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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

In the California part, most of this area is already parkland. Redwood National & State Park, Del Norte Coast State Park, Tolowa Dunes State Park.

The Resighini Tribe is about 40 people, Tolowa Dee'ni is about 110 people. The biggest one is Cher-Ae Heights, 130 people. The largest tribe in the area, not part of this announcement, is the Yurok, around 3000 people. So this is just a small subset of the local indigenous groups making this declaration.

These smaller tribes talk about conservation and the environment, but their main activity is running this casino:

https://www.funattheheights.com/

I do think it is important to preserve the natural beauty of Northern California, but I think the state and national park systems are doing a pretty good job of it, and I wouldn't want to turn the parks over to some local casino operators.

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Wow this is an incredibly grim line of argument:

* These are tiny tribes [because the United States committed genocide on them, stole their children to be raped, tortured, and murdered en masse]

* These people are just casino operators [because the United States made their food supply extinct, banned them from any valuable land, and ultimately confined them to concentration camps on the worst plots of land we could find]

* Therefore, it just makes sense that the United States retain total control over this final plot of land

It’s not clear to me how we should handle this history and how it should bear on present day concerns, but the argument that effectively “we were close enough to a successful genocide that we might as well not pretend otherwise” is pretty astounding.

Your first bullet point here is basically entirely fiction, none of those accusations are factual.

The small number of people relevant to this land-grab are, very literally, casino operators. This wasn't a general commentary on Indian casinos, this is literally people who were born into the privileged position of inheriting generational wealth and privileged legal rights.

If you ignore that you've been conditioned through years of propaganda to see an overly simplified and exaggerated system of "Indians good, European immigrants bad", then this gets trickier when you realize you're basically arguing in favor of some trust fund kids to get more powerful because of who their great-grandparents were, a system which I'm confident you'd oppose if it were a different set of kids born feeling entitled to land, wealth and political power.

I wish I could remember the name of the documentary I watched about youth in one of the Klamath tribes. It would certainly change your perception of "people born into privilege". That may be true for a small number of people, but not the majority.

> The small number of people relevant to this land-grab are, very literally, casino operators. This wasn't a general commentary on Indian casinos, this is literally people who were born into the privileged position of inheriting generational wealth and privileged legal rights.

Sure… downstream of a genocide. I’m not saying the rights aren’t complicated or they aren’t casino operators. I’m saying both of those are a direct consequence of genocide.

> Your first bullet point here is basically entirely fiction, none of those accusations are factual.

No, it’s really not. Did the boarding schools not exist? Did the reservation I was born in not exist? Did the one that I grew up next to with suicide rates 2x any nearby district not exist? Are the migrating megafauna still roaming or are they extinct or so close to extinction they must be protected? Are the rivers still flowing or have they been dammed?

I think this misses the point and is honestly derogatory toward these tribes. They are the ones with the ancestral rights and knowledge to manage the land. They had vastly different strategies than we have implemented that more effectively preserved species and conditions for far longer than us. Painting them as merely profiteers without acknowledging that we are the ones who have taken everything they had and forced them into second-class citizenship in our capitalistic society is perpetrating the same colonial violence.

>They are the ones with the ancestral rights

This doesn’t appear to be the case legally speaking.

>and knowledge to manage the land.

Why do you assume this? Because of their heritage? Americans didn’t move in yesterday, they’ve also been here for centuries and these environmental issues are pretty recent in comparison. You seem to be making a gross assumption here and playing along with their political ploy. Not saying they want the resource wealth but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an incentive to play up the environment for their own territorial gain.

>This doesn’t appear to be the case legally speaking.

How can you defend injustice toward them using the very legal system that has subjugated them?

>Why do you assume this? Because of their heritage? Americans didn’t move in yesterday, they’ve also been here for centuries and these environmental issues are pretty recent in comparison. You seem to be making a gross assumption here and playing along with their political ploy. Not saying they want the resource wealth but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an incentive to play up the environment for their own territorial gain.

It's what I was taught in my forestry program at Cal. Native American strategies that included routine prescribed burning worked better to replenish the forest than ours of absolute fire suppression that has led to more intense and out-of-control fires that decimate forests and their wildlife, for example.

I don’t think we do fire suppression because we are too dumb to understand that unburned materials will build up. We do it because people live everywhere and it is challenging legally to tell people to evacuate their homes because we need to do a controlled burn.

No historically we were too dumb. Prescribed burns were a “revolution” in fire management (1995 in the US)

What is an ancestral right?

If you pee on a section of ground before anyone else, it becomes intertwined from your DNA and anyone sharing above a certain percentage of your DNA has rights to that land, knows more about the land, and can dictate what other people do with that land. I think it's in the Constitution or the Bible or something. </s>

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