This is an extremely white washed version of land back. Pretty sure land back means full control over what happens on that land, including what kind of people can live on it, something that is currently controlled exclusively by the colonial government.
If they’re feeling generous they might give you the option to stay on the condition that you assimilate into their culture.
You know, the thing Europeans forced Indigenous peoples to do. Not saying settlers should be forced through violence to do so, but I think it’s more than fair that if you’re going to stay, you have to assimilate.
But you’re not entitled to even assimilation if they just don’t want you here. And they have plenty of reason not to want you here.
I know that as a 1st gen Chinese immigrant to Canada (I came here as a kid so wasn’t my choice), if all the Indigenous groups where I live unambiguously told me to GTFO. I would in good conscience have to do so and hope I can use my birth certificate to reclaim Chinese citizenship. I’m by every definition a settler so it’s only fair. Whatever struggles I have in China (namely language barrier since I can barely read Chinese) I will have to deal with and it’s not on the Indigenous people to let me stay just because I can’t survive anywhere else.
Where you go back to and what happens to you isn’t the problem of the people you colonized. And by transferring that problem on to them, you are in fact perpetuating colonialism.
As far as I can tell, I’m being told that in this hypothetical scenario, it’s okay for me to be jailed or removed from my home because I’m not indigenous. Am I misreading it?
If you’re so concerned about it, maybe go talk to some of the Indigenous people in your area and work with them then. Give them a reason to let you stay. You complaining to two other settlers on Lemmy certainly won’t help your case.
Thanks for your concern, I’ll make sure to double check my standing with them but I think I’ll be alright. Maybe if I’m lucky, I can do a DNA test and find some indigenous ancestry that I didn’t know about, the thresholds would probably have to be pretty low but it’s possible I could squeak in there and get to be on the ruling side instead.
Tbh if you’re ever told to leave, this kind of mentality will probably be why.
Every Indigenous person I’ve ever met has been super nice and welcoming. They’re not out for revenge like you seem to think they are. I obviously can’t and shouldn’t speak on their behalf, but just from my limited experience talking to Indigenous people where I live, they’re perfectly willing to work with the people living here, Indigenous or not. Indigenous peoples have also been some of the first groups to advocate for the government to accept refugees, using the fact that it’s their land as an argument for people from elsewhere to live here. Your strawman notion of the racist, exclusionary Indigenous person who seeks to do to white people what they did to them is just that, a strawman.
You’re also working under the assumption that they will treat you worse than the current government treats you. News flash, even with white privilege, you’re currently being treated like you don’t have a right to the land. How much is your landlord charging you to live here? Do you have a right to a home under the current laws? No you don’t. If you lose all your money, you will become homeless, and plenty of jurisdictions outright criminalize homelessness and will throw you in jail because of it.
This hits the nail on the head. Settlers fear, above all, being treated anywhere near as badly as we’ve treated indigenous peoples, when they have been infinitely kinder. The last shall be first, that doesn’t mean they will kill of us or deport all of us, but it means the decisions will be driven by indigenous people first and foremost.
It’s telling of the settler mindset that they immediately assume decolonization entails being treated almost as horribly as settlers have treated indigenous peoples.
I never said I thought they’d treat me like this. In fact, I don’t, for exactly the reasons you’re listing. You are the one saying that it would be okay to treat me like this, which is why I’ve been talking to you about your statements, not them.
I’m not saying it’s okay or not okay to treat you like anything. I certainly don’t want you to be treated badly. I’m saying it’s not my place to say what Indigenous people want out of decolonization.
I admit I was being snarky in a lot of my replies because I was ticked off by your comments. You mentioned deportation and jail and I just said “yeah those are possibilities.” Reading it back I can see how I should have put more nuance into this.
I should definitely have stressed this in my previous responses, but Indigenous people are naturally extremely diverse and there is no single agreed upon narrative of what decolonization will entail. There will be some Indigenous groups that only want to be left alone on their land, but there will be others that don’t have a problem with anyone living on their land. You can see some of this diversity in the different Indigenous groups’ views on immigration, but those views are likely different from the views they will adopt after decolonization. The notion that all the Indigenous groups will either unanimously let you stay or tell you to leave is not the correct way to think about it.
Also, Indigenous territories overlap and Indigenous people generally have more nuanced ideas of “territory” and “ownership” compared to European cultures and their strict borders for property and sovereignty. Go to native-land.ca and see for yourself. Indigenous peoples tend to focus more on mutual agreements and understanding between neighbors as to who uses what resources, agreements which are fluid and based on the needs of the people living there, as opposed to drawing lines on a map. Concepts like citizenship and deportation are based on the European framework of sovereignty, not Indigenous ones.
As to what all this entails for the settlers living here? I can’t say. Everything in North America is built around colonialism and we settlers can’t really imagine what it will be like for all of that to be removed with any degree of accuracy. But I highly doubt there will be large scale forced expulsions. I’d say it’s more likely that the notions of property and land titles dissolve in favour of a more nuanced and community oriented approach to where people live. We will have to adopt this paradigm if we want to continue living here.
Makes it a bit difficult when the kid whining is actually a 40 year old man living in a house that his family has lived in for generations. Good luck making the appeal to them.
As far as I know, my ancestors didn’t steal anything. It’s possible they did, and I’m sure they unfairly benefitted from systemic injustice and oppression of others, and I’m happy to help address that at the expense of my own privilege, but I don’t see how that makes it okay to literally deport me to some strange country for their hypothetical crimes.
I don’t have another country waiting to accept me, and I don’t particularly want to leave the only place I’ve ever lived, so if they want me gone, it is their problem. Are they tossing me in jail because I have the wrong ethnicity? Deporting me to a place I have no connection to?
I have no right to say what they should do and neither do you.
Do you think all indigenous people can do whatever the fuck they want, as long as they are on their own land, and noone has any right to judge their actions?
1930s germans were indigenous people on their own land, after all.
I agree that cultural assimilation requirements and dealing harshly with white nationalists are ok; mass expulsion is not.
And I’m also pretty sure that most native Americans don’t want mass expulsion, so this whole discussion is moot.
The aggressor, in the process of atoning for their atrocities, has no right to say that the recourse proposed by the victim is unreasonable.
We are the colonial aggressors, Indigenous people are the colonized victims.
Let’s say a man and a woman live in the same house, and the man hits the woman. If the man is truly seeking to atone for his crime, and the woman tells him to move out because even seeing his face is traumatic for her, would it be reasonable for the man to complain that he has nowhere else to go? To ask the woman where she thinks he should go? To try and guilt the woman into letting him stay? If he does any of those, is he truly sorry for what he did?
You’re right that most Indigenous people don’t want mass expulsion. We should be incredibly grateful for that and it’s a testament of their compassion and desire for equality among all people, even after all we did to them. What we shouldn’t do is tell them that they can’t tell us to leave or that we’d refuse to leave because we have a rightful claim to this land. Doing so is completely unproductive and will only serve to make us less deserving of staying.
As if indigenous societies never fought wars and claimed land between eachother. Send all of humanity to Africa and let the squirrels and birds take back their land while we’re at it.
As if indegenous societies never fought wars and claimed land between eachother.
Not at the scale colonialism has, no. Skirmishes and even conquest between individual tribes is fundamentally different from the systematic genocide of an entire continent’s population.
At what scale does a genocide become bad enough to deport everyone?
Without written history, it’s hard to say exactly how pre-colonial conflics in North America played out, but I’ve found a few sources that suggest that inter-tribe warfare can be just as bloody as any other war (as far as the technology allowed, of course). “Skirmishes between tribes” is quite an understatement.
At what scale? I’d say it’s definitely closer to colonialism than it is to Indigenous wars. No doubt some Indigenous groups were capable of immense cruelty to those around them, but a continent wide ethnic cleansing is something utterly incomprehensible to even the most expansionist Indigenous groups.
Colonialism developed logistics, beauracy, and governing bodies specifically for genocide, which happened over generations. The people in charge of perpetuating it didn’t even know all the people they killed, the concept of those people alone were enough to condemn them. By contrast, even the largest scale Indigenous wars had the combatants reasonably familiar with those they were fighting.
I really didn’t think I was being subtle here. I’m going to stop “just asking questions” and instead say that I’m surprised to see, in this of all threads, a sincere argument that there are some circumstances where it is okay for one ethnic group to systemically displace another, despite both groups only having that place to claim as a homeland.
despite both groups only having that place to claim as a homeland.
Your claim isn’t even close to the magnitude of their claim. They’ve been here for over ten thousand years. They. Own. This. Continent. And. Always. Will.
And again, we displaced them. We are the colonizing class. I am calling for the reversing of what was done to them, which necessarily includes giving them back control over the land. I’m not saying they should displace anyone, but they alone have the choice.
Instead of complaining that indigenous people don’t have the right to remove you, maybe you should focus on contributing to decolonization so they have a reason to let you stay.
where it is okay for one ethnic group to systemically displace another
Ah the old “reverse ethnic cleansing”… all you white supremacists are coming out to play.
The absolute gall of westerners whose ancestors literally did ethnic cleansing, to then yell that at their victims at the hint of returning stolen land back to indigenous sovereignty.
Basically, read it as “you should kill yourself if you’re not exactly where your ancestors lived 10000 years ago”. That’s what these people seem to think, they just don’t want to say the quiet part out loud.
I live in a country where we have a very large amount of Russians, many of whom completely lack citizenship because they moved here during the soviet occupation so didn’t get automatic Estonian citizenship after our independence, but also haven’t gotten Estonian or Russian citizenship after the fact. This number has decreased over the years because most people have acquired some citizenship, but we still have tens of thousands with no state at all. I can’t imagine simply deporting all of those people. In fact, we’re now giving out citizenship to children of non-citizen parents who have lived in the country for at least 5 years, to avoid creating more stateless people. This is despite the fact that a lot of those people getting citizenship are also the descendants of settlers, with roots in a country hostile to our own. Those people’s entire lives are here, who are we to uproot them just because we were here first? It’s too late now.
This is an extremely white washed version of land back. Pretty sure land back means full control over what happens on that land, including what kind of people can live on it, something that is currently controlled exclusively by the colonial government.
If they’re feeling generous they might give you the option to stay on the condition that you assimilate into their culture.
You know, the thing Europeans forced Indigenous peoples to do. Not saying settlers should be forced through violence to do so, but I think it’s more than fair that if you’re going to stay, you have to assimilate.
But you’re not entitled to even assimilation if they just don’t want you here. And they have plenty of reason not to want you here.
I know that as a 1st gen Chinese immigrant to Canada (I came here as a kid so wasn’t my choice), if all the Indigenous groups where I live unambiguously told me to GTFO. I would in good conscience have to do so and hope I can use my birth certificate to reclaim Chinese citizenship. I’m by every definition a settler so it’s only fair. Whatever struggles I have in China (namely language barrier since I can barely read Chinese) I will have to deal with and it’s not on the Indigenous people to let me stay just because I can’t survive anywhere else.
Where you go back to and what happens to you isn’t the problem of the people you colonized. And by transferring that problem on to them, you are in fact perpetuating colonialism.
Spot on comrade.
Pretty much this, you read my mind here.
I couldn’t name a single ancestor of mine that wasn’t born in America, so where would I get shipped off to?
Funny, when indigenous peoples from the americas asked that question, the US settlers just killed them.
Are you really doing a “reverse ethnic cleansing” rn? Lord free me from redditors.
As far as I can tell, I’m being told that in this hypothetical scenario, it’s okay for me to be jailed or removed from my home because I’m not indigenous. Am I misreading it?
If you’re so concerned about it, maybe go talk to some of the Indigenous people in your area and work with them then. Give them a reason to let you stay. You complaining to two other settlers on Lemmy certainly won’t help your case.
Thanks for your concern, I’ll make sure to double check my standing with them but I think I’ll be alright. Maybe if I’m lucky, I can do a DNA test and find some indigenous ancestry that I didn’t know about, the thresholds would probably have to be pretty low but it’s possible I could squeak in there and get to be on the ruling side instead.
Tbh if you’re ever told to leave, this kind of mentality will probably be why.
Every Indigenous person I’ve ever met has been super nice and welcoming. They’re not out for revenge like you seem to think they are. I obviously can’t and shouldn’t speak on their behalf, but just from my limited experience talking to Indigenous people where I live, they’re perfectly willing to work with the people living here, Indigenous or not. Indigenous peoples have also been some of the first groups to advocate for the government to accept refugees, using the fact that it’s their land as an argument for people from elsewhere to live here. Your strawman notion of the racist, exclusionary Indigenous person who seeks to do to white people what they did to them is just that, a strawman.
You’re also working under the assumption that they will treat you worse than the current government treats you. News flash, even with white privilege, you’re currently being treated like you don’t have a right to the land. How much is your landlord charging you to live here? Do you have a right to a home under the current laws? No you don’t. If you lose all your money, you will become homeless, and plenty of jurisdictions outright criminalize homelessness and will throw you in jail because of it.
This hits the nail on the head. Settlers fear, above all, being treated anywhere near as badly as we’ve treated indigenous peoples, when they have been infinitely kinder. The last shall be first, that doesn’t mean they will kill of us or deport all of us, but it means the decisions will be driven by indigenous people first and foremost.
It’s telling of the settler mindset that they immediately assume decolonization entails being treated almost as horribly as settlers have treated indigenous peoples.
I never said I thought they’d treat me like this. In fact, I don’t, for exactly the reasons you’re listing. You are the one saying that it would be okay to treat me like this, which is why I’ve been talking to you about your statements, not them.
I’m not saying it’s okay or not okay to treat you like anything. I certainly don’t want you to be treated badly. I’m saying it’s not my place to say what Indigenous people want out of decolonization.
I admit I was being snarky in a lot of my replies because I was ticked off by your comments. You mentioned deportation and jail and I just said “yeah those are possibilities.” Reading it back I can see how I should have put more nuance into this.
I should definitely have stressed this in my previous responses, but Indigenous people are naturally extremely diverse and there is no single agreed upon narrative of what decolonization will entail. There will be some Indigenous groups that only want to be left alone on their land, but there will be others that don’t have a problem with anyone living on their land. You can see some of this diversity in the different Indigenous groups’ views on immigration, but those views are likely different from the views they will adopt after decolonization. The notion that all the Indigenous groups will either unanimously let you stay or tell you to leave is not the correct way to think about it.
Also, Indigenous territories overlap and Indigenous people generally have more nuanced ideas of “territory” and “ownership” compared to European cultures and their strict borders for property and sovereignty. Go to native-land.ca and see for yourself. Indigenous peoples tend to focus more on mutual agreements and understanding between neighbors as to who uses what resources, agreements which are fluid and based on the needs of the people living there, as opposed to drawing lines on a map. Concepts like citizenship and deportation are based on the European framework of sovereignty, not Indigenous ones.
As to what all this entails for the settlers living here? I can’t say. Everything in North America is built around colonialism and we settlers can’t really imagine what it will be like for all of that to be removed with any degree of accuracy. But I highly doubt there will be large scale forced expulsions. I’d say it’s more likely that the notions of property and land titles dissolve in favour of a more nuanced and community oriented approach to where people live. We will have to adopt this paradigm if we want to continue living here.
Step 1: Steal something.
Step 2: Give it to your kid.
Step 3: The kid whines finders keepers, and that they shouldn’t have to give it back.
Makes it a bit difficult when the kid whining is actually a 40 year old man living in a house that his family has lived in for generations. Good luck making the appeal to them.
As far as I know, my ancestors didn’t steal anything. It’s possible they did, and I’m sure they unfairly benefitted from systemic injustice and oppression of others, and I’m happy to help address that at the expense of my own privilege, but I don’t see how that makes it okay to literally deport me to some strange country for their hypothetical crimes.
Bruh, coming here was the theft itself. What part of stolen LAND do you not understand?
Not the indigenous people’s problem. If they tell you to leave, it’ll be up to you to figure it out.
I don’t have another country waiting to accept me, and I don’t particularly want to leave the only place I’ve ever lived, so if they want me gone, it is their problem. Are they tossing me in jail because I have the wrong ethnicity? Deporting me to a place I have no connection to?
I have no right to say what they should do and neither do you.
Do you think all indigenous people can do whatever the fuck they want, as long as they are on their own land, and noone has any right to judge their actions?
1930s germans were indigenous people on their own land, after all.
I agree that cultural assimilation requirements and dealing harshly with white nationalists are ok; mass expulsion is not.
And I’m also pretty sure that most native Americans don’t want mass expulsion, so this whole discussion is moot.
The aggressor, in the process of atoning for their atrocities, has no right to say that the recourse proposed by the victim is unreasonable.
We are the colonial aggressors, Indigenous people are the colonized victims.
Let’s say a man and a woman live in the same house, and the man hits the woman. If the man is truly seeking to atone for his crime, and the woman tells him to move out because even seeing his face is traumatic for her, would it be reasonable for the man to complain that he has nowhere else to go? To ask the woman where she thinks he should go? To try and guilt the woman into letting him stay? If he does any of those, is he truly sorry for what he did?
You’re right that most Indigenous people don’t want mass expulsion. We should be incredibly grateful for that and it’s a testament of their compassion and desire for equality among all people, even after all we did to them. What we shouldn’t do is tell them that they can’t tell us to leave or that we’d refuse to leave because we have a rightful claim to this land. Doing so is completely unproductive and will only serve to make us less deserving of staying.
As if indigenous societies never fought wars and claimed land between eachother. Send all of humanity to Africa and let the squirrels and birds take back their land while we’re at it.
Not at the scale colonialism has, no. Skirmishes and even conquest between individual tribes is fundamentally different from the systematic genocide of an entire continent’s population.
At what scale does a genocide become bad enough to deport everyone? Without written history, it’s hard to say exactly how pre-colonial conflics in North America played out, but I’ve found a few sources that suggest that inter-tribe warfare can be just as bloody as any other war (as far as the technology allowed, of course). “Skirmishes between tribes” is quite an understatement.
At what scale? I’d say it’s definitely closer to colonialism than it is to Indigenous wars. No doubt some Indigenous groups were capable of immense cruelty to those around them, but a continent wide ethnic cleansing is something utterly incomprehensible to even the most expansionist Indigenous groups.
Colonialism developed logistics, beauracy, and governing bodies specifically for genocide, which happened over generations. The people in charge of perpetuating it didn’t even know all the people they killed, the concept of those people alone were enough to condemn them. By contrast, even the largest scale Indigenous wars had the combatants reasonably familiar with those they were fighting.
I really didn’t think I was being subtle here. I’m going to stop “just asking questions” and instead say that I’m surprised to see, in this of all threads, a sincere argument that there are some circumstances where it is okay for one ethnic group to systemically displace another, despite both groups only having that place to claim as a homeland.
Your claim isn’t even close to the magnitude of their claim. They’ve been here for over ten thousand years. They. Own. This. Continent. And. Always. Will.
And again, we displaced them. We are the colonizing class. I am calling for the reversing of what was done to them, which necessarily includes giving them back control over the land. I’m not saying they should displace anyone, but they alone have the choice.
Instead of complaining that indigenous people don’t have the right to remove you, maybe you should focus on contributing to decolonization so they have a reason to let you stay.
Ah the old “reverse ethnic cleansing”… all you white supremacists are coming out to play.
The absolute gall of westerners whose ancestors literally did ethnic cleansing, to then yell that at their victims at the hint of returning stolen land back to indigenous sovereignty.
Basically, read it as “you should kill yourself if you’re not exactly where your ancestors lived 10000 years ago”. That’s what these people seem to think, they just don’t want to say the quiet part out loud.
I live in a country where we have a very large amount of Russians, many of whom completely lack citizenship because they moved here during the soviet occupation so didn’t get automatic Estonian citizenship after our independence, but also haven’t gotten Estonian or Russian citizenship after the fact. This number has decreased over the years because most people have acquired some citizenship, but we still have tens of thousands with no state at all. I can’t imagine simply deporting all of those people. In fact, we’re now giving out citizenship to children of non-citizen parents who have lived in the country for at least 5 years, to avoid creating more stateless people. This is despite the fact that a lot of those people getting citizenship are also the descendants of settlers, with roots in a country hostile to our own. Those people’s entire lives are here, who are we to uproot them just because we were here first? It’s too late now.
You’re talking to someone from .ml.
You should probably choose your battles on this one, the amount of people there that can’t see double standards or hypocrisy is astounding.