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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain further? I don’t see how you reach your conclusion from your premise. Or, how you reach your premise at all.

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I do want to hear more from more versed people since I hear arguments in favour of indigenous rights that are variations of pro-(insert your ethnogroup) rights. Why are some pro-ethno rights alright and others not? Is it that because some ethnogroups are considered in disadvantage and hence deserving special rights?

I understand the concept Affirmative Action, is this what we are talking about?

"Some ethnogroups are considered in disadvantage" is one way to put it, but it's minimizing it. We're talking about groups that were specifically targeted for their ethnicity: murdered, raped, disenfranchised, and exiled (with no hyperbole).

You can't decimate a group based on ethnicity and then ask why they deserve special treatment for their ethnicity. Further, they're not even getting special treatment- they are having the sovereignty and jurisdiction our _own system_ assigned them validated and reaffirmed after having it unlawfully stolen from them.

You can argue that a tribal government should adopt open, non-ethnocentric policies, but that is their decision to make, not ours.

First of all, there's a complication here in that some Indian reservations were created by the Indian nations themselves (particularly in the Pacific Northwest), while others were created as part of the genocide of Indians carried out by Europeans in the Americas.

So let's focus first on the second category. Imagine that some people from elsewhere showed up, rounded up you and all your relatives and everybody else living within a 400 mile radius, killed 80% of them, then marched the rest to a patch of land you'd never seen before and said "you'll be living here now, it's yours in perpetuity". Then a hundred or more years go by, and the descendants of those people say to your descendants "Well, actually, that land we said was yours isn't really yours, and so the problems with resources, jobs, social order, purpose and meaning you folks have had for a while are going to get worse".

And then someone shows up and says "why should these particular ethnic groups get treated differently from any other?"

If you then turn your attention to the self-created reservations, the story is a bit different. Now imagine that some newcomers show up in your part of the world. They seem ready to fight, and you've heard stories from people who have travelled east over the mountains that they are brutal nasty SOBs. The newcomers say that they are ready to strike a deal, so you decide that this makes more sense. You tell them that they are welcome to come and live in this area, but that you want a treaty that recognizes that you will reserve areas for your own people, along with certain distributed rights like fishing. The newcomers sign the deal, apparently quite happy with it. 200 years later, your descendants realize that the treaty rights are no longer recognized, and that the newcomers have changed everything so much with their logging, mining and dams that even the original terms of the treaty don't much sense any more.

And then someone shows up and wonders why your people should treated any differently from anyone else.

I see, so it's akin to a breach of contract your second scenario. How is this controversial then?

I don't know. Maybe ask the state and federal DOJ's that have consistently fought against enforcement of treaties for more than a century. Or the many Americans who view the treaties as worth less than toilet paper.

Not the original commenter, but what I'm taking from it is that the notion of land ownership was/is foreign to indigenous people. Given that, using the term native land can be misrepresenting native history. I'm not sure what the alternative verbiage would be to describe an area has inhabited by an indigenous tribe. Urban Native Era, a pretty large Native movement/brand, holds the slogan "You Are On Native Land" and I believe they are holding themselves to a pretty high standard of racial sensitivity.

"indigenous people" comprises hundreds of tribes, with distinct cultures and beliefs. Talking about what was or wasn't a "foreign concept" in that context is like doing so for Africans or the kind of Indians that Columbus intended to find.

It's difficult to come to an objective conclusion because so much of what's believed and reported about native culture is often done through appropriate by the descendents of European settlers, rather than the natives themselves, and a lot of mythologizing, fetishizing and stereotyping has taken place over the years as a result. One should at least be wary of sweeping "just so" truisms about historically oppressed people.

Anecdotally, I was able to find some evidence to the contrary[0], and I would expect the actual truth to vary according to tribe.

[0]https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-colu...

[1]https://mises.org/wire/did-indians-understand-concept-privat...

I agree, I do think it is disingenuous to make a blanket statement on Native American's knowledge of land ownership and border establishment. I was merely interpreting what the original comment said.

Given your points, is there a more correct way to define the lands once inhabited by Native peoples?

I strenuously disagree with that part of hhernandez's premise and I don't think "native lands" is actually problematic at all. It's just a generic, umbrella term to me. You could say tribal lands, First Nations lands, aboriginal lands, it's all the same.

It's fundamentally irrelevant anyway to the immediate questions; the land rights they have were assigned by our own system and have been unlawfully disregarded.

It is a very widely accepted notion (among everyone who matters) that ethnostates have no place in the modern world. Hell, it is nearly as universally accepted that the very concept of "ethnicity" is problematic. So why should it not be applied in these cases? Why do some groups deserve their own land, but others don't? Either we all do or nobody does.

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