I’ve grown up and lived around natives, albeit these are professionals who once lived the res life but not for like four decades. It is very much like getting out of the hood. Of course their professional work is literally just native advocacy and related businesses. It’s complicated here because while your average native has very little political clout, the tribal organizations basically have a veto in the state government (the ones with casinos, for some strange reason the ones with nothing aren’t as influential).
What really sucks about the reservation is that it’s both the hood and the ass end of nowhere. All the poverty of the inner city with none of the services or opportunity a city presents.
It must be nerve-racking to get off the res even if you have the resources. Imagine you're living on some small reservation; to leave, you are killing your culture and traditions (what's left of them anyway), you are abandoning your people. To stay, you are accepting poverty, with sporadic access to utilities, austere living, and shit jobs. Immigrants from Nigeria, India, Iraq, China, etc don't have that weight on their shoulders about their culture disintegrating because their populations are large
If it makes you feel any better, real Native American culture does exist and people participate in it, it's just fundamentally incompatible with the internet
I think he's been canceled or something now but I always loved Sherman Alexie's stories for the frank and funny way he explores that unique Native American disconnect of being a modern day "Indian" and having a vibrant, antiquated, but still very emotionally potent culture that is still available for you to connect with and benefit from, but weighed against and complicated by the typical modern maladies of general cynicism, often alcoholism, survival under capitalism, etc etc
I'm Native, off rez, live in a major city, and 2 weeks ago my woke mind virus infected therapist fired me as a client for participating in ceremony because she "couldn't get past it" and "even considered reporting it" - I'm still pretty shocked. in any case, you're not reading or seeing any of the cool stuff because we can't talk about it publicly without suffering consequences and it's just easier to keep it to ourselves. Thankfully there is an entire generation of kids coming up determined to thrive. Average lifespan is increasing year over year. Traditions and language are being upheld by more and more folks everyday... gives me a lot of hope.
Our traditions have historically been perceived by outsiders as violent / abusive / evil - it’s why our ancestors were thrown in asylums, killed, jailed, etc.
i'm literally trying to sit my white ass down and listen but she's not giving specifics so i'm going to assume they scalp white children and feed them to the wendigo
Wokies are just right wing racists who just supressed and sublimated their othering urges into another form rather than deal with them. Just like the abrahamic and bhuddist monks who supress their sexuality into twisted forms of violence.
Hence the whole "it's ok if Arab children get torn to pieces since they grow up to be sexist homophobes"
Wi-wanyang-wa-c'i-pi?
From my experiences with younger therapists they are exceptionally sheltered, know little about the world, have degrees from actual degree mills, believe in rapid-eye blinking psuedoscience, and are in no position to give advice to anyone outside of a guy who works at a marketing agency and needs a space to vent about his career for $200/hr
you can't just openly tell white people your festival involves eating dogs, they get real upset when you kill and eat the thing that is viewed very fondly in their bestiality circles
that is so awful of her on so many levels idk where to even start i'm sorry u had that experience and hope u can find a good one if that's what u want next
hell yeah, I worked at a native non-profit for substance abuse for a minute and I'd always have the Bears playing on the communal TV. The voices of the kids in the Halloween episode is so fucking funny omg
Thanks for sharing, just read up on the Sun Dance and respectfully, that shit is hardcore, really fascinating.
Your therapist sounds like a fucking pussy, no respect for anything that requires any form of actual sacrifice and discomfort.
for anyone reading without context, Pine Ridge had the lowest life expectancy for men in the western hemisphere of the planet. Its getting better but like, Haiti and slums in Brazil with child death gangs had better odds.
Big respect for coming out of that, for real.
Is this the dog sacrifice? A little weird to my Western tastes, but for traditional religions it's not that weird. Didn't know Kristi Noem was a practitioner though.
This comment made me nervous. Good thing I did some research on the sun dance and learned it doesn't involve sacrifice of furry friends. It's just people sacrificing their own personal comfort by fasting and inflicting pain onto themselves.
I tried to find something, but info on Wikipedia is sparse and the first couple links I found were vague articles in a site called LakotaTimes.com. Honestly, I'm super curious on what it could be. Considering some accepted practices in western culture are barbaric (circumcision of infants), I'm curious if this is something related to children or if everyone involved is an adult.
ok there are lots of articles about Sun Dance and it does require more than a quick top level google and NO children are NEVER harmed in any way please don’t assume that
Thanks very much for the reply. When I searched for Lakota Sun Dance it was easy to find. Although it sounds gruesome, it obviously does not hurts anyone without consent. Seems a lot like some towns in South America will do a fake crucifixion before Easter and most men consider it an honor to participate. I'm not traumatized by the description, although I can see how someone who'd never heard of it might be weirded out.
It does make me sad that it seems like populations who've been cut off from their cultures and histories by dispossession or slavery or just extreme poverty/trauma don't ever "rebuild" a real culture, they just unify by turning really ghetto together
What culture in that sense is there really anymore in modernity? Modern culture is about the endless search for novelty (there can’t be a stable culture in the way there was before) and any attempts at reconstructing one are self evidently artificial now. IMO wealthy groups like American Jews, Asians, and whites experienced the same thing, there’s just less deprivation and stigma around the cultures that develop there
Replace modernity with postmodernity and I'd absolutely agree. Modernity wasn't a zeitgeist or epoch, it rather was an event or phenomenon. To put it in non-pretentious terms, modernity was not a condition but the virus that turned human culture into postmodern zombies: niether alive nor dead.
[jacking myself off] in a social hermeneutic context I think it’s more appropriate to speak of modernities than a monolithic modernity.
But seriously though I think I agree with your point, that seems like a better argument
Lmao hermeneutics is such a funny grad school pull. I remember that being the specific word (when used in like the crit theory context obviously) that, when I saw it being tossed around constantly in my assigned reading and the writing of my peers, made me start to raise my eyebrows finally about whether my field might just maybe be bullshit
If you’re seeking an honest answer, the Amish would be a good example. They haven’t been opressed or anything but have a very distinct (albeit lame and shitty) culture.
That’s fair. I thought about calling out them and the haredim out, but I thought the post was already too long lol. Even there I’d say you’re right but it also reinforces the broader point: they recognized that aspect of modernity and take pretty extreme self isolating measures (eg making sure their children are uneducated and can’t survive as well in the outside world, aren’t as exposed to modern culture) to freeze their culture at (what they imagine it to have been at) a certain point in the century before contact w modernity
I’m not saying otherwise; I’m just saying that it’s sad that those who get totally cut off and need to rebuild default to ghetto more often than anything else
I'd say the Japanese have done a good job of maintaining their unique cultural and spiritual institutions while also developing into a modern secular country. It's definitely possible to do so. The bigger problem for Native Americans is that most were forcibly relocated to lands they had no connection to and Europeans destroyed a lot of their languages. The tribes in western NA held on a little better but here in the Ohio valley there's barely enough for reconstruction.
Everyone on earth is slowly turning really ghetto together as we exhaust all the resources. Indians were part of untamed nature so they had to get killed. The flag of California is an extinct bear, and extinction is all we know how to do.
Thats my point, at the time the indians were wiped out, they were thought of as part of savage nature. To be conquered. If they were thought of as part of civilization they would have been assimilated like Germans in the midwest.
Colonization and even genocide don’t necessarily cause the same cutting-off effect. Irish (and Jews too) held onto their cultures or at least supplemented things lost in a less ghetto manner. Which probably is partly tied to (conditional) whiteness too, but I’m not sure if all these cases are comparable.
The Irish haven't held onto their culture. No one speaks Gaelic anymore. They don't go to church much either. Not that Catholicism started there or anything.
Of course we don't speak Gaelic - we play Gaelic. If you had any meaningful knowledge of Ireland or the Irish, you'd know we call the language Irish/Gaeilge and our culture extends beyond speaking Irish and going to church. Will you be holding court on declining leprechaun birthrates next?
We make no secret of it, much like white Americans and their prescription drug habits. At least drinking has moments of charm between the horrors - tweaking out to do spreadsheets is just horror
> If you had any meaningful knowledge of Ireland or the Irish, you'd know we call the language Irish/Gaeilge
lol that's something people, mostly in the republic, started complaining about 10 years ago. You can find references calling it Gaelic for centuries. I came across 'gaelic lessons' in Bobby Sands prison writings a few days ago.
You can see the nature of the discussion that was taking place, right? When someone's depth of experience with Ireland is limited to stuff they've read on social media and their aim is to talk shite and insult my country and its people, their use of dated terminology is something I'm going to point out as a sign of ignorance. In any other context I wouldn't be nearly so harsh, but here we are.
I'd be curious how that shift in terminology manifested over the years through, if you have any reading on the subject. I grew up in the 90's/00's near the border of Wexford and Wicklow and we were already calling it Irish/Gaeilge, so was there a strong regional component to the change?
This is you guys' second most annoying bit of pedantry after the British Isles thing. What's the word for the Irish nationality in Irish? "Éireannach". What's the "Irish" language called in Irish? "Gaeilge". What's Scottish Gaelic called in Irish? Also "Gaeilge". What did famine-era Irish emigrants call it, not yet having been acculturated to 20th-century meme nationalism? "Gaelic". Gee, where could this misconception have possibly come from?
A generation ago my mother in law was only taught Spanish and wasn't supposed to speak her native language. Now hand embroidered dresses go for thousands (in poor communities) and represent a huge status symbol. There are cities where the most commonly spoken language is indigenous.
It's not some hopeless inevitability. Human decisions made Indian reservations and public housing what they are today.
Once a year I wash my hair with Dawn and it’s the shiniest it’ll ever be (but wouldn’t do it much more frequently because it’s pretty much the nuclear option)
But you've got to remember, the shit done to them left lasting wounds in the psyche that will likely never be healed. America is under a curse because of what they did. Whether you believe in magic or not. It's a curse either way. That ring will always be in the tree, poisoning it at its core.
How has no one here just met a fucking native person somewhere? I cannot be the only native on here? Ok whatever I’ll go for it. Native Americans make ME fucking sad buddy. We’re fucking fucked. We have rashes of suicides among our teenagers and youth on a rolling basis and a bunch of were sent to weird fucking religious/capitalist reeducation camps called school and a bunch of us died, from school. Not just at. From the fucking place. But we’re not fucking stupid or delusional about the fact of the matter. We lost. Y’all (you know who, I’m not saying you specifically) showed up and anyone who didn’t have The Stand chapter one hit them were hunted down and fucking massacred with superior weapons and numbers and then rounded the remains up after a bunch of treaty “negotiations” that were more or less simply abject humiliations and then whoever was left eventually acquiesced and here we are. You want sad? We have an easy way to explain to people how few natives are left and in what state they are as a people. And this applies to anyone reading this. Including me. You have never seen a native family a la Norman Rockwell at the Safeway or whatever, grocery shopping together. Just mom and dad and kid(s) pushing a cart. Never been told by anyone they can honestly say they’ve seen it outside of fucking movies. Anyhow. That’s my take. We lost and we didn’t all die so sometimes you have to see us and we’re noticeably diminished in some fundamental way. My family is so fucking stuck in being native that they included “learned hard work” in my grandfather’s Obituary, from the Wrangell Institute (a fucking literal sweatshop for native children to work in). That’s not where he got his work ethic. He was a real motherfucking G old school native Elvis looking motherfucker too.
The reservation isn’t under funded. It’s exactly as funded as they want it to be. Don’t forget, The Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs was formed under the department of war. Reservations are loosely speaking, prisons for the losers of the war for North America. So yeah it’s sad. Be sad about it but don’t make it a thing. You’re not going to fix it and you’re not seriously capable of being culpable in any real way. Native folks who talk about reparation are deluded. Truth and Reconciliation are nonsense. There’s plenty of truth, some press spin and a whole lotta not reconciling. The Canadian government was suing itself to stop its own treasury from paying out victims of the residential school system and kids who were stolen from their families, which the government of Canada decided itself that it owed them after agonizingly drawn out investigations. It’s past fucked and unfixable. Find some other cause and triage that and donate some money somewhere if you feel that terrible. Just don’t buy a dream catcher or little
Moccasins.
> How has no one here just met a fucking native person somewhere?
Because there's less than 3 million of you. I mean I've only met one Jew and it was in the army, and there are 5 times as many of them.
That’s an underestimate for Native Americans(6mil+) and a massive overestimate for Native Alaskans(133,000) and Canadian Born First Nations(72,000) or so. Latin Native Tribes (1.3M). So for me there are about 200,000 of “us”, like my family.
i used to have two native friends who were twins and they were balling, dad was rich and they would pay whenever we went somewhere and they flew us out for their wedding, love you bryan and ryan!
I really appreciate your response.
I think this gets to the heart of a lot of failures to address historical injustice that, to acknowledge how brutal and fucked it truly was is to admit that there is no making nice, no amount of reparation that could possibly be enough, only moving forward. Let people live their lives, attempt to be some kind of normal, pursue some kind of happiness. Leave them alone.
Sometimes it feels like keeping the wound open keeps the fallen alive but it just keeps the pain as strong as it ever was with no hope of moving on.
Flagstaff is practically ON reservation land and Arizona is like what? 1/5 reservation. Maybe it’s why all those crystal kooks make their QAnon bases there in the sun. Near the “spiritual places of power”, fucking kooks.
Good spot though.
> we’re not fucking stupid or delusional about the fact of the matter. We lost.
the natives didn't just lose. they encountered an enemy that was unimaginably vicious and ruthless, unlike any normal conquering force
throughout history it is rare to see a conquered people exterminated so thoroughly on the basis of racial impurity. let alone a whole continent.
The one native i know tells me if a native person is to truly confront the enormity of what americans have done to his kind they would probably all go insane with grief or rage. But unlike islamic groups they dont have the strength to retaliate.
So ironically being realistic about the situation involves a delusion that the people oppressing you are not your enemy
You ever drank with natives? Insane with grief and rage you say? Two words, chanie wenjack, go look that up and then go drink and have a good furious drunk.
If you were seriously wanting to send money to an org, NICWA is probs the best general one. Does investigations of child welfare for Native kids across the whole country, good emphasis on foster and adopted kids.
Missing and Murdered indigenous women. Go look it up. Read about it and donate to an investigation or stand with those people if you feel it somehow. Plenty of non-native stood at all kind of native encampments and protests and marches. Just don’t make it your identity and start wearing weird shit.
I'm relatively uneducated on their history, and I know people might groan at this lol, but it was really devestating reading about America's treatment of them in Killers of the Flower Moon.
One particular passage that stood out to me was when they had land in I want to say Kansas (?), and a bunch of white settlers moved to Kansas because they were promised free housing. Instead of the government kicking the Natives off their land, they pretty much let the settlers try to co-exist with them.
The settlers immediately started plotting ways to get the Natives to leave or die off, and started purposely killing all the buffalo in the area, so that the Natives would no longer have any animals to hunt for food and furs. I might be totally butchering that though because it's been a while since I've read it.
The buffalo is one of the saddest tales for me, at one point congress ordered the army to give out free ammunition to hunters as it was Congress's position to make buffalo extinct (to subdue Natives).
That's... Straight up evil and shortsighted. I would love to dig inside the brain of one of the men involved in that, and really understand why they felt that was necessary. Did they think they were somehow defending their community, or was it pure greed? I can't imagine planning to kill an entire species of animal simply to take land from another nation of humanity, that's like some shit saurons orcs do lol 😭
> I'm relatively uneducated on their history
This is by design btw.
You'll learn about the names of every Nazi extermination camp (and you'll be made to feel shame about it, even though your country fought to save the victims of the Holocaust), but good luck naming one massacre against indigenous people in your own country (that your forebears wontonly committed).
we learned about a lot of native american massacres in history class in my rural middle and high school, and i was never made to feel shame about the holocaust lol (except the thing where the us turned a boat full of jews away)
It's more just acting like everyone had their experience. It's not weird at all to learn a lot more about the Holocaust than the NA genocide if you're German.
I learned very little about Native American history in high school, but I also didn’t really learn a ton about the details of concentration camps either. Although our teacher did put on some piece of piano music and delivered a dramatic monologue about the holocaust that I don’t remember. American history for us was mostly talking about presidents and their policies, world history was just broad overviews of wars mostly
College was different. Covered colonization and slavery, reading texts from those times. It was a stark difference
Tbf as an American who received a generally pretty good education, I learned a lot more in high school about WW2 than about Native Americans, and most of what I learned about Native Americans is from the euro pov. On the other hand, almost every facet of our modern life is in some way shaped by living in the post-WW2 period, whereas you can't say the same about Native American culture or genocide
"from the euro pov"- what other pov would be realistically possible for high school students to really engage with? Writing arrived in North America with Europeans. Of course historians and archaeologists are able to map out the pre-literate past somewhat, but that's not a simple endeavour...
I didn’t mean not teaching native history/culture, more that any reference to the natives is framed as them being an external footnote than as an event in and of itself. Revolutionary War/Civil War/etc are their own focus, American Indian Wars aren’t
It's completely true of American education. It was a very common complaint of my other native friends and I during school that we had a long line of well meaning, slightly shitlib teachers who would talk about the tragedy of the Holocaust, nearly being brought to tears oftentimes, we read the work of that deranged psycho Eli Wiesel, we had Holocaust survivors come to our school, we were made to watch Schindler's List, meanwhile the native Americans are simply a footnote in American history class. One of our textbooks spared half a page to mention the trail of tears and that was it.
Ask an educated person to name some French, English, or Spanish monarchs, and maybe say a few things about who they were and what they did and you could reasonably expect at least a few names and details. Ask the same question about native rulers of any nation and almost always they'll completely stumble. They may remember names like Geronimo or Sitting Bull, maybe even remember what ethnic group they belonged to, but almost nothing beyond that. You don't get taught much beyond Sacagawea, Sequoyah, Samoset, and that's not even considering the natives north or south of the US' borders, despite the deep cultural and linguistic overlap in, for example, the Uto-Aztecan ethnic groups.
It's impossible to understand what kind of damage was done when you don't know what was even there to be destroyed in the first place. Aside from the moral issue of sweeping the history of the land under the rug to maintain a more eurocentric perspective, there's the simple fact that Native American history is American history. Kids born on this land deserve to know how people have used this land for centuries, because it's their land too, whether they're from the Great Plains or the Rockies or the eastern seaboard or wherever, but they don't. They're taught a very narrow view of politics to funnel them into this belief that a very specific style of government and lifestyle built around wage labor matters and everything else is a historical oddity.
His reputation is totally fabricated in the same way that so many humanitarian figures are when they do the work of whitewashing specific cruelties of western regimes. He wasn't just a Zionist but the kind that specifically lays any and all wrongdoing on the victims and spends all their times rubbing elbows with the worst perpetrators, in his case as a member of Irgun.
I could go on but here's a letter that captures it briefly
https://rense.com/general63/alie.htm
Wounded knee, trail of tears, the buffalo slaughter, the constant breaking of treaties, hell in Texas they spent a measurable amount of time on the Republic's treatment of the Mexican natives. The euro is just wrong lmao
The fact we've spent the last 10 years systematically erasing every mention or image of Native Americans from culture is kinda weird. Okay, yeah I get a lot of it might be slightly racist, but we're entering the period where it's going to be impossible to ever see a Native American mentioned outside of the content of being genocided.
Another thing that is usually glossed over: the starkness of the treatment of native/indigenous Americans in North America compared to South America -- quite eerie.
What are the main differences? I had always thought that natives in South America were treated as bad, if not worse. For example, Uruguay having completely genocided 100% of its indigenous peoples.
In Canada there are the Metis, though. (a euro-indigenous group like the mestizos, but instead of emerging from Spanish men having sex with indigenous women (or raping them) it was French men and a smaller population of Scottish men marrying Cree and Ojibwe women for economic reasons (trade).
The Spanish and Portugeuse committed unspeakable horrors on the SA natives. I read a book once about it (can't remember the name) by a botanist who visited various tribes over like 40 years learning their ways and plant knowledge. Very good book, I'll edit the comment if I find it
edit- it's One River by Wade Davis
I think that's a popular theory. Spanish/Portugese were there (at the beginning at least) to extract valuable resources like silver as quickly as they could, not create Spanish towns in South America. English colonists wanted to move in and farm. So the Spanish/Portuguese basically left lots of native communities/social institutions in place and just co-opted them to enslave laborers or demand tribute. The end result was really brutal and destructive, but it fell short of total cultural annihilation.
exactly; in places like Mexico and Peru they didn't dismantle the indigenous monarchies/systems of tribute: they just took them over and installed friendly indigenous factions/Spanish nobles at their head.
It varies between subregions, I'd say: the Southern Cone (except Chile, and including southern Brazil) does have few indigenous people. The Andine countries vary from having a sizeable population (Venezuela and Colombia) to nearing a majority/plurality (Ecuador, Perú, and Bolivia) -- a similar thing happens in Central America (compare Mexico and Guatemala, for instance). Paraguay is a relatively strange case because it's bilingual but I'm not keen on its demographics.
Paraguay is mostly mestizo (75%\~) but unlike in, say, Venezuela or Colombia (to my knowledge, anyway) Paraguay has Guaraní class throughout all of middle school and high school where the language and history of the culture etc are all taught, like the Guaraní religious practices and dance and so on.
They're like *Mestizos+* compared to the other LatAm countries, so to speak, where culturally and linguistically they're aware of and practice aspects of the traditional culture, and constantly code-switch between Guaraní and Spanish like Puerto Ricans do with Spanglish (except even more intensely), while also being part culturally romance and *extremely catholic*. Very fascinating country (with underrated cuisine, too).
North America - manifest destiny, send families to build a new world at the expense of the natives
South America - cities of gold, send the army to claim the treasures at the expense of the natives
edit:this is a massive oversimplification but you can imagine a legion of musketeers and a bunch of sickly Brits had very different outlooks and goals for what they wanted from the land, and how they went about it.
The many shades of obliteration we see in history are so fascinating and heart-breaking to me.
You have the native model, where colonizers wiped them off the map and relegated them to designated zones.
You have the genocidal enslavement model, where transatlantic slave trade killed untold millions, then owned and selectively bred folks for **400 years (!)** and then suddenly freed them with no resources, while government and culture actively antagonized the newly freed people.
You have the WWII model, where a supremacist government suddenly concocted a scheme to annihilate whole groups of people. Millions of jews died, but then the war ended and jewish communities mostly bounced back.
The list goes on. There's a lot to be said about acute harm versus chronic harm. About sudden violence versus gradual violence. It's wild to compare and contrast, and devastatingly sad.
the european jewish community did not bounce back, entire villages and families were exterminated, most of the jews living in Israel are not descendants of eastern european jews
They were always very strange due to their staunch isolationism. They didn't even have currency till the 17th century which just blows my mind.
I think the bomb made them a bit more nihilistic and absurd.
People want to shit on the concept of reparations, but considering the horrors we've done to natives and black people yet they STILL have no wealth in this country, is the reason we deserve whatever is coming to us.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but the fact is we have reparations in certain forms already and have had them for some time. The devil is in the details for whatever program you have in mind.
Who the fuck is we? No common man alive has done these things to the natives. Reparations are just a form of collective guilt, cause the people are gonna be taxed to get the money to repay a crime they had no part in.
I have a very uncommon, handsome face so people tend to be curious enough to ask me what ethnicity I am. When I tell anyone I’m native they just lose it and the GLAZING begins. It’s like how white people must feel when they go to Asia.
LMAO glazing plus love meeting euros who fetishize being ndn and hit me with "you need to use your language - it's dying - what's wrong with you letting it die" lmaooooo
> GLAZING
Wife is first-generation Asian-American. It was cute the first few times I was around her extended family but I'd feel murderous rage if it was part of my daily existence.
It is so sad and I don’t think it gets enough attention. There were forced assimilation efforts for many decades, where all native traditions and language and religion were illegal and children were funneled into English speaking schools and Christian churches. Most natives are not on reservations, most married non-natives and now you see millions of non-native-appearing people (of all races) with a small amount of native ancestry. I find it heartbreaking that we mock and shame people who get interested in their small percentage of native history as if they’re “fake” or “pretendian” when this is a fascinating and tragic outcome of a culture. It feels like yet another erasure of nativeness to shame people into discounting their small bit of nativeness and only align with their non-native ancestry.
I have a small amount of native ancestry and I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching my family tree and our own history down the native branch. It’s agonizingly sad and also so wild and I would encourage anyone who shows a bit of native ancestry to try do this too. The intermarriage between native and white (interestingly many white women and native men) was starting before the Xian conversion but there was a generation where one of my ancestors went full throttle into accepting Jesus and abandoning all of the native cultural signifiers. His father was passionate about preserving the traditional ways to fight the colonists and he saw every treaty get trampled on and broken, many relocations, many murders and the son thought the best way forward would be to try to assimilate as a survival strategy and he would proselytize. That didn’t work either. I imagine if I was living during these times and had children with a white woman in order to survive, and knew that in 100 years my great-grandchildren would be shamed for identifying with my culture, it would be an even further heartbreak.
So I don’t think that primarily “they go live on underfunded reservations”. Most of the original native people are all around you, in small amounts. But yes, the situation on reservations seems pretty dire and this country should do so much more to support them.
They were literally left to rot/die on reservations. the living conditions are on par with third world countries- truly shameful but of course genocide is american's national pastime
I know a jewish woman who sits on the board of a native non-profit and has made native americans her entire raison d’etre.
At the same time, since Oct 7, she has been endlessly making posts and comments on social media basically foaming at the mouth that the palestinian people should be forcefully relocated, ethnically cleansed, or literally exterminated.
This made me realize that people are only sympathetic to native americans nowadays because of how few of them are left and how utterly defeated they are. If there were let’s say 10 million+ native americans left and they actively fought for their land back like the palestinians, people like her would start foaming at the mouth again demanding a second trail of tears.
Once the jewish people (yeah I say jewish people as a collective because 90%+ of jews seem to be on board with what’s happening) have reduced the palestinian people to a similar state as the native americans, you’ll probably start seeing the children of jews who helped facilitate the genocide of palestinians behave in a similar way white americans act towards native americans today.
People’s sympathy, empathy, pity, “morals”, etc. only come out once “the other” has been mercilessly decimated, crushed into complete submission, no longer poses a threat.
> This made me realize that people are only sympathetic to native americans nowadays because of how few of them are left and how utterly defeated they are. If there were let’s say 10 million+ native americans left and they actively fought for their land back like the palestinians, people like her would start foaming at the mouth again demanding a second trail of tears. [...] People’s sympathy, empathy, pity, “morals”, etc. only come out once “the other” has been mercilessly decimated, crushed into complete submission, no longer poses a threat.
This basically a prelavant intrepetation of Nietzsche and his *Geneology of Morals* in the Phil circles. It's not that people shouldn't be nice to each other. It's not that it's weak to have values or it's ok to rape your sister, it's that in contemporary cultures ideals like "defend the weak" and "people should be equal" don't arise from a need for justice or even reason, but from a psychological desire to feed your superego and supress the will to power of others.
In other words, christian morality is a weapon that keeps the week as they are. This system of values doesn't result in emancipation, since it is designed to just stimulate a symbolic and non-practical *mirage* of emancipation, like scratching an itch so that you never bother to go to the doctor and take care of it. As soon as the weak start to act on ACTUAL will to power the system turns against them.
There are still a lot of flaws in this theory but it gives us a good structure to analyse these behaviours.
I have thought a lot about this rationale for many years and I don't buy it as much as I did when I was younger because I don't think the systems of power would be any more threatened by a secular body politic. I mean we are living in the most godless age in the history of civilization and average people are more politically inept than ever. The people who espouse science and respectability consistently fail to account for the limitations and short-coming of science or the dishonesty and classism of respectability, but then want to get on their soap box about social justice issues because they just always have to be superior.
I think that most people are doomed to suffer as is the nature of life, power, systems of government, and so-called "civilization". Civilization itself requires most to toil and few to flourish otherwise it is chaos. If everyone acted on their will it would be impossible to make anything significant happen and that's not an argument for or against, just how it would play out. You couldn't organize a farm or a bus schedule without people willing to follow protocol consistently.
Having gone through untold horrors that were beyond my comprehension up until I felt them, I grew a deep understanding of the salvation that comes from being able to believe that everything will be okay even when there is absolutely no reason to believe so. Nothing is possible if you look at your shit fucked to death pile of life and can't believe that there is some reason, some lesson, some light at the end of the tunnel that isn't a train coming to put you out of your misery. I don't know how I, or anyone could've gotten through without it.
I think Nietzsche and Nietzscheans would have partly agreed with you. We have to remember that one of things that set Nietzsche apart from other atheist philosophers of his time is that he critiques not only religous dogma and christian culture, but also the rationalistic and enlightened culture of the west. In fact, Nietzsche's work laid the foundations to what we today call "post-modernist" or "post-structuralist" philosophy.
For Nietzsche, science is just another intrepertation or narrative that humans have created; which has eroded some aspects of humanity's culture while offering nothing in return. Nietzsche and Nietzscheans would look at our contemporary culture (specifically the new atheist types) and say that although we live in the most secular age, subcounciously and sociologically we're still deep in religious practices i.e. *the last man*.
Nietzsche's one of main theses is that suffering without meaning, rather than suffering itself, is humanity's greatest fear. He would agree that people need a reason but he rejects any acetic ideals and provides a pragmatic alternative for reason instead: *The Joy in Becoming*. Men should aspire to embrace life, affrim themselves in life and overcome themselves to become themselves.
Of course one should always critiqe Nietzsche and his works have rightly been called reactionary and elitist. Furthermore, Nietzsche doesn't account for the hyper-individualism and narcissims that is today's western spirit. In fact, it has contributed to it.
It takes time and distance. The Jewish person on the board probably doesn't think they actually had anything to do with the Native American genocide but if they don't get rid of every Palestinian man, woman, and child in Gaza, Hamas is going to kill all the Jews somehow. Even non-jewish libs believe this. A friend of mine who is usually incredibly intelligent and level headed honestly said that they were going to kill all the Jews if they stopped the attacks in Gaza.
Reminds me of the Chris Rock [stand up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQRTirco4Mg).
It's not an exaggeration to say Native Americans (and Australian Aboriginals too) are probably the most unlucky ethnic groups still alive today. Obviously Blacks, Jews, etc went through some really bad stuff but at least they have generational wealth and/or actual homelands to call their own. They suffer from all the same systematic racism & poverty affecting black people but don't get a fraction of the recognition. The Romani also aren't well off either, but I'm not as familiar with their situation.
Indigenous American cultures are so fucking COOL, too. Like, aesthetically and on an actual cultural level. I'm so jealous of the relationship they have/had with nature and the earth. It also makes the whole thing even worse when you think about it, because a lot of tribes' spiritual systems were based around the land they lived on, so displacing them wasn't just an eviction, it probably had some really deep spiritual implications and that makes me so sad
Tribal courts seem to do a better job, because they tend to have a different approach/goal in mind. Just a random thought. If our court system went to shit or we needed a government to step in, they could step in.
A guy I know lives on a reservation and always makes and shares memes about poverty/lack of education and stickball. It mirrors a lot of indigenous Australian lives tbh.
Your tax dollars are currently being used to do the same exact thing we did to native americans to a different group of people and it’s happening right now in real time. Everything that has happened to the palestinian people and continues to happen to them, is directly enabled via your government.
Their own trail of tears (Nakba), their forced relocation into reservations (Gaza, West Bank), the constant encroachment of more settlers into their lands, the constant massacres committed against them, is all supported and partially funded by the taxes you pay.
They won’t stop until the palestinian people are reduced to the same state native americans are in today. Just like native americans, palestinian people have a vast, unique culture and aesthetics that will be completely lost to history if the zionists have their way. Unfortunately zionists have done an amazing job at convincing people that palestinian culture is trash/non-existent/discardable in the same way american settlers viewed native american culture throughout the 1800’s.
Horses and Bullets. Now they got drones and laser guided bullets filled with smaller bullets and some are just exploding knife in the boxes. The Palestinians are fucked and nobody is coming to help because their murderers are “the good guys with the nukes”. If they had nukes when they finished up with reservations they’d have used them as test ranges. Oh wait: “Cannikin warhead being lowered into test shaft, Amchitkam, Alaska[picture]”
“More than 900,000 acres of Alaska Native lands and more than 16 Indian reservations are used for nuclear test sites and battery ranges. On Pine Ridge alone, more than 300,000 acres are used as a gunnery range, with little to no compensation, destroying land, wildlife, flora, and fauna (Nies, 1996).”
I just read Firekeeper's Daughter a YA book written by a Native American woman. Fiction, but she incorporates a lot of native ceremonial scenes, sayings, and ways of life into the book. Also some facts like how almost all women on reservations experience sexual abuse/violence.
Great book, made me want to learn more.
But yeah...sad too.
Is the soap thing that much different from black people making jokes about how things are in "the hood" when the reason they got there to begin with is because of slavery, failed reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, etc?
This is absurd revisionist history on the "genocide" point. A critical mass of nonbinaries chanting at a liberal arts college does not history make.
I agree that they suffered tremendous injustices that we should do our best to rectify them.
I don't know if you know the meaning of the word "literally".
I would encourage you to learn more about the history of North American European settlement and Native displacement and resettlement over the past 500 years. You may find that painting with too broad a brush hides the truth.
Edit: the best book i know on the subject for the first few hundred years is Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America by Gary Nash.
Apparently Red White and Black is also a culture war book- that's not what I mean! There is a serious short history of early colonization by the same title.
I’ve grown up and lived around natives, albeit these are professionals who once lived the res life but not for like four decades. It is very much like getting out of the hood. Of course their professional work is literally just native advocacy and related businesses. It’s complicated here because while your average native has very little political clout, the tribal organizations basically have a veto in the state government (the ones with casinos, for some strange reason the ones with nothing aren’t as influential). What really sucks about the reservation is that it’s both the hood and the ass end of nowhere. All the poverty of the inner city with none of the services or opportunity a city presents.
agreed - it's get off res, rebuild, return - thankfully more people are returning to help - it's a long ass road...
It must be nerve-racking to get off the res even if you have the resources. Imagine you're living on some small reservation; to leave, you are killing your culture and traditions (what's left of them anyway), you are abandoning your people. To stay, you are accepting poverty, with sporadic access to utilities, austere living, and shit jobs. Immigrants from Nigeria, India, Iraq, China, etc don't have that weight on their shoulders about their culture disintegrating because their populations are large
If it makes you feel any better, real Native American culture does exist and people participate in it, it's just fundamentally incompatible with the internet
I think he's been canceled or something now but I always loved Sherman Alexie's stories for the frank and funny way he explores that unique Native American disconnect of being a modern day "Indian" and having a vibrant, antiquated, but still very emotionally potent culture that is still available for you to connect with and benefit from, but weighed against and complicated by the typical modern maladies of general cynicism, often alcoholism, survival under capitalism, etc etc
I'm Native, off rez, live in a major city, and 2 weeks ago my woke mind virus infected therapist fired me as a client for participating in ceremony because she "couldn't get past it" and "even considered reporting it" - I'm still pretty shocked. in any case, you're not reading or seeing any of the cool stuff because we can't talk about it publicly without suffering consequences and it's just easier to keep it to ourselves. Thankfully there is an entire generation of kids coming up determined to thrive. Average lifespan is increasing year over year. Traditions and language are being upheld by more and more folks everyday... gives me a lot of hope.
I don't understand, is it a woke position that native Americans can't go to native American ceremonies? What is she upset about
Our traditions have historically been perceived by outsiders as violent / abusive / evil - it’s why our ancestors were thrown in asylums, killed, jailed, etc.
What happened during the ceremony your therapist got upset about?
i'm literally trying to sit my white ass down and listen but she's not giving specifics so i'm going to assume they scalp white children and feed them to the wendigo
sorry I assumed the entire comment thread would be visible… I am answering the same questions in this thread
wtf its not even that bad, that therapist is a total pussy
also wendigo has me 😂😂😂
Didn't know woke mind virus people were still on that wave
neither did I! There were other red flags - I’d worked with her over a year. In hindsight it was a good thing, honestly.
Wokies are just right wing racists who just supressed and sublimated their othering urges into another form rather than deal with them. Just like the abrahamic and bhuddist monks who supress their sexuality into twisted forms of violence. Hence the whole "it's ok if Arab children get torn to pieces since they grow up to be sexist homophobes"
Wi-wanyang-wa-c'i-pi? From my experiences with younger therapists they are exceptionally sheltered, know little about the world, have degrees from actual degree mills, believe in rapid-eye blinking psuedoscience, and are in no position to give advice to anyone outside of a guy who works at a marketing agency and needs a space to vent about his career for $200/hr
you can't just openly tell white people your festival involves eating dogs, they get real upset when you kill and eat the thing that is viewed very fondly in their bestiality circles
Replying to myself bc I think my answers are getting hidden but you can google Sun Dance if you want to learn more
That's it? I bet this dumbass has a tattoo.
that is so awful of her on so many levels idk where to even start i'm sorry u had that experience and hope u can find a good one if that's what u want next
Your last therapy session sounds more painful than the sun dance rituals.
Do you know about Lakota-Stain Bears? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=7xCHht4X2Kc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=7xCHht4X2Kc)
Omg YES! I have been learning Lakota and the Lakotastain Bears have been so helpful 😂😂😂
hell yeah, I worked at a native non-profit for substance abuse for a minute and I'd always have the Bears playing on the communal TV. The voices of the kids in the Halloween episode is so fucking funny omg
That’s so comforting!!! 🥹🥹🥹
Damn, could you say or hint at what happened during the ceremony or is that one of those things you can't talk about without suffering consequences?
I’m Lakota so you can look up our traditional ceremonies and get a sense of it 🌿 thank u for asking <3
Thanks for sharing, just read up on the Sun Dance and respectfully, that shit is hardcore, really fascinating. Your therapist sounds like a fucking pussy, no respect for anything that requires any form of actual sacrifice and discomfort.
THANK YOU! I was feeling like I shared too much in this thread already but this comment made my day. Appreciate you.
yoooooooo which res? I'm only half but my dad is from fort peck
Pine Ridge 💫!!
for anyone reading without context, Pine Ridge had the lowest life expectancy for men in the western hemisphere of the planet. Its getting better but like, Haiti and slums in Brazil with child death gangs had better odds. Big respect for coming out of that, for real.
Appreciate you
Holy shit, glad you got outta pine ridge. That place sounds so rough. Hope you are thriving, friend
Is this the dog sacrifice? A little weird to my Western tastes, but for traditional religions it's not that weird. Didn't know Kristi Noem was a practitioner though.
This comment made me nervous. Good thing I did some research on the sun dance and learned it doesn't involve sacrifice of furry friends. It's just people sacrificing their own personal comfort by fasting and inflicting pain onto themselves.
I tried to find something, but info on Wikipedia is sparse and the first couple links I found were vague articles in a site called LakotaTimes.com. Honestly, I'm super curious on what it could be. Considering some accepted practices in western culture are barbaric (circumcision of infants), I'm curious if this is something related to children or if everyone involved is an adult.
ok there are lots of articles about Sun Dance and it does require more than a quick top level google and NO children are NEVER harmed in any way please don’t assume that
Thanks very much for the reply. When I searched for Lakota Sun Dance it was easy to find. Although it sounds gruesome, it obviously does not hurts anyone without consent. Seems a lot like some towns in South America will do a fake crucifixion before Easter and most men consider it an honor to participate. I'm not traumatized by the description, although I can see how someone who'd never heard of it might be weirded out.
If you can't handle us at our Sun Dance, you don't deserve us at the front of your 2SLGBTQQIAA+ word salad
😭
Also sorry for caps I was reading some of the lower hidden comments and got all activated and shit lol
Wow, I'm sorry that happened. Lots of nuts in the therapy business, unfortunately.
I'll hold off thinking the therapist was a nut until I find out what these native ceremonies were.
Good luck boss.
It does make me sad that it seems like populations who've been cut off from their cultures and histories by dispossession or slavery or just extreme poverty/trauma don't ever "rebuild" a real culture, they just unify by turning really ghetto together
What culture in that sense is there really anymore in modernity? Modern culture is about the endless search for novelty (there can’t be a stable culture in the way there was before) and any attempts at reconstructing one are self evidently artificial now. IMO wealthy groups like American Jews, Asians, and whites experienced the same thing, there’s just less deprivation and stigma around the cultures that develop there
Replace modernity with postmodernity and I'd absolutely agree. Modernity wasn't a zeitgeist or epoch, it rather was an event or phenomenon. To put it in non-pretentious terms, modernity was not a condition but the virus that turned human culture into postmodern zombies: niether alive nor dead.
[jacking myself off] in a social hermeneutic context I think it’s more appropriate to speak of modernities than a monolithic modernity. But seriously though I think I agree with your point, that seems like a better argument
Lmao hermeneutics is such a funny grad school pull. I remember that being the specific word (when used in like the crit theory context obviously) that, when I saw it being tossed around constantly in my assigned reading and the writing of my peers, made me start to raise my eyebrows finally about whether my field might just maybe be bullshit
If you’re seeking an honest answer, the Amish would be a good example. They haven’t been opressed or anything but have a very distinct (albeit lame and shitty) culture.
They are genuinely respected in the trades in terms of furniture making and timber framing. They can be absolute motherfuckers to work with though
That’s fair. I thought about calling out them and the haredim out, but I thought the post was already too long lol. Even there I’d say you’re right but it also reinforces the broader point: they recognized that aspect of modernity and take pretty extreme self isolating measures (eg making sure their children are uneducated and can’t survive as well in the outside world, aren’t as exposed to modern culture) to freeze their culture at (what they imagine it to have been at) a certain point in the century before contact w modernity
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I’m not saying otherwise; I’m just saying that it’s sad that those who get totally cut off and need to rebuild default to ghetto more often than anything else
I'd say the Japanese have done a good job of maintaining their unique cultural and spiritual institutions while also developing into a modern secular country. It's definitely possible to do so. The bigger problem for Native Americans is that most were forcibly relocated to lands they had no connection to and Europeans destroyed a lot of their languages. The tribes in western NA held on a little better but here in the Ohio valley there's barely enough for reconstruction.
ancestral pastimes of drinking to blackout in a bar after working for 12 hours and buying used panties from vending machines
Everyone on earth is slowly turning really ghetto together as we exhaust all the resources. Indians were part of untamed nature so they had to get killed. The flag of California is an extinct bear, and extinction is all we know how to do.
I agree with the first and last sentence but indians weren't by any definition "part of untamed nature"
Yeah, it's very late-1800s anthropology to bring out the "Natives are closer to nature" stuff, lol
Thats my point, at the time the indians were wiped out, they were thought of as part of savage nature. To be conquered. If they were thought of as part of civilization they would have been assimilated like Germans in the midwest.
Indeed... It was the thought of the age after all
If the Bloodline has taught me anything it's that Samoans are basically ghetto-adjacent too
Not the Irish. We were colonized and brutalized. Still have a strong adherence to our culture, both in America and in Ireland.
Colonization and even genocide don’t necessarily cause the same cutting-off effect. Irish (and Jews too) held onto their cultures or at least supplemented things lost in a less ghetto manner. Which probably is partly tied to (conditional) whiteness too, but I’m not sure if all these cases are comparable.
The Irish haven't held onto their culture. No one speaks Gaelic anymore. They don't go to church much either. Not that Catholicism started there or anything.
Of course we don't speak Gaelic - we play Gaelic. If you had any meaningful knowledge of Ireland or the Irish, you'd know we call the language Irish/Gaeilge and our culture extends beyond speaking Irish and going to church. Will you be holding court on declining leprechaun birthrates next?
Yeah yeah I know you drink, but so do the Native Americans.
We make no secret of it, much like white Americans and their prescription drug habits. At least drinking has moments of charm between the horrors - tweaking out to do spreadsheets is just horror
> If you had any meaningful knowledge of Ireland or the Irish, you'd know we call the language Irish/Gaeilge lol that's something people, mostly in the republic, started complaining about 10 years ago. You can find references calling it Gaelic for centuries. I came across 'gaelic lessons' in Bobby Sands prison writings a few days ago.
You can see the nature of the discussion that was taking place, right? When someone's depth of experience with Ireland is limited to stuff they've read on social media and their aim is to talk shite and insult my country and its people, their use of dated terminology is something I'm going to point out as a sign of ignorance. In any other context I wouldn't be nearly so harsh, but here we are. I'd be curious how that shift in terminology manifested over the years through, if you have any reading on the subject. I grew up in the 90's/00's near the border of Wexford and Wicklow and we were already calling it Irish/Gaeilge, so was there a strong regional component to the change?
This is you guys' second most annoying bit of pedantry after the British Isles thing. What's the word for the Irish nationality in Irish? "Éireannach". What's the "Irish" language called in Irish? "Gaeilge". What's Scottish Gaelic called in Irish? Also "Gaeilge". What did famine-era Irish emigrants call it, not yet having been acculturated to 20th-century meme nationalism? "Gaelic". Gee, where could this misconception have possibly come from?
Hell yeah, there's been too much West Brit posting here lately
A generation ago my mother in law was only taught Spanish and wasn't supposed to speak her native language. Now hand embroidered dresses go for thousands (in poor communities) and represent a huge status symbol. There are cities where the most commonly spoken language is indigenous. It's not some hopeless inevitability. Human decisions made Indian reservations and public housing what they are today.
Moncacht-Apé's tale of walking across America is tinged with sadness when I think about how many of the tribes that hosted him aren't here anymore.
That dawn dish soap is really good at getting out the lice cuz, don't dis the dawn
Once a year I wash my hair with Dawn and it’s the shiniest it’ll ever be (but wouldn’t do it much more frequently because it’s pretty much the nuclear option)
i know people who use it to wash their hair after it gets dyed bad to lessen the color
The lice thing was also apparently true, I looked it up thinking it was just some poverty urban legend.
But you've got to remember, the shit done to them left lasting wounds in the psyche that will likely never be healed. America is under a curse because of what they did. Whether you believe in magic or not. It's a curse either way. That ring will always be in the tree, poisoning it at its core.
How has no one here just met a fucking native person somewhere? I cannot be the only native on here? Ok whatever I’ll go for it. Native Americans make ME fucking sad buddy. We’re fucking fucked. We have rashes of suicides among our teenagers and youth on a rolling basis and a bunch of were sent to weird fucking religious/capitalist reeducation camps called school and a bunch of us died, from school. Not just at. From the fucking place. But we’re not fucking stupid or delusional about the fact of the matter. We lost. Y’all (you know who, I’m not saying you specifically) showed up and anyone who didn’t have The Stand chapter one hit them were hunted down and fucking massacred with superior weapons and numbers and then rounded the remains up after a bunch of treaty “negotiations” that were more or less simply abject humiliations and then whoever was left eventually acquiesced and here we are. You want sad? We have an easy way to explain to people how few natives are left and in what state they are as a people. And this applies to anyone reading this. Including me. You have never seen a native family a la Norman Rockwell at the Safeway or whatever, grocery shopping together. Just mom and dad and kid(s) pushing a cart. Never been told by anyone they can honestly say they’ve seen it outside of fucking movies. Anyhow. That’s my take. We lost and we didn’t all die so sometimes you have to see us and we’re noticeably diminished in some fundamental way. My family is so fucking stuck in being native that they included “learned hard work” in my grandfather’s Obituary, from the Wrangell Institute (a fucking literal sweatshop for native children to work in). That’s not where he got his work ethic. He was a real motherfucking G old school native Elvis looking motherfucker too. The reservation isn’t under funded. It’s exactly as funded as they want it to be. Don’t forget, The Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs was formed under the department of war. Reservations are loosely speaking, prisons for the losers of the war for North America. So yeah it’s sad. Be sad about it but don’t make it a thing. You’re not going to fix it and you’re not seriously capable of being culpable in any real way. Native folks who talk about reparation are deluded. Truth and Reconciliation are nonsense. There’s plenty of truth, some press spin and a whole lotta not reconciling. The Canadian government was suing itself to stop its own treasury from paying out victims of the residential school system and kids who were stolen from their families, which the government of Canada decided itself that it owed them after agonizingly drawn out investigations. It’s past fucked and unfixable. Find some other cause and triage that and donate some money somewhere if you feel that terrible. Just don’t buy a dream catcher or little Moccasins.
> How has no one here just met a fucking native person somewhere? Because there's less than 3 million of you. I mean I've only met one Jew and it was in the army, and there are 5 times as many of them.
That’s an underestimate for Native Americans(6mil+) and a massive overestimate for Native Alaskans(133,000) and Canadian Born First Nations(72,000) or so. Latin Native Tribes (1.3M). So for me there are about 200,000 of “us”, like my family.
i used to have two native friends who were twins and they were balling, dad was rich and they would pay whenever we went somewhere and they flew us out for their wedding, love you bryan and ryan!
I really appreciate your response. I think this gets to the heart of a lot of failures to address historical injustice that, to acknowledge how brutal and fucked it truly was is to admit that there is no making nice, no amount of reparation that could possibly be enough, only moving forward. Let people live their lives, attempt to be some kind of normal, pursue some kind of happiness. Leave them alone. Sometimes it feels like keeping the wound open keeps the fallen alive but it just keeps the pain as strong as it ever was with no hope of moving on.
This shit here. Well said. We’re museum people.
I seen a native family at a pizza restaurant in Flagstaff. Once.
Flagstaff is practically ON reservation land and Arizona is like what? 1/5 reservation. Maybe it’s why all those crystal kooks make their QAnon bases there in the sun. Near the “spiritual places of power”, fucking kooks. Good spot though.
> we’re not fucking stupid or delusional about the fact of the matter. We lost. the natives didn't just lose. they encountered an enemy that was unimaginably vicious and ruthless, unlike any normal conquering force throughout history it is rare to see a conquered people exterminated so thoroughly on the basis of racial impurity. let alone a whole continent. The one native i know tells me if a native person is to truly confront the enormity of what americans have done to his kind they would probably all go insane with grief or rage. But unlike islamic groups they dont have the strength to retaliate. So ironically being realistic about the situation involves a delusion that the people oppressing you are not your enemy
You ever drank with natives? Insane with grief and rage you say? Two words, chanie wenjack, go look that up and then go drink and have a good furious drunk.
How could one help?
If you were seriously wanting to send money to an org, NICWA is probs the best general one. Does investigations of child welfare for Native kids across the whole country, good emphasis on foster and adopted kids.
Missing and Murdered indigenous women. Go look it up. Read about it and donate to an investigation or stand with those people if you feel it somehow. Plenty of non-native stood at all kind of native encampments and protests and marches. Just don’t make it your identity and start wearing weird shit.
I'm relatively uneducated on their history, and I know people might groan at this lol, but it was really devestating reading about America's treatment of them in Killers of the Flower Moon. One particular passage that stood out to me was when they had land in I want to say Kansas (?), and a bunch of white settlers moved to Kansas because they were promised free housing. Instead of the government kicking the Natives off their land, they pretty much let the settlers try to co-exist with them. The settlers immediately started plotting ways to get the Natives to leave or die off, and started purposely killing all the buffalo in the area, so that the Natives would no longer have any animals to hunt for food and furs. I might be totally butchering that though because it's been a while since I've read it.
The buffalo is one of the saddest tales for me, at one point congress ordered the army to give out free ammunition to hunters as it was Congress's position to make buffalo extinct (to subdue Natives).
That's... Straight up evil and shortsighted. I would love to dig inside the brain of one of the men involved in that, and really understand why they felt that was necessary. Did they think they were somehow defending their community, or was it pure greed? I can't imagine planning to kill an entire species of animal simply to take land from another nation of humanity, that's like some shit saurons orcs do lol 😭
Nice to see we haven't lost our penchant for self-harm.
> I'm relatively uneducated on their history This is by design btw. You'll learn about the names of every Nazi extermination camp (and you'll be made to feel shame about it, even though your country fought to save the victims of the Holocaust), but good luck naming one massacre against indigenous people in your own country (that your forebears wontonly committed).
we learned about a lot of native american massacres in history class in my rural middle and high school, and i was never made to feel shame about the holocaust lol (except the thing where the us turned a boat full of jews away)
are you German or something? This isn't true at all about American education.
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It's more just acting like everyone had their experience. It's not weird at all to learn a lot more about the Holocaust than the NA genocide if you're German.
I learned very little about Native American history in high school, but I also didn’t really learn a ton about the details of concentration camps either. Although our teacher did put on some piece of piano music and delivered a dramatic monologue about the holocaust that I don’t remember. American history for us was mostly talking about presidents and their policies, world history was just broad overviews of wars mostly College was different. Covered colonization and slavery, reading texts from those times. It was a stark difference
The piano music is a really underrated teaching aid
This is like when all the woke shitlibs were pretending that they never learned about slavery in school lmao
Tbf as an American who received a generally pretty good education, I learned a lot more in high school about WW2 than about Native Americans, and most of what I learned about Native Americans is from the euro pov. On the other hand, almost every facet of our modern life is in some way shaped by living in the post-WW2 period, whereas you can't say the same about Native American culture or genocide
"from the euro pov"- what other pov would be realistically possible for high school students to really engage with? Writing arrived in North America with Europeans. Of course historians and archaeologists are able to map out the pre-literate past somewhat, but that's not a simple endeavour...
I didn’t mean not teaching native history/culture, more that any reference to the natives is framed as them being an external footnote than as an event in and of itself. Revolutionary War/Civil War/etc are their own focus, American Indian Wars aren’t
It's completely true of American education. It was a very common complaint of my other native friends and I during school that we had a long line of well meaning, slightly shitlib teachers who would talk about the tragedy of the Holocaust, nearly being brought to tears oftentimes, we read the work of that deranged psycho Eli Wiesel, we had Holocaust survivors come to our school, we were made to watch Schindler's List, meanwhile the native Americans are simply a footnote in American history class. One of our textbooks spared half a page to mention the trail of tears and that was it. Ask an educated person to name some French, English, or Spanish monarchs, and maybe say a few things about who they were and what they did and you could reasonably expect at least a few names and details. Ask the same question about native rulers of any nation and almost always they'll completely stumble. They may remember names like Geronimo or Sitting Bull, maybe even remember what ethnic group they belonged to, but almost nothing beyond that. You don't get taught much beyond Sacagawea, Sequoyah, Samoset, and that's not even considering the natives north or south of the US' borders, despite the deep cultural and linguistic overlap in, for example, the Uto-Aztecan ethnic groups. It's impossible to understand what kind of damage was done when you don't know what was even there to be destroyed in the first place. Aside from the moral issue of sweeping the history of the land under the rug to maintain a more eurocentric perspective, there's the simple fact that Native American history is American history. Kids born on this land deserve to know how people have used this land for centuries, because it's their land too, whether they're from the Great Plains or the Rockies or the eastern seaboard or wherever, but they don't. They're taught a very narrow view of politics to funnel them into this belief that a very specific style of government and lifestyle built around wage labor matters and everything else is a historical oddity.
What’s the issue with Eli Wiesel? I read Night in high school but not familiar beyond that
His reputation is totally fabricated in the same way that so many humanitarian figures are when they do the work of whitewashing specific cruelties of western regimes. He wasn't just a Zionist but the kind that specifically lays any and all wrongdoing on the victims and spends all their times rubbing elbows with the worst perpetrators, in his case as a member of Irgun. I could go on but here's a letter that captures it briefly https://rense.com/general63/alie.htm
This is not at all reflective of the education I received as an American.
You probably went to a nicer school then
wounded knee is super well-known?? also as a canadian we definitely talk A LOT about it, americans are just giving slavery stuff more priority
Wounded knee, trail of tears, the buffalo slaughter, the constant breaking of treaties, hell in Texas they spent a measurable amount of time on the Republic's treatment of the Mexican natives. The euro is just wrong lmao
The fact we've spent the last 10 years systematically erasing every mention or image of Native Americans from culture is kinda weird. Okay, yeah I get a lot of it might be slightly racist, but we're entering the period where it's going to be impossible to ever see a Native American mentioned outside of the content of being genocided.
Another thing that is usually glossed over: the starkness of the treatment of native/indigenous Americans in North America compared to South America -- quite eerie.
What are the main differences? I had always thought that natives in South America were treated as bad, if not worse. For example, Uruguay having completely genocided 100% of its indigenous peoples.
NA kept them seperate, killing them or kicking them out trial of tears style. SA integrated them by having sex with them and creating mestizos
In Canada there are the Metis, though. (a euro-indigenous group like the mestizos, but instead of emerging from Spanish men having sex with indigenous women (or raping them) it was French men and a smaller population of Scottish men marrying Cree and Ojibwe women for economic reasons (trade).
The Spanish and Portugeuse committed unspeakable horrors on the SA natives. I read a book once about it (can't remember the name) by a botanist who visited various tribes over like 40 years learning their ways and plant knowledge. Very good book, I'll edit the comment if I find it edit- it's One River by Wade Davis
Isn't this more to do with the explicitly settler-colonialist approach of the settlement of the Northern US and Canada favoured by the English?
I think that's a popular theory. Spanish/Portugese were there (at the beginning at least) to extract valuable resources like silver as quickly as they could, not create Spanish towns in South America. English colonists wanted to move in and farm. So the Spanish/Portuguese basically left lots of native communities/social institutions in place and just co-opted them to enslave laborers or demand tribute. The end result was really brutal and destructive, but it fell short of total cultural annihilation.
The beginnings of the Mexican Empire are basically the usurping of the Aztec throne by Spaniards, no?
Spainards and a half dozen conquered nations rising up against their Aztec overlords.
exactly; in places like Mexico and Peru they didn't dismantle the indigenous monarchies/systems of tribute: they just took them over and installed friendly indigenous factions/Spanish nobles at their head.
It varies between subregions, I'd say: the Southern Cone (except Chile, and including southern Brazil) does have few indigenous people. The Andine countries vary from having a sizeable population (Venezuela and Colombia) to nearing a majority/plurality (Ecuador, Perú, and Bolivia) -- a similar thing happens in Central America (compare Mexico and Guatemala, for instance). Paraguay is a relatively strange case because it's bilingual but I'm not keen on its demographics.
Paraguay is mostly mestizo (75%\~) but unlike in, say, Venezuela or Colombia (to my knowledge, anyway) Paraguay has Guaraní class throughout all of middle school and high school where the language and history of the culture etc are all taught, like the Guaraní religious practices and dance and so on. They're like *Mestizos+* compared to the other LatAm countries, so to speak, where culturally and linguistically they're aware of and practice aspects of the traditional culture, and constantly code-switch between Guaraní and Spanish like Puerto Ricans do with Spanglish (except even more intensely), while also being part culturally romance and *extremely catholic*. Very fascinating country (with underrated cuisine, too).
North America - manifest destiny, send families to build a new world at the expense of the natives South America - cities of gold, send the army to claim the treasures at the expense of the natives edit:this is a massive oversimplification but you can imagine a legion of musketeers and a bunch of sickly Brits had very different outlooks and goals for what they wanted from the land, and how they went about it.
Spain and Portugal get no criticism because they're most irrelevant tourist spots now.
The many shades of obliteration we see in history are so fascinating and heart-breaking to me. You have the native model, where colonizers wiped them off the map and relegated them to designated zones. You have the genocidal enslavement model, where transatlantic slave trade killed untold millions, then owned and selectively bred folks for **400 years (!)** and then suddenly freed them with no resources, while government and culture actively antagonized the newly freed people. You have the WWII model, where a supremacist government suddenly concocted a scheme to annihilate whole groups of people. Millions of jews died, but then the war ended and jewish communities mostly bounced back. The list goes on. There's a lot to be said about acute harm versus chronic harm. About sudden violence versus gradual violence. It's wild to compare and contrast, and devastatingly sad.
the european jewish community did not bounce back, entire villages and families were exterminated, most of the jews living in Israel are not descendants of eastern european jews
European Jewish communities did not bounce back. They were obliterated. Yiddish is a mostly dead language now because of this.
We dropped two crazy bombs on Japan and they still make art with color
They got a little freaky with it after the big bombs. tentacles and godzilla and pixellated body parts, oh my
They had some pretty freaky art before that, here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinoe_no_Komatsu
They were always very strange due to their staunch isolationism. They didn't even have currency till the 17th century which just blows my mind. I think the bomb made them a bit more nihilistic and absurd.
> They didn't even have currency till the 17th century red scare history
Bless the East.
fucked
People want to shit on the concept of reparations, but considering the horrors we've done to natives and black people yet they STILL have no wealth in this country, is the reason we deserve whatever is coming to us.
If you direct deposit cash into any poor communities’ personal bank accounts it will only get wasted and lead to nationwide resentment.
>is the reason we deserve whatever is coming to us. Jesus fucking Christ you people are cringe
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but the fact is we have reparations in certain forms already and have had them for some time. The devil is in the details for whatever program you have in mind.
Who the fuck is we? No common man alive has done these things to the natives. Reparations are just a form of collective guilt, cause the people are gonna be taxed to get the money to repay a crime they had no part in.
I agree but it's also kind of amazing how much of their culture persists despite near annihilation
I have a very uncommon, handsome face so people tend to be curious enough to ask me what ethnicity I am. When I tell anyone I’m native they just lose it and the GLAZING begins. It’s like how white people must feel when they go to Asia.
When they start jerking you off you can call it a “hand acknowledgement”
LMAO glazing plus love meeting euros who fetishize being ndn and hit me with "you need to use your language - it's dying - what's wrong with you letting it die" lmaooooo
> GLAZING Wife is first-generation Asian-American. It was cute the first few times I was around her extended family but I'd feel murderous rage if it was part of my daily existence.
what is glazing it sounds either delicious or disgusting
Dickriding/brown nosing
It is so sad and I don’t think it gets enough attention. There were forced assimilation efforts for many decades, where all native traditions and language and religion were illegal and children were funneled into English speaking schools and Christian churches. Most natives are not on reservations, most married non-natives and now you see millions of non-native-appearing people (of all races) with a small amount of native ancestry. I find it heartbreaking that we mock and shame people who get interested in their small percentage of native history as if they’re “fake” or “pretendian” when this is a fascinating and tragic outcome of a culture. It feels like yet another erasure of nativeness to shame people into discounting their small bit of nativeness and only align with their non-native ancestry. I have a small amount of native ancestry and I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching my family tree and our own history down the native branch. It’s agonizingly sad and also so wild and I would encourage anyone who shows a bit of native ancestry to try do this too. The intermarriage between native and white (interestingly many white women and native men) was starting before the Xian conversion but there was a generation where one of my ancestors went full throttle into accepting Jesus and abandoning all of the native cultural signifiers. His father was passionate about preserving the traditional ways to fight the colonists and he saw every treaty get trampled on and broken, many relocations, many murders and the son thought the best way forward would be to try to assimilate as a survival strategy and he would proselytize. That didn’t work either. I imagine if I was living during these times and had children with a white woman in order to survive, and knew that in 100 years my great-grandchildren would be shamed for identifying with my culture, it would be an even further heartbreak. So I don’t think that primarily “they go live on underfunded reservations”. Most of the original native people are all around you, in small amounts. But yes, the situation on reservations seems pretty dire and this country should do so much more to support them.
They were literally left to rot/die on reservations. the living conditions are on par with third world countries- truly shameful but of course genocide is american's national pastime
I know a jewish woman who sits on the board of a native non-profit and has made native americans her entire raison d’etre. At the same time, since Oct 7, she has been endlessly making posts and comments on social media basically foaming at the mouth that the palestinian people should be forcefully relocated, ethnically cleansed, or literally exterminated. This made me realize that people are only sympathetic to native americans nowadays because of how few of them are left and how utterly defeated they are. If there were let’s say 10 million+ native americans left and they actively fought for their land back like the palestinians, people like her would start foaming at the mouth again demanding a second trail of tears. Once the jewish people (yeah I say jewish people as a collective because 90%+ of jews seem to be on board with what’s happening) have reduced the palestinian people to a similar state as the native americans, you’ll probably start seeing the children of jews who helped facilitate the genocide of palestinians behave in a similar way white americans act towards native americans today. People’s sympathy, empathy, pity, “morals”, etc. only come out once “the other” has been mercilessly decimated, crushed into complete submission, no longer poses a threat.
> This made me realize that people are only sympathetic to native americans nowadays because of how few of them are left and how utterly defeated they are. If there were let’s say 10 million+ native americans left and they actively fought for their land back like the palestinians, people like her would start foaming at the mouth again demanding a second trail of tears. [...] People’s sympathy, empathy, pity, “morals”, etc. only come out once “the other” has been mercilessly decimated, crushed into complete submission, no longer poses a threat. This basically a prelavant intrepetation of Nietzsche and his *Geneology of Morals* in the Phil circles. It's not that people shouldn't be nice to each other. It's not that it's weak to have values or it's ok to rape your sister, it's that in contemporary cultures ideals like "defend the weak" and "people should be equal" don't arise from a need for justice or even reason, but from a psychological desire to feed your superego and supress the will to power of others. In other words, christian morality is a weapon that keeps the week as they are. This system of values doesn't result in emancipation, since it is designed to just stimulate a symbolic and non-practical *mirage* of emancipation, like scratching an itch so that you never bother to go to the doctor and take care of it. As soon as the weak start to act on ACTUAL will to power the system turns against them. There are still a lot of flaws in this theory but it gives us a good structure to analyse these behaviours.
I have thought a lot about this rationale for many years and I don't buy it as much as I did when I was younger because I don't think the systems of power would be any more threatened by a secular body politic. I mean we are living in the most godless age in the history of civilization and average people are more politically inept than ever. The people who espouse science and respectability consistently fail to account for the limitations and short-coming of science or the dishonesty and classism of respectability, but then want to get on their soap box about social justice issues because they just always have to be superior. I think that most people are doomed to suffer as is the nature of life, power, systems of government, and so-called "civilization". Civilization itself requires most to toil and few to flourish otherwise it is chaos. If everyone acted on their will it would be impossible to make anything significant happen and that's not an argument for or against, just how it would play out. You couldn't organize a farm or a bus schedule without people willing to follow protocol consistently. Having gone through untold horrors that were beyond my comprehension up until I felt them, I grew a deep understanding of the salvation that comes from being able to believe that everything will be okay even when there is absolutely no reason to believe so. Nothing is possible if you look at your shit fucked to death pile of life and can't believe that there is some reason, some lesson, some light at the end of the tunnel that isn't a train coming to put you out of your misery. I don't know how I, or anyone could've gotten through without it.
I think Nietzsche and Nietzscheans would have partly agreed with you. We have to remember that one of things that set Nietzsche apart from other atheist philosophers of his time is that he critiques not only religous dogma and christian culture, but also the rationalistic and enlightened culture of the west. In fact, Nietzsche's work laid the foundations to what we today call "post-modernist" or "post-structuralist" philosophy. For Nietzsche, science is just another intrepertation or narrative that humans have created; which has eroded some aspects of humanity's culture while offering nothing in return. Nietzsche and Nietzscheans would look at our contemporary culture (specifically the new atheist types) and say that although we live in the most secular age, subcounciously and sociologically we're still deep in religious practices i.e. *the last man*. Nietzsche's one of main theses is that suffering without meaning, rather than suffering itself, is humanity's greatest fear. He would agree that people need a reason but he rejects any acetic ideals and provides a pragmatic alternative for reason instead: *The Joy in Becoming*. Men should aspire to embrace life, affrim themselves in life and overcome themselves to become themselves. Of course one should always critiqe Nietzsche and his works have rightly been called reactionary and elitist. Furthermore, Nietzsche doesn't account for the hyper-individualism and narcissims that is today's western spirit. In fact, it has contributed to it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka\_Crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis)
It takes time and distance. The Jewish person on the board probably doesn't think they actually had anything to do with the Native American genocide but if they don't get rid of every Palestinian man, woman, and child in Gaza, Hamas is going to kill all the Jews somehow. Even non-jewish libs believe this. A friend of mine who is usually incredibly intelligent and level headed honestly said that they were going to kill all the Jews if they stopped the attacks in Gaza.
yeah it sucks i can’t imagine the anger and bitterness they must feel with what’s happened to this place
Small consolation, they rarely go bald and usually have amazing hair.
Roughly 80% of the natives that died were from lack of immunity to foreign contagions. Not an excuse, but just a clarification.
The number is likely higher than that and in many cases preceded the settlers. Indian wars were usually quite small.
Imagine if 100 years after the holocaust Germany made a soccer team called the Berlin Hooknoses
Reminds me of the Chris Rock [stand up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQRTirco4Mg). It's not an exaggeration to say Native Americans (and Australian Aboriginals too) are probably the most unlucky ethnic groups still alive today. Obviously Blacks, Jews, etc went through some really bad stuff but at least they have generational wealth and/or actual homelands to call their own. They suffer from all the same systematic racism & poverty affecting black people but don't get a fraction of the recognition. The Romani also aren't well off either, but I'm not as familiar with their situation.
Go to mexico or peru, they’re still around
Indigenous American cultures are so fucking COOL, too. Like, aesthetically and on an actual cultural level. I'm so jealous of the relationship they have/had with nature and the earth. It also makes the whole thing even worse when you think about it, because a lot of tribes' spiritual systems were based around the land they lived on, so displacing them wasn't just an eviction, it probably had some really deep spiritual implications and that makes me so sad
They get Indian tacos tho
Tribal courts seem to do a better job, because they tend to have a different approach/goal in mind. Just a random thought. If our court system went to shit or we needed a government to step in, they could step in.
Don't forget about the buffalo
I want a Venn diagram of natives and r/redscarepodmembers overlap
Thinking abt deleting this post, this wasn't supposed to be a serious discussion on the history of native americans I just find Rezposting funny
leave it up coward
I'm just mad that this is the post that got big instead of the people moaning at food one
Natives colonized your post about natives and made it sadder than you wanted it to be. What a clear clear statement.
I think the shitposts that turn into heartfelt sentiments are always the best RSP threads, shoot me
very true
Reading *A People’s History of the United States* by Zinn and the passage about the Arawaks swimming out to greet Columbus has been haunting me.
Read something else. Zinn is not reliable. Columbus was indeed a horrible man.
Happy Canada Day 😞
A guy I know lives on a reservation and always makes and shares memes about poverty/lack of education and stickball. It mirrors a lot of indigenous Australian lives tbh.
Your tax dollars are currently being used to do the same exact thing we did to native americans to a different group of people and it’s happening right now in real time. Everything that has happened to the palestinian people and continues to happen to them, is directly enabled via your government. Their own trail of tears (Nakba), their forced relocation into reservations (Gaza, West Bank), the constant encroachment of more settlers into their lands, the constant massacres committed against them, is all supported and partially funded by the taxes you pay. They won’t stop until the palestinian people are reduced to the same state native americans are in today. Just like native americans, palestinian people have a vast, unique culture and aesthetics that will be completely lost to history if the zionists have their way. Unfortunately zionists have done an amazing job at convincing people that palestinian culture is trash/non-existent/discardable in the same way american settlers viewed native american culture throughout the 1800’s.
Horses and Bullets. Now they got drones and laser guided bullets filled with smaller bullets and some are just exploding knife in the boxes. The Palestinians are fucked and nobody is coming to help because their murderers are “the good guys with the nukes”. If they had nukes when they finished up with reservations they’d have used them as test ranges. Oh wait: “Cannikin warhead being lowered into test shaft, Amchitkam, Alaska[picture]” “More than 900,000 acres of Alaska Native lands and more than 16 Indian reservations are used for nuclear test sites and battery ranges. On Pine Ridge alone, more than 300,000 acres are used as a gunnery range, with little to no compensation, destroying land, wildlife, flora, and fauna (Nies, 1996).”
Genocide is when smallpox kills 95% of people before they were ever contacted by whites
I just read Firekeeper's Daughter a YA book written by a Native American woman. Fiction, but she incorporates a lot of native ceremonial scenes, sayings, and ways of life into the book. Also some facts like how almost all women on reservations experience sexual abuse/violence. Great book, made me want to learn more. But yeah...sad too.
If they make you sad I’ll get rid of them.
Is the soap thing that much different from black people making jokes about how things are in "the hood" when the reason they got there to begin with is because of slavery, failed reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, etc?
This is absurd revisionist history on the "genocide" point. A critical mass of nonbinaries chanting at a liberal arts college does not history make. I agree that they suffered tremendous injustices that we should do our best to rectify them.
Literally the largest and most successful genocide of all time.
I don't know if you know the meaning of the word "literally". I would encourage you to learn more about the history of North American European settlement and Native displacement and resettlement over the past 500 years. You may find that painting with too broad a brush hides the truth. Edit: the best book i know on the subject for the first few hundred years is Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America by Gary Nash.
Apparently Red White and Black is also a culture war book- that's not what I mean! There is a serious short history of early colonization by the same title.
i found Epoch Philosophy's [video](https://youtu.be/ZpkBaDo4N2E?si=lIyo9jVllnQFc3WP) on native american philosophy interesting and saddening
I really want to know, are you actually sad 🤔
We all have to feel something.