Why do we give special status to “the earliest known people to inhabit a land”? I’m not trying to challenge any particular privilege afforded to any particular group, but I do want to reconcile the entire conception of categorizing people in this way with our modern, western moral framework.
In particular, doesn’t the idea of legally recognizing “a people” seem pretty close to 20th century racial ideologies (per the parent’s point)? How do we test an individual for membership in “a people”? Is there a one drop rule? Do you have to pass a cultural competency test? Speak a language?
What does it mean when we say “such and such land rightly belongs to such and such people”? Even if that people group was the earliest known, that doesn’t mean they didn’t likely take it from an earlier group.
It seems to me that the entire concept is fraught with the same problems that beset 20th century racialism. And please note the distinction between “indigenous people are bad” and “categorizing people into ‘indigenous’ and ‘other’ seems like a bad idea”.
> Why do we give special status to “the earliest known people to inhabit a land”?
Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest known people = special." It's more that displacing, dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most? all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas, Australia, etc.
I don't have any answers for you about how to test for membership, and you're absolutely right that this particular aspect of the issue is fraught. I'm not an expert but I believe that in the United States at least this question is left to the tribes themselves. ("The courts have consistently recognized that in the absence of express legislation by Congress to the contrary, an Indian tribe has complete authority to determine all questions of its own membership."[0]) That seems reasonable on its face at least, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of recreating the issue one level up: the United States government decides who is and isn't a tribe, and that's just as fraught.
These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or their way of life.
> Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest known people = special." It's more that displacing, dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most? all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas, Australia, etc.
Many changes in people groups with respect to territory are simply migrations. Is there any evidence that violent conquest is the norm and migrations are the exceptions? My amateur understanding of history and archeology is that migrations are the norm and conquest is the exception (although posing this as a binary is itself misleading because violence is a matter of degrees). Moreover, lots of people who aren't considered indigenous have been brutally conquered, but we don't afford them special status (e.g., virtually any people which has been conquered by virtually any empire).
I certainly agree that many indigenous peoples in history have been brutally conquered, but considering they aren't the only ones and many of them haven't been brutally conquered, it seems like a crumby proxy.
> These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or their way of life.
Fully agree (who wouldn't? is this even controversial?), but I don't understand the "indigenous is a useful proxy for peoples who have suffered" argument.
All good points. The site is run predominantly by folks from North America, and I live in the United States, so there's a particularly North American flavor to this discussion. That's naturally going to focus on the specific experiences of North American indigenous peoples, which, at least in my reading, are unquestionably experiences of conquest. So in that context, I'm not even sure it's a proxy; it seems like it's actually at the heart of the matter. Whether it's a reasonable proxy at a global scale across all of time, or even an intelligible concept when removed from an American context, I don't know.
Fair enough, but there are also global organizations that deal in the indigenous/other dichotomy, including the UN (which has a special department or council concerning indigenous peoples). So there’s clearly a more universal notion that does my make sense to me.
Its more useful to see the movement to support indigenous people as a counterforce to attempt balance out the power dynamic between the colonizers and colonized. Without recognizing indigenous people as a group, they can not be provided the support that they need and they would get stamped out by the colonizers. In many cases its matter of trying to figure out how we can get the indigenous culture to survive at all.
Of course it is another discussion completely if every culture is something we want to try to rescue. Right now the general atmosphere is that yes, we do want to try to have as many cultures survive as possible instead of the great assimilation thinking of previous centuries.
> Its more useful to see the movement to support indigenous people as a counterforce to attempt balance out the power dynamic between the colonizers and colonized. Without recognizing indigenous people as a group, they can not be provided the support that they need and they would get stamped out by the colonizers.
Wouldn’t it be all the more effective and righteous to categorize between “colonized peoples” (rather than simply indigenous) and “other”? Or even “cultures at risk” versus “other”? Or do the Inuit have some stronger claim than the Irish or the Armenians?
Hey Aaron, I think you're taking undue offense. There's nothing particularly "colonialist" about anything I've posted, and indeed "colonialism" isn't limited to indigenous peoples, which is kind of my point. I'm wondering what utility, if any, can there be in dividing the world into "indigenous" and "other". If anti-colonialism is the ax you'd like to grind, then why not divide the world into "colonized" and "other"? Why use "indigenous" as a proxy?
Why use utility an a measure to begin with? I think we're going to have to agree to disagree simply because of the number of assumptions being brought into this discussion.
Well, I’m not sure why we use “utility”—that seems like a profound question. But that’s the criterion we’ve used to choose our concepts practically forever, so why make the exception for this one concept?
I have to hand it to you. It's clear that you're adept at creating confusion around ideas by "just asking questions", and creating cohesion around fuzzy concepts by stating opinions as facts. I've participated in too many of these "debates" to know where this is headed. If you genuinely want educate yourself on these topics, there are resources to do so. I encourage you to seek these out.
When you argue like this, it betrays your inability to defend your position or even admit as much. And anyway, this isn't a high school debate with winners and losers, it's about understanding and advancing. The defensiveness is unnecessary.
indigenous and colonized are more or less synonyms, its not really a proxy of anything. Why specific word is used instead of another to refer to something is a question more suited for linguists. But if I had to make a guess, I'd venture to say that people prefer to use a term to describe themselves that doesn't center around the negatives.
I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think the Welsh or Irish are on anyone’s list of indigenous peoples, for example. Maybe “colonized” has some specific academic meaning that I’m misapplying to the Welsh, Irish, etc.
In particular, doesn’t the idea of legally recognizing “a people” seem pretty close to 20th century racial ideologies (per the parent’s point)? How do we test an individual for membership in “a people”? Is there a one drop rule? Do you have to pass a cultural competency test? Speak a language?
What does it mean when we say “such and such land rightly belongs to such and such people”? Even if that people group was the earliest known, that doesn’t mean they didn’t likely take it from an earlier group.
It seems to me that the entire concept is fraught with the same problems that beset 20th century racialism. And please note the distinction between “indigenous people are bad” and “categorizing people into ‘indigenous’ and ‘other’ seems like a bad idea”.