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The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

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

#51

Post by atlantic »

b6 wrote: post #26
atlantic wrote: post #14

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?

Violence and war are not unusual historically. But the speed and thoroughness with which a whole continent was cleared of its native inhabitants, and the survivors were subject to all kinds of institutionalized abuse until their culture and traditions were erased, is certainly exceptional, and in recent history only compares in severity with what happened to the aboriginals in Australia.

Moreover, if there was official recognition of what really happened, even now much could be done to redress the original injustice and give these people some closure. Instead, schoolchildren are taught a sanitized version of American history which really adds insult to injury, from the point of view of the surviving natives.

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

#52

Post by arethuza »

whybroke wrote: post #33
b6 wrote: post #7

> 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. Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. What is the author's reas…

If a party owns land the US, by what moral authority can they block others access to it? By what moral authority can they demand rent on threat of eviction? Why wouldn't any democratic agency simply have the right to take it from them without compensation? The reason this is a deeply interesting topic is because there are exceptionally strong claims to property rights made in the US and that same property was almost…

"by what moral authority can they block others access to it"

Actually, here in Scotland there is a fairly widespread recognition (apart, perhaps, from some large landowners) that a lot of land was acquired by rather dubious means. I think this provides a fairly decent justification for the "right to roam" we have over most land.

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

#53

Post by mason240 »

sveme wrote: post #11
b6 wrote: post #7

> 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. Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. What is the author's reas…

Replace "America" with "Germany" and "Eastern Europe" and consider whether you would like to uphold your position. The author's point was that the common narrative of European settlers colonizing an empty continent, alternatively European colonists bringing civilization to wild, barren lands has to be extended with European settlers bringing mass extermination to the indigenous population, through many different mean…

>Replace "America" with "Germany" and "Eastern Europe" and consider whether you would like to uphold your position.

That would strengthen the OP's position by anyone who has even a basic understand of European history.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

atlantic wrote: post #51
b6 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Violence and war are not unusual historically. But the speed and thoroughness with which a whole continent was cleared of its native inhabitants, and the survivors were subject to all kinds of institutionalized abuse until their culture and traditions were erased, is certainly exceptional, and in recent history only compares in severity with what happened to the aboriginals in Australia. Moreover, if there was offici…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by Trombone5 »

b6 wrote: post #26
atlantic wrote: post #14

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?

Well, putting aside the ease with which you deflect an prolonged episode of systematic repression based on ethnicity, did you look at the map?

The scale of the forced displacements is literately continent scale! Its probably the biggest settler colonization in history. Compare with the colonization of South America, where the Spaniards aimed to use the existing population for labour, and thus gave them some rights and allowed them stay. Or Africa, where the Colonial powers basically conquered for labor and not for land to settle.

I don't know that the pattern of forced displacement has ever occurred on this scale, and with so high compression. Usually when people are forced from their lands, there are some crappier lands somewhere else they go to. From the map this obviously was not what happened. The tribes where forced into extremely small areas over the course of just a hundred years.

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

#56

Post by ashark »

rayiner wrote: post #22
javert wrote: 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.

Agreed. Maybe it's a regional thing, but I remember tons of time spent covering Native Americans in grades K-12. More than any other topic in history, probably. Meanwhile we barely covered European history outside the Age of Exploration, and the rest of the world received even less consideration.

From your "early 1990s" mention I'm thinking we're around the same age, though, so maybe it was different before, or it's changed since. Or, again, maybe it's regional. Mid Westerner, but didn't grow up anywhere near a reservation, for the record.

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

#57

Post by kylebgorman »

WalterBright wrote: post #8
CalRobert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? Perhaps things have changed since I lived in the US (two years ago) but most people I knew were more or less completely ignorant of pre-colonial American history, and had only a passing familiarity with Columbus' misdeeds. I hope indeed it has changed.

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.

The Mayan rulers carefully documented their vicious wars of conquest (among other things). Some believe the Incas, with their "quipu" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu) recording devices, were on their way to a writing system. But that's really it re: pre-Columbian writing.

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

#58

Post by clavalle »

whybroke wrote: post #33
b6 wrote: post #7

> 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. Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. What is the author's reas…

If a party owns land the US, by what moral authority can they block others access to it? By what moral authority can they demand rent on threat of eviction? Why wouldn't any democratic agency simply have the right to take it from them without compensation? The reason this is a deeply interesting topic is because there are exceptionally strong claims to property rights made in the US and that same property was almost…

>that same property was almost entirely all stolen in the recent past.

Was there some sort of native American title office that the European settlers missed? Was every square mile of what would become the United States occupied, used, and accounted for?

The English were brutal, no doubt about it, but the French, for one, lived for a couple of centuries side by side with many native peoples in frontier areas without forcefully taking land and treating the natives as a population of people to be dealt with on an equal footing. There was plenty of room for everyone and huge areas of unclaimed, un-worked, un-owned land in every meaningful sense of the word.

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

#60

Post by king_jester »

kghose wrote: post #12
trextrex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what the author is saying is that the history taught in schools and colleges should not omit the part about the how the lands were acquired from the native americans.

And the OPs point is that we should not stop there either, because it is an arbitrary point in history. Also, as the number of immigrants increase in US schools, White guilt and other forms of self flagellation lessens. If you are not European, and your parent immigrated you have less of a complex about where the land came from, and are less likely to want to carry some burden foisted on you by some one with a funny…

> It's interesting to me how we finally got rid of Original Sin, but now have replaced this with other, atheistic forms of this, like trying to make our children feel guilty about Native Americans and Slavery. I personally think this is the best way to increase tensions.

Time and time again people like to derail important discussions about the nature of Native American genocide and slavery by claiming this. Acknowledging this history is not about making people feel guilty, it is about understanding how those people are treated today and how their treatment is an extension of this history. The nature of racism and its history and legacy should not be trumped because it makes someone somewhere feel bad.

The best way to increase tensions is to ignore the past and continue to let that past influence how people are treated in the present, both socially and politically.

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