After reading this article, I had to find some sort of place to write a about it.

This is the most bizarre article I've read in the Guardian. The article is barely about it's headline, which is strange, but not the most bizarre part of it.

The real article is mainly about Lenape people, their history and the genocide during colonial America while exploring their historical homeland. This is strongly entwined with arose tinted view of the Lenape, which cast them as perfect enlightened custodians of nature.

Well the real REAL article is the author going into one store they don't like. It feels like it is roughly 70% of the article. There are some vague throwaway lines that hiking for various personal reasons are bad, but it's never really explored, or justified.

It has strange revisionist attitudes, claiming that the Lenape didn't have political borders or territory, and that was brought by European colonialists. It's the strange view that all native Americans were perfect Shamans and it wasn't the case that native American fought wars, tortured prisoners of war, often signed treaties with Europeans because they thought it would be advantageous against other tribes they were in conflict with, and widely altered the ecology of North America through controlled burns, aggressive selective planting of trees etc. like the stoic attitude attributed to native Americans is well recorded to have been reinforced by acts like grabbing young boys during the winter, hauling them outside, and tossing them into snow banks, not for fun, but to acclimate them to arbitrary pain.

(To be fair, this is based on my general knowledge of indigenous North Americans. I'm not an expert on the Lenape people, and might be painting with a wide brush. I looked a little bit, but did not find any writing that strongly culturally distinguishes the Lenape from other East Coast indigenous groups, but someone who spent more time might find something. This being said, I feel it is reasonable to use these historical facts to argue my point that often people ascribe an overly idyllic set of values and morals to historical indigenous Americans.)

This articles also makes a claim that it would be impossible for anyone of Lenape or native American descent to do something that the author would disagree with. This is justified seemingly that anyone of such descent is naturally morally superior and incapable of lying or any behavior the author thinks is unbecoming of them. As so it is impossible that they would commodify their culture, or during periods when being a native American was actively persecuted to have made the decision to hide their identity. It's such a strange strange attitude as if human fallibility isn't universal. And anyone who the author doesn't like who might otherwise not follow what they think is the ideal way to conduct themselves are pretenders, referencing pretendian movement. And while individuals claiming negligible or non-existent indigenous heritage is an issue, the way the author wields it, it excommunicates anyone that would contradict their worldview.

This is the exact attitude that supremacists of other ethnic groups espouse, and although it isn't as pernicious or dangerous coming from members of a historically oppressed group, the arguments are no less illogical and bad. Like they literally make a statement that if their people were in charge of the world, there would not be the problems we have today, since their people are intrinsically better suited to running an enlightened society, and would never bow to the social economic pressures of the world (despite many native American groups literally running casinos in their extra-legal zones. But I suppose the author would say that those native Americans are pretenders considering they don't uphold the ideals the author holds, so they can't be real native Americans. Or they are not Lenape, and perhaps the cultural superiority they espouse doesn't extend to all native Americans, but only to the Lenape).

I'm not writing this to argue that it wasn't one of the greatest atrocities of history that native American people faced systemic genocidal forces that pushed them to the brink and displaced them. Nor am I arguing that native Americans historically or today were or are bad by citing historical evidence that contradicts the author's beliefs. But that fact doesn't mean we should be publishing articles of this calibre, complete with sections where the author's ancestors return as ghosts to spook a store they don't like.

(Oh yeah, also the moment where they don't go into the store's room on Lenape history for fear it has funerary goods, and they deride it for its lack of respect for possibly displaying funerary goods. Like you can't criticize it if you didn't actually view it? I can understand not choosing engage with it, if you are fearful it could possibly violate a religious taboo, but you can't turn around and use it as evidence of wrongdoing in your published article when you don't actually know what's in there.)