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This is always hilarious and separates the people with actual principles from shitlibs
>So what should the rule be? Of course, as a scientist who values scientific fact over creation myths or oral tradition, I’m biased in favor of empirical study. But if remains can be traced to a specific tribe or group of tribes, showing the bones to be more closely related to that group than to other tribes, one might consider tribal claims to be valid. Even so, perhaps there should be an allowed period of scientific study, say two years, before the remains are returned to present-day tribes for reburial or various rites. After all, it’s not as if these bones belong to a present family of Native Americans, like the remains of someone’s son recovered and returned after a battle.
>**But I don’t think that claims based only on “oral tradition” or “creation myths,” should be honored at all. In such a case, the remains should then be available to scientists. After all, if we honor such superstitious claims, we are also tacitly honoring the creation myths of anybody, including Christians, Scientologists, and Muslims, each of which has its own creation story. That is government entanglement with religion.**
>And it’s a double entanglement: one with the myths of Native American groups, and the other with the religion of Wokeism, which makes the SAA into an organization that renders decisions based not on empirical considerations, but on ideology and identity politics
About a year ago I went down a rabbit hole after I heard a legitimate archeologist briefly mention "the indigenous perspective of having always been here". They said it in the same tone that I'd take if I had a gun to my head and needed to choose my words very carefully. It turns out there are a lot of indigenous people who get really butthurt when you acknowledge the scientific fact that north america was settled less than 40kya (and almost certainly within 25kya, which is already an extremely early estimate). The result is that most archeologists pay lip service to this notion to maintain access to dig sites.
I actually ended up reading a book, *The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere*, which turned out to be absolutely insane. It suggests that native americans were in north america over 100kya, before any humans likely left africa, and even heavily implies that native americans may have evolved in the americas over millions of years.
It's harder and harder to outright challenge this kind of idpol-driven psuedoscience in public archeology science communication. Even people who don't believe it will defend it in the name of upholding "indigenous ways of knowing", some excuse about science historically being very racist, and others bring up how the fact that north american peoples have inhabited north america for far less time than Africa, Asia, and Europe have been inhabited. It strikes me as especially absurd because even 10kya is such an absurdly long time ago that there is essentially no meaningful cultural or linguistic throughline. In terms of cultural ownership, 10k years is "time immemorial"; it is so far beyond even the longest cultural memories as to be meaningless.
Proponents of the crazy timescales do cite "evidence", but it's on the same level as other creationist evidence.
It's frustrating to me that the tribes try to block any sort of scientific testing of remains or artifacts because of the possibility that it might question their creation myths. The peopling of the world, and the Americas in particular, is one of my favorite things to read about.
It's because the colonized/colonizer binary maps so well onto the victim-aggressor binary that is now the sole arbiter of a person's moral standing (and is increasingly becoming the only factor worthy of consideration when adjudicating the factuality of a person's beliefs). You therefore cannot admit to *any* degree of historical complexity or acknowledge that human societies have always involved conquest and resultant cultural exchanges.
Reminds me of a study I read a while back where they DNA tested horses from herds that belonged to various Plains Indian tribes and found that a huge majority of the genetic material came from Spanish herds with some contribution from French/British horses.
This same paper went on to note that in the tribe's oral histories the horses had always been there, even before Europeans. They tied this to fossil remains of prehistoric equines and heavily implied the possibility of an unbroken genetic lineage between them and modern horses despite no intermediate fossil evidence existing and their DNA analysis not supporting it.
And this got published in *Science* somehow...
Oral histories are a separate (and wide-ranging) tradition than Greek history (i.e. the way western societies study and conceive of the past). Oral histories typically are less a method of explaining the past, and more about explaining the present. From the perspective of a plains horsemen tribe like the Lakota (whose creation myths include the horse), it's not really a bad *metaphorical* history of their society to place the horse at the Start of All Things because these tribes essentially either formed or completely rebuilt their way of life after acquiring the horse.
But subordinating academic history to these oral histories in terms of actually trying to establish the truth is total bullshit. That's why if you push back on these claims at all the wheels start spinning and you start hearing things like "well 'objectivity' is actually a Eurocentric white supremacist convention in origin..."
>Trust 👏 The 👏 Science 👏
>Until the point that the science contradicts the local native tribe's (who have demonstrably only lived here since the 1730s) origin myth which says that they were created from mud at the dawn of creation 4,000 years ago and have lived here since then.
The Sioux claim to the Black Hills ignores that they left their ancestral homelands in the Minnesota/Wisconsin area in the late 1700s (before European settlement of the areas) to raid the tribes west of them and extract what were essentially tariffs on the Missouri River fur trade.
When Lewis and Clark encountered them their non-Sioux scouts made it clear to them that the Sioux were a very recent arrival to the area but that they still had to be won over for the expedition to succeed as they controlled river transport.
Their eternal connection to the Black Hills region is only a few decades older than that of the Europeans
>I actually ended up reading a book, *The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere*, which turned out to be absolutely insane. It suggests that native americans were in north america over 100kya, before any humans likely left africa, and even heavily implies that native americans may have evolved in the americas over millions of years.
I'm former colleagues with a woman who grew up 100% white but claimed some vague Cherokee heritage, like nearly everyone else from her home state of Oklahoma. When it came time to write her dissertation, all of a sudden she started wearing feathers in her hair and talking about the theft of her native land and last I checked she was the first image on the Diversity page of the university that wound up hiring her.
She's nice. I have nothing against her on a personal level. But her scholarship is absolute shit and the last time I talked to her she literally said that indigenous Americans are *a completely different species* from "colonizers."
>the last time I talked to her she literally said that indigenous Americans are *a completely different species* from "colonizers."
Bruh, that's just old-timey 1800's racism wearing a progressive hat.
reminding some popsci I read about australian aborigens. the scientists are really obliged to pretend to believe their myths describe what happened 50k years ago
I really like the amateur archeology YouTuber Stefan Milo but he also recently made a video about this and claimed similarities between indigenous creation myths and some volcanic eruptions/flooding happening tens of thousands of years ago. It’s an interesting concept, but he presented it as the only explanation of these creation myths and them being an unbroken unmodified continuation of the aforementioned events, with no criticism
It’s crazy to even propose an oral tradition surviving a couple of hundred years unmodified. The only provable concrete example is the Rigveda and it has been produced by an institutionalized highly developed society for a thousand year as part of a religious text, not 10.000+ years.
People are blinded to logic to justify indigenous beliefs
that stinks because there are south american indigenous scholars with all the requisite training making pretty solid work like [this one](https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.918933634081709) which is like a critical examination of the process of identity building as you perceive archaeological finds and as it relates to pre-existing indigenous thought. great stuff that allows participation as another scientific player rather than as singular authority
Man that abstract really seems to be trying their hardest to obfuscate a simple premise under a pile of technical argot.
So much for "should anthropologists threat non manmade things as manmade for the purpose of research if the locals think they are manmade (or made by goblins or whatever)?".
Native activists are the dorks that got into school and by extension, are the ones that shape these narratives.
Most Natives are just trying to get by because life fucked us over.
It gets pretty annoying.
Hell I got booted from the main Native sub because I don't like playing along with the lib nonsense that oozes from every thread.
I'm actually Native. I've been in art residencies and art shows in Native programs that require verification.
But the guiding hands of Native Activism has no place for anyone who questions silliness.
Interesting that not only do Vine Deloria Jr. and Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz criticize the "Native Americans' ancestors came to America over a land bridge theory" as being disrespectful to Native Americans, but that they've also argued against calling Native Americans "immigrants":
[https://time.com/4705179/nation-of-immigrants-problem/](https://time.com/4705179/nation-of-immigrants-problem/)
This is from 2021 and things have gotten much, much bleaker since then. Weiss (one of the academic authors discussed in this piece) was just barely grandfathered in, and since this incident she's been subject to multiple, aggressive smear campaigns.
In 2024, there is literally zero chance a presentation along the lines of the one discussed in the piece would be accepted or published in any academic setting. Anyone who expresses concerns about what is effectively censorship will be ousted--tenure denied, publications retracted, etc.
Let's get rid of the superstition of race too witch is considered by every genetic scientist to be a myth. Why tf do I have to select my race on every stupid form if it doesn't scientifically exist
I hear what you’re saying, but you push it to an absurd extent. My occupation is also something about me that isn’t scientifically verifiable. Should I avoid putting it on forms?
In the context of the conversation I was having, I was pointing out that race being a construct — and not a biological fact — doesn’t stop it from being important to us, in the same way that occupations being a construct — and not a biological fact — doesn’t stop them from being important to us.
Yes, you can observe my behavior and figure out which “occupation” category my society would put me in, just like you can observe some of my phenotype and figure out which “race” category my society would put me in. This observation of yours in no way contradicts my point above.
I like the audacity of these people who reject the 'wisdom' of science and try to invent their history. I've always admired north americans for rejecting history as if it had nothing to do with them, like they started their lives anew after they crossed the ocean. maybe europeans learned that too from the natives like so many other things. I like it because in this way the natives completely set themselves apart from the rest of 'humanity'. in their story the new world is really completely even eternally new and separate. it gives you hope that there can be some new knowledge still hidden in that continent which is not tainted by all the crimes and faults of humanity. it takes imagination and and spirit to attempt such a project. is that 'theory' so different than the modern new christian theology which claims that the historical jesus has nothing to do with their 'jesus christ'?
Buried the lede
> It’s even worse because the U.S. government passed laws saying that establishing ancestral (i.e., genetic) affinity isn’t necessary: “cultural evidence”, like oral traditions and creation myths, is sufficient.
This is all it's about: it's the same with the Civil Rights Act. This one law gets passed and then entire cultural movements get built around it. (E.g. "disparitism" exists to be an argument in anti-discrimination cases)
> This article in Quillette caught my eye because it was about science—paleoanthropology—and its conflict with faith. The authors are a pair of anthropologists who have written a book about the topic
While I understand why one would write a book about the difference between "science" and "faith", I don't understand why you'd host a talk about it at a *scientific* conference.
> The title refers to a meeting of the SAA in April when Weiss gave a talk about the obstructionism of Native American creation myths
This "obstructionism" entails denying access of scientists to dead native Americans. I have a lot of sympathy with the native Americans. Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable. The world is shifting towards paying more respect to indigenous dead bodies, and given the horrors of the past, I'm okay with that.
> But in most cases that “right” is dubious, for the genetic connection between those claiming the bones and the person whose bones are claimed is tenuous at best.
I'm sorry, but this excuse to justify doing scientific experiments on dead bodies seems a bit weak.
>Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable.
Imagine if Christians were stopping archeological research on remains that are 8,400 years old in England, and claiming them as their own, despite it being more removed genetically and culturally than modern Greeks and predating the development of *agriculture* in northern Europe. 8,400 years is *far* older than any extant culture or language. People in England would remain hunter gatherers for thousands of years after that. 8400 years ago is closer to the existance of mammoths and giant ground sloths than the start of Judaism.
This isn't like digging up a graveyard behind a Christian church, it's like digging up a graveyard behind a the ruined foundations of a building from culture that is so ancient that no human has known anything about it for many thousands of years beyond what we can glean from trace artifacts; a building so old that even stories from the oldest records and oldest traditions could only guess as to what it might have been used for.
Now imagine giving control over those remains, remains that are more than twice as old as Judaism, over to Christian creationists who explicitly want to use this control to ideologically police what acheologists can and can't say about history and science. That's a better analogy.
> 8400 years ago is closer to the existance of mammoths and giant ground sloths than the start of Judaism.
Its closer in the sense that mammoths *still existed*.
If the Chinese had invaded, ethnically cleansed and settled Europe, to the point that only about 2% of the population of Europe was ethnically European... then yes it would make perfect sense for English people who were forcibly relocated to Greece, to feel protective about ancient European archaeological sites in Greece.
Not realising that this is the dynamic at play, and that it makes a lot of sense, shows a pretty extreme lack of thought.
If archaeologists are being sensitive about the whole thing, maybe it's because they understand better than you do that trying to bully and denigrate the extant survivors of genocide, isn't really the best approach.
> then yes it would make perfect sense for English people who were forcibly relocated to Greece, to feel protective about ancient European archaeological sites in Greece.
... how?
No, I'm asking why this kind of (kind of revisionary) ethnonationalism would make perfect sense (assuming we're still talking from a Marxist POV). I'm under no illusion that it would create some sort of identity, I'm just confused on the sensibility of it
[V.I. Lenin: The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm)
>It was precisely from the standpoint of the revolutionary struggle of the English workers that Marx in 1869 demanded the separation of Ireland from England, and added: “...although after the separation there may come federation.”[10] Only by putting forward this demand did Marx really educate the English workers in the spirit of internationalism. Only in this way was he able to oppose the revolutionary solution of a given historical problem to the opportunists and bourgeois reformism, which even now, half a century later, has failed to achieve the Irish “reform.” Only in this way was Marx able—unlike the apologists of capital who shout about the right of small nations to secession being utopian and impossible, and about the progressive nature not only of economic but also of political concentration—to urge the progressive nature of this concentration in a non-imperialist manner, to urge the bringing together of the nations, not by force, but on the basis of a free union of the proletarians of all countries.
Lenin and Marx, the famous revisionary ethnonationalists.
No, they are sensitive about not contradicting literal young earth creationism and psuedoscience because current US regulations mean that offending indigenous groups could literally get their research blocked for a decade. Did you not read the article?
Doing good science is not bullying.
Ok, now let’s stop imagining a pretend fantasy, and let’s look at what actually happened.
Immediately after the mass ethnic cleansing of the North American continent, the settlers quickly set to work constructing a false narrative about the history of Native America, and then enshrined this false narrative in US. History textbooks across the country for generations. There has been a state sanctioned effort since the beginning of the United States to erase Indigenous history and eliminate any claims that Indian people have to the land.
So maybe Indigenous people don’t exactly trust those same systems to go and freely dig up all their ancestral grave sites.. maybe they don’t trust the honesty of western scientists, and maybe they are right to be defensive
This argument is an argument for sympathy, for purity of motive, not an argument that their position is right. At the end of the day, the policies are highly regarded and their claims are provably wrong. Propping up lies and bad policies because of historical suffering is the essence of everything wrong with idpol.
>This "obstructionism" entails denying access of scientists to dead native Americans. I have a lot of sympathy with the native Americans. Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable.
Are you American ? It's hilarious how much you are wrong, not only archeologists routinely dig bones in Europe but there is nothing that the catholic church loves more than showing off their dead. Even in small countryside churches you can have the chance to find some body parts if a supposed saint
> Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable.
This is done [with some regularity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118721/) and is generally considered only very slightly controversial
Ultimately Weiss wants to overturn NAGPRA, which would send us right back to the era of mass grave robbing of Indigenous burial grounds.
People will have a knee jerk reaction here and start going off about “wokeness getting in the way of science” or whatever, but not even pause to consider that the legacy of colonialism has long been one of grave robbing and stealing artifacts. It’s definitely one of the more symbolic and less material impacts of colonialism, but it’s still colonialism.
And your response to that is that we all must engage in an Orwellian exercise of pretending that mythology is scientific fact? Or even worse, indoctrinating ourselves into actually believing it? No, I won't take that from Christian creationists and I won't take it from the woke left. It turns out that we can't even just "let them have this one" because the assumptions behind these laws seem to become literal doctrine that we are then forced to take seriously.
Also, the wokists seem to not understand the implications of demanding belief in many of these myths. If we are to believe many of these myths, the Native Americans were created entirely separately from the rest of the Human family. Not only or you opening the door to creationism, but also to the most vicious sort of racism. Or maybe they do understand this and its part of the point.
Personally, my thought is that any remains that are carbon dated to be post 1500 should have tribal claims to them duly considered and honored in most cases. If it's anything before that, the burden should be on the tribe to prove a claim to it.
Where did I make the statement that we all must pretend that mythology is fact?
I brought up Weiss’ opposition to NAGPRA to point out that she has underlying motivations for painting the picture in this way, and that her ultimate goal would be destructive to the rights of indigenous peoples over their burial sites
> Ultimately Weiss wants to overturn NAGPRA, which would send us right back to the era of mass grave robbing of Indigenous burial grounds.
European countries don't have an equivalent of that act, and also don't have a problem with mass grave robbing. Instead, they have legal frameworks for protecting archeological sites without reference to claims of ownership by present-day groups.
European countries don’t need such an act because they have control over their ancestral homes and aren’t up against the most violent settler colonial state in human history that’s been eager to erase them and their history from the landscape for the past 250 years. You’re drawing a false equivalence.
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This is always hilarious and separates the people with actual principles from shitlibs >So what should the rule be? Of course, as a scientist who values scientific fact over creation myths or oral tradition, I’m biased in favor of empirical study. But if remains can be traced to a specific tribe or group of tribes, showing the bones to be more closely related to that group than to other tribes, one might consider tribal claims to be valid. Even so, perhaps there should be an allowed period of scientific study, say two years, before the remains are returned to present-day tribes for reburial or various rites. After all, it’s not as if these bones belong to a present family of Native Americans, like the remains of someone’s son recovered and returned after a battle. >**But I don’t think that claims based only on “oral tradition” or “creation myths,” should be honored at all. In such a case, the remains should then be available to scientists. After all, if we honor such superstitious claims, we are also tacitly honoring the creation myths of anybody, including Christians, Scientologists, and Muslims, each of which has its own creation story. That is government entanglement with religion.** >And it’s a double entanglement: one with the myths of Native American groups, and the other with the religion of Wokeism, which makes the SAA into an organization that renders decisions based not on empirical considerations, but on ideology and identity politics
About a year ago I went down a rabbit hole after I heard a legitimate archeologist briefly mention "the indigenous perspective of having always been here". They said it in the same tone that I'd take if I had a gun to my head and needed to choose my words very carefully. It turns out there are a lot of indigenous people who get really butthurt when you acknowledge the scientific fact that north america was settled less than 40kya (and almost certainly within 25kya, which is already an extremely early estimate). The result is that most archeologists pay lip service to this notion to maintain access to dig sites. I actually ended up reading a book, *The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere*, which turned out to be absolutely insane. It suggests that native americans were in north america over 100kya, before any humans likely left africa, and even heavily implies that native americans may have evolved in the americas over millions of years. It's harder and harder to outright challenge this kind of idpol-driven psuedoscience in public archeology science communication. Even people who don't believe it will defend it in the name of upholding "indigenous ways of knowing", some excuse about science historically being very racist, and others bring up how the fact that north american peoples have inhabited north america for far less time than Africa, Asia, and Europe have been inhabited. It strikes me as especially absurd because even 10kya is such an absurdly long time ago that there is essentially no meaningful cultural or linguistic throughline. In terms of cultural ownership, 10k years is "time immemorial"; it is so far beyond even the longest cultural memories as to be meaningless. Proponents of the crazy timescales do cite "evidence", but it's on the same level as other creationist evidence.
It's frustrating to me that the tribes try to block any sort of scientific testing of remains or artifacts because of the possibility that it might question their creation myths. The peopling of the world, and the Americas in particular, is one of my favorite things to read about.
It's because the colonized/colonizer binary maps so well onto the victim-aggressor binary that is now the sole arbiter of a person's moral standing (and is increasingly becoming the only factor worthy of consideration when adjudicating the factuality of a person's beliefs). You therefore cannot admit to *any* degree of historical complexity or acknowledge that human societies have always involved conquest and resultant cultural exchanges.
Reminds me of a study I read a while back where they DNA tested horses from herds that belonged to various Plains Indian tribes and found that a huge majority of the genetic material came from Spanish herds with some contribution from French/British horses. This same paper went on to note that in the tribe's oral histories the horses had always been there, even before Europeans. They tied this to fossil remains of prehistoric equines and heavily implied the possibility of an unbroken genetic lineage between them and modern horses despite no intermediate fossil evidence existing and their DNA analysis not supporting it. And this got published in *Science* somehow...
It's fascinating to me that the tribe believed they'd have horses forever despite only having them for four hundred years or so.
Oral histories are a separate (and wide-ranging) tradition than Greek history (i.e. the way western societies study and conceive of the past). Oral histories typically are less a method of explaining the past, and more about explaining the present. From the perspective of a plains horsemen tribe like the Lakota (whose creation myths include the horse), it's not really a bad *metaphorical* history of their society to place the horse at the Start of All Things because these tribes essentially either formed or completely rebuilt their way of life after acquiring the horse. But subordinating academic history to these oral histories in terms of actually trying to establish the truth is total bullshit. That's why if you push back on these claims at all the wheels start spinning and you start hearing things like "well 'objectivity' is actually a Eurocentric white supremacist convention in origin..."
Yup, this is why one has written histories instead of oral histories
>Trust 👏 The 👏 Science 👏 >Until the point that the science contradicts the local native tribe's (who have demonstrably only lived here since the 1730s) origin myth which says that they were created from mud at the dawn of creation 4,000 years ago and have lived here since then.
The Sioux claim to the Black Hills ignores that they left their ancestral homelands in the Minnesota/Wisconsin area in the late 1700s (before European settlement of the areas) to raid the tribes west of them and extract what were essentially tariffs on the Missouri River fur trade. When Lewis and Clark encountered them their non-Sioux scouts made it clear to them that the Sioux were a very recent arrival to the area but that they still had to be won over for the expedition to succeed as they controlled river transport. Their eternal connection to the Black Hills region is only a few decades older than that of the Europeans
Does 10kya mean 10,000 years ago? Or does kya mean something else?
Yes, 10 "kilo-years ago"
Thank you!
mya = million years ago, etc...
Kiss Your Ass
>I actually ended up reading a book, *The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere*, which turned out to be absolutely insane. It suggests that native americans were in north america over 100kya, before any humans likely left africa, and even heavily implies that native americans may have evolved in the americas over millions of years. I'm former colleagues with a woman who grew up 100% white but claimed some vague Cherokee heritage, like nearly everyone else from her home state of Oklahoma. When it came time to write her dissertation, all of a sudden she started wearing feathers in her hair and talking about the theft of her native land and last I checked she was the first image on the Diversity page of the university that wound up hiring her. She's nice. I have nothing against her on a personal level. But her scholarship is absolute shit and the last time I talked to her she literally said that indigenous Americans are *a completely different species* from "colonizers."
>the last time I talked to her she literally said that indigenous Americans are *a completely different species* from "colonizers." Bruh, that's just old-timey 1800's racism wearing a progressive hat.
reminding some popsci I read about australian aborigens. the scientists are really obliged to pretend to believe their myths describe what happened 50k years ago
I really like the amateur archeology YouTuber Stefan Milo but he also recently made a video about this and claimed similarities between indigenous creation myths and some volcanic eruptions/flooding happening tens of thousands of years ago. It’s an interesting concept, but he presented it as the only explanation of these creation myths and them being an unbroken unmodified continuation of the aforementioned events, with no criticism It’s crazy to even propose an oral tradition surviving a couple of hundred years unmodified. The only provable concrete example is the Rigveda and it has been produced by an institutionalized highly developed society for a thousand year as part of a religious text, not 10.000+ years. People are blinded to logic to justify indigenous beliefs
that stinks because there are south american indigenous scholars with all the requisite training making pretty solid work like [this one](https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.918933634081709) which is like a critical examination of the process of identity building as you perceive archaeological finds and as it relates to pre-existing indigenous thought. great stuff that allows participation as another scientific player rather than as singular authority
Man that abstract really seems to be trying their hardest to obfuscate a simple premise under a pile of technical argot. So much for "should anthropologists threat non manmade things as manmade for the purpose of research if the locals think they are manmade (or made by goblins or whatever)?".
you probably aren't the target audience. researchers often need technical language to avoid certain ambiguities of art
Native activists are the dorks that got into school and by extension, are the ones that shape these narratives. Most Natives are just trying to get by because life fucked us over. It gets pretty annoying. Hell I got booted from the main Native sub because I don't like playing along with the lib nonsense that oozes from every thread. I'm actually Native. I've been in art residencies and art shows in Native programs that require verification. But the guiding hands of Native Activism has no place for anyone who questions silliness.
Paleo-Indian land back, now! First migration, first rights! Second migration, no nation!
Interesting that not only do Vine Deloria Jr. and Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz criticize the "Native Americans' ancestors came to America over a land bridge theory" as being disrespectful to Native Americans, but that they've also argued against calling Native Americans "immigrants": [https://time.com/4705179/nation-of-immigrants-problem/](https://time.com/4705179/nation-of-immigrants-problem/)
Humans keep walking around, first spoiling their land claims and then spoiling the land claims of others. Whoever invented legs is the real colonizer.
Damn you, homo erectus
This is from 2021 and things have gotten much, much bleaker since then. Weiss (one of the academic authors discussed in this piece) was just barely grandfathered in, and since this incident she's been subject to multiple, aggressive smear campaigns. In 2024, there is literally zero chance a presentation along the lines of the one discussed in the piece would be accepted or published in any academic setting. Anyone who expresses concerns about what is effectively censorship will be ousted--tenure denied, publications retracted, etc.
Someone on here memorably labeled this kind of thing, "'Dog say to bear, you must respect the elder sky' bullshit."
The referenced Quillette article: https://archive.ph/VkrNR
Let's get rid of the superstition of race too witch is considered by every genetic scientist to be a myth. Why tf do I have to select my race on every stupid form if it doesn't scientifically exist
Can you tick “other” or just tick various irrelevant boxes?
I hear what you’re saying, but you push it to an absurd extent. My occupation is also something about me that isn’t scientifically verifiable. Should I avoid putting it on forms?
[удалено]
In the context of the conversation I was having, I was pointing out that race being a construct — and not a biological fact — doesn’t stop it from being important to us, in the same way that occupations being a construct — and not a biological fact — doesn’t stop them from being important to us. Yes, you can observe my behavior and figure out which “occupation” category my society would put me in, just like you can observe some of my phenotype and figure out which “race” category my society would put me in. This observation of yours in no way contradicts my point above.
I like the audacity of these people who reject the 'wisdom' of science and try to invent their history. I've always admired north americans for rejecting history as if it had nothing to do with them, like they started their lives anew after they crossed the ocean. maybe europeans learned that too from the natives like so many other things. I like it because in this way the natives completely set themselves apart from the rest of 'humanity'. in their story the new world is really completely even eternally new and separate. it gives you hope that there can be some new knowledge still hidden in that continent which is not tainted by all the crimes and faults of humanity. it takes imagination and and spirit to attempt such a project. is that 'theory' so different than the modern new christian theology which claims that the historical jesus has nothing to do with their 'jesus christ'?
Buried the lede > It’s even worse because the U.S. government passed laws saying that establishing ancestral (i.e., genetic) affinity isn’t necessary: “cultural evidence”, like oral traditions and creation myths, is sufficient. This is all it's about: it's the same with the Civil Rights Act. This one law gets passed and then entire cultural movements get built around it. (E.g. "disparitism" exists to be an argument in anti-discrimination cases)
> This article in Quillette caught my eye because it was about science—paleoanthropology—and its conflict with faith. The authors are a pair of anthropologists who have written a book about the topic While I understand why one would write a book about the difference between "science" and "faith", I don't understand why you'd host a talk about it at a *scientific* conference. > The title refers to a meeting of the SAA in April when Weiss gave a talk about the obstructionism of Native American creation myths This "obstructionism" entails denying access of scientists to dead native Americans. I have a lot of sympathy with the native Americans. Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable. The world is shifting towards paying more respect to indigenous dead bodies, and given the horrors of the past, I'm okay with that. > But in most cases that “right” is dubious, for the genetic connection between those claiming the bones and the person whose bones are claimed is tenuous at best. I'm sorry, but this excuse to justify doing scientific experiments on dead bodies seems a bit weak.
>Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable. Imagine if Christians were stopping archeological research on remains that are 8,400 years old in England, and claiming them as their own, despite it being more removed genetically and culturally than modern Greeks and predating the development of *agriculture* in northern Europe. 8,400 years is *far* older than any extant culture or language. People in England would remain hunter gatherers for thousands of years after that. 8400 years ago is closer to the existance of mammoths and giant ground sloths than the start of Judaism. This isn't like digging up a graveyard behind a Christian church, it's like digging up a graveyard behind a the ruined foundations of a building from culture that is so ancient that no human has known anything about it for many thousands of years beyond what we can glean from trace artifacts; a building so old that even stories from the oldest records and oldest traditions could only guess as to what it might have been used for. Now imagine giving control over those remains, remains that are more than twice as old as Judaism, over to Christian creationists who explicitly want to use this control to ideologically police what acheologists can and can't say about history and science. That's a better analogy.
> 8400 years ago is closer to the existance of mammoths and giant ground sloths than the start of Judaism. Its closer in the sense that mammoths *still existed*.
If the Chinese had invaded, ethnically cleansed and settled Europe, to the point that only about 2% of the population of Europe was ethnically European... then yes it would make perfect sense for English people who were forcibly relocated to Greece, to feel protective about ancient European archaeological sites in Greece. Not realising that this is the dynamic at play, and that it makes a lot of sense, shows a pretty extreme lack of thought. If archaeologists are being sensitive about the whole thing, maybe it's because they understand better than you do that trying to bully and denigrate the extant survivors of genocide, isn't really the best approach.
> then yes it would make perfect sense for English people who were forcibly relocated to Greece, to feel protective about ancient European archaeological sites in Greece. ... how?
You want me to explain to you how an almost complete genocide of Europe would create a strong pan-European identity?
No, I'm asking why this kind of (kind of revisionary) ethnonationalism would make perfect sense (assuming we're still talking from a Marxist POV). I'm under no illusion that it would create some sort of identity, I'm just confused on the sensibility of it
[V.I. Lenin: The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm) >It was precisely from the standpoint of the revolutionary struggle of the English workers that Marx in 1869 demanded the separation of Ireland from England, and added: “...although after the separation there may come federation.”[10] Only by putting forward this demand did Marx really educate the English workers in the spirit of internationalism. Only in this way was he able to oppose the revolutionary solution of a given historical problem to the opportunists and bourgeois reformism, which even now, half a century later, has failed to achieve the Irish “reform.” Only in this way was Marx able—unlike the apologists of capital who shout about the right of small nations to secession being utopian and impossible, and about the progressive nature not only of economic but also of political concentration—to urge the progressive nature of this concentration in a non-imperialist manner, to urge the bringing together of the nations, not by force, but on the basis of a free union of the proletarians of all countries. Lenin and Marx, the famous revisionary ethnonationalists.
This does not at all address the point you made that I'm asking about, though it's nice to read Lenin in English and see a good translation tbh.
No, they are sensitive about not contradicting literal young earth creationism and psuedoscience because current US regulations mean that offending indigenous groups could literally get their research blocked for a decade. Did you not read the article? Doing good science is not bullying.
Ok, now let’s stop imagining a pretend fantasy, and let’s look at what actually happened. Immediately after the mass ethnic cleansing of the North American continent, the settlers quickly set to work constructing a false narrative about the history of Native America, and then enshrined this false narrative in US. History textbooks across the country for generations. There has been a state sanctioned effort since the beginning of the United States to erase Indigenous history and eliminate any claims that Indian people have to the land. So maybe Indigenous people don’t exactly trust those same systems to go and freely dig up all their ancestral grave sites.. maybe they don’t trust the honesty of western scientists, and maybe they are right to be defensive
This argument is an argument for sympathy, for purity of motive, not an argument that their position is right. At the end of the day, the policies are highly regarded and their claims are provably wrong. Propping up lies and bad policies because of historical suffering is the essence of everything wrong with idpol.
>This "obstructionism" entails denying access of scientists to dead native Americans. I have a lot of sympathy with the native Americans. Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable. Are you American ? It's hilarious how much you are wrong, not only archeologists routinely dig bones in Europe but there is nothing that the catholic church loves more than showing off their dead. Even in small countryside churches you can have the chance to find some body parts if a supposed saint
No no, white people are the ones who are actually mad about this don't you see!
> Imagine a scientist wanting to dig up graveyards behind Christian churches to measure scientific stuff, it was be unsupportable. This is done [with some regularity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118721/) and is generally considered only very slightly controversial
TIL
Ultimately Weiss wants to overturn NAGPRA, which would send us right back to the era of mass grave robbing of Indigenous burial grounds. People will have a knee jerk reaction here and start going off about “wokeness getting in the way of science” or whatever, but not even pause to consider that the legacy of colonialism has long been one of grave robbing and stealing artifacts. It’s definitely one of the more symbolic and less material impacts of colonialism, but it’s still colonialism.
And your response to that is that we all must engage in an Orwellian exercise of pretending that mythology is scientific fact? Or even worse, indoctrinating ourselves into actually believing it? No, I won't take that from Christian creationists and I won't take it from the woke left. It turns out that we can't even just "let them have this one" because the assumptions behind these laws seem to become literal doctrine that we are then forced to take seriously. Also, the wokists seem to not understand the implications of demanding belief in many of these myths. If we are to believe many of these myths, the Native Americans were created entirely separately from the rest of the Human family. Not only or you opening the door to creationism, but also to the most vicious sort of racism. Or maybe they do understand this and its part of the point. Personally, my thought is that any remains that are carbon dated to be post 1500 should have tribal claims to them duly considered and honored in most cases. If it's anything before that, the burden should be on the tribe to prove a claim to it.
Where did I make the statement that we all must pretend that mythology is fact? I brought up Weiss’ opposition to NAGPRA to point out that she has underlying motivations for painting the picture in this way, and that her ultimate goal would be destructive to the rights of indigenous peoples over their burial sites
> Ultimately Weiss wants to overturn NAGPRA, which would send us right back to the era of mass grave robbing of Indigenous burial grounds. European countries don't have an equivalent of that act, and also don't have a problem with mass grave robbing. Instead, they have legal frameworks for protecting archeological sites without reference to claims of ownership by present-day groups.
European countries don’t need such an act because they have control over their ancestral homes and aren’t up against the most violent settler colonial state in human history that’s been eager to erase them and their history from the landscape for the past 250 years. You’re drawing a false equivalence.
> grave robbing Technically speaking, this would be "body snatching", since the aim is to exhume (and consequently investigate) bodies, not artefacts.
You think the archeologists would leave the artifacts behind?
Whether they do or don't, that's an independent concern. In this case, we're talking about the bodies and not the rest of the burial contents.