Comment by magicsmoke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicsmoke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If that's the case we would see an effort to reverse those wrongs by reverting all the economic benefit that America gained at the expense of Native Americans. All the land and lives taken, and all the wealth and prosperity they could have generated. The total sum if repaid would probably erase a significant part of America from the map.

So it was wrong. But clearly not wrong enough to warrant erasing America and its wealth from existence. Saying sorry and expressing regret is cheap. Actual action is expensive.

As an aside, I wonder what the psychological effects are from growing up in a nation where the public discourse is all about how the nation was unjustly founded. If a significant part of the next generation believes that America's historical foundations are rotten to the core and that its existence is a tragedy, what happens next?

> If that's the case we would see an effort to reverse those wrongs by reverting all the economic benefit that America gained at the expense of Native Americans.

Note that, like LatinX, Native Americans is something only white people say. They call themselves Indians. Activist/government terms usually end up kind of patronizing for some reason.

(And they were called Indians before people from India were called that.)

India has been used in the English language for over 1,000 years, and in Latin and before that Greek for at least 1,500 years before that, along with Indian and its equivalents in other languages.

This was of course well before anyone used the word "Indian" to refer to Native Americans.

Even before America was discovered, "the Indies"/Indians/indios was used to refer to Ethiopia as well as India. They didn't have very clear ideas of where things were but that also suggests it was just meant to refer to any tropical area.

Or you can use backformation and say it's short for Indigenous.

The name India literally derives from the Sindhu river (aka the Indus river), which became Hindu in Persian (S->H is a common sound correspondence between Sanskrit and Persian), and dropped the initial H when getting into Greek. It was also used to refer to some areas beyond India -- (i.e, modern Indonesia or the "East Indies", but the origin of it was from civilizational India.).

I've never heard of India being used to refer to Ethiopia. Ethiopia itself is a phrase of Greek origin, and dates back at least to Herodotus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com