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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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?
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".
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.
The concepts of empathy and active listening are well defined. Calling those concepts "undefined, non-falsifiable, linguistic drivel" is completely unsubstantiated.
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.
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 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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.