"Indigenous Nations" are ethnotribal-pseudostates. They are racist and problematic. Claiming that some land is "Native Land" is the same as claiming some land is "White land".
This is not flamebait. The reservation system is a relic of a time when both the white European settlers AND the Natives saw themselves as separate enough to be unable to live together in a single Nation.
It is time we undo these artificial racial separations.
As for my claim that asserting the existence of Native Land is equivalent to asserting the existence of White Land, well, if we choose to treat people equally, why would certain prohibitions applied to one race not apply equally to others? If we decide that White land is a racist concept, which it is, how can we not apply that same reasoning to everyone else, unless we are racially targeting White people?
There are plenty of high quality, _critical_ comments and discussion to be made on this submission and broader subject - why eschew that in favor of flamebait?
edit: You've since edited your comment, but I still think it could be substantially improved if you want an interesting (and provoking!) discussion.
I don't agree that's its flamebait, and I am even skeptical of the concept of flamebait as one person's flamebait is another's honest opinion.
In fact I think the comment in question is a strait forward and honest opinion that is just missing the usual euphemisms and massaging that usually accompany such controversial topics.
And I also think that questioning whether tribal pseudo sub-states should exist is completely relevant to a discussion about tribal reservations.
The original comment has changed significantly. It was much more terse in its initial posting. I think another important factor to keep in mind here is age of account.
I also read it in it's initial form, and my reply was based on that.
I hate to detail so much from the article content. I strongly disagree with the flagging of that comment. Accusing a nation of being a racist ethno-state is completely on topic, even if controversial. And we regularly see the same accusations levied at America or Israel (I would not want those removed either). I fear a double standard is developing.
If you had more karma, you could "vouch" for the comment. If enough people were to do so, the [flagged] status would disappear. Failing that, you could email the mods to draw their attention to unfairly flagged comments. They do have good taste, however, so they're likely to leave the comment in question [0] flagged. Unlike IRL, the system at HN is rigged against racist dog whistles. If one is ever tempted to write the sentence "This is not flamebait.", one should think more deeply.
I do want to hear more from more versed people since I hear arguments in favour of indigenous rights that are variations of pro-(insert your ethnogroup) rights. Why are some pro-ethno rights alright and others not? Is it that because some ethnogroups are considered in disadvantage and hence deserving special rights?
I understand the concept Affirmative Action, is this what we are talking about?
"Some ethnogroups are considered in disadvantage" is one way to put it, but it's minimizing it. We're talking about groups that were specifically targeted for their ethnicity: murdered, raped, disenfranchised, and exiled (with no hyperbole).
You can't decimate a group based on ethnicity and then ask why they deserve special treatment for their ethnicity. Further, they're not even getting special treatment- they are having the sovereignty and jurisdiction our _own system_ assigned them validated and reaffirmed after having it unlawfully stolen from them.
You can argue that a tribal government should adopt open, non-ethnocentric policies, but that is their decision to make, not ours.
First of all, there's a complication here in that some Indian reservations were created by the Indian nations themselves (particularly in the Pacific Northwest), while others were created as part of the genocide of Indians carried out by Europeans in the Americas.
So let's focus first on the second category. Imagine that some people from elsewhere showed up, rounded up you and all your relatives and everybody else living within a 400 mile radius, killed 80% of them, then marched the rest to a patch of land you'd never seen before and said "you'll be living here now, it's yours in perpetuity". Then a hundred or more years go by, and the descendants of those people say to your descendants "Well, actually, that land we said was yours isn't really yours, and so the problems with resources, jobs, social order, purpose and meaning you folks have had for a while are going to get worse".
And then someone shows up and says "why should these particular ethnic groups get treated differently from any other?"
If you then turn your attention to the self-created reservations, the story is a bit different. Now imagine that some newcomers show up in your part of the world. They seem ready to fight, and you've heard stories from people who have travelled east over the mountains that they are brutal nasty SOBs. The newcomers say that they are ready to strike a deal, so you decide that this makes more sense. You tell them that they are welcome to come and live in this area, but that you want a treaty that recognizes that you will reserve areas for your own people, along with certain distributed rights like fishing. The newcomers sign the deal, apparently quite happy with it. 200 years later, your descendants realize that the treaty rights are no longer recognized, and that the newcomers have changed everything so much with their logging, mining and dams that even the original terms of the treaty don't much sense any more.
And then someone shows up and wonders why your people should treated any differently from anyone else.
I don't know. Maybe ask the state and federal DOJ's that have consistently fought against enforcement of treaties for more than a century. Or the many Americans who view the treaties as worth less than toilet paper.
Not the original commenter, but what I'm taking from it is that the notion of land ownership was/is foreign to indigenous people. Given that, using the term native land can be misrepresenting native history. I'm not sure what the alternative verbiage would be to describe an area has inhabited by an indigenous tribe. Urban Native Era, a pretty large Native movement/brand, holds the slogan "You Are On Native Land" and I believe they are holding themselves to a pretty high standard of racial sensitivity.
"indigenous people" comprises hundreds of tribes, with distinct cultures and beliefs. Talking about what was or wasn't a "foreign concept" in that context is like doing so for Africans or the kind of Indians that Columbus intended to find.
It's difficult to come to an objective conclusion because so much of what's believed and reported about native culture is often done through appropriate by the descendents of European settlers, rather than the natives themselves, and a lot of mythologizing, fetishizing and stereotyping has taken place over the years as a result. One should at least be wary of sweeping "just so" truisms about historically oppressed people.
Anecdotally, I was able to find some evidence to the contrary[0], and I would expect the actual truth to vary according to tribe.
I agree, I do think it is disingenuous to make a blanket statement on Native American's knowledge of land ownership and border establishment. I was merely interpreting what the original comment said.
Given your points, is there a more correct way to define the lands once inhabited by Native peoples?
I strenuously disagree with that part of hhernandez's premise and I don't think "native lands" is actually problematic at all. It's just a generic, umbrella term to me. You could say tribal lands, First Nations lands, aboriginal lands, it's all the same.
It's fundamentally irrelevant anyway to the immediate questions; the land rights they have were assigned by our own system and have been unlawfully disregarded.
It is a very widely accepted notion (among everyone who matters) that ethnostates have no place in the modern world. Hell, it is nearly as universally accepted that the very concept of "ethnicity" is problematic.
So why should it not be applied in these cases? Why do some groups deserve their own land, but others don't? Either we all do or nobody does.
> If we decide that White land is a racist concept, which it is, how can we not apply that same reasoning to everyone else
I think there's a pretty obvious difference between referring to land in historical North America as "Native land" and calling it "White land." And the specific label doesn't matter much, you could say "European land" or "colonized land" and the point remains unchanged.
Your comment seems like the standard appeal to "colorblindness," as if one group of people can invade or otherwise oppress another group, actively set up a vastly unequal distribution of resources and freedoms, and then claim that the only way forward is to deliberately ignore the history and even the existence of the different groups. But of course, to ignore those now is to explicitly support the status quo, and the status quo is still dominated by the historical unequal distribution of resources and freedoms between the groups.
What happened in the past, good or bad, is unchangeable. The only way forward is a colorblind approach as building specific policies around race simply encourage further racial division and entrenchment.
Preventing racial discrimination (a good thing) should not lead into encouraging racial division, but unfortunately our well meaning desire to be equitable often causes that to happen.
> What happened in the past, good or bad, is unchangeable. The only way forward is a colorblind approach as building specific policies around race simply encourage further racial division and entrenchment.
Of course that's definitely not the only way forward. You can fix unequal distributions of resources by, well, redistributing the resources, which requires acknowledging the existence of different groups and the history of how those groups have distributed resources among themselves. And note that acknowledging the existence of a social construct that distinguishes people into different groups does not imply condoning that social construct.
It's not that radical. If a thief steals my car, the way forward is to recognize who is the thief and who is the victim, and to redistribute the resources accordingly. That does not "simply encourage further division and entrenchment between thieves and victims of theft," or if it does, I think that's okay. We don't say "hey, I'm blind to the differences between thieves and victims, we're all just human beings."
The problem isn't remediation for an injustice. The problem is the overt and explicitly racial language and philosophy behind your arguments for remediation. The problem is the inability to remediate history. There is no such thing as cosmic justice.
Are you saying that, unlike other injustices where we as a society generally approve of at least attempting to correct the injustice, this particular injustice is unique, and we shouldn't even attempt to remediate? Or do you oppose all attempts to correct past injustices because "cosmic justice" doesn't exist? I don't hope for cosmic justice, I think justice is up to us humans.
Nothing about my argument relies on racial language or philosophy, any more than my argument for returning stolen property relies on "'thief'-like language or philosophy." My argument for remediation is simply that the injustice occurred, and I think our society should attempt to correct this past injustice just like other past injustices.
> Nothing about my argument relies on racial language or philosophy.
It does because you're relying on racial identity to determine who pays and who receives rather than who stole and who was stolen from. The matter of who did what to whom is "settled" in the sense that all parties are dead.
> I don't hope for cosmic justice, I think justice is up to us humans.
What is your solution to the "stolen land" problem?
The question remains. How do you solve the problem of historical injustice? Focusing specifically on land stolen from Native Americans by European settlers.
As I said yesterday in our conversation, we are in agreement there but I'm not quite sure it solves the problem. A "good start" isn't a solution to the problem and even the "good start" requires enforcing some form of racial governance model otherwise its just another county of the United States.
The situation is at the very least complex and will likely require a "morally impure" solution.
It wouldn't solve the problem, but it would solve a problem. And the USG refusing to act in good faith is a pretty big problem. Any mutually beneficial solutions would be at best infeasible or at worse impossible without at least that.
Yes, it would be messy and complex. International relations already are, why would intranational relations be different?
Historical injustice is not something that people living today are responsible for. Therefore the "problem" of historical injustice is best solved by people today forgiving the people from the past and moving on with their lives.
I don't have the experience to suggest specifics, but I think more government aid programs targeted to Native American communities is a good start. I don't pretend that there's some way of perfectly undoing the land distribution, but I also don't claim that there is absolutely nothing that can or should be done.
If you want to provide government aid to poor communities then by all means do it. But let's not pretend that welfare even approximates a solution to the problem. There is likely no solution.
Well... aside from letting go of past injustices and instead focusing on some better future. Which isn't really a solution at all since it relies on the permanent good will of all future generations.
There is almost certainly no perfect solution. I think everyone is in agreement there. "If you want to provide government aid to poor communities then by all means do it" is major progress over complete resignedness.
> Well... aside from letting go of past injustices and instead focusing on some better future.
This is a false dichotomy. I'm not suggesting attempting to change the past, of course. I am proposing we try to improve things in the future and allow ourselves to be informed by the past.
What is your solution to the "stolen land" problem?
I am by no means an expert, but I think the recent SC case is probably the right approach. I don't see why the US government should not be held to the treaties they signed - I mean, the court still relies on law settled centuries ago.
And if the gov't can't hold up their end, then restitution is reasonable. However, I wouldn't restitute based on today's value just because the tribal land is Manhattan now. But it would seem fair to make them whole based on if the treaty had been fairly followed.
I'd concur, a colorblind approach would have detrimental effects to indigenous people. Colorblindness leads to ignorance and turns a blind eye to the past when working for a fair future. There's a great journal article on this exact subject:
Fryberg, S. A., & Stephens, N. M. (2010). When the world is colorblind, American Indians are invisible. Psychological Inquiry, 21, 115-119. doi: 10.1080/1047840X.2010.483847
The concept of a colorblind approach ignores the existence of historical context. One might as well take a disability-blind approach to whether buildings need wheelchair ramps.
People today are generally not limited by the historical context from which they come. Your parents' individual personalities and ability to raise you does matter, but broader historical context matters very little, unless we try to make it so and that generally just causes conflict.
People in wheelchairs are on the other hand affected by the presence or absence of wheelchair ramps.
Dude, go visit the Pine Ridge Reservation and then come back here and say "prople today are generally not limited by the historical context from which they come.
Why does that article not address the most dominant cause of the wealth gap, which is broken homes and blacks dropping out of school, not going to college etc?
That's an issue of personal choices more than anything else.
> Your parents' individual personalities and ability to raise you does matter, but broader historical context matters very little
Broader historical context plays part in what defines your parents' personalities and ability to raise children in the first place. You're trying so very hard to abstract it away in order to solve this problem but many of us know this won't work.
Some usability issues -- if one border is entirely within another border, e.g. near Seattle, I couldn't figure out how to click it. Also, I wish the map was larger without fullscreening.
Edit: The title also seems to be not quite right, as the map covers more than North America.
Somehow I doubt the Russians, English, Spanish, French etc that arrived in the Americas landed on a Westphalian continent. I think maps like this give the wrong impression.
Wabanaki (among others) invited French colonists to settle Quebec in part to check (and perhaps attack) the Mohawk, among other conflicts. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars
I think it is almost universally agreed that the French treated the natives better and more collaboratively than the English, who took a different tone. It's somewhat a shame that the English won that balance of power so early. I wonder how it would be different today if Canada was still New France.
This map contains a lot of overlapping and very rounded regions that I think convey that it's rough areas of settlement rather than some internationally-recognized partition of the land.
The FAQ also contains this, and more nuanced discussion about what the map means.
Why are we recognizing more than one Nation on this territory?
Indigenous history stretches back thousands and thousands of years. Some Indigenous nations were nomadic, while many had permanent communities and seasonal communities. Often, boundaries between territories overlap because the Indigenous Nations were continuously sharing the land and negotiating agreements through their own diplomatic and legal systems.
But heaven forbid we try to understand something before immediately assigning it to a particular side in the culture war du jour.
"Continuously sharing and negotiating" is a wild ride of a euphemism. It's like writing that the Mamluks and Ottomans continuously shared and negotiated a couple of peninsulas. It's true, but what it doesn't say is incredible.
The FAQ strangely avoids the fact that Indigenous Nations also waged war against one another over territory. Sharing the land and negotiating agreements is a strange euphemism. It sounds more interested in narratives of Noble Savages than historical facts.
I wonder if something more like a smooth probability map would make more sense, rather than overlapping borders. The hard lines can give an unreasonable sense of certainty, even if the intent is to indicate uncertainty.
I took Westphalian to refer to the concept of the "nation state", which--at least in the west--is regarded to have been created at the Treaty of Westphalia.
In the wake of the French Revolution, the hyper-centralist French state, with an Enlightenment-era dislike of diversity and a fondness for "standardization", deliberately eradicated lots of cultural diversity within France -- the Breton and Occitan languages were nearly driven extinct, and Basque's survival is much less assured than on the Spanish side of the border. Were Canada still a French possession, that Parisian chauvinism may well have impacted Canada all the same.
I doubt, the people from the "Nouvelle-France" have diverged a lot from their France counterpart integrating the culture of the native within their own. Most likely France would have lost control like England.
Think about how ‘savage’ and masculine one must be to walk from Asia to North America thousands of years ago. And I’m using savage in the modern, positive connotation. Human society was beyond brutal then.
Humans are dangerous and vile and ridiculous and tribal. There’s nothing unique about that in any race or culture (maybe a few exceptions).
We can’t know how the past being different would affect the future. Had “Native America” become a nation, it could had created substantially worse or maybe better systems. We did create an incredibly fair system with modern technology and medicine that’s saved hundreds of millions of lives.
We can’t disregard all the progress and freedom our systems have brought to the individual. America is the best country in the world because it defends natural rights. We have a long way to go but we can only get to a better world with John Locke and classical liberalism.
Who suggests that any individual person walked "from Asia to North America"? Beringia itself was inhabited for millennia, even after the glaciers receded enough to allow walking south. Groups of humans could have moved a mile per year and covered the distance. (Although, it seems more likely that they moved back and forth much farther in a sort of Brownian fashion.) Also, many theorists suggest that much of the "fastest" migration was via watercraft along the west coast of the Americas.
America is something quite different from "the best country in the world". It would be more accurate (although still too simplistic) to say that we're the most successful "bad guys". Sure, there are other people who fight unnecessary wars of aggression for the commercial interests of privileged ruling-class assholes. It's just that we've fought so many, which have resulted in the violent deaths of so many millions. Eventually quantity has a quality of its own. It is interesting that one's response to this basically anthropological map would be "USA #1!?!"
Of course, LIFE isn't fair. But be careful tearing down classical liberalism hoping that some centralized authority will dictate the perfect expression of how a human being should exist.
Was it really? There is very little evidence of Paleolithic warfare (especially evidence that is direct evidence of war as opposed to perhaps being capital punishment or the like). It's not until you get sedentary populations that you find clear evidence of warfare, and even then, there's still a great many settlements in early periods whose layouts suggest that defense was not a concern.
Or, to put more bluntly, the evidence seems to indicate that it's rather late in the development of "civilization" [1] that warfare is invented.
[1] I'm framing this in the unilinear model of anthropology, which I don't believe in, because this is how popular anthropology treats it.
There's little evidence of warfare in the sense where large groups of warriors gather to attack each other. But Pinker estimates, I think pretty non-controversially, that around 15% of Paleolithic people died to interpersonal violence.
It's shocking that my comment which is a balanced, reasonable, principled perspective, is considered controversial. John Locke is debatable now? Well let's hope the European Union and China know better how to prevent individuals from abusing others by ascending through government structures.
So the case at hand is about the prosecution of a tribal member by the state court.
While I think the SC made the correct legal decision, I am worried about the implications of this. Do we really want to have separate legal systems based on ethnicity or tribal membership? What if the tribe legalizes marijuana but the state doesn't? What if the punishments in one are more severe than another?
Typically the jurisdiction of crime is based on territory, not ethnicity.
Im not a lawyer and I'm not American, so I could of course be completely misunderstanding what the implications are.
Well it's certified based on tribal membership, which is an actual, de jure status. When I wrote ethnicity I am just acknowledging that it's so closely tied to tribal membership that they are effectively the same.
I imagine the tribes can grant status to anyone they like as a sovereign nation, just like America can grant citizenship to whomever it decides.
I see, so, just like how around the world peers recognize the ability of a self-proclaimed nation of define their own nationality so in this case the US is the peer that recognizes tribal government sovereign authority to define who is has membership in it (among other things).
Does tribal governments not have legal jurisdictions? Judicial institutions?
> Clearly this results in confusion, and can't stand
I'm not so sure. The only real effect of this decision is that everybody now has to recognize that a certain class of criminal cases (those in which all parties are members of the Creek nation) in eastern Oklahoma can only be tried in Federal courts (or, for some, Creek tribal courts), not Oklahoma state courts. Nothing else has to change. The Creek nation is already coexisting with non-Creek inhabitants of the same territory and none of that has to change; the city of Tulsa doesn't have to move, people don't have to leave their homes, businesses don't have to relocate. I don't see what makes the state of affairs after this decision particularly confusing or unstable.
The Chief Justice doesn't agree with you there. He wrote the decision "will undermine numerous convictions obtained by the State, as well as the State's ability to prosecute serious crimes committed in the future ... [and] may destabilize the governance of vast swathes of Oklahoma."
I know. I don't find his claims compelling, for much the same reasons that the court majority doesn't, as discussed in some detail in the court's opinion.
> Clearly this results in confusion, and can't stand
It seems pretty clear to me. Both Oklahoma and the federal government willfully ignored established law and usurped jurisdiction that didn't belong to them. That it's inconvenient to the status quo doesn't mean it can't stand.
The territory is "owned" by the tribe(s) although that ownership is subjugated by federal (not state) interests.
Imagine if MA tried to claim that RI was really part of its territory. Eventually, the case reaches the Supreme Court, which rules that in fact RI is actually its own thing. MA has no jurisdiction to prosecute in RI, but the federal government still does.
Except that eastern OK is a lot larger than RI, and the origins of the reservation there are much darker and wrapped up in the appalling treatment of indigenous people.
I'm really not trying to discuss the legality of it.
However, that analogy does not match up with what I read.
>The first is that going forward, certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court rather than state court, if a Native American is involved. So if a Native American is accused of a major crime in downtown Tulsa, the federal government rather than the state government will prosecute it. Less serious crimes involving Native Americans on American Indian land will be handled in tribal courts. This arrangement is already common in Western states like Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, said Washburn.
So it's not the territory that determines jurisdiction, but citizenship. In other words, based on who you are not where you are.
Some of the Pueblo communities close to where I live (Santa Fe) do in fact claim jurisdiction over visitors on their land. There are large roadside signs notifying you of this as you cross into their territory.
The fact that this may not be true is almost certainly just the result of the federal government saying it isn't true, rather than anything to do with the desire of the various tribes.
In most countries, if you're an overseas visitor, you're subject to the law of the country you are in (though they may simply deport you pre or post trial). The fact that this is not (always) true for indian reservations likely reflects the fears of non-indian people rather than the desire of indians.
That's the point the tribe is a separate nation by treaty. The tribe has the right to make legal laws and rules. We almost never actually recognize them but they do exist.
That seems like a horrible precedent. I don't see how this would be any different than, say, a group of Christians or Muslims installing a parallel system of courts to police their own people.
SCOTUS left the door open for Congress to change or nullify the treaty that created the reservations in OK.
If we (American society) decide we'd rather not deal with the complexities of a massive reservation that overlaps half of OK and includes one of OK's largest cities, we can ask Congress to change the rules.
True, poorly phrased - the judgement explained quite plainly that Congress is the correct body to clear up whatever mess exists. And that SCOTUS can't simply throw-away/ignore an otherwise legal treaty.
> Typically the jurisdiction of crime is based on territory, not ethnicity.
The US Constitution allows the country to enter into treaties which are otherwise unconstitutional.
It has entered into a treaty with a different nation with overlapping boundaries, due to the nature of the treaty, and it has to honor that. Congress can further renege on their promises and change the treaty, but the reason that treaty exists is because a prior older unconstitutional act involving the relocation of those indigenous nations to that area of Oklahoma. So Congress and the President won't touch it, not just the current one, but no congress and President will touch this without consequence.
So its not about what we want, its about atonement and having to deal with this incongruency now in the 21st century. We are still in the process of recognizing that there are hundreds of separate semi-autonomous and co-dependent nations within the continental US, and we have to have diplomatic relations with their people, people that cannot be simply deported when they commit a heinous crime, and share a porous border with the rest of the country.
The idea of the stable borders is so new. The Ottoman Empire still controlled much of the middle east before World War I. The British Empire was also still quite expansive at the beginning of that war (and into WW2). The fact that so much of the world speaks Latin-derived languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian...nearly 1 billion people in total) is a relic of the Roman empire's own expansive conquering of territory. Just over 150 years ago, Germany wasn't even a single nation state, but rather a collection of loose territories. Among the native americans themselves, there were constant warring, slavery, even human sacrifice and in some cases cannibalism.
And this is, for example, how the Iroquois treated prisoners of war:
"The captive would be executed after a day-long torture session of burning and removing body parts, which the prisoner was expected to bear with stoicism and nobility (an expectation not usually met) before being scalped alive. Hot sand was applied to the exposed skull and they were finally killed by cutting out their hearts. Afterward, the victim's body was cut and eaten by the community. The practice of ritual torture and execution, together with cannibalism, ended some time in the early 18th century."
For some reason, some people believe that whatever "borders" existed several hundred years ago should be brought forward to modern times. These folks consistently craft a narrative that paints the U.S. in a bad light while ignoring the very real crimes against humanity that occurred on practically every square foot of ground across the globe, going back thousands of years.
From a certain perspective, all of human history can be summed up as an endless series of blood feuds.
Seems like there is quite a bit of fragility and anxiety with this thread, mostly culminating into getting the US out of the spotlight, and talking about humanity through all periods.
Indian land was taken over the course of hundreds of years of false promises and violated treaties. European settlers were predominately the ones drawing the maps, and consistently taking what was not only not theirs to begin with, but what they had agreed belonged to the native tribes and then took anyway. We're not talking about thousands of years of human history, we're talking about very real injustices that are still being perpetuated by one current-day party (largely the states) against another (various tribes). Would you prefer the tribes resort to rebellion and bloodshed to reclaim what is theirs by treaty? Would you prefer that contracts and treaties are simply ignored when inconvenient?
How is it different from the Arab conquest of the middle east and north Africa? or the Mongolian conquest of everything around them or the Han Chinese takeover of everywhere that is now current China? Or Turkish tribes conquest of today Turkey? And why do you think the tribes in America want to rebel? Life in America as it is are good for them like any other citizen in America.
"Indian" land is a meaningless term. When the Sioux fought with the Anishnabe over the Great Plains, whom the Anishnabe occupied earlier than the Sioux, who deserves that land? Do we owe reparations to the Sioux or to the Anishnabe? Presumptively, another tribe controlled that territory before the Anishnabe. There never was this concept of "owned, stable land" until modern times. The way of the world was more like you only got to keep what you could defend. This is why Europe is dotted with massive castles. 1000 years ago, a Viking party could end your town's existence in a single raid. This map is not representative of what is "theirs by treaty". This map is a rough outline of rough territories (some notably overlapping among the individual tribes) from some arbitrary point in the past. It's not relevant in the year 2020, sorry to say. No more so than a map of individual territories of the Germanic tribes of 200 years ago. The native American tribes do enjoy semi-autonomy in various territories across the U.S. and have even contributed to the development of the United States, with native Americans fighting alongside all the other races in nearly every war we've ever engaged in, including the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. They are U.S. citizens and part of this country. Rewinding the clock 200 years is not helpful or productive.
I've heard some version of this argument many times, but I never really understand the point.
Is your point that because the world has been terrible for years, we should not bother to do better and try to right wrongs? What an incredibly defeatist attitude. That just sounds like you are being defensive to criticism of our culture, which is never helpful.
Is your point that you believe that the United States is uniquely targeted for criticism? I don't believe that is true. There is plenty of criticism of the way other colonial powers treated indigenous people. If you are in the US, the criticism is mostly about the US, but if you go to Europe or Australia for example, people are talking about their own nations and their history.
I don't think your comment is entirely untrue, I just think it misses the point and/or doesn't really have a point to begin with.
we should not bother to do better and try to right wrongs?
Are we not better than we were 400 years ago? I think we are.
And righting wrongs? Which wrongs? It's wrongs all the way down. Nobody's hands are clean. Humans have been butchering each other since the beginning of time. We do it less frequently now and attempt to put some rules around it, but we still do it.
The problem is that arguments like this always end with an implicit "QED" that dismisses surviving grievances regardless of how legitimate they may be. What we need to do is hear each other. Responding by saying, "this happened on every square foot of the globe" is implicitly a refusal to listen, a denial of standing to the other. When I read a comment like this, it sounds like a judge tossing a case out of court.
Your comment includes this in other ways too: changing the subject to horrible things the other side did is implicitly a way of saying "I don't need to hear you", and representing the other side as a straw man ("several hundred years ago should be brought forward to modern times") is a way of saying "nothing to see here".
Not at all. I mean hear as in really listen and take in what the other is saying. That's harder than it sounds. It's painful and frightening and almost no one is willing to do it, but I think it's the only way forward. Otherwise we're just going to get more violence and justification of violence, because no matter how deeply we try to suppress them, the grievances of the past will just keep reexploding.
Interesting that you seem to be assuming a particular result from "hearing", excluding the reaction of "I hear you, and I just don't care." which is surely a possibility?
I'm talking about hearing from the heart and not just in the technical sense that might say "Ok, you said your piece and I heard it, now can we just move on". I believe that most people won't respond dismissively to the suffering of others, if the conditions for hearing each other, really listening and acknowledging, are in place. But it's painful and we avoid those conditions as much as possible. For example,
I heard a story about a little girl at one of the residential schools in Canada where the teacher would stick a pin through her tongue when she was caught speaking her native language. It's really hard to hear something like that. Much easier to say "I don't care", although we normally put it that in more self-serving language. And underlying "I don't care" is something more like, "I can't bear this".
The concepts of empathy and active listening are well defined. Calling those concepts "undefined, non-falsifiable, linguistic drivel" is completely unsubstantiated.
It's harder to do over a text forum than in person, but it's not strictly impossible. The low hanging fruit is checking to see if a person is responding specifically to the arguments in your post, or just arguing against a strawman. You can take that a step further and try to determine if their response indicates they understood your argument. This is more error prone, but still a possible method of determining good faith.
I think the problem is when the speaker gets to be the sole determinant of sufficient empathy and listening. It leaves no room for disagreement.
>If you truly empathize with me and understood my position, surely you would agree with me. If you disagree, then you have not listened with sufficient empathy.
I don't like the word "allowed", as if there's some authority here, but if you want my opinion, certainly there is no obligation to agree about anything at all. However, that doesn't mean that listening from the heart is easy. Really hearing what other humans have gone through is not easy. There is a strong temptation to react with denial, because otherwise it's too painful. There is an obligation, I believe, to acknowledge what actually happened, on all sides.
First off, thanks for continuing to engage despite our clear difficulties understanding one another.
When I say, allowed, I mean under the moral and social system you are advancing. You propose that there is an obligation to acknowledge and "hear" what has happened. The problem for me is that you seem to believe that it is impossible to acknowledge and hear without caring, or care without suffering. It seems that you believe people have a moral obligation to share another's suffering.
My first problem is that you claim to be in a position to judge if this obligation has been met.
My second problem is that being heard is not sufficient for the speakers to turn the page on the grievances of the past.
I think it's reasonable to infer that "hearing" in this context doesn't literally mean only the act of perceiving sound. It's clearly referring to listening in good faith.
> From a certain perspective, all of human history can be summed up as an endless series of blood feuds.
Is it so bad that people think we should try to do better?
In my history classes I learned about Europe - itself very much in flux as you mention through the past thousand years - being "invaded" and America being "settled." Things need to be properly acknowledged before they can be moved past. And some of these things that are painted as "revisionism" when they aren't glossed over have lingering harmful effects even today.
Is "None" the answer that would satisfy you? You seem to be implying a slippery slope, but you come off as saying "what's non-trivial shouldn't be attempted."
If you're actually interested in answering that very big question–which, I suspect, you might not be, only ornery and combative–you would do well to read what scholars have written on it. You might even Google the simplest component of the subject.
Here is a start: "US approves $4.5 billion in reparations to Indians, black farmers"[0]
Answers along the lines of "here's a start" are unsatisfying, because the question is where the end is. It's like asking what the ingredients for a loaf of bread are and hearing "well a tablespoon of flour is a start".
I'm not aware of any scholar who's said "after we do X, Y, Z, the wrongs of history will be righted and we won't need any further efforts to make it up to Native Americans". (If you know someone who did, I'd be excited to see what they have to say!)
Some ideas are best conveyed through richer media. Don't hesitate to read Indigenous People's History of the United States, and stop demanding bread recipes on fortune cookie slips.
Truly? I do not. Of course there is an end; equity and the abolition of continuing systems of oppression.
I am honestly blown away that there exists in your mind some set of beliefs which, paired with what I've said, imply I suggest there is no end. Please, what are they?
>Europe - itself very much in flux as you mention through the past thousand years - being "invaded" and America being "settled."
Sometimes, so-called invasions are really migrations. Its no longer correct to talk about aryan invasions, now its the indo-european migrations. On the other hand, the term invasion can be justified. The mongols were not migrants or settlers - they were invading conquerors true as history.
The examples of early natives torturing an executing people is a strange choice here.
Readers, don't forget that these people are the contemporaries of the perpetrators of chattel slavery, and the french revolution, to name a few popular examples.
The sordid atrocities committed all around the Americas by indigenous Europeans are very well-documented and continued beyond the 18th century, legitimized by the US society and government.
To bring such a thing up in defense of borders created during and with the help of those same atrocities is disingenuous, to put it kindly.
It appears to me that such a defense is an attempt to compare 18th century natives to modern US citizens, an obviously unfair comparison, much the same as if I were to compare modern native Americans to Columbus or 18th century slave-owners in the south.
I don't think the intent was to draw a comparison between contemporary native americans and those of the 18th century. Instead, I think it serves to demonstrate that atrocious behavior is not exclusive to the european settlers.
The point is that among the tribes, there never was constant territory. They warred among themselves, conquered each other multiple times over, and there were numerous atrocities committed by some of the tribes who claim to deserve reparations. For the record, I don't think any of this is productive for humanity, but since this has become a popular movement of the moment, let's disentangle this. When the Sioux conquered the Anishnabe, when the Aztec sacrificed humans from "lesser" tribes by the thousands [1], when the Mayans conquered other tribes and did the same, when the Iroquois tortured their conquests, what reparations are these tribes owed? If we're going to rewind the clock 200 years, why not rewind it 300, 400, 1000 years? Let's untangle all of humanity's historical atrocities and try to really see how far this rabbit hole goes.
This map should really have some dates on it. It might represent the state of things within, say, a 100 year period (or so) of European arrival, but it doesn't convey the history of humans in North America. I read the FAQ and could not find any information on what time period is represented here. If someone showed you a map of Europe or China marked out like this, it would be natural to ask "when is this?"
None of that does anything to ameliorate the genocide that was perpetrated against the people living in the Americans when europeans travelled and then settled here. But it's also important not to portray the prior 10k years or more of human settlement in the Americas as static and unchanging.
I appreciate this point. In a similar vein, DNA services like 23andMe should also come with dates on them. In fact, frankly, any mention of ethnicity should come with a date. No cultural group–bound by genes of memes–is truly the same river twice.
Yes, for example the Seminoles weren't native to Florida they were bands of Creeks pushed there by the Upper Creeks and Europeans in the 1700s, and were also invited by the Spanish. They weren't even named as a distinct group until the 1770s. There were many other Florida tribes.
Yup. At a quick glance I think there are some inconsistencies with the dating.
For example, the map portrays Guanajuato as inhabited by Guamares which hasn't really been the case for centuries, or at least there is no recognized group that self identifies as such anymore.
Conversely, the Huron-Wendat are portrayed to live in the St. Lawrence, as is the case now, rather than around Lake Huron as they did in the 1600's.
So both cases can't be simultaneously correct. I think the map is meant to portray modern locations, but I'm not entirely sure.
As an example, Southern Athabascan speakers(e.g. Apache, Navajo) only migrated from what is approximately modern day Canada to the American Southwest within the time frame that Europeans were already on the continent(~1500 AD).
Wait until the indigenous folks start going back further in time and revising their own conquests. That should be fun to watch. Oh, and they had slavery too, in case where their enemies weren't exterminated outright or even eaten sometimes.
Quote from Wikipedia: "Native American groups often enslaved war captives, whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Others however would stake themselves in gambling situations when they had nothing else, which would put them into servitude for a short time, or in some cases for life; captives were also sometimes tortured as part of religious rites, and these sometimes involved ritual cannibalism."
And when Europeans arrived, natives held African slaves, too, as well as sold their own _native_ war captives to Europeans, much like Africans did in Africa. I wonder what they think of the idea of "reparations". But I digress.
So when someone says that Mount Rushmore belongs to the Lakota tribe, if we aren't willing to let the sleeping dogs lie, other tribes might want Lakota to revise that statement. Unwind it far enough, and who knows what tribe settled there first (assuming it even exists nowadays).
Cursory search suggests that Black Hills (now Mount Rushmore) was first settled by Arikara, and then, quote: "The Arikara in the Black Hills was followed by the Crow, Pawnee, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and then to the United States. The Lakota Sioux arrived in the region after getting kicked out of Minnesota in the late 1770s by other tribes. The Sioux took over the region after they drove out the Cheyenne Indian nation. The Sioux forced the Cheyenne to move West."
So yeah, if we're going to unwind, why stop at when the United States took the land. Let's unwind all the way.
Or maybe, just maybe, the SCOTUS decision was idiotic.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've asked you so many times that I'm not sure why we haven't banned you yet. No doubt that's because you've also posted good things. Unfortunately, though, your account really stands out as damaging this place, and if you don't fix this, we're going to have to.
This thread is a great example because while there are commenters on both sides of the issue, your post is the one that stands out as really dragging the discussion down to nastiness.
Maybe stop learning about Native American history from Wikipedia and a "cursory search". You can always find something on the web to "support" your argument. The harder path is to actually do the research to understand the nuances and most importantly, in this case, to learn how much of history is highly innacurate and written by the conquerors.
This is a cool website, and if people go past the landing page they'll find a trove of information and good descriptions of the initiative, as well as rebuttal of the criticisms I've read here so far.
For example, the website is a collaborative effort between multiple entities, and re: map details, they state clearly that "These maps are fluid and ever changing and should be used as an education tool to create dialogue around reconciliation."[0]
They also don't claim to show every single thing on the landing page. For example, living in Quebec, clicking on "Where Am I?" lands me on a list of nations which I'm sure is limited but is at least a starting point for discussion. They specifically mention "There are 634 First Nations in Canada. Learn more about those closest to your location", which might not be directly reflected on the landing page but is acknowledged on the website itself.
Their relationship to acknowledgement being part of a process of reconciliation is not a personal attack on anyone, and it saddens me to think that some people would take it as such. Their FAQ also brings forth the kinds of questions that one might come up with when being made aware of First Nations and treaties and such.[1]
For reference, I am European and I moved to Canada. Perhaps the emotional distance allows for curiosity and a wish to understand as main drivers, rather than feeling attacked or threatened in any way. And I'm French, so technically this is history that I should know at least partially! (but was never taught in school, as the kind of history classes I experienced were very focused on our own belly buttons - Pre-history -> Egyptians -> Greeks -> Romans -> Medieval Europe -> Monarchies (so much time..) -> Industrial Revolution in Europe -> World Wars -> Cold war).
Canada is making efforts towards a better understanding and acceptance of its past without shying away from saying things that temporarily would appear "ego-damaging". In my country, a bit over a decade ago the president was going to a summit of African countries to tell them how irrelevant they are[2]. The humility shown in this website (and to a larger degree in Canada, as evidenced by Trudeau's recent acknowledgement of systemic racism) is as politically challenging as it is morally right in the long run.
The past can't be undone, but the present can acknowledge and work to build understanding and respect for the paths taken.
This is an informative project that originates from Canada that shows just how many different peoples, nations, and polities used to lie hundreds of years ago on pockets of land that's now largely under the sovereignty of post-colonial megastates.
Their coverage is focused on North America, but there's also entries in South America, Australia, and New Zealand.
This isn't a critique of this project, but a question about the spirit of acknowledgement and reconciliation embodied by this and other projects: Africa bore a crushing toll under colonialism. Its people were kidnapped and sold to slavery, which persisted for hundreds of years. In many cases, they weren't even afforded the dilemma of making unequal treaties. Those who remained in Africa lived under colonial powers until after WWII, then in artificial states inheriting the old colonial borders. Many of these places descended into civil war shortly after their independence, and even today their human development lags behind the rest of the world. Ought we not reconcile that?
Of course, it's not a competition. Injustice done to one ought to stand on its own, without comparison to injustice done to others. But the promise of multinational, classically liberal states like Canada, the United States, Colombia, Australia, is that their people are empowered with the right to thrive regardless of how they found themselves in the country, by blood of conquerors, blood of indigenous peoples, blood of slaves, or as recent immigrants. Belief in this lofty ideal, which doesn't always work in practice when one starts much further behind, is also what sets the stage for the self-reflection, compassion, and the desire for reconciliation.
Other parts of the world aren't so keen on this movement. In Europe, similar desires to recognize past inhabitants of a land are painted as irrendentism, hurt by the association with today's xenophobic nationalists and past conquerors who turned to total war and genocide. In Asia, powerful states regularly engage in the subjugation of ethnic groups to this day, but the powers are too significant to world trade and world peace to condemn and alienate. Preservation of life and limb are surprisingly powerful motivators in suppressing this kind of examination elsewhere. Stability, a reduced level of fear, and a latent sense of guilt among the dominant group in power appear to be the necessary preconditions for this kind of movement to emerge and thrive. This isn't a cynical point, but we ought to collectively acknowledge that.
Human history is a story of conquest, and Native Americans fought - fought, not rolled over on their bellies - and were conquered by white settlers. It might not have been a very fair fight given the disparity in technology but it was a fight nonetheless.
The natives were certainly fighting each other before whites arrived, too - the warrior role is an important part of many tribes' culture.
Should the Comanche give reparations and land back to the Apache because they drove them out and slaughtered them almost to complete genocide?
Should the Ojibwe (who I share blood with) apologize for teaching white settlers the name "Sioux", meaning "little snakes", for the Lakota (their enemy)?
The USA should honor its treaties and acknowledge any wrongdoings, but these land acknowledgements that state the land is "occupied" by a foreign power are absurd and I'll continue to strongly object to them.
While I understand this sentiment - especially since as you say, most (if not all) of today's accepted states and borders are the result of bloody, unfair conquest - I do personally struggle with a system of objection/dismissal based on the "well, it's a dog-eats-world" mindset. Interestingly, I've also found that many people (I'm being a bit hand-wavy here, I know) who are completely fine with dismissing indigenous land acknowledgements have plenty to say about Tibet re: China, or Crimea re: Russia, etc. Perhaps it's all realpolitik posturing, but if it has been I certainly haven't been able to tell.
Seems to me that so long as the peoples who "lost" in history are still around and able to generate sympathy, empathy, and understanding, it lands upon us to seriously think about whether or not we should continue the status quo and carry history into the present.
> I do personally struggle with a system of objection/dismissal based on the "well, it's a dog-eats-world" mindset.
I used to be perplexed by these responses on HN as well but they make a certain kind of sense. If you have really doubled down on science and evolution and take them to their logical extreme, Darwinism really does just reduce to "if I can eat you, I win."
It occurs to me that many posters on HN are very okay with this mindset because they are chasing big dreams in life. And if a few people get hurt while they're on their way to riches, so be it.
You see this sentiment all the time in various comment threads.
Probably rich white dudes too. Pretty easy to love the notion of a 'dog eat dog world' when you're born into being on the top and have never seen the other side.
Not necessarily. I've visited many different parts of the world and met many immigrants to this country. Race and affluence can compound these beliefs, but the drive to get ahead no matter the cost is very human and very universal. Being born in poverty is also not a guarantee that you will grow up to become an empathetic person either.
It's not a dismissal to give agency to the opposite side by highlighting their own inter-tribal conflicts and warrior culture.
As for the bizarre strawman tangent, I have nothing to say about Tibet or Crimea, so ... ?
Let's be more empathetic, sure, but let's remain truthful. Seemingly innocuous, feel-good statements like some of these land statements are not leading down any kind of path of reconciliation but rather stoking further resentment and conflict as you've opened the floodgates to unlimited re-litigation of all past grievances.
I'm not entirely sure why you're being downvoted because I wouldn't consider your comment here that objectionable. And in fact you're right -- you did not say anything about Crimea/Tibet; that wasn't so much directed towards you in particular but an observation I was making about a lot of others I know who have said the same thing. It was a bit hand-wavy, and perhaps I should have left it out.
Thank being said, your original comment -- which is what I replied to -- was not so much about highlighting inter-tribal conflicts as it is now that you've edited it. I just want to point out that I really do not appreciate you editing your original comment then replying to me without acknowledging that you've done so, effectively trying to re-write history. It's extremely disingenuous and not at all in the spirit of HN.
You hit the nail on the head: everyone is too busy grouping these separate nations together.
Like there will be a reader here trying to form an opinion and say "wow that opinion from an American Indian/Indigenous/Native American person will now form my opinion since it weighs so much more" as opposed to "one part Ojibwe person has one paradox regarding the Ojibwe nation's relationship with the Lakota nation,
and I wonder what the actual consensus on that specific issue is with the representatives of those nations and the US Federal Government".
There are hundreds of separate nations within the US that are barely on any map. And these all need to be reconciled individually.
Not so simple. Kind of hard to run a farm and grow your food when "land belongs to all". And who'd be stupid enough to put up a building on land they don't own?
Funnily enough, farming on common land was a major part of the English economy several centuries ago, and presumably other Medieval countries as well. What do you think the "tragedy of the commons" is named for?
I think you are suffering from "I can't imagine how things could work differently because I only know how things work currently". Where I am located, on the coast of Ecuador, most land is collectively owned by the "comuna", or a group of local villagers. They sell temporary land-use permits (usufruct) but the land will always belong to the comuna. I can still build on it with the understanding that I would only pass it to my kin if both they and I were continuous inhabitants. The system is designed to promote community and agriculture and prevent speculative interest. From my vantage point the system is working quite well: many wonderful buildings and projects are springing up all over the place.
There are many different ways things could work! Some of them work better than others. I'm aware of this particular way already, as it turns out. It's as simple as the community, which is to say, it's not simple at all, and incredibly prone to cliqueishness.
And if the land very much does not belong to "all". It does not belong to me. It does not belong to the immigrant. It belongs to a rough local equivalent of a suburban HOA.
This isn't that different than the US. When you "own" land you have freehold ownership - you own it within the framework of the state and it can be taken away (with compensation), taxed, etc. In essence, the state is letting you own it.
It's not allodial title which would be true ownership.
So land ownership is bad, but granting exclusive use of land for a set period of time is okay? Who grants the exclusive use of land, and from what authority? If I'm not a part of that comuna, do I need to abide by the rules of who gets exclusive use of a given plot of land?
The model is that the community living there has sole authority and exclusive use of the land. If you're not part of the community, you don't have and can't obtain exclusive rights to the land. I can't speak to the original example of Ecuador, but this is how it works in American Samoa as well.
Right, so there is land ownership. One group of people (comune members) keep another group of people(non-comune members) off of their land by essentially a threat of violence. This seems not at all different from the system practiced in, say, the US.
To speak further of the conflicts of history, many tribes, including the Muscogee (Creek) tribe involved in the most recent Supreme Court decision in Oklahoma, were slaveholders. After the Civil War, the terms of the Reconstruction Treaties contributed to their land loss.
> It might not have been a very fair fight given the disparity in technology but it was a fight nonetheless.
Contrary to popular misconception, most of the Indian Wars actually involved both sides having pretty equal access to then-modern technology, and sometimes the natives brought the better weapons to the fight.
They lost largely because we spent 300 years waging a war of extermination against them, and their smaller base was far less able to manage the attrition they suffered.
The US motto "Might makes right" is along similar lines - we like to think about "right" and "wrong" when in the end, it's the strongest who get their way.
Why do you use the word 'occupied'? I don't see that on the OP, and it seems like an unnecessary step into predictable flamewar to bring that up here instead of reacting to the specific and interesting content that's posted there.
Because that wording is used in the land acknowledgement that I'm most familiar with:
> I/We acknowledge that the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire occupies the sacred and ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples. I/We honor the land of the Ojibwe and Dakota Nations.
The posted website specifically calls out the map's purpose in fueling land acknowledgments,[1] so my comment is exactly on-topic for the posted content.
I purposefully didn't take the topic into flamebait territory with some parallels I could draw to growing anti-white animus with certain slurs that are tied to that (and other) words.
I disagree. I think that you gratuitously inflamed the thread in a way that the posted website was careful not to do. That's explicitly against the site guidelines.
The link you've made is tenuous and frankly looks retrofitted—parallel construction, one might say.
Reducing an interesting post to a well-rehearsed flamewar is vandalism and against the site guidelines. This is supposed to be a place for curious conversation. I think there's plenty of curious conversation to be about the indigenous history of North America as long as people don't toss bombs about "growing anti-white animus". No one used the words you're complaining about until you did. That's a remarkably poor level of HN post. Please don't do that again.
When the Spanish arrived to Mexico, they asked one native what was the name of that area. The person replied: "Ma'anaatik ka t'ann" (I don't understand you"), and the Spanish hispanized that phrase to Yucatan.
As a result, a large extent of territory is now known as Yucatan Peninsula. And many names given to territories in the Americas have similar stories.
Maps like these give the false impression that nearly every square mile of land - even inhospitable desert regions, were once occupied by some native polity.
Reality check: Most indigenous peoples lived in Mesoamerica, with < 10 million in what is now USA/Canada and that's being generous. There are regions of North America today that have no residents. By what grounds are these native lands - because some nomads once wandered through there?
This is why Adverse Possession has been a principle of law for thousands of years.
Without such a concept, there can be no private ownership of land. Because someone can always come out of the woodwork with an old document that says the land your family has owned for tens or hundreds of years is actually their land.
Arguably that reason makes less sense now, given that record keeping and accessibility is much better. It should now be relatively trivial to ensure you own any given land in the land registry.
The bigger argument for it now is making land use more efficient.
For one thing, it's incredibly chauvinistic to dismiss pre-colombian society as "some nomads," and their mobility patterns as having "wandered". Nomadic life-ways aren't the thoughtless ramblings of a child at play, or a sub-sentient beast in simple reactionary pursuit of greener pastures. They summer here, winter there, raise children in these parts, and visit those for sport, trade, or agriculture. Their relationship with the land is purposeful, and maintained by cultural artifacts we'd recognize as Almanacs.
One isn't "wandering" just because they haven't poured concrete.
For another thing, the pre-colombian americas weren't the Gardens of Eden, magically and effortlessly producing sustenance, and materials for us to enjoy. They were cultivated, sculpted, and gamed into those forms which facilitated our survival. There's evidence enough of that in the ways that restrictive intra- and under-growth have returned to the forests indigenous populations kept pruned for their traversal.
Lastly, biomes are big systems, and interconnected. I may have only a small garden, but it's fed from massive watersheds. If I am to survive, the mountains which constitute that watershed must be recognized as "mine" in some regard. So it goes with all the lands which feed into, and out of, those through which "some nomads once wandered."
I hope you can see, now, how myopically your "reality check" frames the situation.
>Nomadic life-ways aren't the thoughtless ramblings of a child at play
In 11th century eastern europe, Kipchaq nomads did the same - "wandering" as in following seasonal patterns within their lands. But it was not until the 17th century that the steppes were settled - and the settlers weren't Kipchaqs.
Imagine if a modern day Ukrainian was presented with a similar indigenous map based on nomadic groups that once roamed his country - it would stretch from the Danube to the Volga! Should we convert the entire pontic-caspian steppe into an indigenous zones for Nogais and Tatars who are related to the historical kipchaqs?
Is it written into Ukraine's laws (and then quietly ignored) that they should respect those groups' territories and negotiate treaties to resolve issues? Fun fact: British Columbia barely has any treaties because people have ignored the issue for decades. This is incredibly slow going: http://www.bctreaty.ca/negotiation-update.
Edit: Read about Nogais and Tatars instead of spewing nonsense :)
Nomadic lifestyles don’t scale. It’s not that “living off the land” is somehow trivial or dumb. In order to treat people with complex diseases, develop medicines, avoid famines during the cold, etc, a civilization needs to move beyond a nomadic lifestyle technologically.
By what right did the the land belong to the native Americans? Do you think all the native tribes spilled out of Alaska and then neatly fitted themselves into mutually-recognized non-overlapping territories never to be disturbed?
Indigenous people have been in NA for an extremely long time and have sorted themselves into nations over that time just like any where else in the world.
If there are overlapping disagreements between Indigenous Nations about land title, as there are with all sorts of modern nations around the world, there are lots of modern mechanisms to settle that.
Not sure how any of this has any relevance or should be used as a justification colonialism and for pushing people off their lands.
It seems like you are trying to avoid the question. What gives indigenous peoples any moral high ground over later settlers? The indigenous* conquered land from each other and moved - an obvious fact which too often gets left out of the conversation. Then, the Europeans came along and possessed the lands for themselves. And you'll find the same story repeated on every corner of the earth. Continual occupation is just not a thing.
* As I've mentioned in another comment, true "indigenous" Alaskans are no more, having been replaced by an unrelated group of people in a later migration to the Americas.
You are brushing off the systematic, mass genocide of native people and dispossession of their land by essentially saying that its happened throughout history, that it’s normal. I’m not really sure how this argument justifies anything. The colonization of America is recent. NA indigenous people are still alive and have special designated land that they were forced to move to. They weren’t even given citizenship by default until 1924–less than one hundred years ago
> continual occupation is just not a thing
I’m not sure where you are getting this. At what point is an occupation over? When the genocide is complete? That hasn’t even happened yet, NA indigenous people are still alive. Do you just expect they to submit, assimilate, and abandon their culture completely?
And you're brushing off all the conflict that Native Americans brought to bear against white settlers (do read some accounts of Apache or Comanche raids some time), and the concessions given to Native Americans after they were conquered (namely their own sovereign nations and plenty of carveouts to hunting and other laws so they can continue to practice their culture unhindered).
They "weren't even given citizenship" because they were considered citizens of their own sovereign nations, not because the US gov't were acting maliciously. For this reason they also weren't required to register for Selective Service to be drafted into WWI (despite this, many non-citizens waived their exemption and registered anyway - maybe they didn't hate the country as much as some might suppose).
I don't know what you expect the US gov't to do when attempts at peaceful coexistence between white settlers and the natives tribes failed. Run away as far as the Apache would chase them (to the Atlantic)? No, they went to war as needed, and even allied with other tribes in doing so.
Random comment - I assume your username is an attempt at wit, but even I did a double take
Suffice to say it was complicated. I was reading about the tribes that aligned with the Confederacy and the fate of black slaves owned by tribes post-Civil War.
My handle dates back to the 90s, when people barely rolled their eyes at a pun in poor taste.
It's probably at its apex of hilarity right now, given the sheer number of folks pissing their pants because of a delusion that there are innumerable secret members of a looooong-dead political party hiding under every bed.
> It's probably at its apex of hilarity right now, given the sheer number of folks pissing their pants because of a delusion that there are innumerable secret members of a looooong-dead political party hiding under every bed.
Huh, "wild coincidence" that a user with the name "waffle_ss" spends their time posting about crime statistics and how killing indigenous people is whatever. I'm sure it has nothing to do with your politics.
> And you're brushing off all the conflict that Native Americans brought to bear against white settlers
Given that you're the first person to bring this up, accusing your parent for "brushing this off" is not coming across as an attempt to have a good faith conversation.
> and the concessions given to Native Americans after they were conquered (namely their own sovereign nations and plenty of carveouts to hunting and other laws so they can continue to practice their culture unhindered).
The US often didn't honor the terms of these concessions.
The parent painted a picture of a one-sided, contemplative genocide when it was far from it. Neither was it a conflict uniquely faced by the United States - read up on the history of Mexico and the Apache for instance. If you want a short biopic version just read about Geronimo's life and what he thought about Mexicans.
> The US often didn't honor the terms of these concessions.
I agree, not in all cases. But before we could talk reasonably about this we needed to swing the conversation back from the idea that the US gov't was operating a land-stealing, genociding steamroller (and for apparently no reason at all, no less).
> The parent painted a picture of a one-sided, contemplative genocide when it was far from it.
No he didn't. To put it bluntly, you're reading things that aren't there. We're all welcome to our interpretations of comments, but untentatively asserting your interpretation is a component of "not having a good faith conversation".
> Neither was it a conflict uniquely faced by the United States - read up on the history of Mexico and the Apache for instance.
And why the need to point this out, when the comment you responded to never suggested otherwise? There is, in fact, implicit acceptance of other genocides in the comment.
> But before we could talk reasonably about this we needed to swing the conversation back from the idea that the US gov't was operating a land-stealing, genociding steamroller (and for apparently no reason at all, no less).
Who exactly are you talking about here? The comment in question never implied "apparently no reason at all".
You're arguing against a nonexistent entity. And the point of my responding to you is to get you back to the reality of the thread, not an imaginary conversation that others here cannot see.
Of course he/she did. The entire premise is based on the notion that the nations before the US were somehow just and the US was not, despite the fact that they were all built on just as much violence and conquering.
> the entire premise is based on the notion that the nations before the US were somehow just and the US was not
No, it’s not. It’s based on the premise that massacres and the legislative dispossession of native lands is wrong. I don’t see why this is a controversial stance
> despite the fact that they were all built in just as much violence and conquering
This is a false equivalency. There was never a single group which built a transcontinental empire, killing, displacing, and ultimately forcing assimilation upon all other groups using organized state violence, all in a few hundred years. The tribal violence in some regions on North America just isn’t the same thing and doesn’t justify the genocide. Even if it was the same thing, it still doesn’t justify genocide. Justifying genocide with genocide doesn’t really make much sense to me
"It's so obvious I cannot point where the person said it".
> The entire premise is based on the notion that the nations before the US were somehow just and the US was not
The commenter in question both implicitly and explicitly has said that is not the premise.
I can only repeat what I said to the other person:
> You're arguing against a nonexistent entity. And the point of my responding to you is to get you back to the reality of the thread, not an imaginary conversation that others here cannot see.
>I’m not really sure how this argument justifies anything.
My argument is not that europeans are in the right because they inflicted upon others what those others inflicted upon still others. My argument is that nobody has a clean record. If your position is that what happened to natives is wrong, then what the natives did to each other is also wrong.
>I’m not sure where you are getting this. At what point is an occupation over?
What I'm saying is you will be hard pressed to find a territory that has been continually occupied by one group since the arrival of humans. At some point each territory was probably wrested from some prior group via the usual means. Exceptions apply. Isolated islands come to mind.
Just because the genocide didn't fully succeed in exterminating every last Native American doesn't mean it somehow wasn't a "systematic mass genocide", for the same reason that just because Nazi Germany didn't successfully wipe every last Jew off the face of the Earth doesn't mean that wasn't a "systematic mass genocide", or how just because the VRS didn't exterminate every last Bosniak doesn't mean the Bosnian genocide wasn't a genocide.
Like, there's nothing mixed about that message at all. The United States systematically displaced or outright exterminated countless Native Americans, and yet some did survive and will hopefully have a chance to recover from that genocide and reclaim some of their lost lands.
Nazi Germany didn't wipe out every last jew because they lost the war. Had nobody stopped Germany I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have succeeded.
Supposing the U.S. did institute a systemic native genocide policy in the past, what prevented it from succeeding? Why are there still natives?
> Had nobody stopped Germany I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have succeeded.
Barring complete world domination they would have no chance of doing so, given the existence of Jews beyond Germany's reach (including those who escaped the Holocaust). Yet, we still consider that a systemic mass genocide.
Same deal with the US and its eradication of in some cases entire tribes; just because the US stopped engaging in systemic mass genocide (for whatever reason) or otherwise didn't succeed in killing or sterilizing every last native doesn't mean my country didn't engage in systemic mass genocide at all.
Hell, even by the incorrectly-narrow definition you seem to be using, there are quite a few tribes that are nowadays entirely extinct, e.g. the Karankawa people in Texas and the Yahi people in California.
Nazi Germany did wipe out almost every last jew in the areas they controlled, in the ~4 years of the Holocaust. 90% of Poland's 3 million jews were killed.
After centuries of supposed genocide, the US Native American population is over 6 million, which is probably similar to what it was before colonization.
The biggest massacre I'm aware of¹ in the US is the 146 killed at Wounded Knee in 1890. The US had complete military superiority, and could have killed everyone at will, but mostly didn't. If this is a genocide, it's a very poorly executed one.
What makes this a bit confusing is that first contact did often result in 90% of the native population dying in both North and South America. But that was an unintentional and unforeseen effect of old world diseases hitting new world populations that had completely unprepared immune systems. Maybe the biggest "random" event in world history!
So what you're trying to say that the dislocation and genocide of people of indigenous nations by colonial nations was morally fine because you assert that the indigenous people probably did something similar in the past? Good grief.
Settlers knew what they were doing and their actions against indigenous people were not moral. They do not need defending.
You're putting words in my mouth as a red herring.
I pointed out how practically everyone is living on conquered land - yes, even the native americans who wrested it from each other, though you cast shade on this inconvenient fact. So does whose.land, which rationalizes the overlapping amerindian borders like so: "Often, boundaries between territories overlap because the Indigenous Nations were continuously sharing the land and negotiating agreements through their own diplomatic and legal systems." Hmmn...No mention of war or genocide - everyone just got along diplomatically apparently.
No you're trying to give settlers a pass on amoral behaviour.
It doesn't matter what conflicts indigenous nations may have entered into (and to be clear, you are completely speculating that they did). It does not justify the behaviour of the settlers that came after.
Effectively your argument is a childlike "well he did it therefore I should be able to". Have higher standards.
A critical component of those modern mechanisms is that land claims can be put to rest. That after a border's acknowledged for a long time, it becomes the border, and everyone has to respect it even if we can't condone the process that created it. Under a standard where territorial claims can be resurrected at any time - where Mexico can declare it owns California, and Britain can declare it owns the Eastern Seaboard, and the US can declare it owns Phillipines - modern mechanisms won't function.
What? Russia claimed it owns part of Ukraine earlier this decade. Sudan split into two countries. There’s an ongoing dispute over islands between China and Japan. There’s also Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Kurds get pushed around by the 4 nation-states who each claim part of their ancestral territory. India, Pakistan, and China all claim Kashmir.
Last century, Israel was created after a war. The Ottoman Empire was partitioned. Tibet was claimed by China. Germany was split in half and then reunited. The USSR split apart. The US annexed part of Samoa, and made states out of Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawai’i. Carving Africa into lines started in 1880. There are dozens of other examples, some administrative and some violent.
Your claim boils down to “a border is a border, until it isn’t.” How is that different from how it’s always been?
I'm not sure I follow the question. A lot of the disputes you mention here are terribly violent, which is why I so strongly oppose efforts to create more of them. A border should almost always remain a border - the process of unmaking a border is so inherently dangerous that only the most extreme circumstances can possibly justify it.
I guess I’m questioning how much the establishment of “more fixed borders” changes anything. I for one don’t know how frequently the indigenous nations in the Americas had fights over territory.
People being people, my suspicion is that it wasn’t all that different from today: peaceful agreements about who uses what land when, with bouts of violence or negotiation when circumstances changed. Wars take a high toll, so they aren’t pursued for fun, especially when they involve a much larger portion of a nation’s population than they do today.
How would this apply to Europe and Asia, where the land has been conquered dozens of times? I frankly don't see how indigenous people have any more rights to "their" land than say the descendants of any random tribe, kingdom or empire that once controlled Anatolia or England.
cool well I hope China invades your country and puts you and your family in education camps since you seem to think this is cool and good and there's nothing wrong with this.
I can't respond to this specifically unless you give specific links. Sometimes, there are extremely bad comments which we've missed—we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Other times, though, people put extreme labels on comments they don't like, and basically want us to ban everyone they disagree with. Also, no matter where one draws the lines, there are borderline cases that require judgment calls and interpretation, making it impossible to please everyone.
How is what I said racism? It's maybe culturalism, and weak if that. It might have been very sad that Ottomans have once conquered Constantinople, or that Anglo-Saxons displaced Celts and were in turn conquered by the Normans, or that Romans or Arabs conquered Jerusalem and then later after a bunch of other people Israelis have (re-?)conquered it, or that China controls large parts of what was historically Mongolian land after the Mongols used to control a bunch of China, or whatever. The race has nothing to do with it. Wars used to be normal, and still are to an extent, however unfortunate that is. The fact that somebody conquered somebody 200 years ago and broke treaties has no bearing on anything whatsoever.
Or, if you think it does, it's YOUR job to articulate how, but in a manner than can be applied consistently in the general case, e.g. for the examples above.
Even the land that was occupied by what we call "natives" was previously occupied by various flora and fauna. The previous settlers had no right to migrate to the area anymore than the Europeans did.
Maybe no one owns the land then? Owning land by purchasing a title registered in the State's land registry can hardly be a stronger claim than being a nomad wandering through.
A lot of comments arguing about the specifics of land ownership in this thread. I think the point of the website is that it's not our land unless you're indigenous.
Do the Alaskan natives own their land? I ask because they represent a separate and later migration. The original Alaskan natives are no longer around to dispute the matter as they were replaced by those who now are now called indigenous. This is reflected in their languages, which are unrelated to other indigenous languages in North and South America.
Well, the ones who "now are called indigenous" actually do exist and are alive, contrary to popular belief and government intervention. And the point is that they do not own their land, settlers do at the moment, and that indigenous folks have a claim preceding Western style land ownership.
But they just stole the land in a similar manner that Europeans stole the land from Natives. If someone steals your car, and then has that car stolen from them - it would be strange to set up a movement to have the car returned to the penultimate thief instead of the original owner.
Migration in prehistoric times does not equate to the well-documented genocide and theft by Europeans, and you're misapplying a principle in order to marginalize the rights of an oppressed peoples who are, as I mentioned earlier, still alive.
To Godwin this, imagine that Nazis succeeded in exterminating every Jew in the world. Would it then be acceptable for the Nazis to keep their gold/jewelry/art/etc?
If the answer is no, would the Nazis have the right to keep their gold/jewelry/art/etc if they waited a few hundred years until the world noticed that the Holocaust happened?
Bad example. Jewish people got Israel as a misbegotten reparation. Indigenous people who are again still alive and deserve reparations are getting their rights and treaties trampled instead. Their claim to the land is not a thought experiment.
I'm confused. A lot of these areas overlap. Are these areas of land ownership or something else? How do you have multiple owners of the same physical location? In which period of time?
In my area, there are several bands of Chumash -- Ventureño, Obispeño, etc -- all of which are the same nation, but different bands. Both are shown on this map, the set and its subsets.
But, of course, some people would have a territory, then another people would come in and claim it as their own territory because the other people weren't "using" it. This started well before 1492 -- and based on nature, probably began long before the Homo genus ever appeared on Earth.
I don't see a time scale on the map. If you go back 18,000 years or so, there were no humans in North America. After that, there was a series of migrations from Asia. Certainly, over time, distinct tribes formed, reformed, and disappeared, over varying areas, until we get the current map you see. It would be nice to see a time scale reflect this morphology.
I'm not sure how indigenous cultures are represented in North America today but the map shows Iwi in New Zealand that are present day, not a historical artefact.
The title is wrong here, as the map includes Australia and some of South America.
I'm a little sad this doesn't include anything in Africa, Asia, or Europe. What about the Zulu Kingdom, conquered by the British? How about what Rome did to all of those Etruscans? What about the Uighurs and Tibetans?
False. There’s no such thing as “squatters rights” or anything or a statute of limitations. At any point the neighbor can sue you to protect his land.
Further, when either property is sold, a survey will show the discrepency.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that this isn't true - the timeframes and exact rules differ by jurisdiction, and there are many actions an owner can take to prevent it, but there absolutely are scenarios where you can build on property that is not your own and end up owning it.
Depends where you live. You and GP are quite possibly speaking true of your respective locations but overlooking the rest of the world.
In some jurisdictions, you are correct: the state owns all land, and purchase agreements are subject to consent of the state. No bill of sale, no rights. I know that the province of BC in Canada is one such jurisdiction. Irony here being that much of indigenous land in nominal BC is unceded and was stolen without even the pretense of a treaty.
On the other hand, I previously lived in Washington state, US, where one could legally take possession of land after 7 years of use and maintenance (as long as it isn't state or federal land), and as I understand it, a hefty chunk of paperwork.
I live in Washington, and I have been personally involved with encroachments on my property in two separate cases, and I personally know of others.
The various lawyers involved all said the same thing - if you don't put a stop to encroachments, you lose the property.
In one case that I knew about, the property owner moved the surveying monument 10 feet to increase the size of his lot. He built his house. 20 years later this was discovered, but oops, it was his land now. In another case, the neighbor did indeed build a garage on a friend of mine's land. My friend called the police, who told him it was a civil matter, not a police matter. So one day, he rented a bulldozer and demolished it. The neighbor called the police, but my friend showed the police the garage was on my friend's land, and that was the end of that. He figured the dozer was cheaper than a lawyer :-) and he was legally in the clear as long as he did it before adverse possession was claimed.
You might be surprised how often people lie and cheat about where the property lines are. It's worthwhile to have an official survey done for property you're considering buying - it can save you a lot of grief later.
Informationally, it has more layers, including treaties, languages and territories.
It's stewarded by a dedicated [and now native-led] Canadian nonprofit, as opposed to a short-term funded collaboration that whose.land is. Also, it's partnering with other groups like https://nativesintech.org/
Indians entered america approx 8000 years ago. Many were nomadic hunter/gathering cultures, which have no defined territory. They followed animal herds, etc., so a map of their area is very approximate at best.
Recently the oldest skeleton was found, and it was caucasian! Caused quite a stir.
Remember that humans have been around for millions of years, and traveled in groups of around 200 people for most of that time. Organization came much later.
There is no evidence Native Americans originated from the Caucasus regions. We have remains that have been dated to as far back as 12,707–12,556 years BP. Accordingly:
> Paleogenomic analysis of the remains revealed Siberian ancestry and a close genetic relationship to modern Native Americans, including those of Central and South America.[1][3] These findings support the hypothesis that modern Native Americans are descended from Asian populations who crossed Beringia between 32,000 and 18,000 years ago.
There's a straightforward rebuttal to about 90% of the horrible arguments (which is at least half of the comments - seriously, hacker news?!) in this thread.
1. Did [other country that was also previously somebody else's] finish their genocide?
2. Would you prefer that Canada and the United States did?
I know your answer to the second one because I know humans are, eventually, (once they stop pretending that they live in a statistics textbook) usually not assholes. So to the whataboutism, I simply ask: understanding that this is not history, but the present, what the fuck do you think you're advocating?
This is not flamebait. The reservation system is a relic of a time when both the white European settlers AND the Natives saw themselves as separate enough to be unable to live together in a single Nation.
It is time we undo these artificial racial separations.
As for my claim that asserting the existence of Native Land is equivalent to asserting the existence of White Land, well, if we choose to treat people equally, why would certain prohibitions applied to one race not apply equally to others? If we decide that White land is a racist concept, which it is, how can we not apply that same reasoning to everyone else, unless we are racially targeting White people?
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