ah yeah "terra nullius", a pretty good excuse if you want to justify colonial occupation of lands that don't belong to you.
It's a horseshit excuse sorry.
It's a horseshit excuse sorry.
If there are overlapping disagreements between Indigenous Nations about land title, as there are with all sorts of modern nations around the world, there are lots of modern mechanisms to settle that.
Not sure how any of this has any relevance or should be used as a justification colonialism and for pushing people off their lands.
* As I've mentioned in another comment, true "indigenous" Alaskans are no more, having been replaced by an unrelated group of people in a later migration to the Americas.
> continual occupation is just not a thing
I’m not sure where you are getting this. At what point is an occupation over? When the genocide is complete? That hasn’t even happened yet, NA indigenous people are still alive. Do you just expect they to submit, assimilate, and abandon their culture completely?
My argument is not that europeans are in the right because they inflicted upon others what those others inflicted upon still others. My argument is that nobody has a clean record. If your position is that what happened to natives is wrong, then what the natives did to each other is also wrong.
>I’m not sure where you are getting this. At what point is an occupation over?
What I'm saying is you will be hard pressed to find a territory that has been continually occupied by one group since the arrival of humans. At some point each territory was probably wrested from some prior group via the usual means. Exceptions apply. Isolated islands come to mind.
They "weren't even given citizenship" because they were considered citizens of their own sovereign nations, not because the US gov't were acting maliciously. For this reason they also weren't required to register for Selective Service to be drafted into WWI (despite this, many non-citizens waived their exemption and registered anyway - maybe they didn't hate the country as much as some might suppose).
I don't know what you expect the US gov't to do when attempts at peaceful coexistence between white settlers and the natives tribes failed. Run away as far as the Apache would chase them (to the Atlantic)? No, they went to war as needed, and even allied with other tribes in doing so.
Given that you're the first person to bring this up, accusing your parent for "brushing this off" is not coming across as an attempt to have a good faith conversation.
> and the concessions given to Native Americans after they were conquered (namely their own sovereign nations and plenty of carveouts to hunting and other laws so they can continue to practice their culture unhindered).
The US often didn't honor the terms of these concessions.
> The US often didn't honor the terms of these concessions.
I agree, not in all cases. But before we could talk reasonably about this we needed to swing the conversation back from the idea that the US gov't was operating a land-stealing, genociding steamroller (and for apparently no reason at all, no less).
No he didn't. To put it bluntly, you're reading things that aren't there. We're all welcome to our interpretations of comments, but untentatively asserting your interpretation is a component of "not having a good faith conversation".
> Neither was it a conflict uniquely faced by the United States - read up on the history of Mexico and the Apache for instance.
And why the need to point this out, when the comment you responded to never suggested otherwise? There is, in fact, implicit acceptance of other genocides in the comment.
> But before we could talk reasonably about this we needed to swing the conversation back from the idea that the US gov't was operating a land-stealing, genociding steamroller (and for apparently no reason at all, no less).
Who exactly are you talking about here? The comment in question never implied "apparently no reason at all".
You're arguing against a nonexistent entity. And the point of my responding to you is to get you back to the reality of the thread, not an imaginary conversation that others here cannot see.
Of course he/she did. The entire premise is based on the notion that the nations before the US were somehow just and the US was not, despite the fact that they were all built on just as much violence and conquering.
"It's so obvious I cannot point where the person said it".
> The entire premise is based on the notion that the nations before the US were somehow just and the US was not
The commenter in question both implicitly and explicitly has said that is not the premise.
I can only repeat what I said to the other person:
> You're arguing against a nonexistent entity. And the point of my responding to you is to get you back to the reality of the thread, not an imaginary conversation that others here cannot see.
No, it’s not. It’s based on the premise that massacres and the legislative dispossession of native lands is wrong. I don’t see why this is a controversial stance
> despite the fact that they were all built in just as much violence and conquering
This is a false equivalency. There was never a single group which built a transcontinental empire, killing, displacing, and ultimately forcing assimilation upon all other groups using organized state violence, all in a few hundred years. The tribal violence in some regions on North America just isn’t the same thing and doesn’t justify the genocide. Even if it was the same thing, it still doesn’t justify genocide. Justifying genocide with genocide doesn’t really make much sense to me
Suffice to say it was complicated. I was reading about the tribes that aligned with the Confederacy and the fate of black slaves owned by tribes post-Civil War.
Last century, Israel was created after a war. The Ottoman Empire was partitioned. Tibet was claimed by China. Germany was split in half and then reunited. The USSR split apart. The US annexed part of Samoa, and made states out of Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawai’i. Carving Africa into lines started in 1880. There are dozens of other examples, some administrative and some violent.
Your claim boils down to “a border is a border, until it isn’t.” How is that different from how it’s always been?
I guess I’m questioning how much the establishment of “more fixed borders” changes anything. I for one don’t know how frequently the indigenous nations in the Americas had fights over territory.
People being people, my suspicion is that it wasn’t all that different from today: peaceful agreements about who uses what land when, with bouts of violence or negotiation when circumstances changed. Wars take a high toll, so they aren’t pursued for fun, especially when they involve a much larger portion of a nation’s population than they do today.
Maybe try to ground yourself in reality and get a moral framework.