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Danimal28's avatar

And who did 'The Natives' take the land from? Other natives...

American Pioneers in the 19th century who actually lived life without servants respected American Indians and their ways, our 'beloved' government decided to remove them much like their efforts on the middle class these days.

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Bill Owen's avatar

"And who did 'The Natives' take the land from? Other natives"

That's not what happened.

The continent was literally unoccupied when the ancestors of Native Americans came to the continent from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age, around 12,000 to 30,000 years ago. Did they then compete for territory, here and there, sure. But nothing like happened when the colonisers came.

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Adam's avatar

You're agreeing that they arrived across an 18,000 year time span. So either they were the slowest walkers in history, or there were multiple waves of people coming across.

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Bill Owen's avatar

We are not sure of the exact date hence the wide range.

It's all a matter of history. Feel free to read up. No need to speculate. Thanks.

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Bill Owen's avatar

And this proves what to you, exactly?

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Bill Owen's avatar

I never said otherwise.

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Adam's avatar

Sure, if you say so.

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Bill Owen's avatar

You're just trolling now. Bye.

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feldspar's avatar

That's a bad rewrite of history.

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Fran's avatar

Well, not familiar with who was here first. I guess you didn't watch those cowboy and Indian movies I watched on TV where the message was this is our land not your's even though you were here first. You cannot excuse what we did to the indigenous people of the America's. Sorry, nor the permission given by the church, which was not restricted to the Americas. Trail of tears, lets see you justify that.

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Jeff's avatar

Conquest has been a human condition since the first caveman stepped outside his cave, looked across a valley seen another clan and said I want their stuff. Asian descendants that built grass rafts set out from their mainland and went island hopping would occasionally bump into others that did the same and wanted each others stuff. Humans did it as a matter of survival and advancement for living conditions. Not excusing what we did to each other as humans but as another commenter pointed out(Danimal28) the Indians weren't exactly living together in peace and harmony either. Some tribes had their own versions of conquest, genocide, slavery, robbing each others food stores, warring over hunting grounds, kidnapping females to breed. I'm not impugning Native Americans just pointing out an uncomfortable truth of human nature that even Indians were prone too.

You seem to be very focused on the church/ christianity. If that what floats your boat, fine, but don't let it skew the truth of history.

Trail of Tears? Justify what? Allowing the Indians that were paid to relocate force their 800 black slaves (some of the Cherokee/Creek elites among them owned) to have to go with them or the misfortune that befell the actual members of the tribe on the way?

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Fran's avatar

I don't want to continue this conversation about how bad the Indians were, and let me just say that your understanding of the Trial of Tears is really off. I am not focused on the church, and it's a thing of the past. Why don't you focus on our Muslim wars, and the millions we displaced and killed then you can focus on using Ukrainian lives so we can keep the number one slot in the world. More timely.

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Bill Owen's avatar

What 'we' did to the native peoples was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history.

There are no excuses.

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Fran's avatar

I can always depend on you to see the truth. Thanks Bill.

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Jeff's avatar

You are a batshit looney. Most insane shit I've heard in terms of atrocities that have happened throughout the history of the world, especially if sick bastards like you are going to put a measure to it.

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Bill Owen's avatar

Thanks for letting me know that some argument and fact free, ill-educated bigot thinks that I am wrong. Your mindless hatreds are showing. Good job. Now everyone sees you.

You can go now.

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Jeff's avatar

Bigotry? Hatred? Yes, and lets ignore disease and how many Native Americans it wiped out, right?

Only a only a self-loathing leftist mental midget could come to the conclusion you have. Violence and atrocities have happened since time immemorial. That you and your idiot friend draw the conclusion that I am justifying violence and murder is your own idiocy and insanity. Systematic planned elimination of a people is wrong. Period. I, however am not guilty of it and neither are any of my ancestors or children today. I am only responsible FOR WHAT I DO.

What clowns like you need to explain is, what is your goal? What are you trying to achieve? What is your agenda? Ok great, America bad. Now what? The insane people that harbor genocidal proclivities are people such as yourself. Constant blaming, constant anger, constant inflaming or pressing for comeuppance or revenge, and against whom? Divisive tribal BS. What do you want, war to start up between a Native American "side" so you can commit your own atrocities?

The psychosis and violence that bubbles just below the surface of you tyrannical minded psychopaths needs to be checked. Little Mao's, Stalins, Hitlers and Pol pots, every last one of you that will not let people like me live in peace without you constantly trying to tear down civilized society just so you can "feel" good.

Thing is Bill Owen, if you were born back in early American times I guarantee you'd be right there committing atrocities against indigenous people. That is what is so laughable about your types. You are a miserable product of your time now and would have been back then too. A man of the times. Bill Owen; Indian killer, slave owner. Stupid self righteous prick.

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feldspar's avatar

Good thing you're good lookin.'

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

I hate acolytes of violence who claim 'violence, conquest, genocide' are part of 'the human condition'. Yes, humanity has a violent history, but if you actually look closely you can also see that different tribes and ethnicities have co-existed peacefully adjacent to each other in many cases for very, very long periods of time, and there were many more peaceful cultures that would never have had it in their conception to launch genocidal wars of settler colonial conquest. By saying conquest is part of the 'human condition', you are both lying and making yourself an apologist for the grossest acts of inhumanity that have been committed by our species, usually acts spurred on and driven by a small minority of sociopathic leaders. Inhabitants of the United States, which has committed some of the grossest violence imaginable during its history, might be especially vulnerable or even dependent on this idea that conquest is 'natural' or inevitable, because it ameliorates and lifts any potential stain or responsibility or duty to correct or change our path. Just keep turning the crank on the violence.

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Jeff's avatar

Acolyte of violence? F U. Can you guys actually f'ing read? I know I suck at English Comp but FFS. Good job Captain Obvious at pointing out SOME tribes of people were capable of living next to each other in peace......of course this usually always came after violent conflict. All part of being a lefty idiot right? Can't tell the fucking difference between accepting the fact that every civilization/society on the planet at one time or another has done atrocious shit. I'm not apologizing for any violence you dumb fck, I believe it should be avoided at all costs until you are forced into it as a matter of self-preservation. Of course you lefty idiots always come back around to America bad as if it's the only place inhabited by the only people that have of course owned slaves or done f'd up shit to people.

The only acts of violence right now being committed in this country, spurned on and driven by a small minority of sociopathic leaders is within the left and the Transhumanist movement. The only crank being turned on violence is within the blue city cesspools that turn felons loose on the law abiding innocent public and politicians on the left that cheer on antifa, Janes Revenge and BLM. I guarantee the violence lays firmly in your camp, not mine.

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Gavin Farrell's avatar

Cops shoot dead in the US every year over 1,000 people. The Global War on Terror has killed directly and via sanctions, by varying estimates, over 3 million people, with millions more displaced. Are you really going to blame 'the Left', ANTIFA, and BLM as the sources of violence in our country? How about the 200k+ 'deaths of despair' (suicide, alcohol, drug OD deaths) that we're now piling up annually. Are those 'the Left's' fault too?

And no, not every civilization has done "atrocious shit."

I'll agree that the foreign policy acts of violence are indeed carried out by a small minority of sociopaths. But 'transhumanists'??? and 'Left'??? Do you really think people like Biden and Victoria Nuland are in any way Left? They're Neoliberals, which are basically the opposite of actual Leftists.

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Bill Owen's avatar

Visit Canada's North sometime as I have. The Inuit are freaking awesome. Gentle, kind, and they will give you the shirt off their back.

No "indian" ever dropped a sun bomb on Japan, or "killed off, what, 20% of the North Korean population." - General Curtis Lemay

That would be Christian white people, aka "savages".

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Danimal28's avatar

I watched them; I will never excuse what we did to indigenous people, but that is the way of the world - and governments(not the People) are responsible for all of it. Just like when they locked you down through the use of force a mere three years ago.

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Fran's avatar

Didn't mean to say they were, it's not just us, look at how Europe used Africa as it's backyard. We used South America as ours. However people, do look the other way or too easily go along with their government's policies. Look at how Americans went along with our Middle Eastern wars, and I bet if those were Christian or Jewish countries I don't think they could have pushed those wars.

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feldspar's avatar

Governments ARE the people, pal. Uncomfortable to contemplate, but there you have it...

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Danimal28's avatar

I think I have a far better handle on this. Government is force, nothing more. It is supposed to protect our rights and negotiate in good faith and that hasn't happened since prior to 1860 for the most part. Government signed treaties with the Native's, reneged, and then used force to conquer them. Not that the Native's were always honest and forthright.... There have been many periods of peace, of course. Today is not a period of peace as the government is using force again to silence and censor Americans.

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feldspar's avatar

So then you're an anarchist?

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Danimal28's avatar

Absolutely not, I have been a public employee most of my adult life. The Constitution limits government except nowadays it employs those that violate their oaths - both political parties. I mean UniParty with two sides.

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Danimal28's avatar

Well here is yet another example of what the government has done to natives

https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-left-immiserates-the-north-american

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Apr 28, 2023
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Fran's avatar

Not true Jerry, absolutely not true.

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DC Reade's avatar

It depended on the tribe. The Comanche were horrifying. They ran a robbery, kidnapping, murder protection racket on horseback, and they maintained their power with a fearsome level of intimidation, including torture. https://scgwynne.com/product/empire-of-the-summer-moon

The Iroquois vs. the Huron, terrifying. Ghastly. https://historyweblog.com/2017/06/tortures-of-the-algonquin-prisoners/

When Hernando de Soto arrived in the Southeast US, he found captive slavery and torture were as widespread among the tribes of southeastern North America, including the dominant civilization- the Coosa- as it was among the Spaniard conquistadors. The author does not whitewash the atrocities of the conquistadors, either. They were unimaginably cruel in those days. https://www.amazon.com/Hernando-Soto-Savage-Quest-Americas/dp/0806129778

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captives_in_American_Indian_Wars

Nobody's clean. It's a sobering thing to realize.

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Fran's avatar

Gratefully I've forgotten the name of the person I was interacting with on this topic. It matters not what the indigenous people of the America's did, but what we did to them in their native lands. We brought disease which practically wiped most of them out, and so it began. It matters not what they inflicted on each other, but our program of extermination, even killing off buffalo, their food, even from a train. We aren't and never were living on reservations, or was our land taken from us.

Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian GoneтАЩ

The American bison is the new U.S. national mammal, but its slaughter was once seen as a way to starve Native Americans into submission.

By J. Weston Phippen

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/

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DC Reade's avatar

Hey, I didn't say that didn't happen. It did happen. Although it does need to be admitted that almost none of the communicable disease transmission was intentional.

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Fran's avatar

No it wasn't. Never said it was.

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DC Reade's avatar

Still, it's important to make that fact explicit, because exotic diseases imported by European settlers were responsible for so much of the depopulation of the North American indigenous people. That process had begun even before DeSoto arrived in Florida with his expedition force of a few dozen men, from Cuba. Although his group made matters much worse, the epidemics had begun to rage simply from earlier contact with shipwrecked Spanish sailors. The epidemics were so deadly that the Coosa civilization of the Southeast had vanished entirely by the time that the English settled Jamestown in 1607, less than 70 years after DeSoto's expedition.

When Lewis and Clark made their expedition in the first decade of the 1800s, they encountered many villages that had already been ravaged by diseases that Europeans for the most part took in stride, like measles. The Plains tribes had contracted them from the small handful of mostly French fur trappers and traders who were the first Europeans to come in contact with the tribes.

It's native to divide history into Villains and Victims. And people who insist that accurately depicting history could only be an exercise in apologism on behalf of some Oppressor Side are simply not doing justice to historical truth with integrity. The atrocities of one side do not justify the atrocities of the other side- and that works both ways. I could enumerate any number of intentional cruelties from the English settlements, dating to the 1600s. But the violence and massacres of the settlers wasn't responsible for depopulating North America. And- to return to the original observation that kicked off this reply thread- many (although not all) of the North American tribes had long been practicing torture, captivity, and horrifying intertribal warfare before the arrival of the first European explorers.

The more one reads history, the more extensive the catalog of crimes encountered.. Innocent societies are exceedingly uncommon, and they're almost without exception small bands scattered across territories with a low population density. The record of large human societies, dominant groups asserting their control over large areas of territory, and powerful civilizations is overwhelmingly connected with their accumulating and maintaining power through organized violence. Everywhere, on every continent. If you know of any exceptions, I'd be eager to learn. Because in all my reading, I haven't found any.

1i realize that some people use the history as a way of justifying the role of violence as a permanent feature of human societies- and even a virtue, and part of an imperative of human advance. I'm a pacifist in principle (conditionally), and I don't buy that line. I think that history is sordid and grotesque, not heroic. But I can't deny the record of the past.

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feldspar's avatar

...and the more advanced and the more organized the more violence required to maintain power...

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Apr 29, 2023
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DC Reade's avatar

To recap, Fran, this reply thread began with this post:

"The concept of land ownership was unknown to Indians apart from those in the Southwest. When a campground was fouled, they moved on to another in keeping with their nomadic nature. Territorial disputes were another question. They warred against one another with a barbarity that stunned white settlers coming across their scenes of slaughter."

To which you replied: "Not true Jerry, absolutely not true."

That denial sounds like you're implicitly "saying they were innocents" to me. More cogently, it's a denial of the historical facts. It's the "absolutely" that really discredits your denial. I can point to example of permanent settlements by some tribes; they weren't all nomadic. I can find some tribes who didn't engage in warfare for territorial gain. But some of them did, particularly the larger and more organized tribal societies.

My statements simply constitute a defense of the partial truth of the historical record that you were dismissing as entirely false. There's nothing else to be read into it.

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Apr 28, 2023
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Bill Owen's avatar

Give it up.

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Bill Owen's avatar

So John Wayne was right to shoot them down like pop bottles?

Good to know.

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Milo Gerber's avatar

Not to excuse the taking of most Native American lands by Euro settlers, but yes indeed the same thing was happening broadly between Native American communities. The West, at the time of European agression, was largely inhabited by Native nations that brutally pried lands from Native predecessors. And slavery was commonplace and widespread. The Southwest was largely inhabited by Athabascan and southcentral (Comance) peoples that slaughtered their way to their final homelands at the time of Euro conquest. Plains tribes had been eradicated by midwestt newcomers like the Lakota, who suppressed and eliminated their predecessors in Canada, the Dakotas, the middle west. It simply is history, and the final victors were simply the last in line of imperialist aggressors.

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