You are not on indigenous land | Hacker News Reader

You are not on indigenous land

noahpinion.blog

22 pointspaulpauper6 comments

Interesting points, articulated much better than I could (or dare risk.)

However I don't think the author is particularly familiar with Vancouver despite the example given, in part due to the awkward "Vancouver, Canada" (missing the province is a surefire way of telling someone isn't from Canada) but also because BC is rife with the type of performative land acknowledgements and guilt mentioned in the rest of the piece. The Squamish Nation developments are fantastic and I support them wholeheartedly. But they are a minority case in a sea of government-endorsed (mandated?) performative gestures.

Another thing worth pointing out, the US Homestead Act which parted out most of the Western US, was one of the greatest and most egalitarian wealth transfers in all of human history.

Sure, it wasn't egalitarian enough - it went to mostly white families. But in the bigger picture, it distributed political power of landowners in a way never before seen, and we all (native tribes included) reap the benefits to this day.

> the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people.

Except for all the land we paid for.

It's also missing that the vast majority of indigenous people in the Americas were dead from smallpox, and then conquest by the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English long before the "US" was a thing, or remotely close to being one. The US such as it was did a lot of terrible things to the scattered and shattered remnants of the natives, but the primary actions leading up to that, the majority of death, destruction, and slavery occurred long before.

This might seem like a nitpick, but I think it isn't in the context of an article making a point about "institutions."

"the United States is stolen land that should be given away"

is a self-disparaging comment - it only works when you're lying.

Just like "Oh, don't mind the mess" bridges the tension when your place is basically clean, "Take our country back" has social meaning so long as you don't mean it and no one believes you.

So, basically he wants to do everything that was in the ACLU post that the article started to critisize....just now he gets to whine about 'the liberals' while doing so.

Gawd, these hate filled people are insufferable.

The author conveniently forgets that Natives had no concept of land ownership, only land use. Stop using the land and you no longer had any rights to it - it wasn't something 'passed down'.

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