Man of the Hole | Hacker News Reader

Man of the Hole

en.wikipedia.org

125 pointsthunderbong20 comments

> He was buried in a traditional indigenous funeral at the same location where his body had been found in August. His burial place was desecrated by farmers shortly after, leading to renewed calls for permanent protection of the land where he and his people had dwelled.

I just don’t understand such pettiness. It’s one of our worst traits.

I want to give the farmers some benefit of the doubt, and claim they were desperate for the land or their families would starve, but I don't even believe it as I'm typing it.

This is not pettiness, but typical behavior of settler-colonial landowners who view indigenous peoples as subhuman pests unworthy of their land for "using it unproductively." They have already committed genocide against his tribe and will try their best to erase his history to prevent him from becoming a symbol of indigenous resistance. We can currently observe the same behavior on the other side of the planet, with the genocidal settler force desecrating and razing to the ground everything they can find.

I remember trying to speak to my dad about the indigenous genocides committed by the American settlers and he said “that was a long time ago.” And while much can be said of such a response, it’s important to recognize that genocides of various groups and regions have occurred throughout the history of colonization, and before, for hundreds and for thousands of years, they have never stopped, and are ongoing to this day. Such things were not a long time ago. They were in the 1990’s, they are today. They can only be ended by a recognition of and reconciliation with the force inside of us that drives us to ignore the needs of others so that we may have what they possess. We must recognize the humanity in all people.

Carl Sagan said “It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent.” [1]

Maybe reconciling with these beasts of our nature, growing up and becoming more far seeing and confident, will be a part of that process.

[1] https://haveabit.com/sagan/earth/

My indigenous partner likes to make a quip: when someone mentions “the apocalypse” he asks “which apocalypse?”

Reminds me of the book I read “The Culture of Make Believe” about how we pretend the world is different than it really is. It has a chapter called “Holocausts” and notes that in US culture we tend to think there was just one, but there have been many.

Yep, it's very important to recognize these things still happen today and are not remnants of the past. It was maybe a few ago that people were being sold into slavery somewhere in Africa. There's something like 30-40 million people trafficked worldwide, not sure how many are sex slaves or how many are children. I think we're all aware of what's happening in Ukraine and Palestine. For those of us living in the United States, it feels like we may be just months away from living in an fascist authorization dictatorship... of sorts.

The problems of the past are very much still with us today.

If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend you to read "Las venas abiertas de America Latina" by Eduardo Galeano. All the atrocities committed by the spanish crown, and how they literally emptied America of its richness (in all senses). And yet to this very day we teach kids a fairy tale about how Colombus with its ships discovered America. And I don't think it was that long ago.

Thank you for the recommendation! I also learned a lot about Columbus’s atrocities and greed from this apparently well-researched YouTube video on the subject:

https://youtu.be/OaJDc85h3ME

He was truly an exceptionally brutal, evil, vile, and selfish person with no regard for the humanity of indigenous peoples.

> confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent

Sounds like a good description of some of the most villainous species of science fiction. Or members of our own species.

Are there any theories at least about the purpose of the holes? There didn’t seem to be many in the Reddit thread from earlier today

The article mentioned possibly being animal trap, hiding yourself or spiritual.

But honestly seem like just guesses.

If they were in his actual dwelling(s), then animal trap seems unlikely -- most critters would shy way from the smell of human, I'd think.

It's very sad as it sounds like some organization built up trust with him and that probably led him to being less cautious and killed by other people (because how he would tell the difference).

To let be or to interfere I guess is always a lose lose choice...

It doesn't seem like he was killed, or at least the article doesn't mention it. He may have poisoned himself (if found ornamented)? Very sad anyway.

Interesting, from the summary it sounded like gunmen were the issue

> After surviving a further attack by armed ranchers in 2009, he was found dead in his home in August 2022.

guess I made a wrong connection

To be fair to you, that sentence was very awkwardly phrased. Considering that’s a 13 year gap, they should really be 2 separate sentences.

I tried separating the sentences but an editor reverted my change.

Do you have any reasons to suspect he was killed? The article says:

> He was found "lying down in the hammock, and ornamented [with macaw feathers] as if waiting for death". There were no signs of violence or any other disturbance before his corpse had been discovered by FUNAI.

The Prime Directive in real life

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