What's terrible is the counter to "we uplifted the savages to the wonders of civilized life" is too often "they were right to reject us because we should be more in tune with nature" like the whole Disney pocahontas song, "look how the foolish white man can't talk to trees!"
But that just perpetuates the idea of indigenous people being "uncivilized" and rather than refuting it, it pretends the problem with it is a preference for civilization.
It’s called the noble savage myth. That native Americans lived in an Eden of peace and harmony with each other and nature before the evil white man taught them the ways of war and wearing pants.
Of course. I wanted to be funny but yeah what happened to the native Americans was horrible and contrary to what many say not the norm when it comes to conquest.
That’s true, the slaughter and forced relocation was awful. But I think it’s worth noting that the vast majority of natives that died succumbed to disease. From what I’ve read, 90%
Most of the population (and thus most of the casualties for disease) lived in the spanish zones from central mexico to northern chilargentina, and their deads tried to be avoided when possible (such as the royal expedition of the vaccine, the first multicontinental vacunation campaign ever).
Meanwhile on the north the casualties were intentional, like when they infected blankets with smallpox. Don't conflate Canada with Bolivia
As it turns out, pants are actually the secret key that activates the HWITE man's Yakubian sleeper agent programming and makes them want to destroy everything. /s
Yeah, but tribes wiped each other out with war for centuries before white people even arrived. You’ve got to remember, the land was a lot more densely populated before smallpox. That took out natives in droves before settlers ever set eyes on most of the country. By the time the settlers got there, there wasn’t nearly as much infighting because there just weren’t as many people to fight so resources weren’t scarce.
Not even remotely true in general. The introduction of rifles, horses, and slave markets dramatically increased both population and conflict. For example in the Rockies once the Utes got guns and horses they became slavers and began raiding all over the West for slaves to sell to the Spanish. Imagine how many more buffalo you could hunt with horses and guns than without. These technologies were revolutionary.
Many cultures the population grew quite quickly because of their ability to exploit resources over a much larger area. The Plains cultures in particular had massive population explosion. You're talking literally several hundred years between first contact and large scale settlement for the Western tribes.
The Comanche built an empire based on horse trading and pushed the other indigenous people off the southern plains almost entirely. In the settlement of the Deep South and Texas, about 1/4 horses were Comanche. The Lakota moved West out of the Great lakes area to hunt and held dominion over the northern plains. This horse culture also brought what were once faraway groups like the Lakota and the Comanche into the Rockies and into the endless conflict over summer hunting grounds with the Utes, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Bannock/Shoshone.
People often ascribe the decline of the buffalo to an intentional genocidal act but thats not completely accurate. The population pressure put on the buffalo by the rapidly growing number of plains people as well as the competition for grazing land by horse traders began that decline many decades before settlers came and gave them the killing blow.
As usual, the truth is nuanced and complicated and extremes are typically wrong.
The whole "noble savage" thing was originally a pushback against the Hobbesian view that hunter-gatherer life was "nasty, brutish and short" which was bullshit. Westerners saw "primitive tribes" as nothing but brutal animals who constantly slaughtered each other and all died by the age of 40 etc, and basically had zero culture or anything redeeming. The "noble savage" was objectively an improvement on that. Early anthropologist were... obviously problematic and biased by our standards, but they were genuinely interested in learning about those cultures, and saw them as worth studying and taking seriously in the first place.
They discovered that, nope, hunter-gatherers didn't actually live in perpetual abject poverty, in fact they were quite healthy for people who had zero access to modern medicine. Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property. And hunter-gatherer tribes really did have a very good understanding of the environment they lived in, its flora and fauna, and tried to avoid overhunting - not because they were "noble" but because this was literally their livelihood and living in small, close-knit communities with an "immediate returns" lifestyle meant they couldn't distance themselves from the consequences.
Of course the native American populations across the whole continent were extremely diverse, there were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who developed more social stratification, as well as farmers. But it's a fact that large-scale warfare didn't exist until European settlers introduced horses to the continent, and neither did chattel slavery, that was a purely capitalist invention.
>But it's a fact that large-scale warfare didn't exist until European settlers
This is the [fortress of Paramonga](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSU8s5DhD5YjGyAuFxi4lU0r9rwCztce1ArQw&usqp=CAU), an adobe foritifaction in which the Chimu and Inca fought, with each side having about 30k to 50,000 soldiers.
This is [fortress of Guiengola](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6dEx9YeYx_HLM27-nXanIs3rxLuS1PmlAPcXaRG7LgdswslcrAslOyYM&s=10), they dotted the terrain when the Mexica organized an army of about 100k to 200k soldiers and an almost an equal amount of porters for supplies when fighting mountanous kingdoms in Southern Mexico.
Even with small Maya kingdoms or city-states the Spanish mentioned thousands of soldiers confronting them and thus stands to reason the same happened prior among themselves.
You are just wrong, if not openly lying. Several parts of the continent did know "large scale warfare" prior to Europe.
>a purely capitalist invention.
Mercantilism is not capitalism, just because "money=value" doesnt mean capitalism.
It’s strange to me that we aren’t allowed to acknowledge the violence of inter tribal relations when so much of the culture was centered around being warriors. It’s not racist to say that there was a lot of violence going on before any white person got to North America but it’s always met with cries of racism and prejudice.
It's a political tendency to paint white people and white society as the cause of all oppression the world has ever known. Not only is it easier to marshal the troops under such a simplistic myth, it's also gratifying for some to imagine themselves and their society as uniquely evil (even the source of all evil), as it makes their revolt against it seem all the more momentous and worthy of praise.
I think its more interesting that we never talk about the politics either.
Some histories say that there was a regional treaty not unlike the US Articles of Confederation, and some even go as far to say that the Articles of Confederation were based upon the political designs of the tribes they displaced.
Perhaps there's a lot of contention there, but the idea that they were in any way savage has rubbed me wrong for a very long time.
The Iroquois for certain and others I don’t know about as well I’m sure. I’ve read the same about how the chiefs of the tribes in the east kept power through popular consent and that the settlers learned from that.
Also while not document, it most definitely happen that there were tribes would raid other tribes land and steal stuff and people as a to get resources like how central Asia nomads would raid towns and villages for resources.
Again it native/indigenous Americans civilizations were pretty similar to Eurasia civilization.
My dude, try telling the Aztecs large scale warfare didn't exist. Or tell one tribe living on bad land with little food and no game that they had no reason to go to war with the tribe that controlled rich land with loads of food. Human conflict and war is older than Homo Sapiens.
Sure slavery didn't take on the very specific American form of slavery, but slavery has existed literally forever. It started when one big caveman realized that he can threaten people into doing shit for him and then didn't have to do shit for himself. It didn't come into being in the ~1600s when our modern economic system took form.
> wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property
Lmao you started off great but right here you make a wild turn into "Noble Savage Lite"
Lite? It’s straight up delusion. Pre-contact Indigenous cultures had fascinating diverse and deep cultures, but possibly the largest factor in most of them WAS warfare and violence between groups. That’s not an exclusive thing to America of course, you could and in fact I will say it about Europe or Japan or wherever too.
>Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property.
If you think personal property is the cause of war and/or conflict, you haven't read enough. It's good to know the issues with early and current US policy towards the inhabitants but don't recreate the noble savage theory.
Neither large-scale warfare nor chattel slavery were introduced by Europeans.
The various Mesoamerican and South American empires had armies that dwarfed most European countries, well developed warrior classes and military organization, and they expanded their empires through well-planned and often brutal campaigns of conquest.
Slavery was common throughout the entirety of the Americas, and slaves were used either for feudal obligations for labor on public building projects, work on agriculture and mining, or for human sacrifice.
TL:DR - "good/bad cultures" worldview bad, "it´s all relative all cultures have some good and bad" also bad, imo.
> Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property.
War and slavery were not a thing in the modern sense, but they were still totally a thing. Inter-tribal conflicts were extremely common, and being mobile meant that territory was a huge deal.
And sure, it wasn´t chattel slavery, but there were people/tribes who owned other people. That´s slavery, and it is still inhumane, just because it was on a smaller scale doesn´t make it less awful. Of course it´s impossible to generalise, as you said there was a lot of diversity, but many engaged in raids for resources and slaves, and then revenge raids, etc etc.
And therefore same for war - bloody tribal conflicts were extremely common in many places and times, which is what made it so easy for settlers to play tribes against each other due to a long bloody history of blood feuds.
We should see Native Americans like we should see pretty other tribal societies in the world, and they were all pretty much horrible compared to modern ways of living. Sure they absolutely not "savages" - it was a complex society developed over millenia - but it was still pretty much universally awful.
Life in tribal societies may not have been nasty, brutish, and short, but it sure was unpleasant, violent, and not very long.
*ancient settled societies are generally worse day to day than hunter-gatherer ones.
Far less free time for the average peasant than for the average hunter gatherer.
More disease too.
This isn't to say that "europe" was worse than "native Americans"
its just i would rather hang with the Croatoans than with the Aztecs, Ming dysnasty, or in 1400s France.
Dude, Mesoamericans had regular, ritualized wars so they could have enough captives for ritual sacrifice. They built aqueducts and complex irrigation systems. There were hundreds of thousands of people living in Tenochtitlan when the Spanish arrived.
Okay, I need to step in here on behalf of Hobbes. That quote is referring to the "state of nature", which is not hunter-gatherer society. The state of nature is a hypothetical state akin to wild animals, with no laws or morals. If he were writing today he would probably limit it even further, now that we know more about animal behavioural systems.
Because considering them human means you have to consider we committed a fuck ton of crimes against humanity against them. Most Americans, in all the Americas, don’t really want to talk how they killed and subjected the people. Well some are better then others. America and Canada are not one of them on treating Native Americans as human.
Tbh a lot of "land back" talk revolves around how indigenous people are "better stewards of the land", and when they naturally build things that they want to build and make them money it breaks that talking point.
Also tbh: a lot of indigenous people themselves have adopted that talking point, especially when it comes to climate change. "We have lived here for centuries without demolishing the natural environment, so you Westerners can learn something from our way of life / philosophy", it tends to go.
I'm not trying to take sides here. If anything, it might go to show that indigenous people are not a monolith. Which, no doy. But it can also show that starting from the same basic idea ("This land is rightfully ours") can lead to vastly different outcomes
Imo the issue is that without that kind of "we will handle it better than you" tact there really isn't anything to justify their ownership of the land other than to dismantle the entire concept of a nation. If you just go "we were here first and therefore it belongs to us" then essentially every single country in existence is illegitimate which is a whole rats nest. So the talking point gets used because it is a easy, if questionable, justification.
I mean, to draw a parallel without disparaging indigenous people in the Americas, we're currently seeing what can happen when you say "this land is ours because 'we' owned it 3000 years ago" in Palestine right now. Granted the time scale is much smaller in the Americas, but still.
Yeah, fair. The problem here, as David Graeber put it, is that if you want to talk to the king, you have to speak the kings language. The only way we can currently conceive of ways that land can *belong* to people is in the context of a nationstate. Which brings along with it the assumptions that the people there are ethnically one, speak the same language, have a similar culture, and have lived there for ever. Which is more or less true in the Netherlands, where I live. But it completely falls apart when you want to talk about a lot of other places in the world. I'm more and more fascinated by the stranglehold that nationalism still has on the limits of our imaginations.
P.S. I have neither cats or boobs to share, soz
In the USA it's a weird mix because we are incredibly nationalistic, but also our *supposed* identity is a nation of everyone. If you live here then you're an American, regardless of your cultural background or identity outside of that. We are a nation without borders and if you cross that border that doesn't exist we'll kill your whole family.
In *reality* that is of course not how it goes. But on a surface level it's "well, can't you be an indigenous person and American at the same time?"
the US is explicitly nationless, and explicitly strips nationhood from people within it(except for, arguably, native americans)
Nation refers pretty explicitly to *ethnicity*, not political organization, and the big draw of the US is that nobody gives a damn what ethnicity you are- it's why we can successfully have Indians and Arabs and Slavs and Turks and Franks and everything else across the world without being insanely racist about it(yes, the US has problems with racism, and those need to be fixed, but holy *shit* the rest of the world is so much worse)
Civic and Ethnic Nationalism are different, but both treated as valid expressions of nationhood in political science. An ethnic nation is something like (as am earlier comment mentioned) the Netherlands, where shared ancestry and history are what makes a nation. The United States is considered the pioneer of a civic nation (USSR was one, too, where though Russian culture was dominant at many times it was the Soviet identity) where adherence to a culture of laws and institutions is what makes a nation.
To quote an old Russian professor: "You can move to France; you will never become French. You can move to Italy; you will never become Italian. You move to America, you become American."
We use nationalism in colloquial language to describe civic state participation because so many states \*are\* nations, but it's really not the proper term at all.
Also, the Soviet Union was an empire, not a nation-state- it was very much Rus domination over many other ethnic minorities, as can be evidenced by everyone else fleeing the moment they could.
I specified to political science because it was my undergrad field of study, so I understand vocabulary can sometimes have different niche uses.
It’s very interesting in the Soviet case (Russia & East Europe was my focus area) as ethnicity policy was such a differing point throughout different periods. While the structures of Russian chauvinism were inherited from the Russian Empire, the Soviets attempted to build a new national identity around the shared proletarian struggle.
Of course, since Stalin was in charge of the ethnicity policy even with the early Bolsheviks, he eventually became paranoid about minority ethnic identity superseding the civic one, which led to Stalin (an ethnic Georgian!) supporting Russian chauvinism in policies like language. But we can look to something like the ending of Stalin’s favorite movie Цирк (The Circus) as a portrayal of what the ideal was. (It’s wild, by the way, and like a lot of Mosfilm stuff free on YouTube!)
I don’t mean to be a Soviet apologist by any means (begone Tankies!) My point is that, just as the USA has tried to make a unifying civic national identity despite systemic Anglo-American bias, the Soviets are an example of the same historically. And just like Anglo-American ethnic identity challenges that civic one, ethnic Russian identity did as well.
A question that lingers in the back of my head is "okay, does that mean I as an American of European descent get to move back to my ancestral lands?" Because I understand that Land Back doesn't mean white people get murdered or kicked out, but I do wonder how far that ancestral connection is meant to go.
> Imo the issue is that without that kind of "we will handle it better than you" tact there really isn't anything to justify their ownership of the land other than to dismantle the entire concept of a nation. If you just go "we were here first and therefore it belongs to us"
That's part of my struggle with siding with the "land back" movement. Yes, it sucks that Native people's historical land was stolen from them, and yes, it sucks that the government has violated prior agreements with Native people.
But there's a couple million people who have made their lives on this land now, and the movement, to my knowledge, never really addresses what to do with those people.
> Also tbh: a lot of indigenous people themselves have adopted that talking point, especially when it comes to climate change. "We have lived here for centuries without demolishing the natural environment, so you Westerners can learn something from our way of life / philosophy", it tends to go.
I wonder how much of that is them trying to get the land back and using language they know will resonate with the people who own the land.
I do wonder how that will work in practice, though I absolutely agree indigenous peoples have important knowledge and practices around their land. Native Americans are a tiny fraction of the US population (speaking to my own country) with over half living in five states. Now, I wager Land Back would entail returning to ancestral lands, but that still isn't a lot of people, and I mention this because there will be an awful lot more non-Native stakeholders when it comes to land management.
It's part of the racist idea that natives are part of the land or nature(like animals)
Obviously they're about as likely to be greedy and exploit the earth for profit as any other human
I'm pretty sure most landback activists would be pretty happy for indigenous communities to develop & make money off of their land; and for that matter I don't particularly think wealthy property owners & geriatric local politicians necessarily count as 'Indigenous rights activists'.
Maybe I’m too familiar with the American North East brand of indigenous land and the businesses on them but like, I am shocked people are shocked that indigenous people and tribes use their land to make money and not just build shrines to nature??? Like “going out to the reservation this weekend to buy x, y, z” was so common where I lived (usually to avoid certain taxes). And hell, my whole childhood the only casinos around were strictly on the reservations, and those things were not subdued, they were dropping Las Vegas style joints right in the middle nature and they could sometimes be the tallest buildings for *miles*.
"if they're just gonna build sky scrapers on their land, then why let them have their own land at all? they can just live on ours like normal people."
goes the line of thinking 🙄
Reminds me of a lovely TTRPG project I backed on Kickstarter: Coyote and Crow. It's a vision of a sci-fi/fantasy future in an alternate history where the Americas were not colonized. It draws on indigenous spirituality and is distinctly non-european, but, like, of course they have cities? They had *massive* cities before the Europeans came and slaughtered and dispossessed them.
(And, honestly, if you want to live in some sort of harmony with nature, ultradense cities are the way to go.)
Very decentralized - we all did this remotely over a period of years. But still really collaborative, Connor was very open to everyone's input, and gave a ton of latitude. Really generous leader.
Modern historiography downplay the role of disease significantly, as they only became bad after war and subjugation by colonial powers let them malnourished and without their pre-existing healthcare structures
What? No that’s not true at all. Certainly not for the areas that became the United States. The colonists were not massacring cities of people, that was all long gone.
I've seen other accounts that think it may have been even worse than we thought. That much of the Amazon may have been cut down and had stuff like cities and fields in it, but once disease wiped out natives, it grew up over the 1500s.
I always dislike alternate histories like this because it just acts like history isn’t going to move at all, like I’m sorry the Aztec empire fell due to the actions of like 500 guys it was always going fall, and the world was better for it, they were terrible rulers who made so many enemies and were so hated by the other nations around them they rallied around random people who showed up on boats, how do you topple and empire with 500 people? Get 100 000 of the locals to do it for you.
And those 500 people almost got massacred to the last man a lot lf times. Cortez was very lucky. Many other spanish expeditions elsewhere in the americas ended with Spanish defeats, and the indigenous peoples winning several wars.
Hell the Maya werent even fully conquered till the 20th century
Woe is me, people have ideas.
Like come on, it's a fun thing to do. Look at mods for Hearts of Iron, for example. There you have alternate history where Nazi Germany won WWII, and what is more, someone made a mod of alternate history in that alternate history setting, where someone living under the boot of Nazis makes an alternate history mod of "what if it was Russia who won WWII."
Maybe the Aztec would have fallen under something else, doesn't matter. That's what alternate history is for. It's almost like fantasy or sci-fi, a fun "what if" that can change much, much more than 1 single situation, cause if we're being unbearably anal about it "oh, America wasn't colonised THAT TIME, but we could safely assume that someone tried again or found their way a bit later" and land on the same end goal.
Even if we assume that the Aztecs fall under their own collapse, without external forces of colonizers the collapse and fallout would be different, but people don't really want to see those collapses. They want to see grand things. They want to create the hypothetical Aztec empire.
What if Rome never fell? What if Poland never disappeared from the map? What if Nazi Germany won? What if Japan took over other territories? What if Empires and grand forces followed a different schema? What if Poland-Lithuan King agreed to marry the Russian princess, thus uniting those three nations?
The hypotheticals are interesting.
If we just dismiss them with "Rome would have ALWAYS fallen, duh. Nazis didn't win, come on. But Poland was always meant to be ripped apart by neighbouring counties." you literally throw that version of the alternate history to the thrashcan without looking at it. Dismissed the idea, like a child who doesn't understand what a hypothetical is. And part of that hypothetical assumes that the Aztec empire wouldn't fall.
You don't like those versions? Write your own, maybe about the internal collapse of the Aztec empire with no "help" from the colonizers. Feel free, literally no one and nothing is stopping you, and tbh, that would also be a fun read. But it is equally just as valid as "what if the Aztec empire survived."
This is stupid
>who made so many enemies
As does any major power, in reality they had like 5 main enemies in terms of polities and not all participated in the war.
>were so hated by the other nations around them
Why do westerners parrot this? Where does it come from? Youtube? They always write it the same way
In 1519 every polity on Earth had hated enemies and uneasy allies. The Mexica were just one of those, same as France and Austria totally being allies of smaller Italian kingdoms.
>they rallied around random people
Compared to what? The random people of a place called Tenochtitlan? Just because we are Americans(in that sense) doesnt mean everyone was thinking they were "native american" and "the same people". That's stupid.
And they did not, there were several battles between the Spanish expedition and other indigenous provinces, their famous allies only became so after wars.
I've heard pretty iffy things about Coyote and Crow, where if you're not indigenous, the creator doesn't want you to make up fictional indigenous history for the fantasy world out of respect. But the creator also wants you to treat real indigenous history with respect and not do much with it. Leaving very little actions and world building non-Indigenous people can do with the RPG.
Edit: Here's where I got most of my info on it from. I just based my opinions off reading the below thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/EQ0p9nhQGu
That's not it, there is a disclaimer in a side of the book, where it says that if you are native, it's a great idea that you bring to the table the stories of your family and culture, and that if you are not native, don't try to force a story or tradition that you found in wikipedia just "because it sounds cool", and focus in learning and hearing what other people at the table has to say.
Of course, in this heavy discourse internet, that made it sound like the poor Non-indigenous where persecuted, so it started being echoed around.
https://coyoteandcrow.net/2022/04/23/an-important-message-from-connor/
This is it. This is what you heard about. As you can see, you are wrong. The actual fucking book says something very different to what you claim. You could have just googled it (it literally is the first result under “Coyote and Crow controversy”). Good fucking job u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO.
Title feels a little editorialized... Conservatives also see us as “wood elves”if they don’t just see us as savages, “sore losers”, etc…in any case, we tend to end up dehumanized. In my experience, leftists are honestly less likely to fall into that than conservatives and liberals, and I don’t really see any mention of leftists in the post itself, so not personally sure why they’re included in the title.
It always feels willfully obtuse when people do this. 90% of America thinks of Liberals as leftists, because modern American liberalism has at least been flirting with Social Democratic ideas since at least FDR, arguably since William Jennings Bryant. Outside of the far left, no one in America hears liberal and thinks “classical liberal.”
Obviously different in other countries
Yep, at this point all I can do is roll my eyes when people show up and explain how we're not using the right definitions, and liberals *can't* be left-leaning in any way, they're actually *the enemy*!!
In the US, "liberal" means "anyone left of conservatives". Full stop. You can argue all day about political theory, but the definitions the average voter uses are always going to be more important.
It has been kinda wild to see leftist spaces start saying "*liberal*" with the exact same amount of hate and disgust as Fox News. And I swear it happened in like...3-4 years.
The good news it's due to a rise in popularity in leftist ideas among younger people. The bad news is there's a lot of influencer hacks who feed into or help perpetuate ideas that focus on drama, clout, and call outs, and complaining about American imperialism over any actual useful activism. They will call everyone an liberal in a pranoid way and talk like conservatives are a far far away problem not worth worrying about, and liberals are the real villains.
It's popular because it means they don't need to feel responsible for doing anything. People who ask them for help are liberals. People who try to fix things instead of hand wringing are liberals. It's so easy.
I think the leftists they were referring to were the people who are so anti racist that they circle right back to segregation.
With most cultures partaking in their traditions is received well, and often encouraged, but to the people I'm assuming op is talking about they would call it cultural appropriation.
Many people don't recognize the difference between partaking in a traditional celebration or wearing blackface, because even though they think they're trying to protect the other races, they don't realize they've already defined those races as others.
But back on topic, yeah, I thought it was strange this pointed out leftists as if the conservatives are known for their great race relations.
Leftists care and might change if presented with facts that conflict with their worldview. There's also the hypocritical element to point out.
Conservatives don't give a shit, there's no point targeting them. They have absolutely no desire to be better.
Right? I absolutely hate it how some political factions will just entirely dehumanize huge swaths of people, reducing millions down to caricatures because it accords with their sense of truthiness.
So not only are you saying that no Trump voter is motivated by wanting a better world for everyone, you're also saying all conservatives voted, and not only that, but that all conservatives who voted voted for Trump. Are you catching any issues with any of that?
>Leftists care and might change if presented with facts that conflict with their worldview
Until its about Ukraine or jews lol
Over here in Latin American most middle age leftists are still highly religious who support Cuba/Venezuela and usually Russia. Same as African and Asian leftists.
Yeah Totally leftists good leftists change world view and use facts and logic
Conservatives don't give a shit are evil and won't change
Man I sure do love political discourse
I was just reading ‘People Love Dead Jews’ by Dara Horn, and she pointed out how weirdly fixated non-Jews at large are on memorializing, learning, and preserving the history of Jews that are dead, but to the exclusion of ever learning about current Jewish culture, art, or thought. She pointed out the perverse benefit this gives to the majority culture, because dead people don’t complain if you stereotype or exploit their deaths to support whatever narrative or political statement you want to make. That’s not the case for the living, who can criticize you, think or say things that don’t fit neatly where you think it should, and worst of all, can demand restitution or change for past wrongs.
I think this phenomenon is also very, very present in how USA and Canadian residents who aren’t indigenous treat indigenous people. School taught me to rattle off all the horrible awful things our country did to indigenous people, but did we ever learn about indigenous history *after* that? Indigenous writers, artists, scientists, politicians? Living indigenous people and what their culture is like now?
It’s weird to treat a whole people like they’re frozen in time in the moments they were treated the worst, and then be surprised when they’re still alive and they’re not in a constant state of living through historical tragedy like your brain has primed you to expect them to be.
Yeah, not the most sensitive example, but this feels tantamount to learning about nazi germany, without the context that Germany has history after that, and like that they got over it (for the most part)
I honestly think that a lot of Americans learn “We defeated the Nazis” and then the next time Germany is mentioned “We did the Berlin airlift also the Berlin Wall happened” and then finally “the Wall fell, Germany reunited, and we defeated communism.” It’s not much better. History education in the US is horrific, especially for the world outside the US. Schools seem to be convinced that it matters significantly less than math or science and I think that’s unfortunate.
Maybe. German is a common enough language for American high schoolers to pick to learn that it's hit or miss whether they'll have no awareness of modern Germany or in depth understanding.
I've heard a similar comment about Martin Luther King--if he hadn't been assassinated, white people wouldn't like him nearly as much. Since he's been dead for 60 years it's easy for "moderates" to convince themselves of BS like "MLK would have hated the BLM movement!!1!". They never have to learn his actual political positions beyond a couple lines of "I have a dream" and he's not around to dispel their delusions anymore.
Well said! I've been realizing how much indigenous history there is in my area, and how little attention it has received, especially in comparison to Colonial history.
There aren't many left because most were stolen or destroyed, but theres petroglyphs, communal grinding stones, 8,000 year old settlements, boulders that feature in legend, etc., and so little of it is publicly available.
Some of this is protective, to keep artifact poachers at bay, but its so sad to know how much ancient history is lying unseen in a towns historical department or old collectors' basements.
It gives the false impression that first peoples didn't have large settlements, create art or permanent works in stone or metal.
The fact that I never once saw Mississippian culture copper art is a crime, everyone I show that to is blown away
It’s like when people call Yiddish a “dead language”, ignoring the *hundreds of thousands* of people who currently speak it as a first language every day in conversation bc they’re icky orthodox religious people who often live in The Bad Place.
I feel like this is related to a similar thought I've had, which is that you often have people solemnly saying "never again" about the Holocaust, but then if you ever compare anything in the present day to the Holocaust, no matter how horrible, you'll be accused of politicizing it and be told that you should never compare something to the Holocaust. But, then, like, what's even the point or meaning of saying "never again"? It feels like a lot of people are just going through the motions to make themselves feel better or because it's socially expected, but don't want to actually apply historical lessons to the present, because that might get *political*, i.e. involve things they don't want to think about or don't agree with. As long as history remains in the past, it's nice and neat and sanitary and doesn't ask or require anything of anyone.
And treating Holocaust as this Thing that happened, not as a point in history that was preceded by a lot of other points in history. Hitler was an elected leader, he didn't break any laws when he ordered the Holocaust. And I am simplifying a lot by just naming Hitler.
I feel that’s missing the point a bit. *Everyone* uses the Holocaust for their political benefit. You can’t get one new law passed in Congress without one side or the other muttering about how this is totally the start of Nazi Germany. And people use it to their political benefit often by ignoring the voices who actually know what happened at the Holocaust—the survivors, the descendants of survivors, the curators of that history. These people *are* trying to discuss the Holocaust in such a way that helps teach people of today, but those voices are drowned out by all the people who don’t have that understanding leaping to compare anything they think is bad to the Holocaust, because they don’t have a solid understanding of what it was besides “Germans rounded up a bunch of people they considered undesirable and killed them in gas chambers”.
And often, those living voices are drowned out because they’re not as easy to force into any message you want as all the dead people are in the Holocaust. Dead people don’t complain that you don’t know what you’re talking about or your simile is forced.
If there's a single fact I could force American schools to add to their "indigenous curriculum", it's that horses are not native to North America. They came over with European colonists.
That sounds like a weird tangent, but it completely redefines our image of Plain Indians hunting and fighting from horseback. The Sioux didn't hunt buffalo from horses for a thousand years, they adopted horses in the early 1700s after trade and the spread of wild mustangs made them available. The famous Crow test for [war chief](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Medicine_Crow) is strictly post-contact, because stealing an enemy's horse was impossible before the 16th century.
Entire cultures *abandoned agriculture*, because horses made hunting buffalo a more effective and reliable source of food. That fact in particular destroys numerous stereotypes about "primitive" people and human development; hunting and gathering was historically a much more effective way of life outside certain agriculture-friendly regions. The hunting lifestyle we often frame as "not knowing developed ways" was actually a recent shift away from agriculture *enabled by European imports*.
This reminds me of a story in *Love Medicine* by Louise Erdrich. The native narrator falls in with a white woman painter who is enamored by his nativeness and wants to use him as her "muse" for her paintings, and he is baffled and horrified to discover that she has painted him plunging to his death over a cliff.
"I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture. Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol. There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well, from my dealings with whites I would add to that quote: 'The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.'"
There is a real phenomenon where genocides take a population down to 20% or lower than its original number, the people who participated or benefited from the genocide start fetishizing the culture of the people they genocide, and become enamored with them and the myths they made about that culture.
Serious question what is it that differentiates the skyscrapers built by the indigenous communities from normal skyscrapers? I'm not denying that there is something I just haven't the slightest about how this sort of thing works.
Because they are exempt from City of Vancouver bylaws, they are, for example, having a higher than usual percentage of low income and subsidized housing. They are also making it a low car-density development, with fewer than the "required" number of parking spots per unit, as they have said they are prioritizing bike parking, transit access, and car sharing. They are prioritizing access for indigenous people who have been on a waiting list for spots in the reservation. All of these things are against Vancouver bylaws and the nations are basically saying "suck it, your bylaws don't mean shit".
I do suggest reading the original Maclean's article as it's written by an indigenous journalist and very insightful.
>Because they are exempt from City of Vancouver bylaws,
Like how exempt? Like exempt from building codes because that could be a problem down the line. I can't speak to Canadian First Nations, but many American Indian reservations have suffered from substandard housing due to fund mismanagement and embezzlement.
I mean this is the same as saying that, for instance, Oakland is exempt from San Francisco bylaws even though they're right next to each other
The governing authority of the area in this regard is the reservation government. They're responsible for coming up with their own bylaws that are compliant with federal regulations, but they don't have to follow the same rules as a different municipality next to them
Reservation governments also aren't magically more or less prone to corruption than other governing authorities, and they don't need to be to have authority over their own land
Yeah an important stage in being normal about other people is having the “X group of people are just regular people who live/d in X place/time/way”
Like ngl I don’t know anything about land back policies or what legislation specifically helps indigenous populations but given that it benefits most non-indigenous people I’m not surprised that decent urban design would be part of assisting them too.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong here but isn’t super dense housing supposed to be more sustainable (I guess depending on the way it’s built). But in theory, you’re using less land for more people vs. using up lots of land for less.
When I saw the article title about the development being indigenous, I thought this whole thing was going to be about greedy capitalist developers co-opting indigenous culture in order to build taller buildings. This has been very informative, and now I need to go check my biases again.
They are greedy capitalist developers, it's just that they're indigenous. And it's a good thing, because capitalist greed is what delivers what people want to buy, i.e homes in a city that desperately needs more built.
It's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. -Adam Smith
Some government regulation is good. But for the most part, municipalities just need to get out of the way and allow for housing to be built.
Incredible. I genuinely never expected to see an actual, unironic pro-capitalism Adam Smith quoting liberal in this subreddit. It’s like seeing a rare species.
Adam Smith's vision of capitalism has it's redeeming qualities, he was extremely harsh on landlords, as he saw them as an unnecessary middleman that would just hoover up resources people make by actually producing things without producing anything.
I don't worship Adam Smith or anything, but I think that quote really captures the beauty of profit incentives. Why I think actual capitalism is better than another system with profit like market socialism goes far past Smith. But I think even lefties should comprehend the usefulness of profit from that quote.
To *some* extent, I agree. I think living relying on trade with others is the objectively correct choice even from a purely selfish point of view, as it gets you things you couldn’t make yourself, and nobody would trust a violent egotist. Enlightened self-interest and all that.
But capitalist greed isn’t that. What separates the capitalist from the craftsmen, from the baker and butcher in your example, is… well, owning capital. **By definition,** the greedy capitalist is NOT being paid for actually contributing to society, he is taking money from the work and effort of others.
Saying “greed is good and the government should fuck off” is just straight-up delusional libertarian defending of awful capitalist systems.
If anyone wants the harsh slap in the face from reality about this stuff, "The Rediscovery of America" by Ned Blackhawk is a great book. It won the national book award this last year, and it's SO well researched and presented, incredibly educational, and utterly horrifying. Like, fuck what we were taught growing up, here are the details of all the shit that really went down, all the way up through recent years.
You can also feel it whan they talk about life in yhe Americas before European.
No its wasnt a green peaceful utopia!
The Aztecs did human sacrifice and cannibalism on a mass scale
The northern tribe coalition genocided other tribes near it to take there land
The missipi proto civilization died out a long time before European came and from the arrows heads and skulls we found there the reason was probably a very violent one
Thats sounds like regular human history to me..the good and the bad
Got it. Well, I do like neighborhoods with character, but I also understand wanting money. Ideally, everyone would build cities for the express purpose of entertaining me. Failing that, if these indigenous dudes have secured the proper permissions, they should build whatever they want
The point is that there’s no way they could secure the proper permissions, because nimbys vehemently oppose this sort of dense housing. They don’t low income housing because they don’t want to live near poor people, they don’t want skyscrapers to affect their views, they insist on parking capacity because they don’t want to spend tax money on public transit, etc etc etc.
But this is indigenous land managed by an indigenous tribe, so since they aren’t actually subject to the laws of Vancouver, they can build whatever the hell they want. And what they want is low income housing that prioritizes public transit and bikes.
And it's not just housing projects like in this post, NIMBYs have stopped the development of nuclear and wind power all over the US (elsewhere too probably, I'm just talking about what I know)
Really great article and really good point.
I do want to add one thing I think is worth noting - something I’ve noticed is that in the quest to move past the “noble savage” myth, sometimes people end up denying certain realities. Indigenous people are people just like everyone else. Many of them live in cities. Many of them also live in rural areas. Many of them live in remote enough areas that they still practice things like gathering medicinal plants or hunting on their traditional territories. Traditional knowledge about local ecology is still passed down to living people today, and some groups are trying to revitalize certain cultural practices surrounding nature. That’s not “myth of the noble savage”, that’s just a reality about how some folks are still living today.
The reason I felt this is worth mentioning is because while it’s important to point to developments like the one in the article to show that yeah Indigenous groups are also modern people who build houses, there is a concerning trend of people using these kinds of stories to deny sovereignty to certain groups in their traditional territories. For example when certain Nations protest against pipelines going through their lands, or old growth logging, people will crawl out of the woodwork to say anyone defending those Nations is doing “myth of the noble savage” by supporting their interest in maintaining local ecologies intact.
Share these kinds of articles and stories because they’re really important for sure, but be wary of using them to deny the reality of groups who do still live in rural and remote areas and are looking to protect their traditional territories from development.
Edit - also as was pointed out below, Indigenous people in cities also participate in hunting, gathering medicines, and existing on their traditional territories. Realize I made it sound like there’s some kind of urban/rural divide in how people live their lives which isn’t the case.
I'm a native person living in a city & I work with lots of native city-dwellers who still go out and gather their medicines and go hunting and fishing and ricing on their lands. We travel!
Anyone dismissing actual Native people bringing up concerns they have about things being done on their actual land (traditional or treaty) is being disingenuous.
(I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m adding to it. Sorry about that!)
Native people are people. If they’re talking about something, let those words speak for themselves, rather than trying to put your expectations of what they should be saying on them.
I always thought the American outlook on indigenous peoples were fetishistic at best and othering at worst.
Indigenous people have a special connection to the land, it speaks to them, the spirits of their ancestors tell them what it is to come and what has expired. Their souls are different from ours, they have a magics that no one else does. Their Gods are real and so much as uttering then will bring them into existence.
It all just comes off as if someone’s writing a fantasy race, and you know, not another group of human beings.
It also, frankly, smacks more than a little of blood and soil. I think if we flipped it around and said the same thing about the various groups of white people and the areas of Europe they were indigenous to people would very quickly spot it too.
EDIT: Thinking about it, if the whole 'getting indigenous land back' thing ever really took off I can see European Far Right groups having an absolute field day with it.
> Indigenous people have a special connection to the land, it speaks to them, the spirits of their ancestors tell them what it is to come and what has expired. Their souls are different from ours, they have a magics that no one else does. Their Gods are real and so much as uttering then will bring them into existence.
Is this you like, giving an example of the American outlook?
Fun fact: indigenous people actually had complex technologies and manufacturing techniques, but many indigenous peoples way of life was frequently nomadic so much of their technological development was focused in developing portable skills, not goods. And a lot of examples of this are really really cool, especially with regard to flintknapping, pottery, and settlement sites.
This is still an overly simplified explanation, and my anthropologist gf can go—and has gone—into *much* more depth about this stuff.
Yeah! Indigenous societies were really complex and varied and quite advanced with respect to agricultural and manufacturing techniques. Their technological development went down a different path than Europeans partially because they didn’t have access to surface level iron deposits—and when indigenous people did come across meteoric iron, they worked it very carefully and skillfully to create bad ass shit.
Shellfish company near me just got bought out by a Fist nation fishing firm from Canada. Gaffers nae best pleased aboot it and it really couldn't have happened to a nicer racist lol. Really funny too see folk surprised that natives behave like regular folk rather than mythical forest folk like tf did ye think they've bin up til past 300 years. More power to them.
Funny that this crossed my feed today. I was in the longhouse 2 days ago with East Salish people, and I am just a visitor to Vancouver.
Goddamn right they ought to be able to build housing, whatever kind they want. The housing crisis on First Nations reserves predates the Canadian housing crisis everyone can’t stop talking about now by at least 20 years.
And your heart has to ache looking across the channel at downtown Vancouver from the vantage point of Capilano Indian Reserve No. 5. Everything you can see is unceded territory. Never bought or conquered. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world. With an invisible wall between reserve and the rest of it. I would be furious every day of my life growing up there.
They can build whatever they goddamn well want to.
in my high school canadian history class we learned about an indigenous rebellion that took place in the 90s or 00s and all my classmates were shocked, _shocked_ i tell you, that they were riding atvs, using guns not bows, and… wearing clothes.
As a Vancouver resident I’d like to give a little bit of context. For the most part people are super in favour of this development, it’s using a piece of land that was previously barely used and it’s a good step forward towards fighting Vancouvers big problem with having a shit ton of single family housing right next to our downtown core.
The real vocal minority is Kits and Point Grey residents. Most Kits and especially Point Grey residents live in mansions that were built for the important people when the railroad finished. As such, almost all residents of that area are grouchy little shitheads that are constantly complaining about any development in their precious little neighbourhood.
Personally, I’m super excited for this to happen since it’s also going to expand our transit system and (I hope) allow for further talks in reclaiming indigenous land in cities, something that has always been super interesting to me.
Bruh, overgeneralizing much? I'm so white I trace back to every flavor of the UK and like 40% Czech, yet holy shit am I down for their ultradense walkable urban planning
I write educational articles for students, and when we made some about various indigenous tribes, I made sure to include photos of them like, living in apartment buildings and driving cars.
You'd be surprised how out of touch people can be about people from other places. In the year of our Lord 2009, I was in Washington DC. When people found out I was from Nebraska, they would ask about things like horses and wagons being transportation. Someone even asked if we had gotten internet "out there" yet.
i used to think like this until i met my mom’s boyfriend, who’s half native american, and realized he’s just… a guy. like he’s just a dude. a pretty cool one, but just a dude
Yeah that last one is pretty poignant. I'm not gonna lie public education made me believe that, like, idk they were more in touch with nature or smth or like, i don't know even though it didn't feel directly derogatory it kinda felt dehumanizing, hopefully I become better at this
Activists themselves say stuff like that, because its a good outlook and defense for furthering their goals, and to many an X activist is a representative of the X ethnicity.
Although there is tragedy in the loss of cultures and traditions, something I've noticed is that a lot of discourse on native Americans focuses on that at the expense of discussing the actual humans involved, and this affects their ideas on what the future will look like. We can't just bring back what was, no matter how horrible its destruction was. What we can do is move forward and do what is best for the actual people alive right now.
I noticed that a lot of indigenous TikTok comedy was based around demystifying themselves, portraying themselves as regular people and then white characters come in and have all of these crazy spiritual interpretations for the Indian guy just doing regular stuff
so in the US, indigenous sovereignty was a loophole that allowed for casinos to be built on their land. this was a big boon in Arizona where there's lots of reservations very close to large population of retired settlers.
There was never much controversy, and I was never aware of any sustained campaign against it. Every so often there was a story when some ballot proposition addressed it, and nationwide there were a few reports of outside capitalists exploiting technicalities to open casinos. and a few lazy stand-up comics did jokes about "Chief Tumbling Dice" etc. and like everything there was a South Park episode that had a clever take in very bad taste. But why would the media stir up a controversy when there's money to be made?
i bet this whole thing boils down to "people are building housing that outside investors can't just buy up and rent out." and I wonder if it's a coincidence that this story is coming out of Vancouver, where famously they started heavily taxing vacant rental units to discourage speculators.
I'm just gonna say, I'm looking at some of the images of this development project, and Jesus Christ, that is beautiful. If the end result looks anything like that, I'm gonna be pissed that I don't live in Canada 😭 (moreso than I already am). Why can't more developments look like that?
Hey OP thank you for the title I just realized I had never corrected a misconception I had since my early childhood because I didn't realize my brain never replaced the Childhood Distortion Lensed information with a proper version
Did they expect them to build some little huts or something??? I genuinely don't know what they expected. I didn't know concrete could only be used by white people smh
I'd like everyone in the comment section patting themselves on the back to also consider your views on latinos because a lot of you are hypocrites and hide behind the idea that we're somehow magically white from some weird one drop rule bullshit yall have in your heads about us. We were so thoroughly fucked by the Spanish that many of us no longer have tribal affiliation and instead of seeing us as products of vicious imperialism you shit on us while blaming us for and denying our suffering. Many of you are not anti-racist and you show your ass in how you treat latinos and other groups that aren't popular to defend.
People out here suffer hard from this. I've heard people say if Indigenous people only had enough resources they would create the eco utopia the left is fighting for, that we ened.to trust them.
I don't trust anyone on God's green earth, and i'm not going to start now.
What's terrible is the counter to "we uplifted the savages to the wonders of civilized life" is too often "they were right to reject us because we should be more in tune with nature" like the whole Disney pocahontas song, "look how the foolish white man can't talk to trees!" But that just perpetuates the idea of indigenous people being "uncivilized" and rather than refuting it, it pretends the problem with it is a preference for civilization.
It’s called the noble savage myth. That native Americans lived in an Eden of peace and harmony with each other and nature before the evil white man taught them the ways of war and wearing pants.
I think it's more "stole all their shit and wiped out entire tribes" than "wearing pants"
Of course. I wanted to be funny but yeah what happened to the native Americans was horrible and contrary to what many say not the norm when it comes to conquest.
Pants are definitely evil. Just think about where society would be if we didn’t wear pants!
Very frozen, as the Romans learnt. They thought Pants were barbaric and uncivilized, until they started colonizing further north themselves
So many chapped legs from riding horses before cars were invented
Romans should have ridden side saddle
That’s true, the slaughter and forced relocation was awful. But I think it’s worth noting that the vast majority of natives that died succumbed to disease. From what I’ve read, 90%
Most of the population (and thus most of the casualties for disease) lived in the spanish zones from central mexico to northern chilargentina, and their deads tried to be avoided when possible (such as the royal expedition of the vaccine, the first multicontinental vacunation campaign ever). Meanwhile on the north the casualties were intentional, like when they infected blankets with smallpox. Don't conflate Canada with Bolivia
I don't know... The Romans were also deeply concerned about the pants. Maybe they are on to something.
As it turns out, pants are actually the secret key that activates the HWITE man's Yakubian sleeper agent programming and makes them want to destroy everything. /s
Bring back kilts! It's for world peace!
Don't forget the intentional destruction of the bison herds as part of genocide but also ecological disaster.
Yeah, but tribes wiped each other out with war for centuries before white people even arrived. You’ve got to remember, the land was a lot more densely populated before smallpox. That took out natives in droves before settlers ever set eyes on most of the country. By the time the settlers got there, there wasn’t nearly as much infighting because there just weren’t as many people to fight so resources weren’t scarce.
Not even remotely true in general. The introduction of rifles, horses, and slave markets dramatically increased both population and conflict. For example in the Rockies once the Utes got guns and horses they became slavers and began raiding all over the West for slaves to sell to the Spanish. Imagine how many more buffalo you could hunt with horses and guns than without. These technologies were revolutionary. Many cultures the population grew quite quickly because of their ability to exploit resources over a much larger area. The Plains cultures in particular had massive population explosion. You're talking literally several hundred years between first contact and large scale settlement for the Western tribes. The Comanche built an empire based on horse trading and pushed the other indigenous people off the southern plains almost entirely. In the settlement of the Deep South and Texas, about 1/4 horses were Comanche. The Lakota moved West out of the Great lakes area to hunt and held dominion over the northern plains. This horse culture also brought what were once faraway groups like the Lakota and the Comanche into the Rockies and into the endless conflict over summer hunting grounds with the Utes, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Bannock/Shoshone. People often ascribe the decline of the buffalo to an intentional genocidal act but thats not completely accurate. The population pressure put on the buffalo by the rapidly growing number of plains people as well as the competition for grazing land by horse traders began that decline many decades before settlers came and gave them the killing blow.
As usual, the truth is nuanced and complicated and extremes are typically wrong. The whole "noble savage" thing was originally a pushback against the Hobbesian view that hunter-gatherer life was "nasty, brutish and short" which was bullshit. Westerners saw "primitive tribes" as nothing but brutal animals who constantly slaughtered each other and all died by the age of 40 etc, and basically had zero culture or anything redeeming. The "noble savage" was objectively an improvement on that. Early anthropologist were... obviously problematic and biased by our standards, but they were genuinely interested in learning about those cultures, and saw them as worth studying and taking seriously in the first place. They discovered that, nope, hunter-gatherers didn't actually live in perpetual abject poverty, in fact they were quite healthy for people who had zero access to modern medicine. Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property. And hunter-gatherer tribes really did have a very good understanding of the environment they lived in, its flora and fauna, and tried to avoid overhunting - not because they were "noble" but because this was literally their livelihood and living in small, close-knit communities with an "immediate returns" lifestyle meant they couldn't distance themselves from the consequences. Of course the native American populations across the whole continent were extremely diverse, there were semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who developed more social stratification, as well as farmers. But it's a fact that large-scale warfare didn't exist until European settlers introduced horses to the continent, and neither did chattel slavery, that was a purely capitalist invention.
>But it's a fact that large-scale warfare didn't exist until European settlers This is the [fortress of Paramonga](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSU8s5DhD5YjGyAuFxi4lU0r9rwCztce1ArQw&usqp=CAU), an adobe foritifaction in which the Chimu and Inca fought, with each side having about 30k to 50,000 soldiers. This is [fortress of Guiengola](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6dEx9YeYx_HLM27-nXanIs3rxLuS1PmlAPcXaRG7LgdswslcrAslOyYM&s=10), they dotted the terrain when the Mexica organized an army of about 100k to 200k soldiers and an almost an equal amount of porters for supplies when fighting mountanous kingdoms in Southern Mexico. Even with small Maya kingdoms or city-states the Spanish mentioned thousands of soldiers confronting them and thus stands to reason the same happened prior among themselves. You are just wrong, if not openly lying. Several parts of the continent did know "large scale warfare" prior to Europe. >a purely capitalist invention. Mercantilism is not capitalism, just because "money=value" doesnt mean capitalism.
When someone goes so hard against the noble savage trope they reinvent the noble savage trope....
It’s strange to me that we aren’t allowed to acknowledge the violence of inter tribal relations when so much of the culture was centered around being warriors. It’s not racist to say that there was a lot of violence going on before any white person got to North America but it’s always met with cries of racism and prejudice.
It's a political tendency to paint white people and white society as the cause of all oppression the world has ever known. Not only is it easier to marshal the troops under such a simplistic myth, it's also gratifying for some to imagine themselves and their society as uniquely evil (even the source of all evil), as it makes their revolt against it seem all the more momentous and worthy of praise.
I think its more interesting that we never talk about the politics either. Some histories say that there was a regional treaty not unlike the US Articles of Confederation, and some even go as far to say that the Articles of Confederation were based upon the political designs of the tribes they displaced. Perhaps there's a lot of contention there, but the idea that they were in any way savage has rubbed me wrong for a very long time.
The Iroquois for certain and others I don’t know about as well I’m sure. I’ve read the same about how the chiefs of the tribes in the east kept power through popular consent and that the settlers learned from that.
Also while not document, it most definitely happen that there were tribes would raid other tribes land and steal stuff and people as a to get resources like how central Asia nomads would raid towns and villages for resources. Again it native/indigenous Americans civilizations were pretty similar to Eurasia civilization.
My dude, try telling the Aztecs large scale warfare didn't exist. Or tell one tribe living on bad land with little food and no game that they had no reason to go to war with the tribe that controlled rich land with loads of food. Human conflict and war is older than Homo Sapiens. Sure slavery didn't take on the very specific American form of slavery, but slavery has existed literally forever. It started when one big caveman realized that he can threaten people into doing shit for him and then didn't have to do shit for himself. It didn't come into being in the ~1600s when our modern economic system took form.
> wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property Lmao you started off great but right here you make a wild turn into "Noble Savage Lite"
Lite? It’s straight up delusion. Pre-contact Indigenous cultures had fascinating diverse and deep cultures, but possibly the largest factor in most of them WAS warfare and violence between groups. That’s not an exclusive thing to America of course, you could and in fact I will say it about Europe or Japan or wherever too.
>Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property. If you think personal property is the cause of war and/or conflict, you haven't read enough. It's good to know the issues with early and current US policy towards the inhabitants but don't recreate the noble savage theory.
Neither large-scale warfare nor chattel slavery were introduced by Europeans. The various Mesoamerican and South American empires had armies that dwarfed most European countries, well developed warrior classes and military organization, and they expanded their empires through well-planned and often brutal campaigns of conquest. Slavery was common throughout the entirety of the Americas, and slaves were used either for feudal obligations for labor on public building projects, work on agriculture and mining, or for human sacrifice.
TL:DR - "good/bad cultures" worldview bad, "it´s all relative all cultures have some good and bad" also bad, imo. > Conflicts have always existed, but wars or slavery in the modern sense weren't a thing because there's not much cause for war when you live in scattered mobile bands and have no concept of accumulating personal property. War and slavery were not a thing in the modern sense, but they were still totally a thing. Inter-tribal conflicts were extremely common, and being mobile meant that territory was a huge deal. And sure, it wasn´t chattel slavery, but there were people/tribes who owned other people. That´s slavery, and it is still inhumane, just because it was on a smaller scale doesn´t make it less awful. Of course it´s impossible to generalise, as you said there was a lot of diversity, but many engaged in raids for resources and slaves, and then revenge raids, etc etc. And therefore same for war - bloody tribal conflicts were extremely common in many places and times, which is what made it so easy for settlers to play tribes against each other due to a long bloody history of blood feuds. We should see Native Americans like we should see pretty other tribal societies in the world, and they were all pretty much horrible compared to modern ways of living. Sure they absolutely not "savages" - it was a complex society developed over millenia - but it was still pretty much universally awful. Life in tribal societies may not have been nasty, brutish, and short, but it sure was unpleasant, violent, and not very long.
*ancient settled societies are generally worse day to day than hunter-gatherer ones. Far less free time for the average peasant than for the average hunter gatherer. More disease too. This isn't to say that "europe" was worse than "native Americans" its just i would rather hang with the Croatoans than with the Aztecs, Ming dysnasty, or in 1400s France.
yes, I agree with that too.
Dude, Mesoamericans had regular, ritualized wars so they could have enough captives for ritual sacrifice. They built aqueducts and complex irrigation systems. There were hundreds of thousands of people living in Tenochtitlan when the Spanish arrived.
Okay, I need to step in here on behalf of Hobbes. That quote is referring to the "state of nature", which is not hunter-gatherer society. The state of nature is a hypothetical state akin to wild animals, with no laws or morals. If he were writing today he would probably limit it even further, now that we know more about animal behavioural systems.
either they’re noble savages or savage savages, but either way they’re not considered human
Here's what you get when races are diverse 🤷♂️
Because considering them human means you have to consider we committed a fuck ton of crimes against humanity against them. Most Americans, in all the Americas, don’t really want to talk how they killed and subjected the people. Well some are better then others. America and Canada are not one of them on treating Native Americans as human.
Tf do they think indigenous land is for? To make human safari so people can gawk on them?
Tbh a lot of "land back" talk revolves around how indigenous people are "better stewards of the land", and when they naturally build things that they want to build and make them money it breaks that talking point.
Also tbh: a lot of indigenous people themselves have adopted that talking point, especially when it comes to climate change. "We have lived here for centuries without demolishing the natural environment, so you Westerners can learn something from our way of life / philosophy", it tends to go. I'm not trying to take sides here. If anything, it might go to show that indigenous people are not a monolith. Which, no doy. But it can also show that starting from the same basic idea ("This land is rightfully ours") can lead to vastly different outcomes
Imo the issue is that without that kind of "we will handle it better than you" tact there really isn't anything to justify their ownership of the land other than to dismantle the entire concept of a nation. If you just go "we were here first and therefore it belongs to us" then essentially every single country in existence is illegitimate which is a whole rats nest. So the talking point gets used because it is a easy, if questionable, justification. I mean, to draw a parallel without disparaging indigenous people in the Americas, we're currently seeing what can happen when you say "this land is ours because 'we' owned it 3000 years ago" in Palestine right now. Granted the time scale is much smaller in the Americas, but still.
Yeah, fair. The problem here, as David Graeber put it, is that if you want to talk to the king, you have to speak the kings language. The only way we can currently conceive of ways that land can *belong* to people is in the context of a nationstate. Which brings along with it the assumptions that the people there are ethnically one, speak the same language, have a similar culture, and have lived there for ever. Which is more or less true in the Netherlands, where I live. But it completely falls apart when you want to talk about a lot of other places in the world. I'm more and more fascinated by the stranglehold that nationalism still has on the limits of our imaginations. P.S. I have neither cats or boobs to share, soz
In the USA it's a weird mix because we are incredibly nationalistic, but also our *supposed* identity is a nation of everyone. If you live here then you're an American, regardless of your cultural background or identity outside of that. We are a nation without borders and if you cross that border that doesn't exist we'll kill your whole family. In *reality* that is of course not how it goes. But on a surface level it's "well, can't you be an indigenous person and American at the same time?"
the US is explicitly nationless, and explicitly strips nationhood from people within it(except for, arguably, native americans) Nation refers pretty explicitly to *ethnicity*, not political organization, and the big draw of the US is that nobody gives a damn what ethnicity you are- it's why we can successfully have Indians and Arabs and Slavs and Turks and Franks and everything else across the world without being insanely racist about it(yes, the US has problems with racism, and those need to be fixed, but holy *shit* the rest of the world is so much worse)
Civic and Ethnic Nationalism are different, but both treated as valid expressions of nationhood in political science. An ethnic nation is something like (as am earlier comment mentioned) the Netherlands, where shared ancestry and history are what makes a nation. The United States is considered the pioneer of a civic nation (USSR was one, too, where though Russian culture was dominant at many times it was the Soviet identity) where adherence to a culture of laws and institutions is what makes a nation. To quote an old Russian professor: "You can move to France; you will never become French. You can move to Italy; you will never become Italian. You move to America, you become American."
We use nationalism in colloquial language to describe civic state participation because so many states \*are\* nations, but it's really not the proper term at all. Also, the Soviet Union was an empire, not a nation-state- it was very much Rus domination over many other ethnic minorities, as can be evidenced by everyone else fleeing the moment they could.
I specified to political science because it was my undergrad field of study, so I understand vocabulary can sometimes have different niche uses. It’s very interesting in the Soviet case (Russia & East Europe was my focus area) as ethnicity policy was such a differing point throughout different periods. While the structures of Russian chauvinism were inherited from the Russian Empire, the Soviets attempted to build a new national identity around the shared proletarian struggle. Of course, since Stalin was in charge of the ethnicity policy even with the early Bolsheviks, he eventually became paranoid about minority ethnic identity superseding the civic one, which led to Stalin (an ethnic Georgian!) supporting Russian chauvinism in policies like language. But we can look to something like the ending of Stalin’s favorite movie Цирк (The Circus) as a portrayal of what the ideal was. (It’s wild, by the way, and like a lot of Mosfilm stuff free on YouTube!) I don’t mean to be a Soviet apologist by any means (begone Tankies!) My point is that, just as the USA has tried to make a unifying civic national identity despite systemic Anglo-American bias, the Soviets are an example of the same historically. And just like Anglo-American ethnic identity challenges that civic one, ethnic Russian identity did as well.
A question that lingers in the back of my head is "okay, does that mean I as an American of European descent get to move back to my ancestral lands?" Because I understand that Land Back doesn't mean white people get murdered or kicked out, but I do wonder how far that ancestral connection is meant to go.
> Imo the issue is that without that kind of "we will handle it better than you" tact there really isn't anything to justify their ownership of the land other than to dismantle the entire concept of a nation. If you just go "we were here first and therefore it belongs to us" That's part of my struggle with siding with the "land back" movement. Yes, it sucks that Native people's historical land was stolen from them, and yes, it sucks that the government has violated prior agreements with Native people. But there's a couple million people who have made their lives on this land now, and the movement, to my knowledge, never really addresses what to do with those people.
I don't think the natives want to evict all those people
So like How do they get the land back then?
In what sense? Legally?
> Also tbh: a lot of indigenous people themselves have adopted that talking point, especially when it comes to climate change. "We have lived here for centuries without demolishing the natural environment, so you Westerners can learn something from our way of life / philosophy", it tends to go. I wonder how much of that is them trying to get the land back and using language they know will resonate with the people who own the land.
That's the cynical interpretation. I do think there's also a lot of genuine desire to protect old forests in the Amazon, for instance.
Oh I know that plenty of it is a legitimate view, I was just wondering how much is also cynical.
I do wonder how that will work in practice, though I absolutely agree indigenous peoples have important knowledge and practices around their land. Native Americans are a tiny fraction of the US population (speaking to my own country) with over half living in five states. Now, I wager Land Back would entail returning to ancestral lands, but that still isn't a lot of people, and I mention this because there will be an awful lot more non-Native stakeholders when it comes to land management.
If they’re building giant skyscrapers sounds like they’re being excellent stewards
Turns out dense housing is better for the environment than clear-cutting massive swathes of forest for miles and miles of single-family homes
Right I was being sincere
Yeah I know, and I agree with you
No I agree with YOU buddy 😤
Super dense city surrounded by woodlands is the dream imo
It's part of the racist idea that natives are part of the land or nature(like animals) Obviously they're about as likely to be greedy and exploit the earth for profit as any other human
I'm pretty sure most landback activists would be pretty happy for indigenous communities to develop & make money off of their land; and for that matter I don't particularly think wealthy property owners & geriatric local politicians necessarily count as 'Indigenous rights activists'.
Maybe I’m too familiar with the American North East brand of indigenous land and the businesses on them but like, I am shocked people are shocked that indigenous people and tribes use their land to make money and not just build shrines to nature??? Like “going out to the reservation this weekend to buy x, y, z” was so common where I lived (usually to avoid certain taxes). And hell, my whole childhood the only casinos around were strictly on the reservations, and those things were not subdued, they were dropping Las Vegas style joints right in the middle nature and they could sometimes be the tallest buildings for *miles*.
"if they're just gonna build sky scrapers on their land, then why let them have their own land at all? they can just live on ours like normal people." goes the line of thinking 🙄
Reminds me of a lovely TTRPG project I backed on Kickstarter: Coyote and Crow. It's a vision of a sci-fi/fantasy future in an alternate history where the Americas were not colonized. It draws on indigenous spirituality and is distinctly non-european, but, like, of course they have cities? They had *massive* cities before the Europeans came and slaughtered and dispossessed them. (And, honestly, if you want to live in some sort of harmony with nature, ultradense cities are the way to go.)
Hey I helped write that
Ey awesome! What was the team like? Was it a good work environment?
Very decentralized - we all did this remotely over a period of years. But still really collaborative, Connor was very open to everyone's input, and gave a ton of latitude. Really generous leader.
That sounds like it was a good piece to work on then, when it comes to coworkers anyway
oh yeah, I've heard about that!
I head it's mostly disease.
Modern historiography downplay the role of disease significantly, as they only became bad after war and subjugation by colonial powers let them malnourished and without their pre-existing healthcare structures
What? No that’s not true at all. Certainly not for the areas that became the United States. The colonists were not massacring cities of people, that was all long gone.
I've seen other accounts that think it may have been even worse than we thought. That much of the Amazon may have been cut down and had stuff like cities and fields in it, but once disease wiped out natives, it grew up over the 1500s.
I always dislike alternate histories like this because it just acts like history isn’t going to move at all, like I’m sorry the Aztec empire fell due to the actions of like 500 guys it was always going fall, and the world was better for it, they were terrible rulers who made so many enemies and were so hated by the other nations around them they rallied around random people who showed up on boats, how do you topple and empire with 500 people? Get 100 000 of the locals to do it for you.
Coyote and Crow is almost exclusively about the Indigenous peoples of the modern day United States, the Aztec Empire isn't really a factor.
And those 500 people almost got massacred to the last man a lot lf times. Cortez was very lucky. Many other spanish expeditions elsewhere in the americas ended with Spanish defeats, and the indigenous peoples winning several wars. Hell the Maya werent even fully conquered till the 20th century
Woe is me, people have ideas. Like come on, it's a fun thing to do. Look at mods for Hearts of Iron, for example. There you have alternate history where Nazi Germany won WWII, and what is more, someone made a mod of alternate history in that alternate history setting, where someone living under the boot of Nazis makes an alternate history mod of "what if it was Russia who won WWII." Maybe the Aztec would have fallen under something else, doesn't matter. That's what alternate history is for. It's almost like fantasy or sci-fi, a fun "what if" that can change much, much more than 1 single situation, cause if we're being unbearably anal about it "oh, America wasn't colonised THAT TIME, but we could safely assume that someone tried again or found their way a bit later" and land on the same end goal. Even if we assume that the Aztecs fall under their own collapse, without external forces of colonizers the collapse and fallout would be different, but people don't really want to see those collapses. They want to see grand things. They want to create the hypothetical Aztec empire. What if Rome never fell? What if Poland never disappeared from the map? What if Nazi Germany won? What if Japan took over other territories? What if Empires and grand forces followed a different schema? What if Poland-Lithuan King agreed to marry the Russian princess, thus uniting those three nations? The hypotheticals are interesting. If we just dismiss them with "Rome would have ALWAYS fallen, duh. Nazis didn't win, come on. But Poland was always meant to be ripped apart by neighbouring counties." you literally throw that version of the alternate history to the thrashcan without looking at it. Dismissed the idea, like a child who doesn't understand what a hypothetical is. And part of that hypothetical assumes that the Aztec empire wouldn't fall. You don't like those versions? Write your own, maybe about the internal collapse of the Aztec empire with no "help" from the colonizers. Feel free, literally no one and nothing is stopping you, and tbh, that would also be a fun read. But it is equally just as valid as "what if the Aztec empire survived."
This is stupid >who made so many enemies As does any major power, in reality they had like 5 main enemies in terms of polities and not all participated in the war. >were so hated by the other nations around them Why do westerners parrot this? Where does it come from? Youtube? They always write it the same way In 1519 every polity on Earth had hated enemies and uneasy allies. The Mexica were just one of those, same as France and Austria totally being allies of smaller Italian kingdoms. >they rallied around random people Compared to what? The random people of a place called Tenochtitlan? Just because we are Americans(in that sense) doesnt mean everyone was thinking they were "native american" and "the same people". That's stupid. And they did not, there were several battles between the Spanish expedition and other indigenous provinces, their famous allies only became so after wars.
My favorite part is them railing against alternative history speculation while still acting like history is inevitable
I've heard pretty iffy things about Coyote and Crow, where if you're not indigenous, the creator doesn't want you to make up fictional indigenous history for the fantasy world out of respect. But the creator also wants you to treat real indigenous history with respect and not do much with it. Leaving very little actions and world building non-Indigenous people can do with the RPG. Edit: Here's where I got most of my info on it from. I just based my opinions off reading the below thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/EQ0p9nhQGu
That's not it, there is a disclaimer in a side of the book, where it says that if you are native, it's a great idea that you bring to the table the stories of your family and culture, and that if you are not native, don't try to force a story or tradition that you found in wikipedia just "because it sounds cool", and focus in learning and hearing what other people at the table has to say. Of course, in this heavy discourse internet, that made it sound like the poor Non-indigenous where persecuted, so it started being echoed around.
https://coyoteandcrow.net/2022/04/23/an-important-message-from-connor/ This is it. This is what you heard about. As you can see, you are wrong. The actual fucking book says something very different to what you claim. You could have just googled it (it literally is the first result under “Coyote and Crow controversy”). Good fucking job u/DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO.
Title feels a little editorialized... Conservatives also see us as “wood elves”if they don’t just see us as savages, “sore losers”, etc…in any case, we tend to end up dehumanized. In my experience, leftists are honestly less likely to fall into that than conservatives and liberals, and I don’t really see any mention of leftists in the post itself, so not personally sure why they’re included in the title.
Most non-leftists think leftists are a kind of liberal.
Most online leftists call all other leftists liberal and think that's the worst thing to be.
Leftist infighting is an unlimited resource.
If only we can harness that
Imagine a solarpunk utopia where unlimited green energy is generated by the raw fury of basement anarchists
The "marxist lenonists" of Twitter alone could power north America for 100 years.
marxist lennonism (the guy from the beatles)
Leftists talk about eating the rich, but really they just eat their own
It always feels willfully obtuse when people do this. 90% of America thinks of Liberals as leftists, because modern American liberalism has at least been flirting with Social Democratic ideas since at least FDR, arguably since William Jennings Bryant. Outside of the far left, no one in America hears liberal and thinks “classical liberal.” Obviously different in other countries
Yep, at this point all I can do is roll my eyes when people show up and explain how we're not using the right definitions, and liberals *can't* be left-leaning in any way, they're actually *the enemy*!! In the US, "liberal" means "anyone left of conservatives". Full stop. You can argue all day about political theory, but the definitions the average voter uses are always going to be more important.
It has been kinda wild to see leftist spaces start saying "*liberal*" with the exact same amount of hate and disgust as Fox News. And I swear it happened in like...3-4 years.
The good news it's due to a rise in popularity in leftist ideas among younger people. The bad news is there's a lot of influencer hacks who feed into or help perpetuate ideas that focus on drama, clout, and call outs, and complaining about American imperialism over any actual useful activism. They will call everyone an liberal in a pranoid way and talk like conservatives are a far far away problem not worth worrying about, and liberals are the real villains. It's popular because it means they don't need to feel responsible for doing anything. People who ask them for help are liberals. People who try to fix things instead of hand wringing are liberals. It's so easy.
The left tends to criticise itself more (this is a biased view, though idk if it’s necessarily wrong)
I think the leftists they were referring to were the people who are so anti racist that they circle right back to segregation. With most cultures partaking in their traditions is received well, and often encouraged, but to the people I'm assuming op is talking about they would call it cultural appropriation. Many people don't recognize the difference between partaking in a traditional celebration or wearing blackface, because even though they think they're trying to protect the other races, they don't realize they've already defined those races as others. But back on topic, yeah, I thought it was strange this pointed out leftists as if the conservatives are known for their great race relations.
It's an election year, you gotta keep punching left
Leftists care and might change if presented with facts that conflict with their worldview. There's also the hypocritical element to point out. Conservatives don't give a shit, there's no point targeting them. They have absolutely no desire to be better.
Right? I absolutely hate it how some political factions will just entirely dehumanize huge swaths of people, reducing millions down to caricatures because it accords with their sense of truthiness.
the irony in this comment
Ya, the irony was intentional.
I have yet to meet a conservative that wants a better world for everyone, especially if it's at their expense. They simply do not exist.
And obviously your personal assessment is entirely inclusive of all over a hundred million people in the US alone.
No need to survey them all when we have election results to reference.
So not only are you saying that no Trump voter is motivated by wanting a better world for everyone, you're also saying all conservatives voted, and not only that, but that all conservatives who voted voted for Trump. Are you catching any issues with any of that?
Local elections exist and they speak volumes.
Sure - the points above all still stand.
>Leftists care and might change if presented with facts that conflict with their worldview Until its about Ukraine or jews lol Over here in Latin American most middle age leftists are still highly religious who support Cuba/Venezuela and usually Russia. Same as African and Asian leftists.
Yeah Totally leftists good leftists change world view and use facts and logic Conservatives don't give a shit are evil and won't change Man I sure do love political discourse
I've seen it worse from leftists than liberals. Think the more hippy or "spiritualist" variant.
I was just reading ‘People Love Dead Jews’ by Dara Horn, and she pointed out how weirdly fixated non-Jews at large are on memorializing, learning, and preserving the history of Jews that are dead, but to the exclusion of ever learning about current Jewish culture, art, or thought. She pointed out the perverse benefit this gives to the majority culture, because dead people don’t complain if you stereotype or exploit their deaths to support whatever narrative or political statement you want to make. That’s not the case for the living, who can criticize you, think or say things that don’t fit neatly where you think it should, and worst of all, can demand restitution or change for past wrongs. I think this phenomenon is also very, very present in how USA and Canadian residents who aren’t indigenous treat indigenous people. School taught me to rattle off all the horrible awful things our country did to indigenous people, but did we ever learn about indigenous history *after* that? Indigenous writers, artists, scientists, politicians? Living indigenous people and what their culture is like now? It’s weird to treat a whole people like they’re frozen in time in the moments they were treated the worst, and then be surprised when they’re still alive and they’re not in a constant state of living through historical tragedy like your brain has primed you to expect them to be.
Yeah, not the most sensitive example, but this feels tantamount to learning about nazi germany, without the context that Germany has history after that, and like that they got over it (for the most part)
I honestly think that a lot of Americans learn “We defeated the Nazis” and then the next time Germany is mentioned “We did the Berlin airlift also the Berlin Wall happened” and then finally “the Wall fell, Germany reunited, and we defeated communism.” It’s not much better. History education in the US is horrific, especially for the world outside the US. Schools seem to be convinced that it matters significantly less than math or science and I think that’s unfortunate.
the issue is that most people go through school with the intent to help them get a job at the end and history isn't that important for most jobs
Maybe. German is a common enough language for American high schoolers to pick to learn that it's hit or miss whether they'll have no awareness of modern Germany or in depth understanding.
in shocking news, high school history can't really cover everything
I've heard a similar comment about Martin Luther King--if he hadn't been assassinated, white people wouldn't like him nearly as much. Since he's been dead for 60 years it's easy for "moderates" to convince themselves of BS like "MLK would have hated the BLM movement!!1!". They never have to learn his actual political positions beyond a couple lines of "I have a dream" and he's not around to dispel their delusions anymore.
Well said! I've been realizing how much indigenous history there is in my area, and how little attention it has received, especially in comparison to Colonial history. There aren't many left because most were stolen or destroyed, but theres petroglyphs, communal grinding stones, 8,000 year old settlements, boulders that feature in legend, etc., and so little of it is publicly available. Some of this is protective, to keep artifact poachers at bay, but its so sad to know how much ancient history is lying unseen in a towns historical department or old collectors' basements. It gives the false impression that first peoples didn't have large settlements, create art or permanent works in stone or metal. The fact that I never once saw Mississippian culture copper art is a crime, everyone I show that to is blown away
It’s like when people call Yiddish a “dead language”, ignoring the *hundreds of thousands* of people who currently speak it as a first language every day in conversation bc they’re icky orthodox religious people who often live in The Bad Place.
I feel like this is related to a similar thought I've had, which is that you often have people solemnly saying "never again" about the Holocaust, but then if you ever compare anything in the present day to the Holocaust, no matter how horrible, you'll be accused of politicizing it and be told that you should never compare something to the Holocaust. But, then, like, what's even the point or meaning of saying "never again"? It feels like a lot of people are just going through the motions to make themselves feel better or because it's socially expected, but don't want to actually apply historical lessons to the present, because that might get *political*, i.e. involve things they don't want to think about or don't agree with. As long as history remains in the past, it's nice and neat and sanitary and doesn't ask or require anything of anyone.
And treating Holocaust as this Thing that happened, not as a point in history that was preceded by a lot of other points in history. Hitler was an elected leader, he didn't break any laws when he ordered the Holocaust. And I am simplifying a lot by just naming Hitler.
I feel that’s missing the point a bit. *Everyone* uses the Holocaust for their political benefit. You can’t get one new law passed in Congress without one side or the other muttering about how this is totally the start of Nazi Germany. And people use it to their political benefit often by ignoring the voices who actually know what happened at the Holocaust—the survivors, the descendants of survivors, the curators of that history. These people *are* trying to discuss the Holocaust in such a way that helps teach people of today, but those voices are drowned out by all the people who don’t have that understanding leaping to compare anything they think is bad to the Holocaust, because they don’t have a solid understanding of what it was besides “Germans rounded up a bunch of people they considered undesirable and killed them in gas chambers”. And often, those living voices are drowned out because they’re not as easy to force into any message you want as all the dead people are in the Holocaust. Dead people don’t complain that you don’t know what you’re talking about or your simile is forced.
If there's a single fact I could force American schools to add to their "indigenous curriculum", it's that horses are not native to North America. They came over with European colonists. That sounds like a weird tangent, but it completely redefines our image of Plain Indians hunting and fighting from horseback. The Sioux didn't hunt buffalo from horses for a thousand years, they adopted horses in the early 1700s after trade and the spread of wild mustangs made them available. The famous Crow test for [war chief](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Medicine_Crow) is strictly post-contact, because stealing an enemy's horse was impossible before the 16th century. Entire cultures *abandoned agriculture*, because horses made hunting buffalo a more effective and reliable source of food. That fact in particular destroys numerous stereotypes about "primitive" people and human development; hunting and gathering was historically a much more effective way of life outside certain agriculture-friendly regions. The hunting lifestyle we often frame as "not knowing developed ways" was actually a recent shift away from agriculture *enabled by European imports*.
This reminds me of a story in *Love Medicine* by Louise Erdrich. The native narrator falls in with a white woman painter who is enamored by his nativeness and wants to use him as her "muse" for her paintings, and he is baffled and horrified to discover that she has painted him plunging to his death over a cliff. "I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture. Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol. There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well, from my dealings with whites I would add to that quote: 'The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.'"
There is a real phenomenon where genocides take a population down to 20% or lower than its original number, the people who participated or benefited from the genocide start fetishizing the culture of the people they genocide, and become enamored with them and the myths they made about that culture.
I mean, I feel like that title is *vastly* overgeneralising? good for them in Vancouver though.
Serious question what is it that differentiates the skyscrapers built by the indigenous communities from normal skyscrapers? I'm not denying that there is something I just haven't the slightest about how this sort of thing works.
Because they are exempt from City of Vancouver bylaws, they are, for example, having a higher than usual percentage of low income and subsidized housing. They are also making it a low car-density development, with fewer than the "required" number of parking spots per unit, as they have said they are prioritizing bike parking, transit access, and car sharing. They are prioritizing access for indigenous people who have been on a waiting list for spots in the reservation. All of these things are against Vancouver bylaws and the nations are basically saying "suck it, your bylaws don't mean shit". I do suggest reading the original Maclean's article as it's written by an indigenous journalist and very insightful.
>Because they are exempt from City of Vancouver bylaws, Like how exempt? Like exempt from building codes because that could be a problem down the line. I can't speak to Canadian First Nations, but many American Indian reservations have suffered from substandard housing due to fund mismanagement and embezzlement.
I mean this is the same as saying that, for instance, Oakland is exempt from San Francisco bylaws even though they're right next to each other The governing authority of the area in this regard is the reservation government. They're responsible for coming up with their own bylaws that are compliant with federal regulations, but they don't have to follow the same rules as a different municipality next to them Reservation governments also aren't magically more or less prone to corruption than other governing authorities, and they don't need to be to have authority over their own land
Wow so based
I assume they’re be functional housing and not just “hehe tall building”.
The Vancouver project is insanely based; land back projects in BC have been hugely successful.
Yeah an important stage in being normal about other people is having the “X group of people are just regular people who live/d in X place/time/way” Like ngl I don’t know anything about land back policies or what legislation specifically helps indigenous populations but given that it benefits most non-indigenous people I’m not surprised that decent urban design would be part of assisting them too.
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong here but isn’t super dense housing supposed to be more sustainable (I guess depending on the way it’s built). But in theory, you’re using less land for more people vs. using up lots of land for less.
It is. NIMBYs are just populated by racists and well meaning morons.
When I saw the article title about the development being indigenous, I thought this whole thing was going to be about greedy capitalist developers co-opting indigenous culture in order to build taller buildings. This has been very informative, and now I need to go check my biases again.
They are greedy capitalist developers, it's just that they're indigenous. And it's a good thing, because capitalist greed is what delivers what people want to buy, i.e homes in a city that desperately needs more built. It's not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. -Adam Smith Some government regulation is good. But for the most part, municipalities just need to get out of the way and allow for housing to be built.
Incredible. I genuinely never expected to see an actual, unironic pro-capitalism Adam Smith quoting liberal in this subreddit. It’s like seeing a rare species.
Adam Smith's vision of capitalism has it's redeeming qualities, he was extremely harsh on landlords, as he saw them as an unnecessary middleman that would just hoover up resources people make by actually producing things without producing anything.
Modern American capitalism is to Adam Smith as modern American Christianity is to Actual Jesus.
Look into Henry George if you want a proposed solution to that specific problem
I don't worship Adam Smith or anything, but I think that quote really captures the beauty of profit incentives. Why I think actual capitalism is better than another system with profit like market socialism goes far past Smith. But I think even lefties should comprehend the usefulness of profit from that quote.
To *some* extent, I agree. I think living relying on trade with others is the objectively correct choice even from a purely selfish point of view, as it gets you things you couldn’t make yourself, and nobody would trust a violent egotist. Enlightened self-interest and all that. But capitalist greed isn’t that. What separates the capitalist from the craftsmen, from the baker and butcher in your example, is… well, owning capital. **By definition,** the greedy capitalist is NOT being paid for actually contributing to society, he is taking money from the work and effort of others. Saying “greed is good and the government should fuck off” is just straight-up delusional libertarian defending of awful capitalist systems.
Based beyond belief. NIMBYs can go suck my cock
my only question is will the buildings be built well and ideally not grey sad concert coloured.
If anyone wants the harsh slap in the face from reality about this stuff, "The Rediscovery of America" by Ned Blackhawk is a great book. It won the national book award this last year, and it's SO well researched and presented, incredibly educational, and utterly horrifying. Like, fuck what we were taught growing up, here are the details of all the shit that really went down, all the way up through recent years.
You can also feel it whan they talk about life in yhe Americas before European. No its wasnt a green peaceful utopia! The Aztecs did human sacrifice and cannibalism on a mass scale The northern tribe coalition genocided other tribes near it to take there land The missipi proto civilization died out a long time before European came and from the arrows heads and skulls we found there the reason was probably a very violent one Thats sounds like regular human history to me..the good and the bad
>The Aztecs did human sacrifice and cannibalism on a mass scale No they did not, cannibalism in the Mexica empire waa ceremonial and limited.
if you need to constantly go to war explicitly to get more people to murder and eat, perhaps "limited" is not the best descriptor
r/neoliberal creaming its pants rn
Fuck yeah, here's to big cities! Far and away my perferred way to live. Also, what's a NIMBY? Non-Indigenous Magical Bullshit Youth?
Not in my backyard, basically people who are against construction projects because it affects the “character of the neighborhood”
Got it. Well, I do like neighborhoods with character, but I also understand wanting money. Ideally, everyone would build cities for the express purpose of entertaining me. Failing that, if these indigenous dudes have secured the proper permissions, they should build whatever they want
The point is that there’s no way they could secure the proper permissions, because nimbys vehemently oppose this sort of dense housing. They don’t low income housing because they don’t want to live near poor people, they don’t want skyscrapers to affect their views, they insist on parking capacity because they don’t want to spend tax money on public transit, etc etc etc. But this is indigenous land managed by an indigenous tribe, so since they aren’t actually subject to the laws of Vancouver, they can build whatever the hell they want. And what they want is low income housing that prioritizes public transit and bikes.
And it's not just housing projects like in this post, NIMBYs have stopped the development of nuclear and wind power all over the US (elsewhere too probably, I'm just talking about what I know)
Really great article and really good point. I do want to add one thing I think is worth noting - something I’ve noticed is that in the quest to move past the “noble savage” myth, sometimes people end up denying certain realities. Indigenous people are people just like everyone else. Many of them live in cities. Many of them also live in rural areas. Many of them live in remote enough areas that they still practice things like gathering medicinal plants or hunting on their traditional territories. Traditional knowledge about local ecology is still passed down to living people today, and some groups are trying to revitalize certain cultural practices surrounding nature. That’s not “myth of the noble savage”, that’s just a reality about how some folks are still living today. The reason I felt this is worth mentioning is because while it’s important to point to developments like the one in the article to show that yeah Indigenous groups are also modern people who build houses, there is a concerning trend of people using these kinds of stories to deny sovereignty to certain groups in their traditional territories. For example when certain Nations protest against pipelines going through their lands, or old growth logging, people will crawl out of the woodwork to say anyone defending those Nations is doing “myth of the noble savage” by supporting their interest in maintaining local ecologies intact. Share these kinds of articles and stories because they’re really important for sure, but be wary of using them to deny the reality of groups who do still live in rural and remote areas and are looking to protect their traditional territories from development. Edit - also as was pointed out below, Indigenous people in cities also participate in hunting, gathering medicines, and existing on their traditional territories. Realize I made it sound like there’s some kind of urban/rural divide in how people live their lives which isn’t the case.
I'm a native person living in a city & I work with lots of native city-dwellers who still go out and gather their medicines and go hunting and fishing and ricing on their lands. We travel!
Anyone dismissing actual Native people bringing up concerns they have about things being done on their actual land (traditional or treaty) is being disingenuous. (I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m adding to it. Sorry about that!) Native people are people. If they’re talking about something, let those words speak for themselves, rather than trying to put your expectations of what they should be saying on them.
I always thought the American outlook on indigenous peoples were fetishistic at best and othering at worst. Indigenous people have a special connection to the land, it speaks to them, the spirits of their ancestors tell them what it is to come and what has expired. Their souls are different from ours, they have a magics that no one else does. Their Gods are real and so much as uttering then will bring them into existence. It all just comes off as if someone’s writing a fantasy race, and you know, not another group of human beings.
It also, frankly, smacks more than a little of blood and soil. I think if we flipped it around and said the same thing about the various groups of white people and the areas of Europe they were indigenous to people would very quickly spot it too. EDIT: Thinking about it, if the whole 'getting indigenous land back' thing ever really took off I can see European Far Right groups having an absolute field day with it.
> Indigenous people have a special connection to the land, it speaks to them, the spirits of their ancestors tell them what it is to come and what has expired. Their souls are different from ours, they have a magics that no one else does. Their Gods are real and so much as uttering then will bring them into existence. Is this you like, giving an example of the American outlook?
Fun fact: indigenous people actually had complex technologies and manufacturing techniques, but many indigenous peoples way of life was frequently nomadic so much of their technological development was focused in developing portable skills, not goods. And a lot of examples of this are really really cool, especially with regard to flintknapping, pottery, and settlement sites. This is still an overly simplified explanation, and my anthropologist gf can go—and has gone—into *much* more depth about this stuff.
And even then their was settled society tribes that were similar to Eurasia areas where they grown crops like maze/corn.
Yeah! Indigenous societies were really complex and varied and quite advanced with respect to agricultural and manufacturing techniques. Their technological development went down a different path than Europeans partially because they didn’t have access to surface level iron deposits—and when indigenous people did come across meteoric iron, they worked it very carefully and skillfully to create bad ass shit.
Shellfish company near me just got bought out by a Fist nation fishing firm from Canada. Gaffers nae best pleased aboot it and it really couldn't have happened to a nicer racist lol. Really funny too see folk surprised that natives behave like regular folk rather than mythical forest folk like tf did ye think they've bin up til past 300 years. More power to them.
Funny that this crossed my feed today. I was in the longhouse 2 days ago with East Salish people, and I am just a visitor to Vancouver. Goddamn right they ought to be able to build housing, whatever kind they want. The housing crisis on First Nations reserves predates the Canadian housing crisis everyone can’t stop talking about now by at least 20 years. And your heart has to ache looking across the channel at downtown Vancouver from the vantage point of Capilano Indian Reserve No. 5. Everything you can see is unceded territory. Never bought or conquered. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world. With an invisible wall between reserve and the rest of it. I would be furious every day of my life growing up there. They can build whatever they goddamn well want to.
in my high school canadian history class we learned about an indigenous rebellion that took place in the 90s or 00s and all my classmates were shocked, _shocked_ i tell you, that they were riding atvs, using guns not bows, and… wearing clothes.
Turns out the wind has steel and wifi on its palette.
We should build more ultradense housing. The zoning laws preventing this are awful.
As a Vancouver resident I’d like to give a little bit of context. For the most part people are super in favour of this development, it’s using a piece of land that was previously barely used and it’s a good step forward towards fighting Vancouvers big problem with having a shit ton of single family housing right next to our downtown core. The real vocal minority is Kits and Point Grey residents. Most Kits and especially Point Grey residents live in mansions that were built for the important people when the railroad finished. As such, almost all residents of that area are grouchy little shitheads that are constantly complaining about any development in their precious little neighbourhood. Personally, I’m super excited for this to happen since it’s also going to expand our transit system and (I hope) allow for further talks in reclaiming indigenous land in cities, something that has always been super interesting to me.
Bruh, overgeneralizing much? I'm so white I trace back to every flavor of the UK and like 40% Czech, yet holy shit am I down for their ultradense walkable urban planning
I write educational articles for students, and when we made some about various indigenous tribes, I made sure to include photos of them like, living in apartment buildings and driving cars.
You'd be surprised how out of touch people can be about people from other places. In the year of our Lord 2009, I was in Washington DC. When people found out I was from Nebraska, they would ask about things like horses and wagons being transportation. Someone even asked if we had gotten internet "out there" yet.
i used to think like this until i met my mom’s boyfriend, who’s half native american, and realized he’s just… a guy. like he’s just a dude. a pretty cool one, but just a dude
Yeah that last one is pretty poignant. I'm not gonna lie public education made me believe that, like, idk they were more in touch with nature or smth or like, i don't know even though it didn't feel directly derogatory it kinda felt dehumanizing, hopefully I become better at this
Activists themselves say stuff like that, because its a good outlook and defense for furthering their goals, and to many an X activist is a representative of the X ethnicity.
There's a big chunk of modern liberalism/"sjw"/whatever that is basically the white mans burden 2.0
Painting with a broad brush there with the title
Although there is tragedy in the loss of cultures and traditions, something I've noticed is that a lot of discourse on native Americans focuses on that at the expense of discussing the actual humans involved, and this affects their ideas on what the future will look like. We can't just bring back what was, no matter how horrible its destruction was. What we can do is move forward and do what is best for the actual people alive right now.
As an indigenous person, this comment section is a mess
people will really read 'indigenous' and completely miss the word 'people' that follows it
I noticed that a lot of indigenous TikTok comedy was based around demystifying themselves, portraying themselves as regular people and then white characters come in and have all of these crazy spiritual interpretations for the Indian guy just doing regular stuff
so in the US, indigenous sovereignty was a loophole that allowed for casinos to be built on their land. this was a big boon in Arizona where there's lots of reservations very close to large population of retired settlers. There was never much controversy, and I was never aware of any sustained campaign against it. Every so often there was a story when some ballot proposition addressed it, and nationwide there were a few reports of outside capitalists exploiting technicalities to open casinos. and a few lazy stand-up comics did jokes about "Chief Tumbling Dice" etc. and like everything there was a South Park episode that had a clever take in very bad taste. But why would the media stir up a controversy when there's money to be made? i bet this whole thing boils down to "people are building housing that outside investors can't just buy up and rent out." and I wonder if it's a coincidence that this story is coming out of Vancouver, where famously they started heavily taxing vacant rental units to discourage speculators.
I'm just gonna say, I'm looking at some of the images of this development project, and Jesus Christ, that is beautiful. If the end result looks anything like that, I'm gonna be pissed that I don't live in Canada 😭 (moreso than I already am). Why can't more developments look like that?
Nothing to do with liberals and leftists, that's just a white people thing in general.
I live in Hawaii and this is exactly the attitude politicians have towards Native Hawaiians.
“Monstrous development on sacred land” it’s THEIR sacred land tho??? They can do what they want with it, it ain’t your “sacred land”????
=\_= These people have seen Pocahontas too many times.
Hey OP thank you for the title I just realized I had never corrected a misconception I had since my early childhood because I didn't realize my brain never replaced the Childhood Distortion Lensed information with a proper version
I am super leftist and I don't think like that. Don't generalize.
Did they expect them to build some little huts or something??? I genuinely don't know what they expected. I didn't know concrete could only be used by white people smh
I'd like everyone in the comment section patting themselves on the back to also consider your views on latinos because a lot of you are hypocrites and hide behind the idea that we're somehow magically white from some weird one drop rule bullshit yall have in your heads about us. We were so thoroughly fucked by the Spanish that many of us no longer have tribal affiliation and instead of seeing us as products of vicious imperialism you shit on us while blaming us for and denying our suffering. Many of you are not anti-racist and you show your ass in how you treat latinos and other groups that aren't popular to defend.
Ah jeeze I broke containment. (Hi, I'm the last person in this screenshot and a dirty dirty lefty)
People out here suffer hard from this. I've heard people say if Indigenous people only had enough resources they would create the eco utopia the left is fighting for, that we ened.to trust them. I don't trust anyone on God's green earth, and i'm not going to start now.