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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

There's a leftwing trop that the way to get attention and bring about change is to take charge of the words in the conversation. It goes back to an influential book called Keywords for Radicals. In this specific case the argument is that '[City or town] is their home, they just don't have access to housing' - which is true enough in that people who are homeless often still have strong social and community despite finding themselves living in a vehicle or on the street.

Trying to redefine the conversation by changing the wording seems rather clumsy and inept to me, but also your objection it in overly pedantic. You can just keep using 'homeless' (as I do) and simply ignore side arguments about the semantics.

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> It goes back to an influential book called Keywords for Radicals

... That book was published in 2016. Semiology has been around since at least the late 19th century (and can be traced back much further than that). Foucoult's approach to studying language and words through their genealogy and Derrida's contributions to literary studies were both big in the late 20th century. And feminist scholars from both analytical and continental traditions have been pointing out that language isn't neutral for forever. Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony was done in the early 20th century.

Any of these would serve as better starting points for when leftists started focusing on the relationship between power and language. Not sure why you found this random book to pick on but it seems like you're missing some serious context here

It's more than just the "leftwing" that does this sort of thing it has been going on for a long time. Keywords for Radicals appears to have first released in 2016. "first published April 12th 2016"

I'm sorry, I mixed up the title with that of a different work (though I believe inspired by the one I had in mind). The work I was referencing is called simply Keywords and dates from 1976.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keywords:_A_Vocabulary_of_Cult...

The latest effort I've come across is very much a right wing effort. Trying to rename Native Americans as First Immigrants.

I detest any renaming such as this, and this is compounded here, as most native Americans were certainly not "first".

Most archeological evidence I've read up on, shows those we call native americans, to be only one of a multitude of immigrant waves.

And yes, their arrival displaced those already here, sometimes violently.

Every beast and creature wars, and competes, for territory. Humans are no different.

"Immigrant waves" ... probably not. Reaching the Americas from Asia, Africa, Europe by sea is probably not impossible and likely happened more than we tend to imagine, but was still extremely challenging. There has probably not been a multitude of immigrant waves.

"Normal patterns of within-continent human migration" ... sure. My Hopi neighbor still (jokingly) calls the Dine (Navajo) "those Athabascans" (referring to the people of what is now British Columbia who migrated to what is now the US soutwest in the 1400s).

No only is there the sea, and the artic route, but with water level drops, immigration happened via land corridors, during the ice age.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

This ice age lasted about 100k years, which is perhaps 1/3 of the time modern humans have ever existed.

Multiple peoples immigrated during this time.

There has probably not been a multitude of immigrant waves.

Archeological evidence says otherwise.

I do not believe there is any solid evidence of multiple waves at this point. Happy to be shown wrong on this.

It is still up in the air when the land bridge to Siberia was open, when/if it was used, how often it was used, and how far those who crossed it migrated in any given time interval. The information I am most familiar with suggests likely low-single digit migrations via this route (if indeed it happened at all).

The "arctic route" is not a suggestion I am familiar with.

To be fair, I think you need to read a bit more here. I was going to provide links, urls, but quick Google searches (for example), cite theories re: people living on the land bridge for countless generations, and why not? Why wouldn't people live there?

It was land, right on the ocean, and they've found evidence under water of people living at the end, of this being the case.

And if people are living on the bridge, why on earth would they just stay put. For 100k years of time?! Even if the land bridge was only open for 10% of that time, that's more than all recorded human history!

But beyond this, I'm baffled that you haven't heard of the artic route. How do you think the Inuit got where they are today? Artic people just lived in the artic, and didn't care if it was some future country called "Russia" or "China" or "Greenland", but just wandered where ever they wanted.

But what I find baffling is that there is the concept of "one wave". What does that even mean?

Was there a group of people in a boat, and they crashed on the shore, and the entire massive population of all of North and South America arrived from those dozen or so peoples?! Because that's "one wave".

Or was there an old civilization, 10k year ago, 100k years ago, 200k years ago, and all the people came by boat then, and then just... what... no one ever came again ever? For 100k, 200k years?!

There has never been a single wave, a single point, ever! Why do people believe this? I'm genuinely baffled here.

It being difficult, vastly underestimates our ancestors.

My only thought is that perhaps you grew up in a Mormon household, and believe that all the peoples here are of a single lost tribe of Israel? Or maybe you were taught in a more traditional public school, back when people were still hung on the idea that the Earth was 6k years old, so of course, naturally, there was only one wave of Natives!

A lot of narrative about native americans was crafted with theology in place. It's time to disown that.

A "wave" for immigration/colonization purposes typically describes a period of somewhere between a decade and a century, during which "significant" numbers of people from one place arrive and remain in a different place. The "wave" that occured post-Columbus also wasn't a single wave, but had several somewhat discrete "waves" within it: the initial Spanish settlement starting in the early 1500s and ramping up across the 16th century; then the English starting to arrive on the eastern seaboard during the 17th century. At that point, migration by sea was sufficiently easy (not easy!) that from that point forward, it is hard to separate out distinct "waves", and we simply have 200+ years of steady migration towards the Americas.

So now to go back in time: the issue with the "they were on the bridge, so obviously they moved south" model is that it is one thing to live on or near the bridge (which they clearly did), and something else to migrate thousands of miles across an essential arctic landscape with little/no access to food. This has raised some questions among paleo-archeologists about whether the people who crossed the open land bridge ever did actually migrate substantially further south or not. The consensus that I read seems to still veer towards this being "likely", but not a certainty.

The alternative (or parallel) pathway is to arrive by sea. And yes, it is absolutely possible that the "entire massive population of all of North and South America" could come from a dozen or so people. To think otherwise, as you put it, is to "vastly underestimate our ancestors" :)

Of course, that's not saying this we know this to be true, although the genetic variability of indigenous Americans, last I read about it, does seem to point to a very narrow origin. This could also be explained by many different settlings originating from the same source population, so this is also not a decided question.

The Arctic route that you still haven't really described goes from where to where? Most people would associate the land bridge with "the Artic", so the most common version of "the arctic route" would be "from Siberia to Alaska", but you seem to be referring to something different. As far as I know, it is not currently well understood when the peoples who live in the Arctic arrived there (archeology looks a little different in that sort of landscape).

What I would say to all of this, is that the length of time is key here. And also that the ice age, plus the jungles of more southern regions, would be exceptionally good at scrubbing smaller human group evidence.

People have known how to salt meats essentially before modern humans. But regardless, fish keeps easily, and dried fruits and nuts are very packable, and simple to make:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican

It is beyond simplistic to throw food stores on a two-pole travoline, and drag it behind you. Even more trivial to do so with a sleigh.

Traveling "great distances" without food, when people can stop and fish, or hunt seal, is to me strange, especially when food stores do exist for travel.

To put this another way, virtually every primitive/low tech society we have found, has shown signs of food storage.

So I don't get the "but it is hard to travel" long distances argument.

The artic route is just people wandering around the artic, over the pole. Again, stored food and summer temps.

But that all said, I go back to the timefame. Hundreds of thousands of years, for modern humans, to make it over and over again to fresh territory.

From where I sit, this timeframe alone makes a very strong argument, a third of a million years, which requires proof that it was not difficult, but literally impossible to make the trip.

I would find it beyond bizarre if there were not thouands of "waves".

> I would find it beyond bizarre if there were not thouands of "waves".

How would you account for the narrow genetic variability within indigenous American populations?

I sincerely doubt such statements, for they are often predicated by pre-derived assumptions.

Eg confirmation bias.

One example? Having a close to extinction event, doesn't invalidate that prior waves existed.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...

EG, this potentially happened with populations seen in the old world, so there is no reason to presume differently for the new.

And there is no reason to presume it only happened once, eg near extinction.

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