Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America | Hacker News Reader

Whose Land – Indigenous Nations of North America

whose.land

123 pointsguerrilla241 comments

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.

http://dirt.umkc.edu/archives/dirt2003/mar2003/adverse%20pos...

Well, the UK has basically killed adverse possession in the Land Registration Act 2002, so we'll see how that turns out for them.

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.

Edit: I took out a specious allusion to the BLM.

>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 :)

> And by what grounds are they the Bureau of Land Management's?

You may be accidentally engaging in a form of whataboutism.

The GP questioned whose.land's standards when drawing the borders. But I don't think GP asserted that the U.S.'s claims were any more valid.

> I don't think GP asserted that the U.S.'s claims were any more valid.

They've left it up to our imagination what they think is valid.

Edit: After reflecting on your response, I've taken out the offending line.

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.

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.

Who owns the laptop you’re currently typing on?

I would add, the first people to make use of the land.

And just for some additional context, nearly all Native North Americans share the same ancestral DNA.

Should we adjust our maps now too? There's an unused plot of land near my house. That's not the United States?

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).

It's not quiiiite as polished, but I like this website a bit more: https://native-land.ca/

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/

(If anyone feels supportive of projects like this, and otherwise empowering indigenous communities, NativesInTech has a Slack team and is very welcoming of non-native contributors :) https://forum.nativesintech.org/t/welcome-to-natives-in-tech... )

It actually seems to be the same map in both cases. When I click on any territory in OP's map I'm redirected to the page you linked.

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.

It looks like Canada only. If they have anything from the US it must be somewhere other than the Northern Great Plains.

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.

Unfortunately this is a time for history to be oversimplified, and in some cases rewritten.

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.

Yeah, different tribes did wage war on other tribes. The echoes of those conflicts are remembered today.

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.

> a Westphalian continent.

I know the reference you're making here, but for other readers who may not know the history, can you elaborate a bit please?

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.

Neat map!

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.

Agreed, I was thinking that one possible solution to the first issue could be to have a layer immediately sent to the back upon being clicked.

If you build a garage on your neighbor's land, and he doesn't do anything about it, in about 10 years it becomes your land.

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.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/adverse-possession-t...

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.

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.

We do not return cars to dead people.

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.

It is everyone’s land if it is not owned by a specific person or entity. That is what is referred to as the commons.

Does England not belong to the English, given that the Anglo-Saxons displaced the Celtic Britons during the middle ages?

In fact, it is "our" land, by right of conquest. Just as England belongs to the English by right of conquest.

What is the definition of indigenous?

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.

> caucasian!

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzick-1

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.

It seems that this is one of three proposed origins of the name [0] - and only one of two possible meanings of the "miscommunication" hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucatán#Origin_of_"Yucatán"

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 territory of the Hesquiaht is interesting. They seem to have been a largely maritime tribe...

I hope they add more nations at some point. I know of some missing populations in this map.

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.

[0] https://www.whose.land/en/about

[1] https://www.whose.land/en/faq

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_Dakar_address

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?

Nomadic societies, shifting borders, partially shared residence. There are other possible explanations.

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.

Is this project related to https://native-land.ca/ ?

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?

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?

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.

Fragility is accusing anyone who disagrees with you or presents a slightly impure viewpoint of fragility.

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".

It almost as if your definition of ‘hear me’ really means ‘silently agree with me and acquiesce to all remedies that I alone propose’.

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".

“Hearing from the heart”

This is just undefined, non-falsifiable, linguistic drivel that allows you - and you alone - to dismiss any response you dont like.

Which you do.

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

Ok, let’s test that. So how do you decide if someone on a forum who you have never met has either:

1) listened with empathy, but still disagrees

2) ignored your argument, but replied with the same answer.

You cannot. So its just a linguistic device to bully other people in a conversation until they agree with you.

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.

how do you differentiate "hearing from the heart" and "agree with me and acquiesce to all remedies that I alone propose"?

To me that question sounds like asking how I differentiate "eating a pizza" and "petting a cat". They're obviously not the same.

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 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.

You failed to presume that the OP did that and thereafter still came to their conclusion.

Instead, once you realised that the OP had not capitulated to your point of view, you belittled and dismissed it as not listening/hearing

How else does one hear you and then answer: ‘nah you are wrong, and here is why...’

> 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.

> Things need to be properly acknowledged before they can be moved past.

What acknowledgement would right the wrongs of history? What is the appropriate amount of reparations to be paid?

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]

0. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/301242

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.

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

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.

This is relevant to some moral analyses.

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.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/feeding-gods-hundred...

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.

It takes a pretty impoverished understanding of evolution to write off cooperation and symbiosis as strategies for passing on ones genes.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying those are the conclusions many folks on this forum seem to have drawn.

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.

Yes of course. If you lose your property to a stronger person in a fist fight, it is now his property. Who are we to change this ancient wisdom.

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.

The simplest solution is that land ownership shouldn't exist. Land belongs to all.

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.

The difference is that it's seen as an inherent right of the community, not a title that can be freely transferred to the highest bidder.

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.

Humans have not found a more stable normative concept of capital allocation (property) than: "Who got here first."

Well, "who got here with the biggest stick."

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.

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 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.

[1]: https://www.whose.land/en/whyacknowledge

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.

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.

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.

> Do we really want to have separate legal systems based on ethnicity or tribal membership?

And how does one certify identity/ethnicity and why won't individuals claim as many (or as little) of them?

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.

In the exact same way that every country in the world operates. The tribal government sets the criteria that must be met to be a member of the tribe.

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?

The point that Gorsuch made in his majority opinion was that it's not the Supreme Court's role to figure this out — that's Congress' job.

The SC only interprets the law, which in this case referred to a treaty that never repealed by Congress, so the SC ruled that it must be honored.

Clearly this results in confusion, and can't stand, and the court sent a strong signal that it needs to be resolved by Congress.

... which if past practices provide any indication means that the USA will abrogate yet another treaty.

> 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."

> The Chief Justice doesn't agree with you there.

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.

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules...

> certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court

(emphasis mine)

> So it's not the territory that determines jurisdiction

Seems like there is some contradiction here.

If you are a tribal member, you may go to tribal court and be subject to their laws. If you are not, you won't.

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.

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

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.

SCOTUS can't close the door on congress changing the law, though. That's the purpose of congress.

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.

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