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Think of it like this: You own quite a bit of fenced-land and have built some dwellings on it, a main home, a couple outbuildings, a barn, etc... you and your
by ConcernedCoder 6y ago
Think of it like this:
You own quite a bit of fenced-land and have built some dwellings on it, a main home, a couple outbuildings, a barn, etc... you and your family farm it, raise livestock, hunt, fish, etc... and live quite well off the land without ever needing to leave or venture beyond the fence.
One day you see some strangers outside your fence, looking quite haggard, and ill setting up a camp using nothing but the meager supplies left in their vehicles, and what looks to be parts of the vehicles themselves...
Feeling compassion you attempt to help them, you open your gate and land to them, your home even, providing food, additional shelter, and even teaching them some basic things about your land and how to harvest, hunt, fish and generally live off it...
Fast forward a couple centuries, and now your "guests" have double-crossed
you... taken all your land by force, persecuted your family while committing countless crimes including rapes, murders, and basically genocide on a continental scale.
In an act of "graciousness" during one of countless "treaties" you've been forced into accepting under duress - so that your entire family wasn't completely wiped from the face of the earth... you were "allowed" some small areas of undesireable land by your new masters where you be confined and kept out of the way without constantly needing to be harrased and supervised into submission... that was until those same people found out there was oil and other commodities buried underneath your newly constucted hovels... at which point they just pushed you into smaller and smaller areas, and took what they wanted from you and yours at-will anyway... I mean who could you complain to? their bought-and-paid for system of goverment and courts? the same that were used to persecute your family and steal your lands and heritage?
Now apparently some judges have decided to interpret the law as written, instead of posing for pictures in black gowns with pretty little wooden hammers...
- kyuudou 6y agoThis analogy falls apart some since there was never a concept of land ownership (to my knowledge) amongst the various North American tribes, so there wouldn't have been "fenced-land" semi-permanent dwellings to take over to begin with. Also, not all of them were welcoming in the romanticized way you present and many of them were very brutal to rival indigenous groups. In short, it's a little more complicated than that. Certainly there was much evil committed towards indigenous peoples in many places, though. However, the Aztecs weren't very nice to their neighbors and the fact that they were betrayed by the Spanish seemed like an apt comeuppance for a group led by bloodthirsty warmongering maniacs.