Nicholas wrote: ↑2019-08-11 09:19am
loomer wrote: ↑2019-08-11 03:50am
Darth Yan wrote: ↑2019-08-09 11:50am
given that native Americans are a demographic minority what about the non natives who would compose 90% of the population? Would THEY be expelled or have their rights reduced to keep the power in the hands of the native tribes?)
This has been repeatedly addressed, and you seem to be ignoring the argument around indigenization. What is proposed is not, as you seem to insist, 'keeping the power in the hands of the Indigenous tribes', but rather dismantling the existing systems of oppression and centring Indigenous epistemologies, political structures, and culture, and by doing so ending the systemic barriers and inequalities afflicting the nations we live in. This in no way requires anyone lose any fundamental rights, and I challenge you to show in what way it does. As you seem to find rigorous debate a challenge, I would suggest you start with those rights in the UDHR. I further challenge you to show a published decolonization theorist or theory that in fact calls for either of the things you continually assert are in some way inherent to the proposal of decolonization.
and when it was pointed out that dissolving a nation as big as the US would have international implications and cause mass destabilization his response was “eh who cares.”
Incorrect. My response was not 'eh, who cares', it was that refusing to see justice done in the name of international stability is a repugnant position to me. I will now outline a series of propositions for you. Feel free to say which of them you find objectionable:
1. Justice is preferable to injustice.
2. Where injustice is done, it is the responsibility of those in a position to stop or make good on that injustice to do so.
3. While not all injustice is equal, serious injustices cannot be ignored in the name of stability.
4. Genocide is a serious injustice.
4.a The historical treatment of the Indigenous peoples of the US, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, etc constituted a genocide.
4.b The present treatment of the same either constitutes genocide or a continuing process of the illegitimate theft of land under faulty legal doctrines.
4.c These states being thus founded on genocide and continuing to exist through the illegitimate theft of land are unjust states.
4.d The power structures presently in place within these states are fundamentally rooted within this injustice.
5. Therefore, genocide being a serious injustice that cannot be ignored, and justice being preferable to injustice, it is the responsibility of those in a position of power to end that genocide and make good on it and its ongoing effects, and to do so requires a fundamental change in the way the nation is structured.
In the above quote you challenged Darth Yan to show how indigenization requires anyone to lose their fundamental rights.
Indigenization doesn't. However, immediately afterwards you made an argument about restoring justice, which I have also quoted above. That argument does require that some people lose their fundamental rights. Since you have been repeatedly using both arguments I am going to carefully lay out how.
For the sake of argument I accept your five points above with one exception, although I can imagine situations where I would reject others. I do not accept that present treatment of indigenous peoples constitutes genocide.
Then let us examine the issue of genocide. I will, for convenience, use the Rome Statute. It's not perfect but it's a reasonable starting point.
" For the purpose of this Statute, "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
I believe there is a strong case to be made that subsections c and e are alive and well in Australia, with removals of Indigenous children at an all-time high and a consistent and ongoing hostility by the federal and state governments towards Indigenous communities, and don't get me started on Indigenous deaths in custody. Do you disagree that these elements are in play? I'm rather less well read in the American and Canadian contexts, but I defer to the judgment of MMIWG inquiry in the latter case, whose report quite strongly affirmed that a genocide is ongoing in Canada. I believe similar issues exist in America from my readings on the matter. Which part of this definition of genocide do you feel is inapplicable to America, Australia, Canada, etc?
Given that exception the basis of your claim for ongoing injustice is the "continuing process of the illegitimate theft of land under faulty legal doctrines." So, who does the land actually belong to? It can't be the people it was stolen from because the vast majority of the land was stolen over 130 years ago and the oldest living person today is 116. Since the land doesn't belong to the current tenants (if it did there would be no "continuing process of the illegitimate theft" to make right). Who does the land belong to?
The land belongs to the nations and peoples from whom it was illegitimately seized either communally or according to whatever divisions of land and property those peoples maintained in their law at the time. You operate under the assumption that the death of an original owner extinguishes all property rights. This is incorrect - inheritance rights exist for that very purpose, in fact, and can and are enforced in cases where properties have been stolen. Indeed, there are a rather great many of those cases relating to goods looted by the Nazis, and I see no particular reason to draw a line between real and chattel properties in this context.
Further, in the case of a very great many of the peoples whose land we are discussing, private ownership of land was not present. This land was communally owned (or rather, owned the people of it - an important epistemic and normative distinction) and as such the death of one individual is irrelevant. The rights are attached to the collective of which they are a member, not to them as individuals in isolation, and so the idea that the death of the traditional custodians from which the land was initially taken can in some way interrupt the chain of possession is fundamentally incorrect in this context. There are fringe cases where this does not apply - for instance, groups that have entirely ceased to exist or land that was genuine terra nullius (rare though it may be, there are and were such places and they were settled - though usually the settlers find out at some point there was a reason no one was bothering with it, usually because it turns out to be a god-awful place to live one way or another) - but in the bulk of such cases, either we are concerned with communal and collective rights that cannot be extinguished by the death of a single individual or by the inherited rights to property of their heirs.
You have implicitly answered the currently existing indigenous tribes. On what basis is it theirs? You have never answered this question so I am left to guess and I am guessing either inheritance or institutional continuity.
By the basis of their existing, improperly - and thus invalidly - interrupted ownership. Allow me to give you an example of the underlying logic:
Group A lives in a place with the ordinary lawful interest of occupants, inhabitants, or custodians. Group B seizes that place by violence without valid legal authority. Group A retains its lawful interest in and ownership of that interest despite Group B's intervention, and barring an intervening act sufficient to sever that interest - e.g. voluntary renunciation - it persists. We would not ordinarily consider it a break in the chain of ownership if a bikie gang kicks our front door in, tells us they own our house now, and makes us move in with the neighbours on penalty of being shot in the face!
In either case the process of indigenization that you describe will not grant a right to the land for those who are not tribal members by other standards. You appear to acknowledge this in your long post in response to Broomstick's charge of racism, where despite all your connections to the indigenous population in your area you acknowledge that it is not your land.
The purpose of indigenization is not to grant a right to land, but to facilitate a shift in culture that enables the return of land and the voluntary surrender of improperly obtained property rights. Being as they were never validly acquired in the first place, this simply follows from the legal principle that where there has been a delict, there should be a remedy, and where that delict is a theft, the return of the property ought to be the remedy where possible.
The right to land, such as it may emerge subsequently, will be as a citizen of the newly emergent states, as negotiated and enshrined in the constitutions developed during the decolonization process. It is of course entirely possible no one will possess an individual right to property real or moveable, but if this is constitutional and was arrived at democratically, then I see no reason to object.
Since the injustice described is an ongoing theft, doing justice requires returning the stolen property and sovereignty (since that was also stolen). Not returning some of the property, not assigning and arbitrary value to the property and giving the victim that, not ordering the thieves to make amends by adopting their victims cultural practices, not transforming social structures while letting the theft continue, returning the property whole and entire without strings.
No contest there, subject to the caveat that I believe the only way to 'make it stick', so to speak, is for a democratic transition to negotiate the terms and form of the return of property, and that such a transition necessarily requires indigenization to be successful. Thus, the adoption of Indigenous customs, language, etc as and when appropriate is not some kind of restitution, as you suggest here, so much as simply recognizing the presence of those customs and their validity within the places we live. In this regard I consider it no different to if I were to move to Germany, where I would hopefully learn German to some degree if able out of respect for those around me, and inevitably absorb part of the local culture simply by being.
Since this property includes sovereignty, returning the property means returning full sovereignty to the indigenous population (note not the indigenous population and their non-indigenous allies but the indigenous population who have the inherited right to the land), full sovereignty includes the right to decide who lives on the land, the right to deport or jail those present on it illegally, the right to determine what rules regulate private ownership of property and the right to make war.
Yes, I am well aware of what sovereignty entails. However, here you make a dangerous misstep - very few decolonization theorists and advocates and even Indigenous sovereignty movements (other than those proposing state-within-a-state models) in fact call for a totally exclusive rule of the Indigenous population alone. It is not what is suggested by me, nor by the bulk of the theorists and advocates, and is instead almost totally counter to what is pursued. The goal of decolonization and the restoration of sovereignty is not to simply reverse the order of who gets to hold the leash, who gets beaten with the stick, and who gets to wear the jackboots, but to do away with such things entirely.
Thus doing justice to the indigenous population requires giving them the power to dispossess and expel the people who were born on the land and have been living on it all their life.
And where those people's possession is based on illegitimate acquisition, itself predicated on violent genocide, then that may have to be the case. However, again, I note that very few decolonization theorists and advocates call for the kind of radical approach you here suppose is inherent and innate to the restoration of sovereignty. The idea that this is unjust necessarily presupposes that the present conditions under which the land is held by the non-Indigenous peoples involved are just - a position I strongly, indeed vehemently, disagree with. Those conditions are fundamentally rooted in the illegitimate acquisition of the land, and just as if I buy a stolen car (without knowing it's stolen or with that knowledge, it doesn't matter other than the additional penalty attached to the knowing receipt of stolen goods) I may find myself carless when the police turn up and return it to its rightful owner, these conditions render the current state of possession unjust.
Given human nature and the diversity of indigenous tribes some of them are sure to exercise that power. Thus doing justice will deprive some people of their rights, 300 odd million in the US alone, although I wouldn't expect all of them to actually be expelled (most rulers like having a large tax base). If sovereignty is going to be genuinely returned though all 300 million of them must be permanently denied any say in the government that rules them. So doing justice of the indigenous requires that a lot of people be denied their human rights.
Once again, this is not what I propose, nor what the bulk of decolonization theorists and advocates propose. Democratic models are still largely preferred, and there is thus no inherent requirement as you wish to read in here to disenfranchise or revoke the human rights of Settler peoples. You have made the leap from 'sovereignty will be restored' to 'and will be exclusive, exclusionary, and ethnic' which does not necessarily follow, and indeed,
denies the free and genuine sovereignty of the restored states by stating that they
cannot empower non-Indigenous people living within them.
Indigenization is an intriguing and attractive solution to the problem, of how given the competing claims of justice and human rights in this situation we might build a better society going forward but it is not justice for the indigenous people whose land was stolen. When it was initially brought up I thought you were conceding that justice could not be done in this case but since you keep insisting that we need to do justice it seems not.
Indigenization is not a solution in isolation but is only part of the solution, and a necessary step to creating the cultural conditions necessary for the democratic transition to sovereignty built along the lines of the Indigenous nations and their customs. Doing justice requires more than indigenization alone, however, so yes - I keep insisting on it.
"Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth." M.A.A.A
