Happy Indigenous People's Day

Some thoughts here, about the reality of American Indian lives, via The Conversation.

At the same time? More thoughts here, here, and here, largely focusing on High Country News' "wrongful wokeness" about American Indians, as a reminder that they're human beings who put their pants on one leg at a time, like anybody else.

Potlatch slavery and culture murders and Aztec sacrifices of still-beating hearts aside (yes, all true), racism, tribalism (pun intended), less than perfect environmentalism, are all parts of being an American Indian. 

As for the "native land" of the top link? WHOSE native land? The Sioux were just moving west of the Missouri River in numbers the same time as Lewis and Clark were going up it, having been booted out of Wisconsin by the Ojibwa / Chippewa. The Navajo? The western half of the Arizona part of their reservation and the Utah sliver weren't occupied by them until the 1800s, either. Those are just two of many examples. Do the Sioux want to "neutralize" the Black Hills or even give it to the Shoshone or Arapaho? Do the Navajos want to give land back to the Utes?

There's also a petard-hoisting here. Most American Indians stress that they didn't believe in the past in individual land ownership. True enough. For that matter, if we're using the word "ownership," they didn't believe in tribal land ownership, either. Control? Yes. Ownership, in the "rule of law" sense or even a rough equivalent? No.

Oh, and no, and contra what a non-skeptical leftist like James Loewen says, the Iroquois weren't behind the U.S. Constitution and Chief Seattle didn't say that.

The Conversation, via Pocket, posted wrongfully woke nuttery, from academics, a week ago. Here's my Twitter thread start.

#WrongfullyWoke for #IndigenousPeoplesDay is problematic at best, false at worst, per this piece, which has 2 big wrongs 1/x https://t.co/8WbfvIM4sC
1. It implies static locations for Indian tribes.
2. It implies land ownership, when tribes say their individual members reject it

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 12, 2021

And carry on. You don't need the whole thread, but I'll give you one more tweet:

Details of what Elisa J. Sobo, Michael Lambert, Valerie Lambert get wrong, re pt 1:
Are you going to ask the Ojibwa to do a land acknowledgement ceremony for the Sioux? The Navajo for the Ute? The Comanche for the Apache? The Iroquois for tribes they dispossessed? 2c/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 12, 2021

There you go. That deals with the static locations and hints at the land ownership issue.