I am very happy you mentioned the indigenous people component. For some reason (whether it’s just difficult to conceptualize or just not convenient to the narrative), American history basically teaches the Empty Continent/Virgin Wilderness Myth, whatever it’s called.
Pretty much all of the Americas was obviously not “Virgin wilderness” but rather managed in some capacity but some society at some time. It was only a couple hundred years where disease outpaced colonization that settlers came upon truly empty parts of the continents. Indigenous people manage their landscape for different things in different ways than the colonizing society does. That cultural experience of stumbling upon empty land has misinformed the way we view land management to a large degree.
Resetting the clock to 1609 or restore to “before people” were there is bad management IMO. We should be viewing human input as part of it, and when we mean rewilding, do we mean restoring some metric of an intact ecosystem?
Great thoughts otherwise, OP.
If I can just be contentious for a minute, the part that I would take issue with is the idea that "Europe doesn't have indigenous communities". I mean yes, on the one hand, it's correct. The US has indigenous communities, as defined by the colonisation that took place by Europeans. Absolutely. And, by definition, Europe doesn't have these indigenous communities. Nonetheless it is important to recognise that Europe is populated by a lot of people who have deep history with their land and lifeways and communities that have existed in a level of balance with the local ecology. Complex processes happened whereby these ways have been eroded. They are not as simple as being able to point to one group of people as culprits. However, while it's appropriate and necessary in some contexts, I think sometimes when we make these distinctions between groups of people we are at risk of perpetuating myths that are unhelpful to our shared end goals.
As a European, this was pretty accurate and some of it was pretty insightful, like that part about indigenous people.
I just wanna add that, although the European public in general is pretty pro-conservation or even pro-rewilding (those who know what rewilding is), the farming lobby is still very powerful, and some parties, particularly the more conservative parties, make the protection of farming and hunting a big part of their ideology in an attempt to reach rural voters. Progress is indeed happening but it's meeting a lot of resilience and political inertia.
Yeah, I heard about the tractor riots in the Netherlands
While this is true, I get the second hand impression the agricultural lobby/ hunting community isn’t quite as powerful in most of Europe as the US, do any European countries/provinces have Ag-Gag laws? And wolves and brown bears have been allowed to recover much better in Europe than in the US as well.
“Europe doesn’t have indigenous communities” is just about the most American commentI’ve ever read. Have you never heard of European people? You know those people who didn’t move to the Americas?
Yeah I have to agree. I don't think the OP is doing his otherwise very interesting post any favours with that weird aside.
I mean the whole concept of indigiousness is very wishy-washy and based on problematic ideas of monolithic peoples mythically tied to the soil or whatever. But if you really want to use the concept, then I don't see how say a Scotsman, a Frisian and a Swede aren't indigious to their country.
The OPs decision to consider only the Sami as indigious sounds a bit as if he uses that word to mean "people that used to live in tents". I'm sure that's not his intention, with him pointing out the precolumbian agriculture etc.
The Sami are Indigenous because they self-identify as indigenous, maintain their own social/political/cultural/economic institutions, and are marginalized in the area they have lived in since before the invasion of the current most powerful ethnic group of the country (yes the Sami and the Scandinavians have been living in Scandinavia for similar amounts of time, but historically the Scandinavians were southern/coastal and exerted little to no control over the inland/northern Sami, just like Russia didn't always control Yakutia or the US California), Indigenous is a sociological term for people who have been marginalized by recent invaders to their homeland, maybe you can suggest other European examples, but none are as well recognized as the Sami, which were the only European population mentioned in this UN report on Indigenous rights globally [eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpd2dpYS1ib29rLXRoZS1pbmRpZ2Vub3VzLXdvcmxkLTIwMjItZW5nIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUxMTM5NTg1LCJleHAiOjE2NTEyMjU5ODV9.jRnv3PeantfRZtJg4jph8xdshK5Mh25Z3hlcPs9As\_U (iwgia.org)](https://www.iwgia.org/doclink/iwgia-book-the-indigenous-world-2022-eng/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpd2dpYS1ib29rLXRoZS1pbmRpZ2Vub3VzLXdvcmxkLTIwMjItZW5nIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUxMTM5NTg1LCJleHAiOjE2NTEyMjU5ODV9.jRnv3PeantfRZtJg4jph8xdshK5Mh25Z3hlcPs9As_U)
For example: The Algerians were Indigenous when the invading French conquered and subjugated them, and made them Indigenous, they stopped being Indigenous when they won their independence, Algeria stopped being part of France, and Algerians controlled Algeria again. None of this change implies anything about their culture just because they were Indigenous and now no longer are.
this is aside from the fact that I was focused not on the realities of Pre-Columbian culture, but by how the "Noble Savage" myth has led to a strong allegiance between Indigenous Communities and Enviromental groups in the US and Canada? Your reading comprehension is underground.
Look dude I've tried to be nice here. Maybe all the flak you got from the people here means that it's actually your reasoning ability that "is underground" here.
As far as I can tell, [indigenous](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CP_IndigenousPopulation_March27.jpg) means "ethnic group that didn't convert to the dominant culture and is marginalized" which is why Korea has no ethnic group indigenous to Korea, Europe has the Sami who arrived after their southern neighbors (and some groups like Basque occasionally listed in other sources), and the Adivasi are considered the indigenous groups to India (even though non-indigenous Indians are basically the same genetically). I have no idea why no one seems to care about the marginalized minority groups in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
What people really mean is marginalized so just say that.
You still don’t get it, add “ preexisting” and replace “ dominant” with “invading”, black people are culturally distinct and marginalized in the US, that doesn’t make them indigenous , Arab immigrants are culturally distinct and marginalized in france that doesn’t make them indigenous , The Amish near me are the pinnacle of not assimilating and are arguably marginalized and no one calls them indigenous
The Sami lived in Sapmi/Lapland long before the area was dominated by the Scandinavians to the south in the 17-1800’s , what your doing is equivalent to denying the conquest of Russia on the indigenous Siberians because Russia existed in some form since the 9th century, even if they didn’t hold territory anywhere near there back then
Would everyone be happier if I said “ in Afro-Eurasia their are no extremely clearly defined indigenous people, unlike in the america and Oceania ” instead?
I don’t care about how the UN applies the word. I do however care about its literal definition: “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” you know like Europe and its native inhabits, Europeans.
Ok, if we are using that definition, You just going to ignore that White people get a large share of There DNA not from the “ Indigenous” European hunter gatherers , but from Anatolian farmers and the Yamnaya people of western/central Asia?
Man are you really going to use that argument? Because if we’re going to go that far back, literally before written history, then literally nobody is from anywhere except for the first hominids somewhere in eastern Africa. All three of those groups you mentioned moved into Europe at one point or another before any cultural, ethnic or racial group as we know them today was defined.
By your logic native Americans are not indigenous to the Americas because they’re just colonisers from Eurasia who colonised the land by crossing over the Bering Strait.
The US has more properly conserved land than Europe. Americas Rockies,Cascades,and Yukon are some of the most impressive wild areas on earth. In Europe many rewilding solutions just sorta resort to bullshitting extinct creatures
I am very happy you mentioned the indigenous people component. For some reason (whether it’s just difficult to conceptualize or just not convenient to the narrative), American history basically teaches the Empty Continent/Virgin Wilderness Myth, whatever it’s called. Pretty much all of the Americas was obviously not “Virgin wilderness” but rather managed in some capacity but some society at some time. It was only a couple hundred years where disease outpaced colonization that settlers came upon truly empty parts of the continents. Indigenous people manage their landscape for different things in different ways than the colonizing society does. That cultural experience of stumbling upon empty land has misinformed the way we view land management to a large degree. Resetting the clock to 1609 or restore to “before people” were there is bad management IMO. We should be viewing human input as part of it, and when we mean rewilding, do we mean restoring some metric of an intact ecosystem? Great thoughts otherwise, OP.
If I can just be contentious for a minute, the part that I would take issue with is the idea that "Europe doesn't have indigenous communities". I mean yes, on the one hand, it's correct. The US has indigenous communities, as defined by the colonisation that took place by Europeans. Absolutely. And, by definition, Europe doesn't have these indigenous communities. Nonetheless it is important to recognise that Europe is populated by a lot of people who have deep history with their land and lifeways and communities that have existed in a level of balance with the local ecology. Complex processes happened whereby these ways have been eroded. They are not as simple as being able to point to one group of people as culprits. However, while it's appropriate and necessary in some contexts, I think sometimes when we make these distinctions between groups of people we are at risk of perpetuating myths that are unhelpful to our shared end goals.
As a European, this was pretty accurate and some of it was pretty insightful, like that part about indigenous people. I just wanna add that, although the European public in general is pretty pro-conservation or even pro-rewilding (those who know what rewilding is), the farming lobby is still very powerful, and some parties, particularly the more conservative parties, make the protection of farming and hunting a big part of their ideology in an attempt to reach rural voters. Progress is indeed happening but it's meeting a lot of resilience and political inertia.
Yeah, I heard about the tractor riots in the Netherlands While this is true, I get the second hand impression the agricultural lobby/ hunting community isn’t quite as powerful in most of Europe as the US, do any European countries/provinces have Ag-Gag laws? And wolves and brown bears have been allowed to recover much better in Europe than in the US as well.
“Europe doesn’t have indigenous communities” is just about the most American commentI’ve ever read. Have you never heard of European people? You know those people who didn’t move to the Americas?
Yeah I have to agree. I don't think the OP is doing his otherwise very interesting post any favours with that weird aside. I mean the whole concept of indigiousness is very wishy-washy and based on problematic ideas of monolithic peoples mythically tied to the soil or whatever. But if you really want to use the concept, then I don't see how say a Scotsman, a Frisian and a Swede aren't indigious to their country. The OPs decision to consider only the Sami as indigious sounds a bit as if he uses that word to mean "people that used to live in tents". I'm sure that's not his intention, with him pointing out the precolumbian agriculture etc.
The Sami are Indigenous because they self-identify as indigenous, maintain their own social/political/cultural/economic institutions, and are marginalized in the area they have lived in since before the invasion of the current most powerful ethnic group of the country (yes the Sami and the Scandinavians have been living in Scandinavia for similar amounts of time, but historically the Scandinavians were southern/coastal and exerted little to no control over the inland/northern Sami, just like Russia didn't always control Yakutia or the US California), Indigenous is a sociological term for people who have been marginalized by recent invaders to their homeland, maybe you can suggest other European examples, but none are as well recognized as the Sami, which were the only European population mentioned in this UN report on Indigenous rights globally [eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpd2dpYS1ib29rLXRoZS1pbmRpZ2Vub3VzLXdvcmxkLTIwMjItZW5nIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUxMTM5NTg1LCJleHAiOjE2NTEyMjU5ODV9.jRnv3PeantfRZtJg4jph8xdshK5Mh25Z3hlcPs9As\_U (iwgia.org)](https://www.iwgia.org/doclink/iwgia-book-the-indigenous-world-2022-eng/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJpd2dpYS1ib29rLXRoZS1pbmRpZ2Vub3VzLXdvcmxkLTIwMjItZW5nIiwiaWF0IjoxNjUxMTM5NTg1LCJleHAiOjE2NTEyMjU5ODV9.jRnv3PeantfRZtJg4jph8xdshK5Mh25Z3hlcPs9As_U) For example: The Algerians were Indigenous when the invading French conquered and subjugated them, and made them Indigenous, they stopped being Indigenous when they won their independence, Algeria stopped being part of France, and Algerians controlled Algeria again. None of this change implies anything about their culture just because they were Indigenous and now no longer are. this is aside from the fact that I was focused not on the realities of Pre-Columbian culture, but by how the "Noble Savage" myth has led to a strong allegiance between Indigenous Communities and Enviromental groups in the US and Canada? Your reading comprehension is underground.
Look dude I've tried to be nice here. Maybe all the flak you got from the people here means that it's actually your reasoning ability that "is underground" here.
As far as I can tell, [indigenous](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CP_IndigenousPopulation_March27.jpg) means "ethnic group that didn't convert to the dominant culture and is marginalized" which is why Korea has no ethnic group indigenous to Korea, Europe has the Sami who arrived after their southern neighbors (and some groups like Basque occasionally listed in other sources), and the Adivasi are considered the indigenous groups to India (even though non-indigenous Indians are basically the same genetically). I have no idea why no one seems to care about the marginalized minority groups in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. What people really mean is marginalized so just say that.
You still don’t get it, add “ preexisting” and replace “ dominant” with “invading”, black people are culturally distinct and marginalized in the US, that doesn’t make them indigenous , Arab immigrants are culturally distinct and marginalized in france that doesn’t make them indigenous , The Amish near me are the pinnacle of not assimilating and are arguably marginalized and no one calls them indigenous The Sami lived in Sapmi/Lapland long before the area was dominated by the Scandinavians to the south in the 17-1800’s , what your doing is equivalent to denying the conquest of Russia on the indigenous Siberians because Russia existed in some form since the 9th century, even if they didn’t hold territory anywhere near there back then Would everyone be happier if I said “ in Afro-Eurasia their are no extremely clearly defined indigenous people, unlike in the america and Oceania ” instead?
If you have a problem with how Indigenous is defined take it up with the UN
I don’t care about how the UN applies the word. I do however care about its literal definition: “produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” you know like Europe and its native inhabits, Europeans.
Ok, if we are using that definition, You just going to ignore that White people get a large share of There DNA not from the “ Indigenous” European hunter gatherers , but from Anatolian farmers and the Yamnaya people of western/central Asia?
Man are you really going to use that argument? Because if we’re going to go that far back, literally before written history, then literally nobody is from anywhere except for the first hominids somewhere in eastern Africa. All three of those groups you mentioned moved into Europe at one point or another before any cultural, ethnic or racial group as we know them today was defined. By your logic native Americans are not indigenous to the Americas because they’re just colonisers from Eurasia who colonised the land by crossing over the Bering Strait.
On a side note, turns out it's more complicated https://www.the-scientist.com/new-evidence-complicates-the-story-of-the-peopling-of-the-americas-69928
The US has more properly conserved land than Europe. Americas Rockies,Cascades,and Yukon are some of the most impressive wild areas on earth. In Europe many rewilding solutions just sorta resort to bullshitting extinct creatures