Ten minutes later: hey, about that land we gave you…
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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I know it's just memes, but, if anyone is interested in more perspective on this, I heartily recommend the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It tells the history of the latter parts of the Indian Wars using primary sources (and Native American sources, wherever possible). The result is the story of American expansion from the Native perspective and, while depressing, is also really important to understand.
No you can't have running water. Yes we did promise it to you in a treaty back in 1868
Source: Colorado v. Navajo nation supreme court ruling.
One judge whispers to the other "we didn't even pinky swear, so.."
Yeah just like we told them they could keep South Dakota
To this day nicknamed "The Sooner State" after a bunch of white colonizers who cheated to get lands already stolen from Native Americans before other white colonizers had a chance to steal them "fairly".
White people stealing land is also the origin of the “I’m 1/64th Native American” thing that white people always parrot. The federal government was giving land away to natives, but they had to have a certain percentage of ancestry. Off the top of my head, I think it was 1/8? So one native ancestor three generations ago. But there wasn’t any sort of checks or confirmations for this. So a lot of white people just started lying, and telling the feds that they had the minimum required lineage to claim the land.
And every time the feds came to check in, the white people would start saying it again, so their land didn’t get clawed back from them. And their kids heard them say this, and got told to tell the authorities this whenever asked. And those kids actually believed the lie, because why wouldn’t they? Over time it got watered down even further, and eventually turned into the modern day “oh yeah I’m like 1/64th native, from a Navajo princess” line that white people like to use. All because their 100% white great-great-great-grandparents wanted free land.
The Governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, has been pretty open about the fact that his family did this. People gave Warren shit, but Stitt is so much worse especially considering the way he fucks with the tribes while claiming their heritage. (Stitt was also involved in lots of real estate scams - I believe there’s several states he’s barred from conducting business in)
What makes it even worse is that being “too” indigenous - having too much indigenous heritage - meant that you were too incompetent to manage your own land. It needed to be managed by a white conservator. If you want to see how fucked this situation was, Flowers of the Killer Moon is great.
See also: one of several reasons why Elizabeth Warren isn't president right now.
I believe that she honestly believed it and had no fraudulent or otherwise malicious intent but not to make absolutely sure it wasn't one of those cases was stupid and unwittingly offensive as fuck!
Yup. I honestly think that she could have been president - but for that. She's a firecracker though, still.
I agree. I'd have preferred Bernie and have some reservations about her cozy relationship with the corrupt party establishment, but policy-wise she was definitely the second-best choice in the 2020 primaries.
I would bet that the people of the time saw themselves as very civilized for not simply wiping the native population out.
Like, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad just 250 years before the European ships started arriving in the Americas: "Most of the residents were massacred during and after the siege, with civilian casualty figures ranging in the hundreds of thousands." The end of the Mongol period was when Timur / Timurlane resulting in the deaths of 20 million people. That's just a century before the Europeans started conquering the new world.
Maybe the Europeans of the 1500s to 1800s thought of themselves as kind and enlightened in that they made treaties with the natives instead of just massacring them. Maybe they thought of themselves as exceptionally kind because they actually assigned land to the natives, instead of simply taking all the land for themselves.
Instead of thinking of the European colonial forces as an especially brutal and rapacious group, maybe it's better to think of that entire time period as brutal.
Also, as an aside, the natives are always portrayed as being peaceful, gentle people who are victims of the awful Europeans. But, we know that they were fighting amongst themselves before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans found native villages surrounded by palisades. There were already native groups who had been driven off their land by other native groups. They were massacred, but that was more a function of diseases and technology, rather than a difference in character.
In the Spanish empire IIRC they were all given citicenship, so yes it could have been handled better, even in that era. In fact, the latino ethnicity is the result of the mix between the natives and the colonizers, which happened because they were integrated.
Thanks, can you provide a source for that? Was that true for indiginous people in the Spanish colonies in the Americas in the 16th and 17th century already? Cause these people were not better off. Spain's colonial rule was as brutal and genocidal as any other. The common whitewashing myth goes that the indigenous population of South America 'was reduced' to large parts in this era due to not being immunologicaly prepared to the 'flu'. Well, they were not 'immunologically' prepared to the metal swords and armour and the bullets of the conquistadores. Many of those who survived were killed by working themselves to death in the forced labour system in notorious Spanish silver mines (see e.g. Potosí). Let's be careful not to portray Spanish colonialism as being something 'civilized'* by the omission of this, but maybe that wasn't your intention.
*Well maybe it was civilized, depending on your view on civilization.
I recommend reading this section of the "Spanish colonization of the Americas" Wikipedia article, which has plenty of sources. Obviously they weren't saints, but, at the time, they were "the dawn of human rights" (cited in the article) and took Christian values very seriously, which is also why they converted all the population forcefully. There's no denying that, but, as a silver lining, education and religion were almost one and the same, and they did build many universities, schools, etc.
When I visited the United States, they always tried to paint it as "they were all equally bad" when it came to colonizers in the museums I went to. However, I feel like that is because the "situation" with natives was way worse in North America than it was in South America.
"unless if there happen to be some natural resources that we don't know about yet"
Neil Gorsuch says that Oklahoma is Native American property? Lets see him enforce it.
"Oklahoma is OK"
Never has been, never will be.
Let me out :(
It's the terror of knowing what this world is about..
:)
Next panel on the bottom: those that survive the trip...
:-(
Most tribes didn't have a concept of land ownership, so they wouldn't say "that we own".
Most tribes today are Christian and we still hate them
I'm assuming by "we" you mean the US Government. Is that right?
The Cherokee, famously, were perfectly happy to leave Georgia and Florida on the grounds that "Hey its not like we really recognize a claim to the land you guys can just have it" and never once contested the confiscation of land, much less by taking it all the way to the Supreme Court and winning an unenforceable injunction against their forced removal.
Each tribe was/is an independent nation, with their own ideals, beliefs, social structures, etc.. There's a reason why I said "most" and not "all".
The differences are heavily overstated, primarily as a means of dismissing native people as "primitive" and necessarily subservient to the arriving colonists. The main difference with the Cherokee was simply geographic. They lived in land not heavily settled until later in the colonization process and had more time to acclimate to western legal norms. It didn't save them, but it gave them these neat little anecdotes that we can pretend made them "some of the good ones".
Well I hope it was clear that I wasn't even remotely implying they/we are primitive and should be subservient. I am Cherokee, and Choctaw. My great grandmother, and great grandfather are on the final rolls of the Dawes Act.
Psych!
So tired of the "you can't judge the past the same as the present" crowd
Reserved seating for all!