There are still people for who this was in living memory rule
People always talk about the oppression as ancient history, but it has been perpetual for many groups, not just limited to indigenous. Allotment ran until 1934, giving away native lands. After that they moved to Termination, where they tried to dissolve reservations and negate treaties.
Oh, yeah. I distinctly remember reading in my textbooks in the 4th grade how they were the pilgrims' good friends and agreed to move. This was in the late 90s. That same year, we went to the nearby burial mounds on a field trip. 8yr old me did not put a lot of thought at the time into how the lecturers and their exhibits seemed to depict all of this as happening in the blindingly distant past, as if they'd gone the way of the neanderthal. Adult me only started assessing how it had been presented a couple years ago when I was telling someone else about it, and I am still horrified.
Stuff like this flyer, I never saw until today. That the state of Tennessee is entirely the result of Americans setting up shop on land that still legally belonged to the Cherokee at the time, and that everyone just sorta went along with that except for, increasingly, the Cherokee, was not something I ever heard until I was doing some semi-related reading on my own at the start of this year.
Yeah this was beaten do death in American history classes in middle and high school in the 1980s along with the internment camps during WW2 for Japanese and German citizens.
Heard a Catholic guy go all nuts about the fact that he had hard limits on the fish he could catch, but the Ojibwa could fish unlimited in their own sovereign lands. I tried for a few minutes to explain it’s their right they were given in recompense, and is hardly any compensation.
He just had to go on about liberals and eco terrorists and how they should be mad at Ojibwa fishing instead of the keystone pipeline.
There were too many things to unpack in that 2 minute conversation.
Btw, nice to see you in the wild outside of the folkpunk community!
Not even bothering to work out the logic, is he. If he did, he wouldn't have any right to be angry, and he really, really wants to be angry. Imagine some foreign government gracefully granting you the recognized right to fish in your own damn house.
Same guy was memeing hard about election 2016 and how you’d never see a self respecting conservative throw a temper tantrum about losing, we fell out of contact by the time January 6th happened because he kept calling me nicknames alluding to various communist leaders.
That and the same tired “LGBTQMNOP Alphabet people” statement I’ve heard several times a week since ‘05.
There are middle aged people who were kidnapped from their homes by the government, beaten for using their language, and taught not to ask questions when a classmate disappeared. Anyone who thinks that the oppression of native Americans is some ancient history thing needs to actually talk to some because we still aren’t treating them with any decency
The 3rd largest nuclear accident in human history happened on US soil, but it wasn't Three Mile Island. A tailings pond used by a United Nuclear Corporation uranium mill broke and released over 1,000 tons of nuclear material and nearly 100m gallons of contaminated water into the Puerco river and surrounding land.
The disaster happened in Church Rock, New Mexico a few months after TMI occurred, so it should have had national attention since nuclear accidents were still fresh in everyone's minds. However, most people don't know about it. Why? Because it happened next to a Navajo reservation, and the people primarily effected were Navajo. The US government pretended it didn't happen until the 1990s, and refused to clean it up until the early 2000s. In the meantime, cancer and diabetes have skyrocketed in a community without any genetic history of the diseases, the dust on the reservation has become contaminated and blown all over the place.
Oh yeah, and the UNC built another tailings pond, but this time they decided not to line it so now the groundwater is contaminated too.
I’m sure many families in the west did. I don’t know the heritage on my mothers side, but she is white, and goes back at least to the 1800s in the US, so I can’t imagine I haven’t in someway benefitted from allotment or other genocidal policy of the US Gov. I don’t think any living individual is responsible for anything they didn’t directly contribute to, don’t get me wrong, but I think its important to recognize the immense privilege certain classes of people have had historically, and the immense lack of privilege other classes had, and how those privileges translate into systematic injustices in the present day that we should work to correct.
You are absolutely right that we need to recognize both genocidal and oppressive policies in our countries and where possible restitute people or their descendants, the majority of society usually did directly contribute to those policies. However the case example by the person that answered you is actually more relevant than you would think. While we can't make our ancestors pay for their direct and indirect crimes, oppressed people who make use of horrendous policies should be exempt even in the level of thought.
To give a modern-day example of international law. Asylum seekers can't legally be punished by the mode of entry. Not because it changes it into a good thing but because oppressed people have so few options that are sane.
Reconciling and instituting is also not enough by a mile. We as Western countries need to stop these inhumane policies. I am not American. But mine while being better than most (based on rankings not my opinion) has shit ton issues.