[HN Gopher] Native-Land.ca - Our home on native land
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Native-Land.ca - Our home on native land
Author : thunderbong
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-09-23 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (native-land.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (native-land.ca)
| dang wrote:
| One past thread:
|
| _Contemporary Canadian Indigenous Territory and Language Map_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903173 - July 2015 (7
| comments)
| proxyon wrote:
| Is this a joke? You've just defined everyone who's not European
| as "native" which is a complete social construction and
| fabrication.
| angelzen wrote:
| According to the map, there are 'native lands' only in the
| Americas and Australia. Europe, Asia or Africa are largely
| devoid of 'native lands'.
|
| The map could be interesting as a historical resource.
| Selectively framing it in terms of 'native land' sadly turns it
| into one giant irredentist manifesto.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irredentism
| [deleted]
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Sorry but this seems like a curated list. Where are Kurds,
| Berbers, Yazidi, Basques, land given away by the Yalta
| conference. This makes only certain forms of land appropriation
| illegitimate.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is a general confusion (problem, trouble, discomfort) I
| have with dividing the world up into "indigenous" and "other"--
| it feels very arbitrary and ahistorical (and I'm happy to be
| corrected!). Surely all of human history and pre-history,
| people were moving around and conquering each other's territory
| and so on? What criteria do we use to determine which territory
| rightfully belongs to a given "people" (and "what constitutes a
| people?" seems like another particularly difficult question).
| elnatro wrote:
| Basques are as native as people from Burgos or other Spanish
| regions.
| mc32 wrote:
| I think the implication is their territory was shrunken from
| a larger area and now occupy a small corner.
|
| And the map of the middle east avoids Ottoman/Turk and
| British doings.
| billiam wrote:
| Amazing data representation, but what does it mean? These
| boundaries were always fuzzy and constantly shifting, and
| whatever compromise or snapshots of history are made here, they
| may demonstrate the complexity and ubiquity of indigenous peoples
| in the Americas at the cost of suggesting these peoples exercised
| real territorial control usage patterns like those of Europeans
| of the time. Which sells them short. They found a different and
| perhaps better way to co-exist for many hundreds of years without
| formal states or territorial boundaries, largely without large-
| scale wars, plagues, and (for the most part) wholesale
| environmental collapse. We should study how this worked in the
| Americas without superimposing our ideas of land area control on
| them.
| golemiprague wrote:
| They didn't find any special way to do anything, they just
| lived like people used to live 3000 years ago in the old world.
| beloch wrote:
| Mapping out current or traditional native territories is an
| almost hopeless task.
|
| e.g. The Eastern Shoshone were, at the time of early European
| contact, in Alberta. Their territory on this map doesn't even
| touch Canada. Why? They were forced out (with violence) by the
| Iron Confederacy long enough ago that they no longer claim any
| land in Canada.
|
| Tribal territories _change_ , often radically and especially so
| when nomadic tribes are involved. Hard, immutable, and sharply
| defined borders are a modern construction. If territory wasn't
| actively defended, it was free for the taking. Some territories
| might have had such plentiful resources that they could be
| shared in peace, but most probably had to be fought for. That's
| why you see so many territories overlapping. Several tribes may
| have used a territory and still consider it "theirs", even if
| their control was never solid.
|
| We tend to think of the land as offering limitless bounty to
| hunter-gatherers, but just the opposite was true. Compared to
| land under agricultural or pastoral use, even well-tended land
| used by hunter-gatherers was far less productive. If another
| tribe moved into your tribe's territory, that meant less food
| for your tribe. So, you had to defend your territory.
| Constantly.
|
| New Guinea is a good place to study if you want to learn about
| traditional hunter gatherer societies because tribal
| territories and conflict remained distinct well into the 20th
| century and have been studied extensively. As late as the mid
| 20th century, when two strangers met it was customary for them
| to sit down and try to establish the nature of their
| relationship. Who was on whose land? Was the person who was not
| on their own land in _any_ way related to _anyone_ who belonged
| on that land? They 'd recount genealogies for hours towards
| this end. It was serious business because, if the trespasser
| had no connection to anyone in the territory he had entered,
| the other person was socially obligated to run them out of the
| territory _with violence_.
|
| Today, we mostly think of strangers as potential friends or, at
| least, people bringing money to local businesses. Hunter
| gatherers had to think of strangers as a resource drain that
| needed to be cut off for the good of their society. It's an
| alien way of thinking that we've largely forgotten, but it's
| reflected in this map. People died violently practically
| everywhere you see territories overlapping, and those borders
| are just a snapshot in time.
|
| As for peaceful co-existence... This is a modern myth. Hunter-
| gather societies in New Guinea, although they had no large-
| scale war or pitched battles, had constant, internecine, low-
| intensity tribal conflict. The death-toll due to violence of
| this kind of conflict adds up over time. Jared Diamond, in one
| of his books, estimated that deaths due to violent conflict in
| the tribes he was studying was actually higher in just the
| first half of the twentieth century than in Germany through two
| world wars. The world wars were catastrophic technological
| horrors, but they had a start and an end. Not so with tribal
| conflict. It just goes on.
| II2II wrote:
| I have a hard time reading "peaceful co-existence" into the
| post you are responding to, particularly since conflicts
| between aboriginal groups are a recognized part of their
| history.
|
| What we don't seem to understand very well is the nature of
| territorial claims prior to European contact. It is overly
| simplistic to paint these aboriginal groups as small tribes
| that claimed small geographic spheres since they ranged from
| nomadic groups that migrated across large territories, to
| small villages dependent upon fishing or agriculture, to
| relatively advanced large cities. Yet regardless of the type
| of society they formed, our understanding of how they
| regarded their geographic sphere is tainted by the mostly
| Western histories written of them from the time of contact.
| Not only are these histories tainted by religion and
| politics, but they are tainted by how those historians
| understood the world.
| devindotcom wrote:
| This is great. It's useful to be able to not just visualize this
| but to go from nations/territories to individual treaties, which
| are then linked to tribal sites describing those treaties and
| (very often) how the U.S. government has failed to honor them.
|
| Map link on click leads to
|
| https://native-land.ca/maps/treaties/point-elliott-treaty/
|
| which leads to, among several others,
|
| https://www.duwamishtribe.org/treaty-of-point-elliott
|
| All very clean and direct. This helps me at least understand
| these concepts a little more easily. Thanks to the folks who made
| this.
| mceoin wrote:
| That'd be http://victortemprano.com/. Super nice guy.
| [deleted]
| seattlehistory wrote:
| Foisting this foreign and uniquely-European idea of land
| ownership on societies that never had such a concept to begin
| with seems so utterly colonialist to me.
|
| As told by the history and traditions orally passed down from
| generation to generation, from elders to the young, we know that
| our ancestors did not consider themselves to "own" land. And they
| certainly did not have treaties amongst themselves and others
| before colonizers arrived.
|
| Land is something that all spirited creatures, from humans
| through to the deer through to the tiniest of insects and fungus,
| share. We never "own" it, but merely coexist with it for a
| limited period of time.
|
| The land is as much, or as little, ours as it is the bison's, or
| the elk's, or the snapping turtle's.
|
| We may drive away the bear, or he may drive away us, but in the
| end the land is where it will be and how it will be.
|
| None of us "own" it. It isn't "native land". It is just land.
| 1shooner wrote:
| The site has a lead-in to discussion about critical
| interpretation of the whole phenomenon of territory
| acknowledgement:
|
| https://native-land.ca/resources/territory-acknowledgement/
| salamandersauce wrote:
| And Indigenous people didn't have wars over territory/resources
| in pre-colonial times amongst different groups? Individual land
| ownership is different from group land ownership.
| iFred wrote:
| I disagree with broad brush statements about "uniquely-
| European" ideas when it comes to indigenous peoples of the
| Americas. The concept of land ownership, stewardship and
| ultimately domain of rule, were present with cultures across
| the Americas. This can be inferred though hunting grounds
| passed through clans, to land surrounding structures, like the
| tribe I am from. What seems to be interesting is the uniquely-
| American idea of the native monoculture or some kind of tribal
| harmony with land, resources, and people. It is a shame that
| our history is fragmented and understudied because it wasn't a
| Disney-esque utopia before the Vikings and Spaniards.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm indigenous and maintain close ties to
| my family's pueblo in New Mexico.
|
| [edit for spelling]
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Yep. The colonialist thing here is the notion of making
| sweeping proclamations about all indigenous nations as some
| uniform thing, as if they didn't have any individual
| political and cultural history.
|
| The closest indigenous nations to me, that I'm most familar
| with, those of the NW Coast, certainly had sophisticated
| property rights, both physical (ie. hunting grounds) and
| intellectual (particular rights to use songs, stories and
| figures in art).
| dleslie wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of this Government of Canada web
| document, detailing pre-Columbian conflict in North America:
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-
| defence/service...
| AYBABTME wrote:
| The concept of ownership manifests itself if there exists
| entities (or agents) and limited set of resources to share
| between entities. An entity owns a resource if it can assert
| control over it and deny control over it to others.
|
| It's pretty brutal but in the end, that's kind of what it is.
| If you dissolve all governments, teleport us on a new world and
| wait to see what happens, ownership will develop based on this.
| No one "owns" Jupiter at this time. If one day someone manages
| to deny access to Jupiter to others, while having access to it,
| that person will probably reasonably "own" Jupiter.
| tempranova wrote:
| Hey all! Victor here (founder of Native Land). Check out the
| about page for more info about the org. Send your fixes anytime
| to us, we have a great research assistant who will address them
| in time! Also, we are funded totally through donations and grants
| so get in touch with us anytime on that front. Thanks!!
|
| We also work to add more areas to the map over time -- this isn't
| a 'finished' project.
| earksiinni wrote:
| Hi Victor! This is such a great project. I posted a comment
| elsewhere about why I like it so much.
|
| Will you be releasing more info about your research methods and
| pedagogical theory? Really interested to know more about how
| you make the sausage.
|
| Also, wrt to Africa specifically, I do remember when I was
| doing history grad school about 10 years ago that one of the
| more provocative hypotheses at the time was that some or all
| tribes may be colonial constructs. Curious if you've engaged
| with that hypothesis, and more generally how you're going about
| mapping territories in Africa.
|
| Great work, and I hope that you persevere and not let the
| haters get to you.
|
| P.S.: Are you looking for any volunteers? I do full-stack web
| dev and have experience w/ Mapbox.
| tempranova wrote:
| Hi there! Loved your comment, you get some of the complexity
| this brings up! I am just going out travelling shortly so ill
| respond in detail in a day or so.
| pella wrote:
| The data will be open? (OpenData) or private?
| cl0ne wrote:
| Thanks for making this! The links to more info about languages
| or treaties when you click on a territory is a nice touch.
| dleslie wrote:
| Will you add treaties under negotiation?
|
| The BC Treaty Commission has a website with a map showing them
| at their various stages: https://www.bctreaty.ca/
| dleslie wrote:
| For British Columbia, the province has a map that shows treaties
| in progress, which appear absent from this site:
|
| https://www.bctreaty.ca/map
| pella wrote:
| The OSM tagging ( open data )
|
| - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/American_I...
|
| - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:bo...
|
| - https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/boundary=aboriginal_l...
| culturthrowaway wrote:
| The cultural engineers need to be careful, people might start
| wondering why the overlays are blank in Europe.
| imbnwa wrote:
| From their blog:
|
| >A few notions that underlie this idea of being "Indigenous" in a
| particular place in Africa may seem obvious, but need stating:
|
| >The importance of knowing ones' ancestors and their ties to the
| land
|
| > Knowledge of local power structures and traditions
|
| > Knowledge of religious and spiritual traditions that are tied
| to land and living in a particular place
|
| > Knowledge of language, ethnic traditions, and governance
|
| > That language and ethnicity may intersect in unusual ways, and
| neither is necessarily an indicator of indigeneity
|
| The criterion seems to be, "how much alienation of European
| modernity have you absorbed?", which is just kinda strange to me;
| everyone in Africa who is not an Afrikaner has been there for
| tens of thousands of years and has some measure of a relationship
| to their ethnic traditions, so what would be the threshold?
| Native Americans have a similar situation where there's a
| spectrum of "alienation".
|
| The displacement of the more primordial human lineages such as
| the Hadza and Khoisan happened ~8,000 years ago in the Bantu
| expansion, from which the majority of African languages we know
| today descend.
| cperciva wrote:
| For the non-Canadians (and possibly some Canadians too) who miss
| the reference: "Our home on native land" is an alternative lyric
| some people sing in the national anthem in place of the line "our
| home _and_ native land ".
|
| The word "native" in the national anthem has nothing to do with
| indigenous peoples though -- it's a poor translation of "Terre de
| nos aieux", which is really more along the lines of "land of our
| forefathers"... and is a reference specifically to the
| _Quebecois_ , who settled in what is now Canada long before the
| British conquered them in 1759.
|
| So... yeah, you can mangle the lyrics to make a point about
| European settlers, or you can keep the lyrics as written and make
| a snide remark about how the British should give Quebec back to
| the Quebecois. Neither version is really very flattering to the
| concept of Canada as a nation!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Neither version is really very flattering to the concept of
| Canada as a nation!
|
| A _Quebecois_ friend, after a bottle (or two) of wine, once
| told me there 's no such thing as "Canadian Culture".
|
| It's all either from Quebec or a response to something Quebec
| did.
|
| How true is it?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm no Canadian nationalist/patriot, and I have a lot of
| respect for Quebecois culture. But that is just stupid and
| offensive.
|
| I don't think there's a _single_ Canadian culture. There 's
| many. And no, I don't think much of English Canadian culture
| comes "from" Quebec. In fact most people in English Canada
| have very little actual concept of Quebecois culture. The
| language divide is real.
|
| Quebec is its own distinct nation & culture within Canada.
|
| And frankly if Canada is defined most in response to
| something, it's the US and its revolution. Loyalist refugees
| firmed up the foundations of Upper Canada (Ontario) political
| culture, and the Canadian tradition of "peace, order, and
| good government" likely has its genesis as a response to the
| perceived excesses and dysfunctions of the American political
| tradition.
|
| And all of this is leaving out the first nations, which was
| the original topic of TFA.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Loyalist refugees
|
| Weren't a lot of them criminals that were offered to leave
| the US? Or who harbored allegiance to a foreign regime?
| Wouldn't use the term "refugee" for that...
|
| > the Canadian tradition of "peace, order, and good
| government"
|
| Citation needed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Canada_Rebellion
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-
| grav...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Bui
| l...
| wk_end wrote:
| "Peace, Order, and Good Government" is the maxim of the
| Canadian government, like "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
| of Happiness" is for the US government, and "Liberte,
| egalite, fraternite" is for the French. Pointing out that
| it hasn't always lived up to that (nor have the US and
| France of course) is a non sequitur here.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| The Loyalists were people loyal to the English monarchy.
| They didn't harbour allegiance to a foreign regime but
| the current one. They fled because they were on the
| losing side of the war.
| cperciva wrote:
| That sounds rather like what some people say about American
| beer: There's no such thing as American beer; there's stuff
| they call "beer" but it really isn't.
|
| You could probably make a case that there isn't much of a
| _unified_ Canadian culture, but rather a large number of
| Canadian cultures. The indigenous peoples of Canada clearly
| have their own cultures; so do the Quebecois and the
| Acadians. After that you start getting more into "imported
| cultures"; there are large British and American influences
| across the country but also large minority groups which --
| especially in the prairies -- have have made contributions to
| local cultures.
|
| It has been said that where the USA is a melting pot which
| turns immigrants into Americans, Canada is a mosaic in which
| every piece retains its original nature; immigrants are
| encouraged to retain their cultural practices rather than
| discarding them in the name of conforming to "Canadian"
| culture.
| earksiinni wrote:
| This is mapping at its best: challenging our spacial, social and
| temporal norms, in this case by subverting political geography.
|
| Gone are the clear, neatly delineated boundaries of modern nation
| states. A new, equally clear yet very different geopolitical
| regime is presented. Contiguous territories that abut each other
| yet also kinda overlap (or sometimes really overlap). A three-
| part scheme that distinguishes between territory, language, and
| treaty.
|
| This approach provokes so many questions. What does it mean to
| overlap (is it a process vs. a static reality, is it peaceful,
| etc.)? What is a territory and who defines it? What happens in
| the little slivers of land not covered by the translucent blobs?
| What happens in the waterways and lakes? Is the concept of
| "treaty land" universal in some way? What does non-treaty land
| mean?
|
| We debated all these issues in grad school, and seeing it in an
| interactive map like this is all the more powerful. I hope that
| readers here see the questions that maps like this provoke as an
| asset rather than proof of fallibility.
|
| Looking forward to reading more about the creator's research and
| pedagogical methods.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't
| understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why
| Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people. What
| defines an "indigenous" people? Is it some sort of lack of
| genetic or cultural mixing with other peoples? Even then, did
| Europeans have more migrations and cultural exchange than the
| Native Americans, or do we merely understand European migrations
| better for various reasons? Or is it merely a concept of "exotic"
| (or perhaps "primitive"?) relative to the Eurasian mind? Or
| cultural and economic detachment from the Eurasian world?
|
| Maybe it's relative geographic stability (e.g., not moving around
| very much)? But it seems like that's pretty arbitrary depending
| on how much you zoom out--i.e., if you zoom out wide to all of
| Europe, Europeans were very stable for a very long time, and if
| you zoom in tightly on a given Native American tribe, they
| probably migrated over a wide geographical area.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't
| understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why
| Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people
|
| The Wikipedia page for Indigenous peoples claims that the
| majority of indigenous people live in Africa and Asia. [0]
|
| My first thought for indigenous people in Asia would be
| Tibetans, but if I google "are Tibetans indigenous?" it appears
| to be a matter of debate.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| To illustrate the complexity of such questions, here's a map
| of hypothesized haplogroup spread across east asia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-.
| ..
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > What defines an "indigenous" people?
|
| This map is mostly a still picture of where different tribes
| and ethnicities were when they first encountered Europeans (or
| written history).
|
| "indigenous" French, for example, is harder to define because
| there was no written history or very little. Are the people who
| painted the Lascaux caves [0] the "indigenous" French? After
| them there were Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures that evolved;
| where they descendants of the Lascaux people or part of a group
| that settled the area?
|
| Same thing with Greenland and eastern Canada, the Viking made
| some descriptions of the natives that more or less matches what
| Europeans latter observed. But it's not clear they were talking
| about the same culture [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling
| II2II wrote:
| > This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't
| understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why
| Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people.
|
| The difference is likely linguistic. When it comes to Europe,
| Asia, and Northern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about
| nation states, empires, kingdoms, or other political
| structures. When it comes to the Americas or Southern Africa,
| we have a tendency to talk about tribes that are pigeonholed
| into larger cultural groups based upon their similarities. In
| some cases, that may be fine in the sense that it
| differentiates how societies functioned. In other cases, it is
| used to trivialize the degree of development reached in the
| Southern Hemisphere and the Americas even though there is
| evidence of developed societies.
|
| As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous
| people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even
| though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the
| peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion
| (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others).
| Y_Y wrote:
| What about "most recently replaced" as a definition"?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think that would incorporate a whole lot of people that we
| don't normally consider "indigenous". Moreover, in some cases
| indigenous people haven't been fully replaced. It also
| doesn't clear up the confusion about "what is a people" and
| "how do you test for individual membership in a given people
| group?". And what about the "land ownership" inferences that
| we usually hang off of "indigenous". If Native Americans take
| back Ohio, does that make non-Native-American Ohioans
| "indigenous"? This example is admittedly contrived, but the
| whole concept feels contrived to me.
| zokier wrote:
| > What defines an "indigenous" people?
|
| Generally part of it is history of colonization. Good example
| of non-european related indigenous people are the Ainu, who are
| considered indigenous in comparison to the colonizing Japanese.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| What about groups which haven't been colonized in any
| significant way? What about non-indigenous groups which
| _have_ been colonized? It seems pretty arbitrary.
| iammisc wrote:
| Every way you slice and dice it, 'indigenous' is another word
| for 'pure bred' or 'Fatherland', which, when you use its
| synonym, makes it sound as dangerous of an idea as it is.
|
| The reason indigeneity is not applied to Europe or Asia is
| because those cultures are just as indigenous as the natives of
| other parts of the world, but they've advanced well beyond
| that.
|
| The resurgence of indigeneity as a concept is due to a
| resurgence of the noble savage myth on the behalf of europeans
| and a xenophobic, racial purity craze on behalf of certain
| self-described indigenous (it's hardly a universal thing).
|
| In reality, being part of a lineage that's been on a certain
| plot of land gives you no more rights or authority than anyone
| else. Land division, ownership, and use should be determined by
| the needs of currently existing people, not tied indeterminably
| to the past. Why is it that we are happy to toss out any old
| tradition, and any old legal document, in order to bring it up
| to date with modern needs, but we simultaneously need to kowtow
| to people who claim their authority solely from the immobility
| of their ancestors?
| GnarlyWhale wrote:
| What a needlessly divisive, inaccurate, and frankly
| disgusting characterization.
|
| The literally definition reads: "Indigenous or less commonly
| indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants
| of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a
| now-dominant group"
|
| In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse
| peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization.
|
| In extension, here in Canada the Metis People (explicitly
| descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are
| recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and
| cultural practices. They are by no means thought of as "pure
| bred" as you reductively tried to frame it.
|
| The University of Alberta has an excellent, widely accoladed,
| and free MOOC on Indigenous Canada that I highly recommend
| you, and anyone else interested in learning more, consider
| taking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the Metis not entitled
| to the same tax benefits as other indigenous groups?
| Y_Y wrote:
| > 2) Can an MNO citizenship card be used for a tax
| exemption?
|
| > No. Metis are not presently exempt from paying
| provincial or federal taxes. You should not attempt to
| use an MNO citizenship card for this purpose. If you do,
| you will be personally liable for any legal consequences.
|
| (from https://www.metisnation.org/registry/citizenship/fr
| equently-... )
|
| The same page almost comes close to answering the
| question I had, which is, "what make a person Metis"? It
| seems to be someone who is not otherwise "aboriginal" but
| also not entirely not so either.
| iammisc wrote:
| > "Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating
| to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially
| of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group"
|
| And exactly, what am I supposed to learn from this? What
| happens if you descend from the earliest known inhabitant
| of a place? Don't we all? Exactly what are you supposed to
| gain from being a descendant of such a person as opposed to
| those who are not? Do I get brownie points for having a
| nose?
|
| > In extension, here in Canada the Metis People (explicitly
| descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are
| recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and
| cultural practices.
|
| Exactly my point. The word is either meaningless (anyone
| who's different is indigenous) or it refers directly to a
| notion of racial purity. You can't have it both ways.
| Either its meaningless and useless or its meaningful and
| dangerous.
|
| I belong to such a creole group, and I don't understand why
| it ought to make me so special. Guess what... it doesn't.
| Governments can classify us as whatever they want. I'm
| indigenous, like all other humans, in that I descend from
| the earliest known inhabitants of many places, presumably.
| And I'm also a mix of many cultures, like EVERY other human
| being on the planet. Oh also, I'm the child of conquerors,
| because literally everyone is. No one is special. People
| who think their ancestors make them special deserve the
| highest forms of criticism.
|
| EDIT: one more thing:
|
| > In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse
| peoples that inhabited a land prior to European
| colonization.
|
| How needlessly eurocentric
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Why do we give special status to "the earliest known people
| to inhabit a land"? I'm not trying to challenge any
| particular privilege afforded to any particular group, but
| I do want to reconcile the entire conception of
| categorizing people in this way with our modern, western
| moral framework.
|
| In particular, doesn't the idea of legally recognizing "a
| people" seem pretty close to 20th century racial ideologies
| (per the parent's point)? How do we test an individual for
| membership in "a people"? Is there a one drop rule? Do you
| have to pass a cultural competency test? Speak a language?
|
| What does it mean when we say "such and such land rightly
| belongs to such and such people"? Even if that people group
| was the earliest known, that doesn't mean they didn't
| likely take it from an earlier group.
|
| It seems to me that the entire concept is fraught with the
| same problems that beset 20th century racialism. And please
| note the distinction between "indigenous people are bad"
| and "categorizing people into 'indigenous' and 'other'
| seems like a bad idea".
| _moof wrote:
| > Why do we give special status to "the earliest known
| people to inhabit a land"?
|
| Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the
| earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of
| violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest
| known people = special." It's more that displacing,
| dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be
| frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most?
| all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas,
| Australia, etc.
|
| I don't have any answers for you about how to test for
| membership, and you're absolutely right that this
| particular aspect of the issue is fraught. I'm not an
| expert but I believe that in the United States at least
| this question is left to the tribes themselves. ("The
| courts have consistently recognized that in the absence
| of express legislation by Congress to the contrary, an
| Indian tribe has complete authority to determine all
| questions of its own membership."[0]) That seems
| reasonable on its face at least, but it does have the
| unfortunate side effect of recreating the issue one level
| up: the United States government decides who is and isn't
| a tribe, and that's just as fraught.
|
| These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and
| they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's
| not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that
| it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent
| where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or
| their way of life.
|
| 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233104/
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the
| earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of
| violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest
| known people = special." It's more that displacing,
| dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be
| frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most?
| all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas,
| Australia, etc.
|
| Many changes in people groups with respect to territory
| are simply migrations. Is there any evidence that violent
| conquest is the norm and migrations are the exceptions?
| My amateur understanding of history and archeology is
| that migrations are the norm and conquest is the
| exception (although posing this as a binary is itself
| misleading because violence is a matter of degrees).
| Moreover, lots of people who _aren 't_ considered
| indigenous have been brutally conquered, but we don't
| afford them special status (e.g., virtually any people
| which has been conquered by virtually any empire).
|
| I certainly agree that many indigenous peoples in history
| have been brutally conquered, but considering they aren't
| the only ones and many of them haven't been brutally
| conquered, it seems like a crumby proxy.
|
| > These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and
| they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's
| not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that
| it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent
| where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or
| their way of life.
|
| Fully agree (who wouldn't? is this even controversial?),
| but I don't understand the "indigenous is a useful proxy
| for peoples who have suffered" argument.
| _moof wrote:
| All good points. The site is run predominantly by folks
| from North America, and I live in the United States, so
| there's a particularly North American flavor to this
| discussion. That's naturally going to focus on the
| specific experiences of North American indigenous
| peoples, which, at least in my reading, are
| unquestionably experiences of conquest. So in that
| context, I'm not even sure it's a proxy; it seems like
| it's actually at the heart of the matter. Whether it's a
| reasonable proxy at a global scale across all of time, or
| even an intelligible concept when removed from an
| American context, I don't know.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| I guess I'm ok with nuance and gray areas and anti-
| colonialism in a way that doesn't feel like a
| contradiction. Sorry that's hard for you.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Hey Aaron, I think you're taking undue offense. There's
| nothing particularly "colonialist" about anything I've
| posted, and indeed "colonialism" isn't limited to
| indigenous peoples, which is kind of my point. I'm
| wondering what utility, if any, can there be in dividing
| the world into "indigenous" and "other". If anti-
| colonialism is the ax you'd like to grind, then why not
| divide the world into "colonized" and "other"? Why use
| "indigenous" as a proxy?
| [deleted]
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| I think you don't see a lot of this in Europe, Africa, or Asia
| because 'indigenous' in this context implies that the people
| who were there 'first' have been replaced by people who came
| from somewhere else. In Europe especially, this mostly happened
| before recorded history, and the borders of cultures and
| nations have changed so many times since then, it's hard to
| point to any one group as 'indigenous' in those areas.
|
| In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most
| places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced)
| to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the
| Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as
| much time documenting them.
|
| And finally, I put quotes around 'indigenous' and 'first',
| because for the most part this is a map of the groups of people
| who were most recently replaced; before the map of tribes in
| the Americas you see in the link, there were larger
| cultures/empires that rose and fell (Inca, Aztec, Maya,
| Mississippian, etc).
| themgt wrote:
| > In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most
| places the indigenous people were not displaced (and
| replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia,
| or the Americas
|
| The latest genetic evidence suggests there was actually a
| very high level of replacement of the indigenous inhabitants
| of a large part of central/southern Africa, e.g.
|
| _Despite a gap of 5,000 years in some cases, all four of the
| children's genomes were remarkably similar to one another.
| But compared with the DNA of modern Africans, their genomes
| were more closely related to those of the hunter-gatherer
| groups in west central Africa that are sometimes known as
| Pygmies than they were to those of contemporary Cameroonians
| or other Bantu-speaking populations._
|
| _The researchers also used the genomes to understand even
| older events in human history. The four children seem to
| descend from a group of Homo sapiens that branched off from
| the common ancestors of our species more than 200,000 years
| ago -- perhaps even earlier than the ancestors of distinct
| Indigenous southern African groups known collectively as
| Khoesan peoples. Previous studies of modern human genomes had
| suggested that these groups descended from the oldest
| distinct lineage of Homo sapiens._
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5
|
| So populations who'd been living in Africa for 200k years
| were displaced and replaced just recently, in fact the tale
| seems quite familiar - original hunter gatherer populations
| replaced by agriculturalists. Europe and Asia are much the
| same, nearly everywhere.
| iammisc wrote:
| > In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most
| places the indigenous people were not displaced (and
| replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia,
| or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not
| spent as much time documenting them.
|
| The Arab conquests of North Africa would like to question
| this.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Not necessarily from a genetic perspective, North Africa is
| predominantly Amazigh genetically (and Copt in Egypt),
| however much people may identify as Arab[0] culturally, and
| have been there since before recorded history.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_A
| fric...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| How comprehensive is this? I don't see a tribe that a neighboring
| city is supposed to be named after.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| According to the website it looks to be an active work in
| progress and would welcome corrections/improvements.
| dleslie wrote:
| At the very least, it's missing treaties under negotiation.
| mc32 wrote:
| This is pretty comprehensive in some geographies with glaring
| exceptions like Southeast Asia where there is no mention of the
| hills people who typically were driven out of China and into SE
| Asia. The Hmong are probably the most well known since there is a
| pop in the US.
|
| The Black Sea area probably has had too much turnover to be
| useful. India is also underrepresented.
|
| Come to think of it South Africa also has a history of
| displacement by colonialists and also others looking for
| opportunity in the wake of the colonialists.
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