By ‘them’, I mean Native Americans. You may be familiar with the Nantucket series, where Nantucket island is sent back in time. I want to flip it around for a little thought experiment;
Moundville Archaeological Site is the place. Due to quantum timey-wimey spaceballs, the palisaded settlement circa 1400 A.D. is transported forward to the current date, along with 10 surrounding square miles of what would become Alabama, replacing what is there now. Roughly 1000 people are transported forward with their settlement.
Two questions -
How much trouble are these people in?
You’re the Governor of Alabama. Congrats on the election victory, by the way. Once it has become clear what has happened - the past has come to the present, what do you do?
I think they’re screwed. Even if we have some scientific stuff verifying that they’re from the past and we can’t return them to whence they came, I’d have to assume that part of it being an historic site is that people aren’t going to be allowed to live there. According to the wiki, I’d also assume the 1,000 people brought forward are the ones who were living there then, and the 10 miles surrounding it are where they’d be growing all their food. Those 10 square miles are probably not part of the historic site, and the people who (on paper) own that land now would probably be pretty annoyed that somebody tore down their parking lot and put up a paradise. The 1,000 people wouldn’t be allowed to farm that land, they wouldn’t be allowed to live on the site, and they have absolutely no concept of what’s going on; plus, there’s an excellent chance that their language has shifted enough in 580 years that their descendants can’t talk with them. It would be a holy hell of a shitstorm, but they might well end up on a reservation.
I’ve wondered a similar question: Have the humans really learned anything?
What do you think would happen, given today’s prevailing sensibilities, if the Earth Humans discover and begin to colonize a distant planet, populated by sentient bipeds with culture and technology roughly on the level of Native Americans of, say, 18th century?
Will the Earth Humans peacefully coexist with them (like the Paleface Earth Humans now give lip-service to how they might better have treated Native Americans)? Or do the Earth Humans occupy, oppress, enslave, and/or massacre the Native Sentient Bipeds – but only until there are too few to matter much, at which time the Earth Human colonists will become enlightened and mend their ways (in lip service only, of course)?
What does The Dope think? I know what I think. (Hint: It ain’t pretty.)
I think we’d do better. We’ve learned something from history.
I think the real problems would be integration with the modern universe, and not so much whether we’d kill them, or even forcibly relocate them. I think the prevailing wisdom would be to leave them where they are for the time being – and tough beans to people whose property is affected. We can fix them up with replacement property, but this is a gigantic and miraculous event, a once-in-a-universe affair. We have so much to learn from it. Just going in and shoving them around would be absurd.
I think the ultimate integration would still be mishandled. I don’t think there is any right answer. We can’t just build a wall of isolation. There is no avoiding the titanic and destructive culture shock of the encounter.
There’s also the question of disease… We’d better be johnny on the spot with intensive medical care, because one neighbor kid with measles could make the whole matter entirely academic.
There are already untouched cultures on this planet that are just like the Native Americans were a few hundred years ago. Look up the Sentinelese people off the coast of India, for example. Nominally they are governed by India and subject to their laws, however, the country takes a hands off approach and lets them live the lives they have lived for hundreds of years.
Similarly there are cultures in the Amazon that are protected by the Brazilian government from encroachment, enslavement, occupation, and what have you.
So yes humans have learned, and we are better than we were in the 1500’s.
As to the land, I think that the federal government would certainly buy the land from the former property owners and designate the area a guarded preserve of some sort, in the immediate term.
Over time, I think there would be a raging debate over what the ethical way of treating them really is. One camp will contend that we are obliged to leave them alone, while the other will argue that it is cruel to deny them the benefits of modern science and law.
A hands-off approach works for the Sentinelese, who live on remote islands owned by a country that is still itself dealing with severe poverty. As to an enclave in the middle of a developed nation, many people will see hands-off as an abdication of responsibility. Are we really going to let them die of treatable injuries and infections? Are we comfortable letting their children grow up with no formal education?
Constitutionally, there are probably some equal protection problems lurking in a hands-off approach, but I think the rules are slightly different for Native Americans, and I am not knowledgeable in that area.
These cultures are protected more on paper than in reality. While the laws do forbid all you say, in actuality, unscrupulous and illegal loggers are doing plenty of encroaching and occupying. I don’t know about enslaving, but they are happy to murder and massacre. Hundreds of Amazonian Indians have been killed in the last decade.
The only advantage I see for the theoretical Alabama Indians is that Moundsville is more accessible and therefore easier for the government to police than is the Amazon.
No problem, as they’d all be dead within a week. There would be lots of contact with modern people and Western diseases before someone figured out what was going on. Exit the time-travellers.