 

Whether the GSS asks about having had counselling in the last year, days in poor health, or having a “mental or emotional disability,” t he direction of the results is always the same: the more Left wing you are, the more mentally ill; the more Right wing—often including “far Right”—the more mentally healthy.

This contrasts with a recent article in Quillette [The Woke Left v. the Alt-Right: A New Study Shows They’re More Alike Than Either Side Realizes, By Zaid Jilani, Quillette, August 3, 2020] arguing that there are considerable psychological similarities between the far Left and the far Right. But Kirkegaard’s research shows that on one crucial issue there is a huge difference. The far Left are mentally ill. The far Right are, on many measures—such as “ever had a mental health problem,” or “days in poor health”—the mentally healthiest of all political gradations.

Kirkegaard found the same relationship when controlling for age and sex. The only change: mental health scores for “Conservatives” were, on some measures, fractionally better than for “Extreme Conservatives.” However, both were still dramatically healthier than Liberals, with Extreme Liberals being conspicuous outliers in terms of terrible mental health.

Kierkegaard even finds the same relationship in American voting patterns. In general, the most mentally ill people are those who strongly identify as Democrat and the least mentally ill are those who strongly identify as Republican. There is a roughly linear decline in mental ill health as you move from “Strongly Democrat” to “Strongly Republican.”

But Kierkegaard’s incredibly in-depth analysis then does something very novel. It reverses the question, exploring how “happy” people of different political viewpoints rate themselves, as mentally healthy people tend to be of a “happy” disposition. There are various anomalies which Kirkegaard puts down to sampling errors. But, overall, people appear to be happier the more conservative they are.

Kirkegaard is cautious about making sense of the causes of this relationship between Leftism and mental illness. He notes that academics tend to be very Left-wing and that there are reports of increasing levels of mental illness among PhD students:

This suggests that there is perhaps something about being in university that is causal for mental illness and probably also encourages people with poor mental health to self-select into it.

But Kirkegaard also observes that both mental illness and political viewpoint are strongly genetic. So, an explanation that would fit better: being “Conservative” is associated with ways of thinking that would have been adaptive under the harsh conditions to which human populations were subject until the Industrial Revolution. Mental health would also have been adaptive. Accordingly, both would have been selected for together–meaning we would expect the two to go together for genetic reasons.

Similarly, as selection pressures have hugely weakened, deviations from these evolutionarily-adaptive thought patterns would also go together.

And we would expect the “far Left”—with their notions of it being good not to have children or moral to allow one’s ethnic group to be wiped out—to be acutely mentally ill, just as Kirkegaard finds. It is these kinds of extremists, he notes, that tend to become politically active.

In other words, in the BLM Era, Kirkegaard’s study clearly shows that Western societies are actually being held to ransom, pressurized and generally intimidated by a mob of people who are, in fact, very seriously mentally ill. They should, in many cases, be in psychiatric hospitals rather than marching through the streets for “racial justice.”

It’s Official! Young White Leftist Females Are Nuts - 15 April 2020

 

One of the most iconic images of the last decade is the youngish, female Social Justice Warrior collapsing to the ground and emitting what has been described as “a visceral, primal scream” [Protester who screamed at Trump’s inauguration: ‘This is not America,’ By Martin Geissler, ITV News, January 20. 2017] at the precise moment that Donald Trump was officially inaugurated as President of the United States. The protestor seemed to embody every stereotype about the young, liberal, Snowflake female: childish, attention-seeking, and, most obviously of all, mentally unstable; unable to cope with life’s disappointments and setbacks. A body of research of by psychologist Lee Jussim [Tweet him] has found most stereotypes are empirically accurate [Social Perception and Social Reality, by Lee Jussim, 2012]. And new research, so far only tweeted by the researcher in question, has shown that this stereotype to be more accurate than most. If you meet a liberal female under the age of 30, there is a more than 50% chance that she will have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder.

Zach Goldberg—whose Twitter profile explains that he is a “PhD student/Wokeness Studies scholar researching the ‘Great Awokening’”—has analysed the latest dataset released by the reputable Pew Research Center. This is the Pew Research Panel, Wave 64, which interviewed a representative sample of 11,537 American adults between March 19^th and March 24^th. In analysing the dataset, what really caught Goldberg’s attention was differences in whether interviewees had ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition among the white sample.

 

Among those aged 18 to 29, some 20.9% of those who described themselves as “Conservative” answered “Yes” to the question “Has a doctor or healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?” For those in this age group who were political “Moderates,” 26.3% answered “Yes.” But among those who self-classified as “Liberal” those answering “Yes” jumped up to an astonishing 45.9%.

So, to be clear, almost half of young white American Leftists have been diagnosed with a mental illness.

The same pattern was found among whites aged 30-49, 50-64, and 65 and older, except that the numbers with a diagnosis shrank with age. The only exception was among Moderates, where 26% of those in both of the two youngest age groups had been diagnosed with a mental illness.

In general, females are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions than males, because one of the most common of these conditions is depression. According to psychologist Daniel Nettle in his 2007 book Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, females, being more prone to worry and anxiety, are more prone to depression than males. So Jonathan Haidt, known for his Moral Foundations Theory of political preferences whereby Liberals and Conservatives have a fundamentally different system of morality, asked Goldberg if he had broken down the data by sex.

 

And Goldberg—who is doing a PhD in Political Science at Georgia State University—analysed the data again, breaking it down by gender. The results were as predicted and were all the more striking for it. According to Pew Research Center data, 56% of Liberal females aged 18 to 29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, compared to 33.6% of Liberal males in this age band. Goldberg commented that this is the biggest sex gap by far in this particular dataset, meaning that young, Liberal females are, for some reason, particularly strongly prone to mental illness.

Even among Liberal females aged 30 to 49, over 39% have suffered from a mental illness. The most mentally stable of all are “Conservative” males over the age of 65, 4.5% of whom have ever been told by a doctor that they have a mental health condition.

Again, there are some interesting anomalies. Liberal females aged 65 and over are equally as mentally unhealthy as comparable Liberal males. Moderate women aged 30 to 49 have worse mental health than Moderate women aged 18 to 29. But the most striking result, according to Goldberg, is high levels of mental ill health among young, female, Liberal Whites.

Goldberg’s findings set off a refreshingly intelligent and reasoned Twitter debate with other researchers regarding the causes. Dr. Emily Ekins, right, of the Cato Institute, presented evidence that poor mental ill health is correlated with perceiving the world as beyond one’s control.

 

She demonstrated that this is how American Liberals see the world—as controlled by Conservative forces—whereas Conservatives feel that they have agency, and can impact the world, and their place in it, if they work hard enough. In other words, Liberals are fatalistic and this makes them depressed. [What Americans Think Cause Wealth and Poverty, by Emily Ekins, September 27, 2019]

One possible excuse: Liberals tend to be wealthier and more educated and this may mean that they have better health insurance and are more likely to go to the doctor, thus getting themselves diagnosed. But this would be unlikely to explain such huge differences in mental ill health. Nor would it make sense of the enormous difference that Goldberg finds  between young Liberal females and young Liberal males.

A simpler explanation: extreme left-wing ideas reflect a maladaptive way of seeing the world. Liberalism is associated with ideas such as socialism (putting the interests of other families above your own), Multiculturalism (placing the interests of other ethnic groups above your own), extreme environmentalism (putting the interests of other species above your own) and anti-natalism (believing that it is morally wrong to breed). In terms of passing on your genes, these are maladaptive ways of seeing the world, so we would expect them to correlate with other maladaptive ways of seeing the world, such as depression and the concomitant belief that life is futile and that you may as well kill yourself.

Indeed, this would be in line with evidence that being left wing and atheistic is associated with mutant genes which would have been washed out under high levels of child mortality and in previous generations due to the strong relationship between mutations of the body (and thus a poor immune system) and mutations of the mind. With the collapse of child mortality, these mental mutations—whether depression or maladaptive ideas—have built up in the population [“The Mutant Says in His Heart, ‘There is No God,’” by Edward Dutton et al., Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2018].  

The stereotype that young, Liberal females have mental health problems is clearly true. But we are left with difficult questions.

Why are these problems so much more elevated among young Liberal females than any other group in our country? Why are they so unhappy and unstable, even compared to the male fellow-travellers of the same age?

Could it be that they are, ultimately, happier in a society where female influence is a bit less?

 https://web.archive.org/web/20200817224332/https://shauntrain.blogspot.com/2020/08/its-official-young-white-leftist.html

Germany Plans To Require That Lights Dim At Night To Save Insects (AFP) 5 Aug 2020

© Yuri KADOBNOV Bavarians were unexpectedly enthusiastic about saving bees in a 2019 petition.

Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects: is planning to ban floodlights from dusk for much of the year as part of its bid to fight a dramatic decline in insect populations

 

In a draft law seen by AFP, the country's environment ministry has drawn up a number of new measures to protect insects, ranging from partially outlawing spotlights to increased protection of natural habitats. 

"Insects play an important role in the ecosystem...but in Germany, their numbers and their diversity has severely declined in recent years," reads the draft law, for which the ministry hopes to get cabinet approval by October.

© David GANNON Sundown could mean bright lights must go out in future for German cities like capital Berlin.

The changes put forward in the law include stricter controls on both lighting and the use of insecticides.

Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors, while searchlights and sky spotlights would be outlawed from dusk to dawn for ten months of the year. 

The draft also demands that any new streetlights and other outdoor lights be installed in such a way as to minimise the effect on plants, insects and other animals. 

The use of weed-killers and insecticides would also be banned in national parks and within five to ten metres of major bodies of water, while orchards and dry-stone walls are to be protected as natural habitats for insects. 

The proposed reforms are part of the German government's more general "insect protection action plan", which was announced last September under growing pressure from environmental and conservation activists. 

- Weedkiller -

Attention will now turn to the agriculture ministry, which is under pressure to deliver on promises such as an overall reduction in the use of pesticides. 

Most notably, Germany said last September that it would phase out the controversial weed killer glyphosate as part of the insect action plan. 

On Wednesday, environmentalists welcomed the draft law but urged further action from the agriculture ministry.

"We will not stop insect decline with tinkering alone," said Rolf Sommer, a director at the German chapter of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The environment ministry's proposals were "a starting block for more insect protection", but more reforms were needed to pesticide regulations he added.

The German Nature Conservation Association (DNR) meanwhile called on agriculture minister Julia Kloeckner to "do her homework" and deliver on the promise to phase out glyphosate by 2023. 

In the past year, Germany has repeatedly made headlines with its efforts to protect insects.

Last April, the state government of Bavaria was caught off guard by a wildly popular petition calling for greater protection of bees. 

Rather than putting the petition to a referendum, the state simply passed it straight into law after 1.75 million people signed it in a matter of months. 

Earlier this year, electric car giant Tesla faced delays to the construction of its new "gigafactory" outside Berlin due to the relocation of several ant colonies away from the building site. 

kih/hmn/tgb

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/germany-plans-to-dim-lights-at-night-to-save-insects/ar-BB17BlkR

The curious survival of the US Communist Party - By Aidan Lewis (BBC) 1 May 2014

Image caption Party leaders hold a conference call with other board members around the country twice a month

Like fellow movements around the world, the US Communist Party suffered a crippling blow with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But a small group of die-hard members persevered.

Not far from Wall Street, on the seventh floor of an elegant eight-storey building on West 23rd Street, is the headquarters of an improbable political survivor - the Communist Party USA.

The office is bright and modern. On one wall are black-and-white photo portraits of major figures in the party's history. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin are stacked in bookshelves.

The building was bought to house the party in the 1970s before the surrounding neighbourhood of Chelsea became fashionable. "We got a great bargain on it," says secretary-treasurer Roberta Wood.

In a concession to capitalist reality, all but two floors are now rented out. The revenue supports People's World, an online publication that is the direct descendent of the party's long defunct newspaper, the Daily Worker.

Communist Party USA

• Founded in 1919
• Peaked in 1930s and 1940s
• Last fielded presidential candidate in 1984

The party claims 2,000-3,000 members nationally. It has just two salaried staff - Chairman Sam Webb and his deputy Jarvis Tyner, who was a vice-presidential candidate in the 1970s.

Its ultimate aim, however, is still sweeping in its ambition. "Socialism will usher in a new era in this country," the party programme states. "The great wealth of the United States will for the first time be for the benefit of all the people."

"The longer-term goal", says Webb, is "the communist society, the ending of all class divisions, a society of equality, the withering away of the state".

The Communist Party was once a forceful presence in American politics. In its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s it had a strong network across the country, scoring several local election successes. Three Democratic congressmen were secretly Communist Party members.

Image copyright AP

Image caption Earl Browder, seen here holding a hammer, led the Communist Party from 1934-1945

Membership never got above 100,000, but its influence was wider. "It certainly had an impact on American life," says Harvey Klehr, a political science professor at Atlanta's Emory University.

The onset of the Cold War brought persecution for US Communists and their allies, most famously at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and later, from Senator Joe McCarthy.

If we enter coalitions on the basis of people agreeing with our vision of socialism we could probably fit into a small but growing phone booth

Sam Webb, Chairman, Communist Party USA

That period was "devastating" for the party, even though "the repression against them was so strong and over the top, it gave them a really strong sense of esprit de corps", says Vernon Pederson, professor of history at the University of Great Falls, Montana.

"It also seemed to mean to them that all the things we said were going to happen are happening - the revolution is coming and this is the first wave of repression, just like we predicted all along."

During the Cold War the CPUSA had a parallel underground structure, and a small number of people spied for Moscow. Until the 1980s the party was receiving substantial amounts of Soviet funding, says Klehr, money that the FBI knew about and tracked.

Many members left over Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as the party maintained an orthodox, pro-Moscow line.

The final split came when Gus Hall, leader from 1959-2000, supported the coup by Soviet hardliners against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

Pederson says he is "mildly amazed" the party managed to survive the fall of the Soviet Union, but credits a core of members "who simply refused to give up regardless of how bleak things looked".

Post-war crackdowns

Image copyright Getty Images

The House Un-American Activities Committee was formed in 1938 to protect the US against Nazi infiltration, but soon became a vehicle for targeting suspected Communists in the trade unions, Hollywood, and the government. It gained a reputation for publicity seeking, playing on anti-Communist hysteria, and hectoring people with unconventional opinions. But it did score a notable success when persistent questioning by future president Richard Nixon resulted in the exposure as a spy of former high-ranking state department official Alger Hiss. After revelations that espionage had allowed the Soviet Union to obtain an atomic bomb more quickly, Congress passed the 1950 Internal Security Bill, which placed various restrictions on Communists and communist organisations. The same year, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin launched a crusade against communism, claiming that scores or even hundreds of Communists were working in the state department. Four years of witch-hunting resulted in thousands of people losing their jobs and hundreds being imprisoned.

"They have extremely strong beliefs and have invested an incredible amount of their own personal identities into the Communist Party," he says.

Webb, the current leader, is a slightly stooped 68-year-old with a gruff but gentle voice. He seems more comfortable talking about the current political climate than about ideology.

The immediate task, he says, is to defeat America's "extreme right" by contributing to a broader coalition of left-wing groups that campaign against economic inequality and minority rights.

The party faces a demographic challenge - a former head of the New York chapter recalls attending more than 100 funerals in the early 2000s. But it claims a small uptick in membership and payment of dues of late, attributing a surge in interest to the financial crisis of 2008 and - paradoxically - to right-wing attacks against "socialist" Democrats for piquing the interest of some on the left.

Webb points to other recent events, including the Occupy movement, the election of Socialist Kshama Sawant to Seattle's city council and Bill de Blasio winning the mayoral race in New York.

He also notes that even Republicans are talking about poverty. "The climate in the country is changing, people are thinking about economic inequality."

A socialist society is the goal in the "foreseeable future", Webb says, with communism "probably much more distant".

"If we enter coalitions on the basis of people agreeing with our vision of socialism, we could probably fit into a small but growing phone booth," he quips.

Critics who've followed the party's course, however, are dismissive.

"The positions they take are really indistinguishable from the left-wing social democratic groups," says Ron Radosh, a historian and writer who left the party after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. "I don't even know why anyone belongs to it." Klehr calls the party "a sect, a cult almost", and says he stopped paying attention to it nearly 10 years ago because it had become "essentially irrelevant".

 

We try to let our work speak for us, and not make it so much about the 'C' word

Tony Pecinovsky, District organiser, Communist Party USA

Tony Pecinovsky, a 36-year-old district organiser for the party in Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee, says fading memories of the Cold War and the CPUSA's pragmatic, grass-roots activism have lessened the stigma around communism - but prejudice endures on the ground.

"I've been called a home-grown terrorist, I've gotten threatening phone calls, I've gotten people showing up at my house who aren't welcome," he says. "Anti-Communism and all that is still very real in terms of the far right wing in our nation and the tea party elements."

"We try to let our work speak for us, and not make it so much about the 'C' word."

Webb says he doesn't get harsh reactions when he tells people he's a Communist. Some younger people - perhaps with only a vague understanding of what the world means - even think it's "cool". But he hints that the party may finally, quietly shed some historical baggage as it builds alliances with other groups on the American left.

Looking ahead to the party's convention in June, he says he wants to create an atmosphere in which "comrades" feel free to raise their concerns, including over the party's name.

"Some feel we ought to consider changing it. Others strongly feel we shouldn't. So we've agreed that we'll allow space for that conversation to take place."

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26126325

Statue of white woman holding hatchet and scalps sparks backlash in New England - by Nick Fiorellini (Guardian) 3 Aug 2020

Hannah Duston, subject of the first publicly funded US monument to a woman, is implicated in the deaths of 10 Native Americans

The Hannah Duston statue in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Another stands in Boscawen, New Hampshire. Photograph: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo

Nick Fiorellini

Published on Mon 3 Aug 2020 04.00 EDT

The statue is the earliest publicly funded monument to a woman in the US.

It stands in the out-of-the-way town of Boscawen, New Hampshire. It shows a woman holding a hatchet in one hand and a fistful of scalps in the other. Her name is Hannah Duston.

As protests across the US topple statues of historical figures with connections to colonialism and slavery, Duston’s name has largely stayed out of the national conversation. But concerns about the New Hampshire statue, and another in Haverhill, Massachusetts, are now emerging.

This is because Duston is implicated in the deaths, and scalping, of 10 Native Americans.

“The statues were made to send a message to the indigenous community, that they are inferior, that their land would be seized, and they would be removed and put on reservations,” Judy Matthews, a Haverhill resident, told the Guardian.

The Duston statue vandalized in Boscawen, New Hampshire. Photograph: Denise Pouliot

She spoke during a 30 June city council meeting in Haverhill, asking officials to consider moving the statue to a less public place.

Those who support keeping the Duston statues claim their removal alone won’t benefit indigenous people, and that Duston was acting in self-defense.

Duston was born and raised in Haverhill, then a small farming town, amid disputes among English colonists, the French in Canada, and various Native American nations. She was a homemaker with nine children, and her cousin and uncle were tried at the Salem witch trials.

‘Reject the lies of history’: Washington reckons with tributes to racist past

Read more

She was captured by the Abenaki nation during a military engagement in 1697 with her nurse-maid and newborn and was forced to trek a great distance to an encampment in present-day Boscawen where she claimed the Abenaki killed her baby by bashing her head against a tree.

Duston, probably with the help of other captive colonists, killed the Native Americans – six of whom were children – before escaping and being generously rewarded for the scalps.

The two statues were erected in the mid-19th century to vilify Native Americans following the civil war and to promote the idea of westward expansion. Several other markers and memorials that do not bear Duston’s image were put up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

For decades, Abenaki, residents, scholars and local municipalities have debated what should be done with the two statues, and those concerns have come to a boil.

On 3 July, an online petition began to circulate among local social media groups calling for the removal of the statue. A counter-petition shortly followed. Ten days after Matthews spoke at the city council meeting, the monument was vandalized with the words “Haverhill’s own monument to genocide” written in chalk.

Shortly after the vandalism, Haverhill’s mayor, James Fiorentini, appointed two Native Americans to the Haverhill Historical Commission (HHC), which protects the town’s historic structures, to make recommendations for the future of the monument.

“I want to tell the other side of the story – of the Native Americans who lived here, of the immigrants who built the shoe factories, of the African Americans who were freed from slavery, and of African Americans who lived here as slaves in Haverhill,” said Fiorentini.

Yet the historical commission has not met since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and does not have a plan for when it will do so again.

Descendants of Duston, such as Diane Dustin Itasaka, who works alongside other family members at the Dustin Garrison House, are glad these conversations are happening but believe people should delve more deeply into Duston’s history before declaring that the statue must go.

“I want people to know that Hannah or any of the other women, children, babies, and men who had gone through any raid like this, if she really did do the unthinkable, it wasn’t because they were natives but because they were her captors,” claims Itasaka. “If the French had captured her, it would have been the French. It wasn’t because they were native.”

Itasaka hopes the saga will be included in the history curriculum at local schools because “if school kids or adults knew more of the history, they would understand more of how and where we are today”.

Similar conversations are happening in New Hampshire. Elizabeth Dubrelle, the head of education and public programs at the New Hampshire Historical Society, says the group made the conscious decision not to include Duston’s story in the revamped school curriculum.

That is “in part because we don’t think it’s appropriate for kids”, she said. “I think it’s way too violent. No matter whose side you take, or what you think about it, I just don’t think it’s a good story for kids.”

Unlike in Massachusetts, there is now a concrete plan to adapt the New Hampshire statue. Proposed by representatives of the Cowasuck band of the Pennacook Abenaki people and New Hampshire state officials, it was approved on 17 July.

The changes include renaming the site of the Duston statue from the Hannah Duston Memorial Site to Unity Park N’dakinna, which means “our land” in Abenaki, and adding additional signage and monuments around the statue discussing discrepancies within the story, allowing the visitor to come up with their own conclusions.

For Denise Pouliot, who is Abenaki and involved in the project, one of the most important things to come out of it might simply be reminding others of her people’s long history in the region.

“If you go out on to anywhere on the other side of the Mississippi [River] and you ask about an indigenous tribe in New England, they’ll tell you there are none,” she said. “That’s a fundamental educational problem within this country, and how are we going to move forward as a nation if even our history is so broken?”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/03/hannah-duston-statue-new-hampshire-native-americans