Less than half an hour later, the finders keepers rule I talked about elsewhere in this thread gets invoked.

it’s almost like the most thought-terminating cliches abaolutely HAVE to be said and mentioned at the slightest available opportunity 🤣

Maybe you should get off your armchair and go to a protest

(I admit I probably violated rule 1; my apologies to @Samsuma for that.)

What I mean by this is that people who are actually involved in these issues out on the street talk very differently than people do on lemmy. Or reddit for that matter. I go to some Indigenous issues protests in British Columbia now and then, usually it’s street blockades; “land back” is a very common rallying call. I’ve chatted with many protesters; what they mean by this is “the landlords should be indigenous” essentially. And also that much more territory should be transferred back to the reserves. Some people even put the goal at replacing the government entirely. But nobody is talking about ethnic cleansing.

By finders keepers, what I thought you meant was “it was done in the past, by different people, so it’s not a problem that can be solved anymore.” That’s different from “we have to completely erase all people descended from settlers/colonists.”

While colonialist Spain formally recognized in 1542 Indigenous peoples as “free vassals of the Crown” as Spaniards themselves, not slaves. Of course, as in The Mission movie portrayed, many colonialists violated the Crown’s laws (Columbus himself was imprisoned for violating a Crown law from 1495 banning enslaving Taíno people). The Spanish crown wanted conversion + integration whereas British sought *erasure * of the Indigenous. But it was not just the Crown laws, individuals from Spain easily intermarried from early on, the English did not.

This distinction of the Spanish colonist vs all their norther neighbors that were far more repressive. I attribute this to the Spanish experience under Islamic rule for 8 centuries, were difference were highly tolerated and conversion was only mandatory for those not considered as “peoples of the Book” mentioned on the Islamic scriptures.

To conclude, Spanish colonialism, from the Americas to the Philippines, was abusive, sometimes heavily, but the centuries later the ‘civilized’ British one was plainly genocidal from begining to finnish and the independent United States, continued with the legacy if not increasing it. In word of historian James Axtell: “The Spanish asked Native people to become something else [Christians]; the British demanded they vanish.”

Very few countries currently are based on native eviction, where settlers have nearly replaced the indigenous peoples.

As a founding point? Yes, I agree. I also agree that colonization scale done by British was greater than anything ever done before.

However, that wasn’t my point. My point was: almost everyone on Earth lives where they do because their ancestors killed or evicted the people that lived there previously. This is in particular is not unique to any western country. Hell, reading the history of Russia, my home country, makes it pretty clear that my own deep ancestry did plenty of killing and evicting too, mostly of themselves, to get to where they all ended up (not even talking about Siberia here). It wasn’t at the founding point of Russia though, and none of the peoples who lost their wars are culturally alive anymore. Does it matter if all the conquest led to the foundation of a modern country, or just different tribal lands (or later city states)? I don’t think it does.

I think what does matter is justice for those descendants of the colonized who are still alive, and if there’s noone left, at least understanding and recognition of the horribleness that lead up to the point of your birth.

While I agree in general, there’s also nuance to be had IMHO.

For example: Russian Empire colonizing Siberia was a bloody affair. Of course it was not anywhere near the atrocities committed in the new world, but still a lot of natives died due to localized warfare and disease. Do you think that when USSR formed, the Siberian peoples should have been given full sovereignty, as separate countries (not even part of USSR), and rule over themselves and the descendants of russian settlers that were left there; or was the actual solution of giving them autonomous republics within the RSFSR the better one? I lean on the latter. I think if a socialist revolution ever happens in the US, this is the way it would happen. Full jurisdiction and sovereignty for indigenous people in certain areas (they need to be much larger than current reservations, though), shared jurisdiction and sovereignty in other limited areas where descendants of settlers live. And, of course, land to the peasants, factories to the workers - I strongly suspect both casual and systemic racism will be much less of an issue once capitalism no longer burdens the working class.

USAmericans are also doing this too. The overconsumption done by yankees would require multiple planet earths if everyone were allowed to consume as much as they do and the US government is guilty of exporting a capitalist system that causes climate change, not to mention the imperialism abroad.

I mentioned this as another thing that needs addressing in a timely manner.