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Based, I presume, on my support for politically incorrect scholars in this area, I got a tweet from a First Nations activist who told me I needed to listen to a linked song, “Burn your village to the ground.” The song’s words were extrapolated from a speech in the 1993 movie, Addams Family Values, which I remembered as hilarious. It’s set at a summer camp to which the affectless and quasi-sociopathic Wednesday Addams, along with her brother Pugsley, have been sent, where almost everyone is white, blond and privileged. The Addams kids naturally hate every minute of it.

The highlight of the summer is a first Thanksgiving Day pageant mounted for the parents’ delectation, in which the popular, blond campers play Pilgrims, who invite Indians (played by the camp’s social outsiders) to their feast. Wednesday plays the lead Indian role. The script casts her as a forelock-tugging avatar of Indian gratitude for white largesse. But then Wednesday goes off-script and delivers a deadpan rant about colonialist evil and Indian oppression (“you are taking the land which is rightfully ours … we will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will drink highballs … And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground”). Mayhem ensues, as Wednesday and the other “Indians” actually burn down the set, and “roast” the smarmiest pilgrim on a spit.

My response to that revisited scene was more nuanced than in my pre-“woke” original viewing. Normally today, references to an indigenous person scalping another, or making slaves of captives, or practicing any other barbaric customs are met with hostile accusations of racism, even if the comments are made in jest. So I asked my Tweetlocutor why she was promoting a stereotypical presentation of indigenous persons as “savages.” She responded to the effect that any scene in which whites get murdered was funny to her. Her commentwas immediately retweeted several times, I presume approvingly.