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> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. Land has been changing hands

• dharmach 12y ago
  >Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. The scale and the speed were different. When a group of people moves in occupying part of the land, gradually over a long period is very different to one just moves in, kills all and takes everything.
• trextrex 12y ago
  I think what the author is saying is that the history taught in schools and colleges should not omit the part about the how the lands were acquired from the native americans.
  • kghose 12y ago
    And the OPs point is that we should not stop there either, because it is an arbitrary point in history. Also, as the number of immigrants increase in US schools, White guilt and other forms of self flagellation lessens. If you are not European, and your parent immigrated you have less of a complex about where the land came from, and are less likely to want to carry some burden foisted on you by some one with a funny political agenda. It's interesting to me how we finally got rid of Original Sin, but now have replaced this with other, atheistic forms of this, like trying to make our children feel guilty about Native Americans and Slavery. I personally think this is the best way to increase tensions.
    • king_jester 12y ago
      > It's interesting to me how we finally got rid of Original Sin, but now have replaced this with other, atheistic forms of this, like trying to make our children feel guilty about Native Americans and Slavery. I personally think this is the best way to increase tensions. Time and time again people like to derail important discussions about the nature of Native American genocide and slavery by claiming this. Acknowledging this history is not about making people feel guilty, it is about understanding how those people are treated today and how their treatment is an extension of this history. The nature of racism and its history and legacy should not be trumped because it makes someone somewhere feel bad. The best way to increase tensions is to ignore the past and continue to let that past influence how people are treated in the present, both socially and politically.
    • trextrex 12y ago
      Yes. Ideally history taught in schools should present all sides in an unbiased manner without leaving parts out and go all the way to the present. But it happens all too often that parts of history are left out because of political agendas, ignorance, or lack of data. My understanding of the article is that the auther is pointing out one part of history that is consistently not taught (but should be).
      • happyscrappy 12y ago
        They should also teach that Native Americans owned Negro slaves, but that doesn't fit the narrative.
        • rmxt 12y ago
          I don't think that a few sentences can do a complicated topic justice, but it would folly to point out what you are saying without also acknowledging that Europeans are indeed the people that brought that specific form of slavery to Native Americans. No Europeans, no Native American ownership of Africans, but I agree that a holistic view of Native American culture should be presented in textbooks, etc.
        • benbreen 12y ago
• sveme 12y ago
  Replace "America" with "Germany" and "Eastern Europe" and consider whether you would like to uphold your position. The author's point was that the common narrative of European settlers colonizing an empty continent, alternatively European colonists bringing civilization to wild, barren lands has to be extended with European settlers bringing mass extermination to the indigenous population, through many different means.
  • mason240 12y ago
    >Replace "America" with "Germany" and "Eastern Europe" and consider whether you would like to uphold your position. That would strengthen the OP's position by anyone who has even a basic understand of European history.
  • b6 12y ago
    I don't think I'm strongly pushing any particular position -- I think the author is, and I'm asking why. Basically, what makes this particular story of human savagery, out of all of them, crucial right now? If it's high time for Americans to acknowledge that the US is built on someone else's land, is it also time for everyone else in every other country to do the same thing? Is there any country whose borders don't include territory that used to belong to people of some other ethnicity or culture? Are we even sure we understand how to determine who really owns what piece of land? I'm genuinely asking. It seems very basic, but I don't know how to answer it. Please note, I'm not trying to claim that any particular instance of violence was alright because everybody else was being violent too. Without a doubt, it was appalling, atrocious savagery, and will hopefully never be repeated. It's just that, in the field of appalling, atrocious savagery, there's a lot of competition.
    • sveme 12y ago
      But isn't "same old, same old" a dangerous position? I understand what you are saying, there have constantly been wars in every possible inhabitable area, everywhere in the world and especially at the end of the 19th century. So the US is not special in that respect. But the outside view of the US is that they deem themselves special - the shining beacon on the hill - a narrative that cannot be accommodated with its history. Germany had to come to terms with its past, acknowledge its past, is it too much to ask American citizens to do that as well, and continue onwards with a little more humbleness? The history of the US is not particularly nasty in comparison to other countries' histories, but it is not particularly exemplary as well.
• atlantic 12y ago
  So presumably, if some foreign power invaded the US next week, violently exterminated most of the population, and herded the survivors into a few tracts of land, you would be fine with that? After all, land changes hands continuously.
  • b6 12y ago
    Not at all. Nor am I "fine with" what happened to the natives. All I'm asking is, would it be any major abberration, considering human history? Or would it just be: after atrocious violence and savagery, land briefly under the control of vague human entity X now seems to be under the control of vague human entity Y, episode #37,093,840?
    • afarrell 12y ago
      It would not be. And all of those instances make Robert Nozick's arguments about the sanctity of property rights as a first principle laughable on every continent. I've yet to find a another debate to which this is relevant. Well, except perhaps the debate over that native american reservation that the federal government is currently seizing to hand over to a coal mining company.
    • atlantic 12y ago
      Violence and war are not unusual historically. But the speed and thoroughness with which a whole continent was cleared of its native inhabitants, and the survivors were subject to all kinds of institutionalized abuse until their culture and traditions were erased, is certainly exceptional, and in recent history only compares in severity with what happened to the aboriginals in Australia. Moreover, if there was official recognition of what really happened, even now much could be done to redress the original injustice and give these people some closure. Instead, schoolchildren are taught a sanitized version of American history which really adds insult to injury, from the point of view of the surviving natives.
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
• jasonisalive 12y ago
  America has long held itself up as "better" than other countries - more virtuous, more wise, more free, more advanced, etc. etc. When you actually look into it you see: a) the utterly brutal dispossession and extermination of a weak and technologically primitive existing population b) the callous and self-serving enslavation of vast numbers of people c) vicious and destructive interference in weak countries across the 20th and 21st century to facilitate the wholesale theft of natural resources. I'm not saying that the rest of the world doesn't have its own sins, or that any other country would have been particularly better if they had the opportunities that America has had, but please, get down off your high horse. The ignorance and self-infatuation of American people is why they are so widely hated.
  • b6 12y ago
    I don't think I'm on a high horse. I'm actually extremely critical of the US. Rereading my comment, is it possible you attributed viewpoints to me that I didn't actually express?
  • happyscrappy 12y ago
    They are widely hated by Europeans who do not even realize they are a vassal state. Most of the rest of the world would do anything to get to America.
    • userulluipeste 12y ago
      "Most of the rest of the world would do anything to get to America." I find this to be just a self-enforcing attitude (which one may get a chance to feel when entering a USA consulate). Some decades ago, when there was a big difference in the quality of life between USA and "the rest of the world" (thanks to WW2 outcome), it made sense to claim such a thing. But things change, you know?
    • coldtea 12y ago
      Spoken like a true American (with all that implies). Most of the world would want America to fucking live them alone.
  • 12y ago
• whybroke 12y ago
  If a party owns land the US, by what moral authority can they block others access to it? By what moral authority can they demand rent on threat of eviction? Why wouldn't any democratic agency simply have the right to take it from them without compensation? The reason this is a deeply interesting topic is because there are exceptionally strong claims to property rights made in the US and that same property was almost entirely all stolen in the recent past. And because one gets such inconsistencies as claiming the theft occurred in the "mists of time" when, by definition, the constitution itself is further back in those same mists of time. And the logically absurd (and patently false claims) that one can't locate a parcel's original possessor therefore some arbitrary purchaser down an illicit chain can make nearly unlimited exclusive claim to owning it. And of course endless use of tu quoque. So the authors intention is an utterly uninteresting red herring. It is a remarkable opportunity for thoughtful people to examine their own inconsistent views. The rest will simply shut their ears and convince themselves their is no reason for contemplation.
  • arethuza 12y ago
    "by what moral authority can they block others access to it" Actually, here in Scotland there is a fairly widespread recognition (apart, perhaps, from some large landowners) that a lot of land was acquired by rather dubious means. I think this provides a fairly decent justification for the "right to roam" we have over most land.
  • clavalle 12y ago
    >that same property was almost entirely all stolen in the recent past. Was there some sort of native American title office that the European settlers missed? Was every square mile of what would become the United States occupied, used, and accounted for? The English were brutal, no doubt about it, but the French, for one, lived for a couple of centuries side by side with many native peoples in frontier areas without forcefully taking land and treating the natives as a population of people to be dealt with on an equal footing. There was plenty of room for everyone and huge areas of unclaimed, un-worked, un-owned land in every meaningful sense of the word.
    • 12y ago