There's Gold in the Hills | Hacker News Reader

There's Gold in the Hills

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32 pointsgmays12 comments

“It didn’t take long for me to discover that these lands were systemically stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism.”

Everyone is playing by the same rules…this includes Natives and their own capturing of soil…this feigned ignorance of the progress of human sentience through capturing land and improving it is deceitful.

The rote narrative that somehow all the Native Americans were some peace-loving Earth shamans is factually incorrect.

>"stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes."

The Comanches, the most powerful tribe in the country, were brutal, vindictive, plundering murderers who took slaves and delighted in killing as a rite. They "stewarded" only by murderous foray 250,000 square miles. Read "Empire of the Summer Moon"

They had no concept of private property because their territory ended right where their massacres couldn't reach, not because of some transcendent and noble ideals.

That's a bit of a catch-22 argument, isn't it? If a history of violence and conquest invalidates land claims, then the white settlers who violently settled North America have no legitimate right to this land, right? But if that history doesn't invalidate their land claims, then you can't really turn around and say that somehow Comanche land claims are illegitimate.

Or maybe you're arguing that there is no such thing as morality in land claims, and it's simply a matter of who is better able to kill and steal, and white settlers just were better at this?

Does anyone have a right to land, except for that which is enforceable by the threat of violence? Why are they called Native Americans? Is all land simply owned by the first foot put there anywhere in the planet?

I'm not defending "white" settlers, or any settlers. My goal is to dispel the intellectually lazy myth this article leads with.

Not the above commenter, but:

> stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes. Through invasions, plagues, violence, coercion, bribery, war, and lopsided deals with the United States government, Indigenous groups and their ways of life were nearly obliterated

This clearly implies that invasions, violence, war, were brought by the US government to indigenous groups.

In reality, their "way of life" always consisted of these things.

It's a clear myth being perpetuated in the language of this article — even in words like 'stewarded' vs. 'stolen'.

It's much like Europe and everyplace else - regular warfare and invasions and vast territories changing hands. The only difference is the people in Europe wrote things down.

(In contrast, very little is known about England for centuries after the Romans left, as the inhabitants were illiterate. Nobody knows if King Arthur existed or not, for example.)

DNA evidence has been slowly illuminating the pre-Columbian history of the North American Indians.

"Empire of the Summer Moon" is a fantastic read. I could hardly put the book down. It would make a great miniseries, and it's all true.

Is it possible that private property and/or violence against humans is orthogonal to so-called stewardship of land? E.g. cultural norms could result in better natural preservation, even if by accident rather than by what a modern person see as a noble motivation.

It is certainly possible. It's also not just possible, but true where some private stewards cultivate beauty (vineyards) and some public lands cultivate destruction (downtown Seattle). Violence takes place on land, but stewardship I don't think is some inherent thing. All animals war over territory.

"The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending."

It still doesn’t excuse genocide and taking over their land.

Aztecs also were no peaceful bunch but it doesn’t make Spain ruining them to the ground good guys.

Is it not merely a coincidence this is on the front page at the same time that the U.S. is proposing to sell off its public lands to those with the deepest pockets?

Maybe, but if so only in a misleading way.

Selling public lands has no bearing on the ability to prospect for and extract minerals like gold. You’ve always been able to do this on public lands. It is in law and has priority over most other land use rights.

There are other private land use rights which are adversely affected by adjacency to Federal land, which may motivate the legislation, it is a real problem. It doesn’t make any sense to sell off most public lands; the regions where this is an issue are relatively small and the legislation isn’t targeted in the slightest.

As an avid enjoyer of these wilderness areas, I find the legislation highly suspect. The given reason is obvious bullshit, and it isn’t narrowly targeted at regions with legitimate land use problems created by the current state.

Also, I know some of the areas covered very well. There seems to be some selectivity for public lands that would make a killer private resort. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. People would absolutely lose their minds if they realized some of the land opened up by the legislation. It doesn’t seem random.

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