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Comment by ecuaflo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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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