That’s the thing though, actually stopping genocides and ethnic violence…kinda requires a willingness to do just that. If not you’re basically just a person who bitches about stuff and does nothing about it.
I was going to go to Myanmar and lend them some of my extensive guerilla warfare experience but they told me I wouldn’t be able to post in the SDMB.
So when you said:
I think when that happens, at a BARE minimum people should raise as much awareness as possible to prevent it happening in the future.
You actually didn’t mean to say “BARE minimum” you meant to say “ALL that we should do is raise awareness, because it lets me snipe around like a useless dolt on a message board and not have to consider anything more meaningful that might require policy changes, budgetary decisions or other things that might affect me more than random words I type into my computer.”
No? Right after that I suggested two policies.
I mean “give them more political power” isn’t a policy, it’s a platitude. “More money” I guess is at least borderline a policy so there you go, you figured it out. More money.
There are a lot of real ways to give them more political power. We could have senators representing tribes as an example.
The most obvious thing would be to pass a new VRA because Native Americans have been disenfranchised from voting in many cases.
That would certainly break the Republican stranglehold on the Senate when we added 600 some new Senators. I would question the realistic possibilities of that happening.
Edit: It would actually be around 1200 new Senators.
I’m going to do your work for you and assume that you’re saying that there are something like 300 tribes and that I would have to give all of them 2 senators.
No, that wouldn’t be the only way to give them senators.
You certainly couldn’t lump tribes together, that would suggest the tribes are all fungible because they’re all “Indians.”
No, it would suggest that they’ve been getting trampled over by our government for hundreds of years with a woefully inadequate say in the government that’s been doing it.
Thank you for providing a classic example of the Reductio ad absurdum fallacy.
Your solution to community destruction is to finish breaking up the communities?
And here we go again: the claim that all the active bad behavior was a long long time ago, way in the past, nothing to do with us. Just a matter of ancient history.
It’s not an either-or. Rather the reverse: acknowledging why and how the quality of life got bad may essential to get changes that actually are improvements.
And have you asked any such existing people whether they want these discoveries publicized? Or do you prefer to guess without looking?
We seem to be short on such representation on this board; and I’m certainly not qualified to speak with that voice; but there are currently plenty of public statements out there on the subject. Here’s a sampling:
Part of healing is accountability. In that regard, it is imperative that the United States begins to do the hard work of addressing the physical and cultural genocide it has exacted on Indigenous people.
These stories need to be told so that all people here and around the world can understand that genocide has been committed here in Canada.
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. “Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families,
NDN Collective joins the call for continued searches for mass and unmarked graves on all properties of former Indian residential schools across Canada and the United States.
“The discovery of the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada is a sorrowful reminder that the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has repeatedly called for transparency and accountability for the historical and generational trauma caused by Native American boarding schools in the United States. In 2016 and 2017, NCAI called upon the United States government and organizations that operated residential boarding schools to fully account for their treatment of Native children and be fully transparent in providing records related to enrollment and living conditions.
I think a better question is how many want to leave the reservation if they had the financial means to do so? The reservations are often not even anywhere remotely close to the tribe’s historic lands, and many of the people living on them probably would enjoy life elsewhere. Giving them that freedom is a virtuous act. Largely because we, collectively, put these people on the reservations, they deserve the agency to decide if they want to leave.
I mean 50 years ago gets you to 1971. You frankly need to shut your stupid fucking mouth about “durrr he is denying genocide again.” Seriously, if you can’t debate honestly, fuck off. No one is fucking denying anything, I’m saying people who only care about “awareness” campaigns about decades old bad things, but aren’t working to improve the lives of living, breathing people today, are just “leisure activists.”
I never claimed it was either or, at all. Maybe you could point to where I did (you won’t, because you can’t.) What I did say is people who are focusing on awareness should also focus on improving present day quality of life, if all you can do is keep saying the kind of mealy mouthed nonsense like you did in the prior two passages, you’re obviously not someone who cares much about the modern day plight of native Americans.
I mean I haven’t “guessed” one way or the other, right? I haven’t said I’m against them being publicized, nor have I really said I’m “for it”, but as as general rule I’m in favor of exposing under-reported, or unknown, prior bad acts on a societal level. For that matter I’m always in favor of knowing more accurate details about the past. You seem to be very stupid, because several of your comments here basically seem to be saying “oh so you want to improve native lives today, that means you think we can’t also raise awareness about past wrongs, and that you’re against raising awareness about past wrongs.” It’d be amazing if any of you nitwits actually could debate honestly, but sadly I doubt you can.
Give them the money, and let them choose whether they want to leave their existing communities, or to use it to improve those communities and their lives within them. Giving them the money only if they choose to leave is not giving them “agency.”
Right here.
Sure you have.
What is that “think” based on, if not on a guess? I asked you whether you had any evidence for it, and you haven’t provided any. I provided evidence of existing Native Americans/First Nations who care a great deal about bringing to light what you want to write off as having happened years ago, and you’ve ignored it.
I look forward to your taking your own advice.
Right, and nothing I said that you quoted, remotely suggested I had any issue with raising awareness of genocide. You read that into it, you are so many layers deep into toxic, deliberate misreading of anyone who doesn’t circle jerk with you and say the exact same, slack jawed zero thought bullshit you say, that you literally don’t ever realize that you’re just adding words into discussions that have never been spoken, and making assumptions about things unsaid. You are a piece of trash dishonest debater.
Do you really think no one on the multitude of Rez just can’t afford to leave? It’s 2021… and lots of us have left.
But why leave? Why must one want to leave? I actually think if Mistermage pre-deceases me I’ll be getting in line for a Rez house. I might get to connect with cousins and second cousins!
I grant that many Rez are not in the most attractive places for tourists but… other than in the NE and SE of the USA where there are so many other historical/money making places to visit … why couldn’t portions of them be granted monies to become more tourist friendly. I mean Black Hills but owned by the tribes/Bands.
Throw in actual Treaties being actually respected! Woohooo!
Checks Forum
Fuck you! My Band has a Treaty from 1837. Treaties | Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe
My Band ago just won yet another lawsuit… that won against the county most of the reservation is in *see link above… and then went right into a squabble against the police over jurisdiction Mille Lacs County revokes law enforcement agreement with Mille Lacs Band - PERM
I was born in 1970… my 2nd oldest brother was forcibly sterilized ~1978 since he had mental health problems. In one of his lucid periods a decade later he railed against it happening. Being castrated… is leagues beyond getting a vasectomy. Not asked of him nor our mom (dad was passed by then). Just… done.
Again, if you want to improve Native/Indigenous/Aboriginal lives: Treaties respected, free college for everyone (1), and stop forgetting about us because we are inconvenient just like so many others: homeless, mentally ill, “Essential workers”, white/red/black/brown/yellow (think that’s the colors), and last but not least LGBQT folks. Not like we all want a handout… but a hand up would be nice.
(!) heh (1) Why should higher learning be restricted to people with money. I was smrt. I could have benefitted from going to college. I was smrt enough to choose Mistermage and all 3 kids followed in his footprints and have certificates (trade school) and our daughter is going to be a nurse like her paternal grandmother.
Perhaps you might be a little bit more enlightened by reading the older Opinion articles of https://indiancountrytoday.com/opinion … I guess the USA is kinda ahead in the showing of records of times past … simply because 1) so many different accounts, 2) not just the Catholics, and 3) it’s still going on.
But not really getting ahead… still just sweeping aside.
No-one gives a shit what you “think”, since actual Native/FN voices have said they do care, and see the one as part of the other. Or is their mental health not part of their “quality of life” to you?
Aah, who am I kidding, you don’t give a shit about what Native people actually say, you’ve proved that time and again.
Maybe if they’re conservatives.
I have to say you take a more generous view of me than I do of you, since you say “No-one gives a shit what you think”, means you at least believe I can think. I on the other hand, am not convinced that you are capable of rational thought at all.
No, I did not assume that no one could afford to leave the reservations. I come from a very rural and very impoverished part of Virginia, where I can trace my family back about 5 generations at least in one branch of the family. A drop in the bucket time-wise versus the amount of time that native Americans have lived on this continent, but enough time that there are certainly people in my own family who got stuck in intergenerational poverty and never left home. I think this isn’t an unusual thing, and is fairly well documented in a sociological/economic context.
Part of what you leave behind when you grow up somewhere very poor and move elsewhere is an extended family support system, and when you’re already poor, it can be very hard to get by without that. Hence my question as to whether there would be any benefit to “moving” grants for people who want them.
This is actually an idea I have had for years but in a different context–there’s a lot of very poor people who are kind of trapped in the “high cost of living” areas of the country, think Bay Area, Seattle area, NYC etc, they make just enough to live at a very subsistence level. Due to the high cost of living of their area, they make nothing more, and they’re often not eligible for most Federal financial benefits. They would almost certainly enjoy a higher standard of living if they could move a few hours away to a less expensive city, maybe a suburb of a less expensive city. But moving requires a collection and outlay of capital. For people living hand to mouth, coming up with the savings to secure a new rental property, and then cover the costs of moving, simply isn’t possible. So they end up stuck where they are. These people are in a very different situation than low income people on reservations, or low income people in Appalachia stuck in intergenerational poverty, but I think some sort of program to assist people in these situations moving would be beneficial.
I think offering reservations tourism development money and other direct investment would be a good idea too, I wouldn’t be against that at all.
Like I had said “many” reservations are located nowhere near traditional tribal lands, but I am aware that some are–this is especially common with the smaller (in population) tribes east of the Mississippi. A large number of the reservations west of the Mississippi are actually forcefully displaced eastern tribes that were moved out there against their will. Point I was making is in many cases the native Americans did not choose to be in these reservations to begin with and I think that is a moral wrong, and I think we owe it to them as human beings agency to easily decide if they want to live elsewhere. I also think we owe them some level of financial support to improve the quality of life on the reservations as well. But I’ll also say that investments designed to invigored low income areas often have poor rates of return. Looking back to where I grew up in rural, low income Appalachia, that region has been subject to several significant Federal schemes to alleviate poverty. Over a 30 year period the Appalachian Regional Commission plowed over $2bn in grants to the region, and the ARC has an annual budget of $285m. There have been large programs to expand internet access (to the tune of over a billion), and often times this money appears to have achieved very little. Appalachia remains one of the lowest income, last developed places in the United States.
That’s a terrible thing, but it was actually a common thing for people with mental health or developmental disorders in the 1970s, and that is not just on reservations. It is actually still commonly performed today, although now it is only done with informed consent of the parents/guardians.
I don’t have an issue with most of this. The only one I can’t fully get behind is blindly respecting any treaty we ever signed with any tribe. Some of those treaties would entail grants of land to tribes that simply would be too large, and would imperil too many property owners. At the end of the day we (being the United States) have the superior claim to the land through the oldest and most important right of all between nations–right of conquest. We can’t roll the United States back to being a few colonies on the eastern seaboard over the plight of a couple million indigenous people.