Hacker News Reader

Comment by waffle_ss | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com