
The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession - samclemens
http://aeon.co/magazine/society/americans-must-not-forget-their-history-of-dispossession/
======
b6
> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that
> the United States is built on someone else's land.

Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North
America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of
it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of
people who lived there at that time.

What is the author's reason for saying that it was at such-and-such a
particular time that things were exactly as they should be, that everyone was
occupying their proper piece of land?

I mean, it was violent bloodshed before the invaders arrived, and then it was
... more violent bloodshed after they arrived. People were being mean to each
other long before the invaders arrived, and also after -- and ever since,
everywhere in the world. Does the author think it's particularly bad to be
mean to people who are of different ethnicity?

~~~
jasonisalive
America has long held itself up as "better" than other countries - more
virtuous, more wise, more free, more advanced, etc. etc.

When you actually look into it you see: a) the utterly brutal dispossession
and extermination of a weak and technologically primitive existing population
b) the callous and self-serving enslavation of vast numbers of people c)
vicious and destructive interference in weak countries across the 20th and
21st century to facilitate the wholesale theft of natural resources.

I'm not saying that the rest of the world doesn't have its own sins, or that
any other country would have been particularly better if they had the
opportunities that America has had, but please, get down off your high horse.
The ignorance and self-infatuation of American people is why they are so
widely hated.

~~~
javert
Everything you are saying here is oversimplified to the point of being grossly
inaccurate (for example, 600,000 Americans died in a war to END slavery---why
do you ignore that?). Basically, this is an apologia for hating Americans.

It is selectively historicizing something to justify your final sentence,
which is an apologia for hating Americans.

If you hate Americans, maybe you shouldn't post on a website full of
Americans.

And don't say you don't hate Americans. There is no reason to present a bunch
of completely slanted history and just be like, "oh yeah, this is why _other_
people hate Americans, but they are ignorant because they are selectively
historicizing it." That is clearly not your attitude or your point.

By the way,

\- Natural resources do not belong to whoever happens to live near them but
simply ignores them. They belong to the person who extracts them. Property
rights are acquired by use, not by where you were born or by your nationality.

\- There were many cases of peaceful co-habitation with Native Americans and
many cases of Native Americans initiating force against the settlers. Probably
these categories account for a lot more than the category of outright
brutality against natives, though that did happen some, particularly under
Andrew Jackson (which is relatively late in our history!).

\- It is worth recognizing that Americas founders were adamant about
maintaining neutrality, so foreign interference is in many ways un-American.
Moreover, it is worth recognizing that America has a moral right to interfere
in foreign countries that threaten force against its citizens or their
property, as does any country.

~~~
jasonisalive
_Natural resources... belong to the person who extracts them._

Wow, you must be a legal scholar. So let's say one day you come home to find
that I've demolished your house and started drilling for oil. You're cool with
that, I'm sure.

 _There were many cases of peaceful co-habitation with Native Americans and
many cases of Native Americans initiating force against the settlers._

Good job at whitewashing. Let's say one day you come home and I'm camped on
your front lawn. You tell me to get off so I beat you and take your living
room as punishment for your "bad behaviour." A few weeks later you get angry
and try and force me out again. This time I kill your wife and kids and give
you the basement as a "reservation." Shouldn't have initiated force against
me, right?

 _America has a moral right to interfere in foreign countries that threaten
force against its citizens_

This is just so laughable. If you think that the history of American 20th and
21st century foreign policy is about self-protection then... well, I guess you
could say all those democratically elected leaders of third world countries
were sort of threatening American citizens right? Threatening them with fair
prices for natural resources maybe? Maybe if you consider all resources
everywhere property of America, then anyone who refuses to sell you them for
next to nothing and suppress their own citizenry for kickbacks is an
aggressor...

I've been to America and the majority of the people I met - and this is in the
nicer cities - were like big, stupid puppies, who thought America was the
greatest country, and were completely confused when you said, well, no,
actually... As I've said elsewhere there's no excuse for doing the wrong
thing. Americans love to play the moral high card but they brutally annexed
their country from a weak and vulnerable pre-existing population with much
deeper historical and spiritual ties to the land. Then they've proceeded to do
some of the nastiest things of the last few hundred years. Heaven forbid they
be forced to admit any of that. The onus is on them though. The moral
corruption of never acknowledging one's foundational guilt is inexorable.

------
protomyth
Mentioning President Lincoln in a positive light doesn't jive with his
treatment of the Dakota
[https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie](https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie)
(movie link).

------
protomyth
"Of this self-identified population, only a fraction are visible minorities,
subject to the discrimination that shapes identity and forges political
movements."

Yeah, right. I think the author did very little research into the modern
problems. Also, self-identified might cut it for the news media, but each
tribe has a list of enrolled members. If you are not on someones list, you are
not Native American for a vast majority of purposes.

------
flavor8
Was "El Norte" (the Spanish settlement of California) only along the coast, or
did they never lay full claim to the land? Curious as to why it doesn't really
show on this visualization.

There's an excellent book about settlement patterns in the US called American
Nations, by Colin Woodward. His theory is essentially that we don't pay nearly
enough attention to the different influences of the competing original
colonies, and that if you examine the history in this light there are all
kinds of interesting narratives that you can draw. E.g., tidewater slavery !=
deep south slavery in fairly significant ways, because of the origin of each
of those colonies (british gentry vs progeny of barbados slave owners) - and
yet we generally make no distinction at all.

------
golemotron
This is another case of 'I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup'

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-
anything...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-
except-the-outgroup/)

------
brooklyndude
It hits a lot of Americans at one point in their life, "We're not always the
good guys." It's taken me a lifetime to understand that.

------
chema
Very interesting visualization. It complements the recent release of _An
Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States_ by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an
excellent introduction to a consistently ignored aspect of US History.

[http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-
the-U...](http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-
States-P1041.aspx)

~~~
javert
Consistently ignored? Not at all. We are constantly reminded of this topic
these days. It's very popular.

For instance, all you hear about on Columbus Day is about how (supposedly)
horrible Colombus was, and how people are insulted that we still celebrate
him.

~~~
rayiner
Columbus was awful and we should be ashamed for celebrating him. We also learn
way too much about native Americans, in some weird cultural guilt trip for
past misdeeds. That isn't new--much of my childhood was wasted on learning
native American history in the early 1990's.

~~~
CalRobert
Wasted? Seriously? If you live in the Americas it's a part of the history of
your home. If you think all history is a waste, then sure, but to focus on
just the history of the people who lived on a landmass for most of its
populated history is a bit inconsistent.

~~~
javert
No, it is a waste as a schoolchild to spend years and years studying Native
Americans at the expense of everything else, when literally everything we know
about them can be learned fairly quickly. There simply isn't that much
information there.

Having also been a schoolchild in the 90s, I assume the same material was
simply being repeated over and over and over. The American school system is
busted like that.

------
swatow
Vaguely reminiscent of maps of Israel and Palestine. Of course in the case of
Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for obstinately refusing to
accept the very generous division of 1807, in which they had the majority of
the land. Instead they attacked the European settlers, leaving them with no
choice but to expand for the purpose of self protection.

~~~
coldtea
> _Of course in the case of Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for
> obstinately refusing to accept the very generous division of 1807_

Why should they accept the "generous division" of invaders?

Would you accept the "generous division" of your house or property, to some
guy that just arrived and wants it?

------
kingmanaz
> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that
> the United States is built on someone else's land.

As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North
American aborigine" are being conflated.

The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the
North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies
to acknowledge "someone else's land" stem from a failure to distinguish
between United States citizenship and chance birth on the North American
continent. The North American Aborigine peoples may have historically been
born on the North American landmass, but they were not the founders of the
United States nor the people whose interests said nation was designed to
further. The disorganized aboriginals variously aided or hindered the
expansion of the Republic depending on the particular tribe's short term ends.

The European pioneers did not "steal" a pre-existing democratic republic,
rather, they struggled, triumphed, and created their own for their progeny.
North American Aborigines lived outside the republic until reservations were
allotted to them, reservations which they largely continue to live apart in
today.

Frankly, the tone of the parent article smacks of 1960s-era Baby Boomer
coming-of-age politics. Its high time to question this line of thinking.

~~~
mr_luc
I agree that "someone else's land" is a bit much.

Saying that "North American Aborigines lived outside the republic" is a bit
misleading, because it insinuates that they weren't interested in
assimilating, and becoming a part of that struggling, triumphing mass of
people that identified as Americans at that time.

More truthfully, leading up to the times when they were forcibly relocated to
reservations, they were never allowed in, for the same reasons that black
residents of the US had a tough time in those years: the world around them was
quite racist and (especially in the case of indians) kleptomaniac.

In fact, many Native Americans tried to assimilate; I remember reading about
one enterprising native gent in the early 1800s who had made himself quite
rich from trade, had a mansion, the whole nine yards ... until the day came
when his town wanted his stuff. So they took it, because America was in large
part founded on the notion of repeatedly taking stuff that the natives
considered their property.

Acknowledging the massive wrongs committed by this country against those
peoples isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I agree with you that we need to be
realistic about what conclusions we draw from it. Yes, the United States stole
stuff from the indians. No, we're not going to now consider dispossessing the
current owners of that stuff; that's akin to, say, questioning the rightness
of the origins of modern-day Israel. There's a state there now, so it's moot.

~~~
cmurf
This is a bad analogy because Israel continues in the modern day to usurp land
from Palestinians, forcing them to self-dispossess. So if you're going to say
exportation and colonization is wrong and should be illegal, you're right,
this was learned during WWII and codified in the Geneva Conventions after it
and why all Jewish settler land acquired on Arab villages is considered
illegal by the international community minus Israel. And yet this land
transfer continues as settlements are expanded, today. So it is not moot to
question the rightness of modern day Israel or any other state that forces an
indigenous population to self-dispossess.

