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Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

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Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#231

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

rexpop wrote: post #205
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

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.

I'm sure you understand why this sounds suspiciously like a claim that there is no end.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#232

Post by thethethethe »

kortilla wrote: post #229
BeetleB wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> No he didn't. To put it bluntly 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

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#233

Post by s1artibartfast »

neonate wrote: post #220
s1artibartfast wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is one allowed to hear from the heart and then disagree, or is disagreement evidence that someone didn't try hard enough?

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 ackn…

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.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#234

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

oh_sigh wrote: post #210
sxv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#235

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

oh_sigh wrote: post #211
jaegerpicker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not different. Such courts exist in many countries.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#236

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jcranmer wrote: post #108
seebetter wrote: post #13

[flagged]

> Human society was beyond brutal then. 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…

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.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#237

Post by dang »

waffle_ss wrote: post #172
dang wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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 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.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#238

Post by dang »

deleuze wrote: post #217
dang wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why are you letting a user named "waffle_ss" post justifications for the mass slaughter of indigenous people?

Please let's avoid dead-end ideological death war here.

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#239

Post by filoeleven »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #164
Tiktaalik wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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?

Re: Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

#240

Post by yellowapple »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #213
yellowapple wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 genoc…

[flagged]

> 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.

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