Who says it is “their land”? Invaders invade. If the invasion is successful they conquer. If they conquer they claim the land as their own. The “native” peoples that are in North America today invaded and took the land from others who were mostly displaced into South America. Bottom line, universal human law has always been that whoever won the last war owns the land.
I say this to all who want to immigrate into “our” land: if you want to come here, become an American and be one of us, that’s fine, come on. If you want to live here and be what you are where you live now then don’t come. We welcome those who want to be with us and want to become one of us. If you don’t want to become and live like an American then stay where you are or go somewhere else.
I say this to all who identify as “native” people: I did not invade and conquer your land. Europeans invaded lands some of your ancestors owned. Those Europeans displaced those people and claimed ownership of the land. Some of those Europeans and their descendants are also some of your ancestors just as some of the people they displaced are some of my ancestors. The Europeans and the people they displaced are our ancestors, yours and mine.
I ask “native” peoples to re-read the second paragraph above. Is this not just how our ancestors felt towards the Europeans? The way it worked out was not pleasant. Invasion never is. I don’t identify as “native” or European, just what I actually am, an American. Isn’t it way past time all of us, you included, recognize reality and identify as Americans, not some people apart? We are one people.
So, who says it is their land? The law, treaties, the courts and all the documents. Ownership of the land is not the real question. It is whether we are one people or not. “Not” is the wrong answer and is not good for anyone.
Who says it is “their land”? Invaders invade. If the invasion is successful they conquer. If they conquer they claim the land as their own.
Where do you live? Do you own a home? If I invade it and take it from you is that ok with you? After all, that is your proposition, no?
The “native” peoples that are in North America today invaded and took the land from others who were mostly displaced into South America. Bottom line, universal human law has always been that whoever won the last war owns the land.
What “others”? The first settlers were the first people . If you cannot understand this simple fact, then you have no argument. Is that concept too difficult for you?
I didn’t bother reading the rest. This is not universal. Not even in the Bible. But let’s talk about now. International agreements say that you don’t get keep everything just because you came in and killed some people. We have alliances now, we have nuclear powers and rich countries with soldiers and bases in other countries. We, well, some of us, are trying to leave the conquistador mindset in the past.
Mostly, it’s convenience to claim these ancient and outdated “universal laws”. You want the land, the right to govern, but then you don’t want to let the ancestors of the people conquered to have the same rights as you. They work just as much, have as much to contribute, but because of something a person from the same general part of the world as your ancestors did 300 years ago, you think you’re better than them. You, personally, I doubt you even fought, obviously you didn’t fight in the original push to expand our borders. You were just born into them, now you say that gives you rights. Why?
Am I ever disappointed in your response. You always - well, almost always - give a thoughtful response. This time something caused you to make a knee-jerk response. Not like you at all.
You assume these thoughts are indicated in my post. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Again, you add words or thoughts that were not in my post.
What “rights” do you think I claim that are not granted to every citizen of our nation?
Wars are fought with more than guns and bombs. No one ever really “owns” land, they just establish authority over it, whatever is on it and whoever lives on it. That was true in ancient times and is true today.
The situation in the world is what it is. This nation grants everyone here the right to sit around, piss and moan about how wrong things were that got us to this point and the right to live partly in the past. We also grant everyone the right to recognize that reality is what the world is today and the right to live as they wish in that reality.
For me and my tribe, we choose reality. I think anyone who doesn’t choose reality is wasting his/her life, but I will respect his/her choice but I will not accept that he/she has the right to force me to live in the past with them.
For me and my tribe, we choose reality. I think anyone who doesn’t choose reality is wasting his/her life, but I will respect his/her choice but I will not accept that he/she has the right to force me to live in the past with them.
But you will accept that he/she has the right to force you to live in their present with them?
It is not that you had any choice at all. The Europeans took all the good land and relegated the indian to reservations to live on the left-overs, after they took the most productive and fertile areas and laid them to waste and broke some 400 treaties and when that was litigated, congress declared that Tribes did not have any rights to enter into treaties, fundamentally asserting that Indians had no property rights at all.
NOV 10, 2020 # Broken Treaties With Native American Tribes: Timeline
Concluded during the nearly 100-year period from the [Revolutionary War], some 368 treaties would define the relationship between the United States and Native Americans for centuries to come.
The treaties were based on the fundamental idea that each tribe was an independent nation, with their own right to self-determination and self-rule. But as white settlers began moving onto Native American lands, this idea came into conflict with the relentless pace of westward expansion—resulting in many broken promises on the part of the U.S. government.
more …
In this treaty, signed at Fort Laramie and other military posts in what is now Wyoming, the U.S. government [recognized] (Sioux Treaty of 1868 | National Archives) the Black Hills of Dakota as the Great Sioux Reservation, the exclusive territory of the Sioux (Dakota, Lakota and Nakota) and Arapaho people. But after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, miners and settlers began moving onto the land en masse.
Native resistance to the treaty’s violation culminated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, after which government troops flooded the region.
By that time, Congress had ended the nearly 100-year-old practice of making treaties with individual Native American tribes, declaring in 1871 that “henceforth, no Indian nation or tribe…shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.”
Your question makes no sense at all. No one can escape the reality of the present unless they create some illusion of a different reality. I think that’s called delusional.
We are not talking about escaping reality. We are talking about rights that are being denied a special group of citizens.
What is delusional is to trust people who seek to take your home and your constitutionally granted rights, such as what is going on in several States as we speak.
The only authority I claim in this context is the authority to recognize that reality is in the present. And yes, I do believe I have that authority. So do you or anyone else. It is up to you to choose whether you use it.
I know nothing of that. If a certain group of people are being mistreated because of their ethnicity, I think it would be best to lawyer up and do battle in court. We have an administration that is supposed to be extremely minority and ethnic friendly. The alternative might be to storm the Capitol. That seems to get people’s attention.
Yes by the people who want to take it all from the minorities (which are becoming the majority). It is the law abiding citizens who are being deprived of their rights.
Ask women what they think about men depriving them from having the right to have an abortion and their own bodies and encouraging people to spy on their neighbors like Nazi Germany did to identify Jews.
“The peopling of the Americas is a long-standing open question, and while advances in archaeology, Pleistocene geology physical anthropology , and DNA analysis have progressively shed more light on the subject, significant questions remain unresolved. While there is general agreement that the Americas were first settled from Asia, the pattern of migration, its timing, and the place(s) of origin in Eurasia of the peoples who migrated to the Americas remain unclear.”
And this article and several others go into great detail about what we know and don’t know about who got here when and how. Fascinating subject.
One thing I get from reading and presentations on TV and what I’ve found on the web is that they aren’t quite sure how the nations which were here at the time of European discovery came to be. It seems like there was quite a lot of interaction among some peoples and very little among others. The history certainly seems incomplete.
I also suspect that much of what is presented by modern native peoples as history is mythology. Any time we get mysticism in our culture, yes even in any religion, it can easily take us off the true track of fact and into fantasy. The more of that sort of thing there is, the less I trust what is attributed to it.
That’s one subject we can agree on totally. I wonder what the H were those politicians thinking! Dumber than dumb.
My bottom line: abortion is murder, by definition. Murder can be justified. The one person, the potential mother, that makes that decision is the only one who can say it is justified. If that one says it is justified then the rest of us should accept that it is. Once the decision is made the rest of us have no business being involved in any way unless our help is requested by the woman. We cannot have our government pay for murder even if it is justified except in a very few limited circumstances. Even then the government should not decide whether it is justified. The one responsible for the life is the mother. She should either pay for it herself or have insurance that covers the cost, otherwise she will have to seek financial help. We should allow those who want to help to contribute financially, either on a case by case basis or through a general private, not government, fund. Such contributions should not be regulated, recorded or tax deductible.
Here’s the “reality” that you are claiming. The people who won the “war” against the inhabitants who were here before Eurorpeans are all dead. So, do those dead people own the land? I’m pretty sure you are claiming that the descendants of the people of the same general part of the world that “won” those “wars” somehow inherited this “universal” right, that you just made up.
I put “won the wars” in quotes because we actually made treaties, then broke every one of them. So, we cheated. But, according to you, WE STILL get the land. And I’m using WE very loosely. My dad’s grandfather came over from Germany because land inheritance there was based on birth order. Some of my mother’s ancestors fought in previous years, but most did not. The only thing they all have in common is that they are white.
That’s what you think fits your universal law. If not, please explain who you are referring to in the above “whoever”.
I’m pretty sure I don’t own land. I live on the land, but I don’t own it. Like the Native Americans, I don’t understand how one can “own land” when one can’t pick it up and take it with you.
I did not check this quote posted by Write4u, but I accept that it is from a reliable source. This is a prime example of what I posted about the one that wins the war takes control of the land.
The results of any conflict are most likely not pleasant for all involved, but the results are the reality of the situation. The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan and we can see clearly that they intend to control that land. The best thing for all involved with Afghanistan to do is to recognize the reality of their situation and deal with it however they choose. Ditto for the peoples of North and South America who lost control of their lands to European invaders. Living as if some remembered life from the past can become reality will do nothing to better their situation.
First off, I never claimed that taking control of land by victors was a “right”. It is just the reality of what has always happened following war. Those European invaders established a government. Do we need to investigate the purpose of government or can we agree that it is to “govern”? Is there anything about the application of “governing” that is obscured from us? I think not.
The descendants of the Europeans (aka the “white man”) have indeed inherited the government, along with everyone else inside our borders. No one, including native peoples, are excluded from that inheritance. As a nation, we have gone to great lengths to secure equality under the law. Agreed, that the process has been slower than we would have it and it has not been without conflict, but we have continued to seek a more perfect union.
There are those who choose to see themselves as different and special and strive to keep their identity separate from from the rest of us. Our government - ours, not just mine - provides those people with the freedom and security to make that choice. I think anyone who considers the situation should agree that people who choose to reject joining all the rest of us as citizens of our one nation do the nation a disservice.
I think such separatists want to be not separate but equal but rather separate and special. Racial and ethnic superior-ism is not limited to any one group and is certainly more evident in those who identify as “special”. We have seen around the world how pride in “racial or ethnic purity” serves no good purpose.
I like to seek agreement, so here it is. Also, correct, you didn’t say “right”, you said “law”, but what do we base laws on, if not universal human rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
And, yes, the winners of those early wars won and established a government, by hook and by crook, with slave labor and going against emerging thoughts on the right to conquer, kill and otherwise destroy cultures. So, what does a government have the right to do? We enshrined slavery, then changed it, then looked the other way while our laws about freedom were broken in the South. Other countries still overtly don’t extend rights to women, they put ethnic groups in re-education camps, they heavily favor one region over another, or there is just out-and-out tribal warfare. Are all of those “universal laws”? I think you are bending that term far beyond it’s breaking point, to where it is the “law of the jungle”.
We did not invade. We helped them win their war against the USSR, but we used the CIA, and got blowback. We tried to train soldiers, working with their government, that said it was against the Taliban. Then we released a bunch of Taliban prisoners and left without withdrawing weapons.
Warriors in that region have switched alliances throughout history, and they did it again this time, taking guns we gave them, with them. One of the biggest miscalculations, was the will of Afghan men to stand up to the Taliban.