Read the newspaper, dude.
Here in Washington State, the Makah tribe has been creating a serious political ruckus over the last year or so by insisting on their tribal right to hunt gray whales.
The spectacle has been perversely amusing:
The Indians, and the liberals on their side, are asserting their right to hunt. They’ve been going out into the Sound in a canoe and throwing harpoons at whales, and have actually killed a couple. (No outboard motors or harpoon guns, mind you.)
The environmental liberals oppose all whaling, and have been protesting at the Makah’s reservation, and harassing the whaling canoe. One woman was just injured doing this; she zoomed her jet-ski in at the canoe, and when she spun to zoom away, she was run over by the Coast Guard boat that was protecting the Indians.
And the conservatives, who believe in neither Indian rights nor environmental concerns, are similarly fighting with each other, but on the other side of the issue: Some want to let the whales get killed, and some want to prevent the Indians from doing anything under past treaties.
Me, I don’t know what to make of it, and I apologize for the semi-hijack. (Actually, now that I think about it, I’d better start a new GD thread for this.)
The point is, many Native Americans are very much interested in reclaiming their historical way of life. What has the white man brought? Television, antibiotics, motorcars (eventually), and hard liquor. A lot of Indians I know (I’m part Cherokee, and my best friend is fullblood from a tribe in Oregon) would gladly get rid of the white man’s trappings, good or bad, to go back to a more straightforward traditional existence.
As far as what happened historically, I don’t want to let anyone underestimate the magnitude of the genocide that stains the American flag. What happened in Kosovo, in Rwanda, even what happened to the Jews under the Nazis – none of these approaches the scope of what was done in North America.
Estimates as to indigenous populations range all over the map, from 15 million up to 50 million. I’m no anthropologist, so I can’t credit any particular argument, but even if we stay on the low side, the point remains. The current native population in North America is in the neighborhood of 1 million (again, estimates vary).
Now, it’s virtually impossible to make a straight-line calculation between a population in the year 1500 and now, but you can’t ignore the precipitous drop. One way or another, since the Europeans landed, millions upon millions of the indigenous people were simply exterminated.
Even 50 years after the Holocaust, people are starting to forget about that inhumanity, or treat it with nonchalance or even derision. The attitudes displayed by those on this board who say “we don’t owe ‘em nothin’” are unsurprising, given that the Indian Holocaust started in 1492 and ended 100 years ago.
What do we owe? Monetarily, specifically, how do you attach a dollar value to the horror? I don’t think you can. To simply say “to the victor goes the spoils, fuck 'em if they lost” is to show the worst kind of Middle-Ages selfishness. But I don’t hold with the other end of the spectrum, that says all white people living today should move back to Europe and leave the land to its original inhabitants, or any of those other reductio ad absurdum arguments.
But consider: If you own land in, say, Seattle, especially waterfront land, you should be aware that it was stolen from its original residents. That means 100% of the value in the land that you own has been handed down over the generations from a past theft. That value had to come from somewhere, and if you look to the depressed reservations, with their high rates of alcoholism and suicide, their low standards of living and literacy, you’ll see where the value of your land was stolen from.
Exactly right. This isn’t history we’re talking about, some abstraction from the past. This is a pattern that began in the past and is still continuing today.
Given that, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to cut the Red Man a little slack.