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The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

aeon.co

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively little is known about pre-colonial history in North America, due to the absence of writing from those times. This is pretty much true of all peoples that did not have writing.

Quite a lot of the history has been written from the stories carried down, and I do believe the central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. (Edit: quite a lot of the old stories are written down, downvoters- I cannot help if you don't value the current efforts. I won't be providing links as there is Google and I have to deal with a damn blizzard)

Europeans destroyed them. It's a crime against history that can hardly be expressed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#42
post #22
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistently ignored? Not at all. We are constantly reminded of this topic these days. It's very popular. For instance, all you hear about on Columbus Day is about how (supposedly) horrible Colombus was, and how people are insulted that we still celebrate him.

Columbus was awful and we should be ashamed for celebrating him. We also learn way too much about native Americans, in some weird cultural guilt trip for past misdeeds. That isn't new--much of my childhood was wasted on learning native American history in the early 1990's.

Wasted? Seriously? If you live in the Americas it's a part of the history of your home. If you think all history is a waste, then sure, but to focus on just the history of the people who lived on a landmass for most of its populated history is a bit inconsistent.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of the history has been written from the stories carried down, and I do believe the central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. (Edit: quite a lot of the old stories are written down, downvoters- I cannot help if you don't value the current efforts. I won't be providing links as there is Google and I have to deal with a damn blizzard)

Europeans destroyed them. It's a crime against history that can hardly be expressed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

I understand that it's simpler to say just "Europeans" instead of "European colonial powers", but before you know it you may cast an unjust collective accuse over an entire continent full of people, many of which had nothing to do with the sins of America's colonization.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#44

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "s…

This argument could be extended to literally any people, at any time in history who explored, conquered, annexed or founded a colony/country on a parcel of land that had been explored or lived on before. Franks, Gauls, Nordic vikings, Indo-Europeans, Phoenecians, Romans. They're all in the same club of explorers, navigators, warriors, tradesman, etc. It's also a major logical fallacy to assign current moral/ethical mores to a totally different time and place in history. "But it was bad that the Aztecs ripped hearts out of innocent virgins." Yeah, it was insanely horrible, but at the time that act kept the earth spinning and the gods happy (in their belief system). Want to go back in time and make the argument against that?

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#46

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "s…

I don't see how either this quote or the article from which it is drawn conflates those those two categories of people. Indeed, it says that we "conquered" the native lands, a word that usually refers to one polity expanding from lands of its own into lands outside of it. It presupposes that native american lands were outside of the United States.

Yes, the European pioneers struggled. Both a military campaign and an agricultural enterprise are very difficult.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#47

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "s…

I agree that "someone else's land" is a bit much.

Saying that "North American Aborigines lived outside the republic" is a bit misleading, because it insinuates that they weren't interested in assimilating, and becoming a part of that struggling, triumphing mass of people that identified as Americans at that time.

More truthfully, leading up to the times when they were forcibly relocated to reservations, they were never allowed in, for the same reasons that black residents of the US had a tough time in those years: the world around them was quite racist and (especially in the case of indians) kleptomaniac.

In fact, many Native Americans tried to assimilate; I remember reading about one enterprising native gent in the early 1800s who had made himself quite rich from trade, had a mansion, the whole nine yards ... until the day came when his town wanted his stuff. So they took it, because America was in large part founded on the notion of repeatedly taking stuff that the natives considered their property.

Acknowledging the massive wrongs committed by this country against those peoples isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I agree with you that we need to be realistic about what conclusions we draw from it. Yes, the United States stole stuff from the indians. No, we're not going to now consider dispossessing the current owners of that stuff; that's akin to, say, questioning the rightness of the origins of modern-day Israel. There's a state there now, so it's moot.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#48

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "s…

The European pioneers did not "steal" a pre-existing democratic republic,

Correct. They didn't steal a pre-existing political entity analogous to their own. What they stole was land and resources. Through force, manipulation, guile, rape, and genocide.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#49

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "s…

This argument could be extended to literally any people, at any time in history who explored, conquered, annexed or founded a colony/country on a parcel of land that had been explored or lived on before. Franks, Gauls, Nordic vikings, Indo-Europeans, Phoenecians, Romans. They're all in the same club of explorers, navigators, warriors, tradesman, etc. It's also a major logical fallacy to assign current moral/ethical m…

So generally, if you buy something from a burglar which belonged to someone else until some act of violence, the law does not recognize your ownership over the property but instead would demand you return it to its original owner.

For practical purposes, it doesn't make sense to give that land back wholesale. But it is relevant to, for example, a Libertarian reading Robert Nozick and claiming that he has a moral right to his property because it was originally claimed legally and then transferred through a chain of non-coersive transactions.

Re: The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

#50
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So presumably, if some foreign power invaded the US next week, violently exterminated most of the population, and herded the survivors into a few tracts of land, you would be fine with that? After all, land changes hands continuously.

Not at all. Nor am I "fine with" what happened to the natives. All I'm asking is, would it be any major abberration, considering human history? Or would it just be: after atrocious violence and savagery, land briefly under the control of vague human entity X now seems to be under the control of vague human entity Y, episode #37,093,840?

It would not be. And all of those instances make Robert Nozick's arguments about the sanctity of property rights as a first principle laughable on every continent. I've yet to find a another debate to which this is relevant.

Well, except perhaps the debate over that native american reservation that the federal government is currently seizing to hand over to a coal mining company.

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