Comment by rodric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rodric | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I can appreciate this, it was not the historical point of view of the people calling themselves Americans.

“What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

~J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, 1782 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/letter_03.asp

Does it matter much if they called themselves American? The tribes and nations on the continent were certainly more related to each other than to the arrivals from other continents. Just as European tribes and nations were more related to each other than to faraway peoples. And African tribes and nations.

The "American" described in your quote there by Crevecoeur is not an American in any ethnic sense. Any modern non-native person calling themselves an American, can only do that in a cultural and ideological sense. Which is of course immensely strong by itself. Just as Catholic, Protestant, Communist, and other non-ethnic labels people have identified with.

"American" is a poor demonym because "America" is both North and South America. USian would be a better fit and "Native USian" would naturally include all indigenous and non-indigenous people in the US.

If you’re following this line of reasoning then even the “native” Americans aren’t actually native because they migrated here too. Further, the concept of “America” referring to what is geographically the United States today isn’t a concept that was held be tribal peoples. It wouldn’t have ever made sense to describe them in this context as the original Americans because they never held such a concept themselves.

Also, tribal peoples, whether that’s in Europe or elsewhere are defeated and destroyed and swallowed up by other tribes and civilizations and over the long arc of history lose the status of being original as they are absorbed into a new entity. You can’t describe or study a Roman people as if they are “native” but not extended that same viewpoint to the modern day United States, for example, because both have absorbed other peoples who were native.

America is a real physical landmass. Two actually. "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.

Otherwise we have to argue that dinosaurs didn't exist, because they had never heard about Pangea.

> Also, tribal peoples, whether that’s in Europe or elsewhere are defeated and destroyed and swallowed up by other tribes and civilizations and over the long arc of history lose the status of being original as they are absorbed into a new entity.

Well it's not true, because of genetical heritage. It still exists, and now in modern times we can study the human genome better than ever. It is messy, it is overlapping, but it's not unworthy of study and curiosity. They weren't swallowed up and disappeared, genetically speaking. Very rarely would a genocide be complete, because conquerors would take the women at least from the conquered.

Being ethnically Roman was not the same as being a Roman citizen or Roman subject. The tribes which ethnically were Roman can be found listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_tribe

Here is more about Roman citizenship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship

Just like in ethnical nations today, you can become a citizen by virtue of birth ethnicity, or by other procedures. And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.

> America is a real physical landmass. Two actually.

America refers to the United States of America in virtually all context in the everyday English speaking world.

> "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.

Let’s put it another way…

The people who live here now are the natives over the long arc of history. You’re only focusing on a small sliver of time in a very constrained historical environment.

If you say the native Americans as they are called are the only “real” natives so to speak you have to apply that standard everywhere. And if you think that the disruption of native lands in the past was bad, you’d also have to believe that continuing to bring more people to America is also bad, ergo immigration to the Americas is immoral.

> And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.

This is untrue in the western world, specifically the Anglo-American world. It’s difficult for most of the world to understand our societies and I think this is a good example of how things get confused. I can’t, as a white American, become “Chinese”. But a Chinese man or woman can certainly become an American and belong to our nation. There is no question about that.

There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

Also, your notion that certain people are inherently tied to certain places is only true if you accept arbitrary cutoffs for arrival time. The Lakota migrated from the Great lakes to the western planes in the 1700s, but it's hard to imagine them without their horses (which came from the old world) and bison (which they never would have hunted in ~Michigan). More time has passed since the arrival of the Spanish in Tenochtitlan, than between the arrival of the Aztecs (who probably migrated there from ~Arizona) and the Spanish. And of course, All the Native Americans descended from tribes that crossed the Bering straight from Russia, and every human's ancestors lived exclusively in Africa for a very long time. Anglo Saxons, Gaels, Norse, etc were constantly on the move within Europe before any of them crossed the Atlantic. Israelites displaced Canaanites before being displaced by Romans, then Arabs, then "coming back" after WW2. At any point in time, in any location on earth, the ethnic groups considered "native" almost certainly descended from people who were not considered native within at most a couple hundred years. Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

English doesn't help. I realize I myself used the term "Native American" while trying to argue that the term is out of date, but our language just was never equipped to describe these kinds of long term, highly chaotic processes.

This is exactly the kind of interesting and wonderful discussions which people loose out on when they claim that the entire world is a melting pot and no ethnicities exist etc etc. Which you still do, even though you have good knowledge of anthropology.

There is nothing arbitrary about making cutoffs. It is difficult and undefined and subject to splendid complexity. After all its people we're dealing with here, so of course it is complex. But there are obvious external differences and similarities between people, and denying this takes a level of warping one's mind which would permanently damage the mind. For no benefit to anybody. There's also history, archeological evidence and genetic evidence.

What I notice in this discussion is people demanding exact limits everywhere, and throwing everything away when there isn't any. But there are some very exact limits, and the discovery of the New World is one of those. The people who were there before were more related to each other than they were to the arrivals.

> Many white people can trace over 2 hundred years of ancestry in the new world. To say that's not enough to qualify as "native" is to have an incoherent conception of nativeness.

"Native" isn't any badge of honour. Saying somebody is native to the land while the other is not doesn't mean anything to their qualities.

With the research into people's heritage and history, the goal is to go as far as you can before the mists of time become too thick. Beyond that, there's not much we can do but speculate blindly.

> There is far more human genetic diversity within Africa then there is in the rest of the world combined.

I've heard this before, but it just doesn't match up with what we can see and experience in physical reality. So they've measured in the wrong way quite frankly. The difference between people (everybody in the world) is in their genes, but you can probably not measure just quantitively. Especially since humans share an astonishing amount of DNA with beasts and with plants.

I can paint a house red and a house blue, and then a scientist will say that they are more similar in colour to each other than the red house is to a rose, because he just measures the chemicals in the paint.

Or, to loop back to the core of this conversation. There is no exact definition and clear boundary as to what is a boat and what is not a boat. There is no exact limit possible to define between a person being beautiful or not, but you can still point out a lot of measurements of all kinds, and most importantly everybody knows it when they see and experience it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com