Trump tells minority Congresswomen to "go back where they came from"

[Effie]

Broomstick, I'm going to level with you.

You've engaged in a comical (and possibly deliberate) misreading of a post by Effie, and an act that falls somewhere on the spectrum between racist micro-aggression and full on racist with loomer. Until you correct the former and own and apologize for the latter I really don't see the value of engaging with you in this thread.

No she didn’t. Loomer’s assuming that if the US dissolved the new native nations are going to be perfectly ok with whites blacks Mexicans etc being there or that old tribal conflicts like those between Navajo and Hopi aren’t going to flare up again. He ignored that since native Americans are a small percentage compared to other poc or white people that the only way to ensure a fully “native character” of the new nations would be to create ethnostates (just like how the Israelis had to forcibly expel most Palestinians.) It was basically “because shut up” whenever he engaged with her points.


The bundajeeling comment was weird but it seems that you’re using it as an excuse to dodge her points.

So stop being a coward

There is no point in trying to discuss racial matters with someone who engages in racist microaggressions, because they're trying to provoke a response and not to listen and respond meaningfully. But it is also worth giving people a chance to correct themselves if they misspoke. Neither of those things are cowardly. Cowardice would consist of going with the flow and refusing to make waves for the sake of avoiding confrontation.

[Straha]

Broomstick, I'm going to level with you.

You've engaged in a comical (and possibly deliberate) misreading of a post by Effie, and an act that falls somewhere on the spectrum between racist micro-aggression and full on racist with loomer. Until you correct the former and own and apologize for the latter I really don't see the value of engaging with you in this thread.

No she didn’t. Loomer’s assuming that if the US dissolved the new native nations are going to be perfectly ok with whites blacks Mexicans etc being there or that old tribal conflicts like those between Navajo and Hopi aren’t going to flare up again. He ignored that since native Americans are a small percentage compared to other poc or white people that the only way to ensure a fully “native character” of the new nations would be to create ethnostates (just like how the Israelis had to forcibly expel most Palestinians.) It was basically “because shut up” whenever he engaged with her points.


The bundajeeling comment was weird but it seems that you’re using it as an excuse to dodge her points.

So stop being a coward

1. This is Effie's post where she lays out a pretty compelling history of reconstruction, with multiple citations to different sources, and makes a direct comparison between how important slavery was to the mid-19th Century economy to how important steel production was to the 20th century economy. This is Broomstick's post where she accuses Effie of saying the 20th century retroactively effected the 19th century.

2. We all know the Bundjalung quote by now.

There are two explanations that can explain these actions together in this thread. Either Broomstick is a bad faith actor dismissing true effortposting from others and engaging in racist micro-aggressions to provoke people, or she engaged in a pretty bad misread of a post and didn't understand the implication of her rhetoric. I've known her long enough to have some hope it's the latter, and I'm giving her a chance to correct herself.

3. Let's talk about cowardice. You have made a series of idiotic posts in this thread that show no engagement or understanding with the other discussions going on around you, often relying on (explicitly) racist tropes in your rhetoric. People have engaged in massive point-by-point rebuttals of you, which you then precede to ignore before retreating back to the same tired old retread of the same basic point. When people call you out on that, you slink away from the thread before coming back to find an unrelated post which you then try to grab in twist back into the context of your point, like some inept hyena. To compare your hubris to that of Black Knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail would be an insult to him and an excuse to you. If you want to throw out accusations of cowardice step one is to go back to Loomer's exhaustive answers to you and respond. Otherwise, kindly fuck off.

[Darth Yan]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4
pointing out that in one decolonized location the white minority was wiped out in retribution is NOT racist. The abolitionists of the day were able to point to slavery ending peacefully in the British colonies. South Africa has also been doing fairly well with the end of apartheid. That the white southerners shamelessly ignored the nuances of the situation (many blacks were disgusted by the massacre, that non French were spared, that Toissant Louverture would not have approved of the massacre, or that the French were exceptionally brutal even by slave owner standards and that this was in the aftermath of a devastating war) doesn’t change that the massacre happened.

But no Loomers posts are NOT well argued. He ignores basic facts of human nature (white black native, all are capable of great good or evil) and history (in Israel the Arabs were expelled because it was feared having too many would disrupt the “Jewish character” of the state; 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?) 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.” His passion and desire for justice are admirable but his refusal to consider practicality or long term implications fatally undermines anything he advocates. Same thing with most decolonist activists of you he and Effie embody that ideal.

And before you twist my words I’m not opposed to tearing down racist structures. The civil rights act, voting rights act and the attempts to strike down segregation (attempts because the conservative courts seem to be doing their level best to undo the progress made) were all necessary and hardly had a debilitating effect on society.

[Effie]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4
pointing out that in one decolonized location the white minority was wiped out in retribution is NOT racist. The abolitionists of the day were able to point to slavery ending peacefully in the British colonies. South Africa has also been doing fairly well with the end of apartheid. That the white southerners shamelessly ignored the nuances of the situation (many blacks were disgusted by the massacre, that non French were spared, that Toissant Louverture would not have approved of the massacre, or that the French were exceptionally brutal even by slave owner standards and that this was in the aftermath of a devastating war) doesn’t change that the massacre happened.

But no Loomers posts are NOT well argued. He ignores basic facts of human nature (white black native, all are capable of great good or evil) and history (in Israel the Arabs were expelled because it was feared having too many would disrupt the “Jewish character” of the state; 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?) 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.” His passion and desire for justice are admirable but his refusal to consider practicality or long term implications fatally undermines anything he advocates. Same thing with most decolonist activists of you he and Effie embody that ideal.

And before you twist my words I’m not opposed to tearing down racist structures. The civil rights act, voting rights act and the attempts to strike down segregation (attempts because the conservative courts seem to be doing their level best to undo the progress made) were all necessary and hardly had a debilitating effect on society.

Loomer has devoted a great many words to the notion of reindigenization. You ignore them completely in this post. Why should anyone engage with you if you're just going to repeat yourself regardless of whatever they say? Is this some sort of mildly sadistic game?

[Straha]

>snip<

You are literally reposting the same arguments that have been answered before. Respond to Loomer's posts and then I'll respond to your bullshit here.

[Broomstick]

Sorry Broomstick, but I'm not going to bother spending the time and energy typing up another long response to you until you go back and address the ones already posted. I don't really have the inclination to waste my time on someone who vomits invectives and then disappears for ten days without a guarantee they're actually committed to the discussion, especially when they mindlessly regurgitate talking points already repeatedly addressed. Either way you'll be waiting a few days as I have a prior engagement commencing tomorrow.

Oh, look at the little hypocrite - YOU announce you're waltzing off for a few days and expect that's OK, but god forbid I don't put answering your bullshit ahead of any other priority in my life, including making a living.

I didn't just disappear from the discussion for a few days, I disappeared from the entire forum because I had shit I had to do in real life. Fuck you if you don't understand that.

And, since I have neither the time nor inclination to dredge through a week's worth of your bullshit either summarize your fucking points or shove them up your ass. I am NOT at your beck and call. I have just as much right as you do to deal with my real-life shit ahead of this board. Fuck off to hell if you don't understand that.

[Broomstick]

Broomstick, I'm going to level with you.

You've engaged in a comical (and possibly deliberate) misreading of a post by Effie, and an act that falls somewhere on the spectrum between racist micro-aggression and full on racist with loomer. Until you correct the former and own and apologize for the latter I really don't see the value of engaging with you in this thread.

If you have a problem with my posting take it up with a moderator. I'm not at your beck and call either.

[Broomstick]

So stop being a coward

It's not a matter of cowardice - either they don't have an actual answer to the question of "how do you safeguard 300 million non-Natives during this scheme" or else they actively want to render 300 million people stateless and ethnically cleansed. Which doesn't speak well of either of them.

[Nicholas]

So stop being a coward

It's not a matter of cowardice - either they don't have an actual answer to the question of "how do you safeguard 300 million non-Natives during this scheme" or else they actively want to render 300 million people stateless and ethnically cleansed. Which doesn't speak well of either of them.

I'm not the people you have been arguing with but they have said they won't respond and I have seen them give an answer in this thread to how they will "safeguard 300 million non-Natives during this scheme." The answer is that this scheme will not be implemented until it is approved by a majority vote (which given the numbers involved means a majority of those 300 million need to vote for it). They expect that this approval will come after moral argument convinces a majority of these people to learn the native language and culture and integrate into the native tribes. There is one instance of a people changing their language as a result of moral argument (the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionists who created Israel) so it is possible. Obviously any proposal which gets the support of a majority of that 300 million is not going to leave them vulnerable to ethnic cleansing or statelessness.

Now I do believe that this agenda of merging the settler population with the native population is logically incompatible with the argument that just requires that the land be returned to the natives. I believe this because the vast majority of the land in question was stolen over 130 years ago so the grounds for the claim of the current natives must be inheritance since none of them were alive when the land was stolen. The Decolonization advocates have not said on what basis they believe that the current natives inherited these properties but whatever grounds it is must rely on continuity between the historical Native Americans and today's Native Americans. The integration of a large portion of the non-Native population into the native tribes would destroy that continuity (the numbers involved guarantee that) and thus destroy their argument about justice requiring the land be returned. But I haven't said that explicitly before so they haven't had a chance to answer that critique so I don't know what their response would be.

I hope that helps you understand.

Nicholas

[Broomstick]

Thank you, Nicholas, that summary was quite helpful.

The answer is that this scheme will not be implemented until it is approved by a majority vote (which given the numbers involved means a majority of those 300 million need to vote for it). They expect that this approval will come after moral argument convinces a majority of these people to learn the native language and culture and integrate into the native tribes.

You mean learn one of the hundreds of languages spoken among the Native groups in North America, and that presumes those languages are actually still alive. While some (Hopi dialects, Navajo, Cherokee, etc.) are still very much living languages other are either moribund or actually deceased.

There is also the issue of integration - not all Native groups are open to that. While some are quite amenable to people joining their group other simply do not allow it. Some never have allowed - either you were born into the tribe or you weren't and there was no mechanism for an outsider to join.

And, while there is much to admire in the Native cultures there is also much that is incompatible with modern society and standards If I start listing the negatives I will, of course, be labelled a bigot for no more than pointing out the truth: pre-conquest North America was far from a paradise. It was not egalitarian. It was not peaceful.

There is one instance of a people changing their language as a result of moral argument (the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionists who created Israel) so it is possible.

Except that those Zionists were already united by a common culture or closely related cultures (the various flavors of Judaism) and had been raised from childhood using Hebrew as a liturgical language so they were already somewhat acquainted with it. That's a very different case than attempting to adopt an entirely different culture and language, a language that is from a completely different language family than the one you have grown up speaking.

[Darth Yan]

Thing is their arguments are idiotic. If you aren’t going to assimilate them where do they go? Yet when it’s raised Straha Effie and Loomer all dodge the point.

[Effie]

Thing is their arguments are idiotic. If you aren’t going to assimilate them where do they go? Yet when it’s raised Straha Effie and Loomer all dodge the point.

Why would this be any different from any other human being who refuses to integrate with the society they live in? They would naturally leave as soon as possible, because undoubtedly the future Broomsticks and Yans would find living in a decolonized United States of America so intolerable as to make anywhere else appealing. The vast, overwhelming majority of decolonization advocates support eliminating barriers to migration generally, so this would be quite practical. Any such people who wished to remain as revanchist terrorists could be treated as such, probably with significantly greater gentleness than any contemporary state would offer given the druthers of decolonization advocates.

This is like asking "well what would happen to American expatriates if Thailand ended its military base agreement with the US?" The vast majority have no desire to become Thai enough to live happily in Thailand, so they'd leave peacefully, and the remainder would live out their lives happily integrating into their new home. No need for violence except maybe against criminals resentful of their loss of privilege enough to engage in violence of their own.

Thank you, Nicholas, that summary was quite helpful.

The answer is that this scheme will not be implemented until it is approved by a majority vote (which given the numbers involved means a majority of those 300 million need to vote for it). They expect that this approval will come after moral argument convinces a majority of these people to learn the native language and culture and integrate into the native tribes.

You mean learn one of the hundreds of languages spoken among the Native groups in North America, and that presumes those languages are actually still alive. While some (Hopi dialects, Navajo, Cherokee, etc.) are still very much living languages other are either moribund or actually deceased.

There is also the issue of integration - not all Native groups are open to that. While some are quite amenable to people joining their group other simply do not allow it. Some never have allowed - either you were born into the tribe or you weren't and there was no mechanism for an outsider to join.

And, while there is much to admire in the Native cultures there is also much that is incompatible with modern society and standards If I start listing the negatives I will, of course, be labelled a bigot for no more than pointing out the truth: pre-conquest North America was far from a paradise. It was not egalitarian. It was not peaceful.

The belief that cultures are so static and inherent that Native cultures as of 2019 are identical to those of 1492 or 1619 or 1819 is fundamentally a racist one of staggering obliviousness and stupidity. There is no point in saying anything more to that because there is no point in dignifying the grotesquerie of treating Natives as a people outside of time and history with anything more than spittle.

The idea that what decolonization advocates want is a utopian society, rather than a rectification of a particular assemblage of injustices, cannot, to my mind, be justified by anything that anyone who can be said to be pro-decolonization in this thread has said. I am thus curious as to your reasoning for making such a seemingly irrelevant statement, beyond the surely-incorrect assumption that you used it to try and legitimize your appalling statement dealt with above.

There is one instance of a people changing their language as a result of moral argument (the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionists who created Israel) so it is possible.

Except that those Zionists were already united by a common culture or closely related cultures (the various flavors of Judaism) and had been raised from childhood using Hebrew as a liturgical language so they were already somewhat acquainted with it. That's a very different case than attempting to adopt an entirely different culture and language, a language that is from a completely different language family than the one you have grown up speaking.

Just because you feel yourself incompetent to learn a non-Indo-European language, or indeed even a non-Germanic language depending on how we read "family", does not mean other people are so unequipped.

This argument also ignores that the concrete proposals envision a lengthy period of transformation, significantly longer than that which formed Israel in practice and at a minimum as lengthy as the gap between the Balfour Declaration and the Nakba. Your logistical concerns are not in line with such proposals, and are thus not really relevant..

[Darth Yan]

Thing is their arguments are idiotic. If you aren’t going to assimilate them where do they go? Yet when it’s raised Straha Effie and Loomer all dodge the point.

Why would this be any different from any other human being who refuses to integrate with the society they live in? They would naturally leave as soon as possible, because undoubtedly the future Broomsticks and Yans would find living in a decolonized United States of America so intolerable as to make anywhere else appealing. The vast, overwhelming majority of decolonization advocates support eliminating barriers to migration generally, so this would be quite practical. Any such people who wished to remain as revanchist terrorists could be treated as such, probably with significantly greater gentleness than any contemporary state would offer given the druthers of decolonization advocates.

This is like asking "well what would happen to American expatriates if Thailand ended its military base agreement with the US?" The vast majority have no desire to become Thai enough to live happily in Thailand, so they'd leave peacefully, and the remainder would live out their lives happily integrating into their new home. No need for violence except maybe against criminals resentful of their loss of privilege enough to engage in violence of their own.

Thank you, Nicholas, that summary was quite helpful.

The answer is that this scheme will not be implemented until it is approved by a majority vote (which given the numbers involved means a majority of those 300 million need to vote for it). They expect that this approval will come after moral argument convinces a majority of these people to learn the native language and culture and integrate into the native tribes.

You mean learn one of the hundreds of languages spoken among the Native groups in North America, and that presumes those languages are actually still alive. While some (Hopi dialects, Navajo, Cherokee, etc.) are still very much living languages other are either moribund or actually deceased.

There is also the issue of integration - not all Native groups are open to that. While some are quite amenable to people joining their group other simply do not allow it. Some never have allowed - either you were born into the tribe or you weren't and there was no mechanism for an outsider to join.

And, while there is much to admire in the Native cultures there is also much that is incompatible with modern society and standards If I start listing the negatives I will, of course, be labelled a bigot for no more than pointing out the truth: pre-conquest North America was far from a paradise. It was not egalitarian. It was not peaceful.

The belief that cultures are so static and inherent that Native cultures as of 2019 are identical to those of 1492 or 1619 or 1819 is fundamentally a racist one of staggering obliviousness and stupidity. There is no point in saying anything more to that because there is no point in dignifying the grotesquerie of treating Natives as a people outside of time and history with anything more than spittle.

The idea that what decolonization advocates want is a utopian society, rather than a rectification of a particular assemblage of injustices, cannot, to my mind, be justified by anything that anyone who can be said to be pro-decolonization in this thread has said. I am thus curious as to your reasoning for making such a seemingly irrelevant statement, beyond the surely-incorrect assumption that you used it to try and legitimize your appalling statement dealt with above.

There is one instance of a people changing their language as a result of moral argument (the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionists who created Israel) so it is possible.

Except that those Zionists were already united by a common culture or closely related cultures (the various flavors of Judaism) and had been raised from childhood using Hebrew as a liturgical language so they were already somewhat acquainted with it. That's a very different case than attempting to adopt an entirely different culture and language, a language that is from a completely different language family than the one you have grown up speaking.

Just because you feel yourself incompetent to learn a non-Indo-European language, or indeed even a non-Germanic language depending on how we read "family", does not mean other people are so unequipped.

This argument also ignores that the concrete proposals envision a lengthy period of transformation, significantly longer than that which formed Israel in practice and at a minimum as lengthy as the gap between the Balfour Declaration and the Nakba. Your logistical concerns are not in line with such proposals, and are thus not really relevant..

Not even remotely comparable. People stay at military bases temporarily. The US is a country that people spent their whole lives. Also you missed the point. There would be natives tempted to expel the non natives for the sake of ensuring the native character

[Darth Yan]

In short there are always going to be natives who don’t want to let non natives assimilate. Hell as I said natives are a minority. To maintain political control they’d have to be an ethnostate.

And no you are misinterpreting broomstick. What she said is that you seem to assume it’s cut and dry. It isn’t. They weren’t utopian and they had their share of problems

[Effie]

Not even remotely comparable. People stay at military bases temporarily. The US is a country that people spent their whole lives. Also you missed the point. There would be natives tempted to expel the non natives for the sake of ensuring the native character

How is this any worse than the current state of affairs in the United States of America today, where a third of the population, and close to half of the politically engaged population, are not only tempted to ethnically cleanse people but also actively working towards that happening? To the point of some of them going on spree murder rampages? That is, if this is simply a lateral move in this dimension while rectifying the injustice of settler colonialism then it is still a positive improvement and thus you have not offered any good counterargument against working towards it.

Unless, of course, Native people being nativist towards white people is much much worse than white people attempting to ethnically cleanse Latinx people.

And all this is assuming that you're correct that nativism would be a problem, as if hatred on national grounds is an inevitable aspect of the human condition. Speak for yourself, bub.

[Darth Yan]

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Nativism is idiotic regardless of who preaches it.

Like it or not some progress was being made in regard to native rights so decolonizing is hardly the only option. You seem to think that as long aaa it’s not white people nativism is ok.

[Broomstick]

Thing is their arguments are idiotic. If you aren’t going to assimilate them where do they go? Yet when it’s raised Straha Effie and Loomer all dodge the point.

Why would this be any different from any other human being who refuses to integrate with the society they live in?

Wow, you are just determined to be a fucking thick-headed idiot, aren't you?

It's not about whether or not a member of the "invader" category wants to integrated, it's a matter of whether or not the Native group with the "restored" rights even allows integration. What part of "some Native groups have no mechanism to bring in an outsider" are you having trouble comprehending?

For example, the Yahi do not even give their names to strangers - the last one alive was known as "Ishi", his word for "man", because there was no way for him to be introduced to others in a manner allowing him to give his real name. How the fuck do you think a group like that is going to incorporate outsiders? Moot point, actually - they're all dead. So I guess we don't have to worry about them.

You, and loomer and straha are painfully ignorant of just how diverse the Native North Americans were/are, how many different cultures, how many different social systems. Some would be happy to bring others into their tribes and cultures. Others would literally prefer to die out than to allow that to happen - the Yahi did die, others are on their way. I guess anyone living in those areas is shit out of luck, huh?

[They would naturally leave as soon as possible, because undoubtedly the future Broomsticks and Yans would find living in a decolonized United States of America so intolerable as to make anywhere else appealing.

So... what qualifies YOU to know my mental state? You know fuck-all about me.

I guess you completely missed the part where I stated I was married for 30 years to a man whose family was Eastern Band Cherokee. I fucking married someone from one of those cultures you worship. So you've got some fucking nerve stating I'm a bigot. How fucking well do YOU know even one person with an actual ancestral claim to North American real estate?

The vast, overwhelming majority of decolonization advocates support eliminating barriers to migration generally, so this would be quite practical.

Oh, no fucking problem - let's change the whole fucking world while we're at it. What the hell makes you think the majority of the world's population shares your goals for the world? Maybe we can all sit in a circle and sing "Kum-by-yah" to make it happen.

The difference is that because I have actually met and known Native Americans I don't view them with romanticized notions - they're people, just like all the other people, with the same range of saints and sinners, generosity and greed, tolerance and intolerance. Holy fuck, they can't even agree amongst themselves what they want - that's why there are not one but THREE Cherokee nations these days, rinse and repeat across the continent. What about those folks of Native descent who chose to assimilate and are happily in the mainstream culture rather than their ancestral one? Or don't they count, too?

You assume everyone is going to see the Native cultures and languages as superior and discard their own languages and cultures in favor of someone else's. Why? What possible thing in society or history lead you to believe this could ever occur on the scale required for people to vote the dissolution of their current nation and convert it into 500+ separate entities? And that those 500+ entities are all going to be equally receptive to adopting outsides into their culture?

The belief that cultures are so static and inherent that Native cultures as of 2019 are identical to those of 1492 or 1619 or 1819 is fundamentally a racist one of staggering obliviousness and stupidity. There is no point in saying anything more to that because there is no point in dignifying the grotesquerie of treating Natives as a people outside of time and history with anything more than spittle.

How cute - you continue to attempt to construct a strawman of my position.

Again - you keep blasting past such points as bringing up the split of the Cherokee into three nations not one. My description of how the Semiole were formed of refugees and displaced the prior inhabitants of the region to Louisiana. I've discussed recent issues between the Seneca (who have also split into multiple groups) and New York State. Anyone reading this thread can see that I am far more aware of the current (as well as past) diversity of Native groups than you are.

There is one instance of a people changing their language as a result of moral argument (the adoption of Hebrew by the Zionists who created Israel) so it is possible.

Except that those Zionists were already united by a common culture or closely related cultures (the various flavors of Judaism) and had been raised from childhood using Hebrew as a liturgical language so they were already somewhat acquainted with it. That's a very different case than attempting to adopt an entirely different culture and language, a language that is from a completely different language family than the one you have grown up speaking.

Just because you feel yourself incompetent to learn a non-Indo-European language, or indeed even a non-Germanic language depending on how we read "family", does not mean other people are so unequipped.

Oh my god - you are truly amazing.

I have at this point studied six languages other than English, none of which are Germanic in origin, one of which has a VSO word order which is not at all the usual rule for Indo-European languages, and one of which is from the Afroasiatic language group. But hey, you're just assuming. I'm not claiming anything like actual fluency in any of them although in my best of the lot I was able to travel to the European country of origin and effectively communicate with the people living there so I have some ability to use it. It's precisely because I have studied other languages I know just how fucking hard it is to learn another language, especially one outside your native language family.

I mean, fuck, a lot of Native nations are having trouble just getting their own people to learn their language, much less outsiders. For that matter, so are a lot of language minorities in places like Europe.

You are suggesting that people are going to voluntarily
1) Give up an internationally dominant and advantageous language like English
2) Learn an obscure, minority language with a radically different structure and vocabulary
3) Maintain this going forward without contamination from outside North America

Absolutely fucking nothing supports the notion of this happening. In reality, what really happens (and has done so throughout history)
1) People give up their local languages for an internationally dominent and advantageous language
2) The obscure, minority languages, if they survive at all, survive in a hybridized form with the more powerful language

History saw this with Roman Latin dominating across much of Europe, hybridizing with local languages to generate the Romance languages like Spanish, French, Romanian, etc. History saw this happen in England when the French invaded and the native Anglo-Saxon hybridized with Norman French to make the language we're writing and reading right now.

This notion of the "invader descendants" giving up their own culture and language, adopting that of the (mostly vanished) natives flies in the face of all past experience that I'm aware of - if you can provide and exception please do so.

This even supposes that this is what the Natives want - which recent lawsuits demanding that the mainstream culture STOP using cultural appropriations, demanding that the names of sports teams, college mascots, and so on be changed to eliminate references to Native cultures would seem to put a lie to. You are the one who treats the Natives as something other than people, assuming they are in lockstep in views and opinions and that your views and opinions are theirs. And they aren't. Sure, some Natives think the way you do. A lot more of them do NOT.

This argument also ignores that the concrete proposals envision a lengthy period of transformation, significantly longer than that which formed Israel in practice and at a minimum as lengthy as the gap between the Balfour Declaration and the Nakba. Your logistical concerns are not in line with such proposals, and are thus not really relevant

The Jews waited, hoped for, and planned for nearly two thousand years to restore Israel. It wasn't some notion born out of the ashes of WWII. You are just fucking ignorant about what you're talking about. The only reason I still engage with you is for those in the audience who might read your bullshit and be misled by it.

I'll also point out that Jews are well known for not encouraging conversion and Israel is currently under fire for alleged ethnic cleansing of Arabs from their territory - precisely the thing you claim will not happen. Again, history puts a lie to your assertions.

(I'll also mention the longstanding moratorium on Israel v. Palestine disputes on SD.net - I mention it in passing but I have no intention of actually discussing that topic.)

[Effie]

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Nativism is idiotic regardless of who preaches it.

Like it or not some progress was being made in regard to native rights so decolonizing is hardly the only option. You seem to think that as long aaa it’s not white people nativism is ok.

Please go back, read my post, then actually respond to it instead of repeating yourself.

Wow, you are just determined to be a fucking thick-headed idiot, aren't you?

It's not about whether or not a member of the "invader" category wants to integrated, it's a matter of whether or not the Native group with the "restored" rights even allows integration. What part of "some Native groups have no mechanism to bring in an outsider" are you having trouble comprehending?

For example, the Yahi do not even give their names to strangers - the last one alive was known as "Ishi", his word for "man", because there was no way for him to be introduced to others in a manner allowing him to give his real name. How the fuck do you think a group like that is going to incorporate outsiders? Moot point, actually - they're all dead. So I guess we don't have to worry about them.

You, and loomer and straha are painfully ignorant of just how diverse the Native North Americans were/are, how many different cultures, how many different social systems. Some would be happy to bring others into their tribes and cultures. Others would literally prefer to die out than to allow that to happen - the Yahi did die, others are on their way. I guess anyone living in those areas is shit out of luck, huh?

I honestly don't know where to begin here.

"Restored" just straight-up tells me you're being disingenuous here. Bringing up a group of people who are all dead and who we know very very little about because they were exterminated by Californian settlers, in order to argue that Native people just would have to ethnically cleanse "outsiders" because of said group and because of policies that you very obviously don't understand the context of in contemporary Native national laws, is, well, evil. There is no better word for such a twisty use of American history to make your point. It is akin to people who argued against women's suffrage by pointing to the domination of women by their spouses in law to conclude that women would thus provide an additional vote for their husband rather than voting their own conscience.

I cannot speak with full authority on the precise context of said laws. I will merely note that some of them are in the same context as blood quantum laws- an effective imposition on said nations with genocidal intent, and others are in the same context as Native-focused intellectual property laws, attempting to limit people claiming national status in order to practice plastic shamanism or exploit traditional art for money. They are not, in fact, what you are intimating them to be, an effort to maintain a clean and total separation between the particular nation and all other human beings, (well, I suspect you may well mean between the particular nation and white people, but never mind that) as you would, if you had the level of social intimacy you claimed, understand, because the Navajo Nation does not allow for formal legal adoption into tribal membership but does not ban mixed marriages, does not exclude children of mixed marriages from tribal membership, does not restrict outsiders from travel through Navajo Nation land except on religious grounds that apply to everyone.

Indeed, even if said laws were to be continued infinitely, that does not prevent reindigenization, that simply requires the creation of new categories, perhaps new national groups, in order to retain any such distinction while still recognizing the efforts to integrate with the rightful residents of the land and live with them rather than over them.

Which is the key problem here. You are presuming a kind of formal neutrality that does not exist. You are presuming that the Native hostility to white people participating in their cultures which you perceive (never mind that it really doesn't exist to the same extent you're inventing) is a cultural black box, rather than being predicated on the problem that white participation is often done from a position of superiority, or even appropriation. Thus, to suggest that the hostility would remain even in a context where white superiority was explicitly disdained and a formal position of humility and accommodation was adopted is a rather enormous settler move to innocence, though not the largest one you engage in in this post.

[They would naturally leave as soon as possible, because undoubtedly the future Broomsticks and Yans would find living in a decolonized United States of America so intolerable as to make anywhere else appealing.

So... what qualifies YOU to know my mental state? You know fuck-all about me.

I guess you completely missed the part where I stated I was married for 30 years to a man whose family was Eastern Band Cherokee. I fucking married someone from one of those cultures you worship. So you've got some fucking nerve stating I'm a bigot. How fucking well do YOU know even one person with an actual ancestral claim to North American real estate?

Another settler move to innocence. "I can't be racist, I'm married to a Native person, and anyways you clearly can't possibly know any Native people yourself if you advocate this silly decolonization business, you must just worship and fetishize them!"

Oh, no fucking problem - let's change the whole fucking world while we're at it. What the hell makes you think the majority of the world's population shares your goals for the world? Maybe we can all sit in a circle and sing "Kum-by-yah" to make it happen.

The difference is that because I have actually met and known Native Americans I don't view them with romanticized notions - they're people, just like all the other people, with the same range of saints and sinners, generosity and greed, tolerance and intolerance. Holy fuck, they can't even agree amongst themselves what they want - that's why there are not one but THREE Cherokee nations these days, rinse and repeat across the continent. What about those folks of Native descent who chose to assimilate and are happily in the mainstream culture rather than their ancestral one? Or don't they count, too?

You assume everyone is going to see the Native cultures and languages as superior and discard their own languages and cultures in favor of someone else's. Why? What possible thing in society or history lead you to believe this could ever occur on the scale required for people to vote the dissolution of their current nation and convert it into 500+ separate entities? And that those 500+ entities are all going to be equally receptive to adopting outsides into their culture?

So your argument here is that "actually, the vast majority of the world's people LIKE the world order in which tourism primarily flows monodirectionally and laws are written and enforced to favor tourists and expatriates from more powerful countries, such that they can in some cases get away with literal murder. If they want anything at all, they want stronger barriers, more nationalism, and unending hatred and suspicion." I have no real comment here, beyond you missing the point that within the world that decolonization advocates want to create, this would be quite practical.

"What about the people who chose to assimilate" is a really fascinating question. If you were inclined to respond honestly and openly, I'd wonder what exactly you think would happen in the process of reindigenization. Do you think that baseball would be criminalized? People thrown in jail for playing catch? Would rock and roll be outlawed, in your mind? It's a fascinating question in what it implies about your perceptions, but it's also so plainly stupid I regret acknowledging it now.

Your argument here, it seems, is:

1. The current state of affairs is, if not good, so much better than decolonization with reindigenization that there is no comparison.
2. You know this because you know Native people and you have managed to recognize them as humans.
3. Because your opponents support decolonization with reindigenization, they obviously have no social intimacy with Native people. No friendships, no fuckbuddydom, no romantic or sexual long-term relationships.
4. Adopting the language and culture of the people you live among is a recognition of their superiority (!!!) and as such reindigenization is impossible because it would involve white people recognizing the superiority of Native people and that's just not going to happen because history offers no examples of people assimilating voluntarily (?).

I will make no comment here about what exactly 4. implies about assimilated Native people and whiteness. I think it stands for the critical reader to simply look at the chain of "What about Native people who've assimilated to white culture, aren't they valid" and "Assimilation means recognizing the superiority of what you're assimilating to" and stroke their chin thoughtfully, brow furrowed, and go, "Hmmm".

How cute - you continue to attempt to construct a strawman of my position.

Again - you keep blasting past such points as bringing up the split of the Cherokee into three nations not one. My description of how the Semiole were formed of refugees and displaced the prior inhabitants of the region to Louisiana. I've discussed recent issues between the Seneca (who have also split into multiple groups) and New York State. Anyone reading this thread can see that I am far more aware of the current (as well as past) diversity of Native groups than you are.

I "blast past" them because they're just irrelevant noise you're using to try and summon up an ability to speak for Native people as a white person, while I, and Straha, and Loomer, are constructing our arguments not on any kind of presumed closeness to Nativeness (itself yet another settler move to innocence) but on broader questions of law, justice, and equity. So you can claim to be the Lorax-but-for-Natives all you like, it's still fundamentally irrelevant to the argument and really rather pathetic.

Oh my god - you are truly amazing.

I have at this point studied six languages other than English, none of which are Germanic in origin, one of which has a VSO word order which is not at all the usual rule for Indo-European languages, and one of which is from the Afroasiatic language group. But hey, you're just assuming. I'm not claiming anything like actual fluency in any of them although in my best of the lot I was able to travel to the European country of origin and effectively communicate with the people living there so I have some ability to use it. It's precisely because I have studied other languages I know just how fucking hard it is to learn another language, especially one outside your native language family.

I mean, fuck, a lot of Native nations are having trouble just getting their own people to learn their language, much less outsiders. For that matter, so are a lot of language minorities in places like Europe.

You are suggesting that people are going to voluntarily
1) Give up an internationally dominant and advantageous language like English
2) Learn an obscure, minority language with a radically different structure and vocabulary
3) Maintain this going forward without contamination from outside North America

Absolutely fucking nothing supports the notion of this happening. In reality, what really happens (and has done so throughout history)
1) People give up their local languages for an internationally dominent and advantageous language
2) The obscure, minority languages, if they survive at all, survive in a hybridized form with the more powerful language

History saw this with Roman Latin dominating across much of Europe, hybridizing with local languages to generate the Romance languages like Spanish, French, Romanian, etc. History saw this happen in England when the French invaded and the native Anglo-Saxon hybridized with Norman French to make the language we're writing and reading right now.

This notion of the "invader descendants" giving up their own culture and language, adopting that of the (mostly vanished) natives flies in the face of all past experience that I'm aware of - if you can provide and exception please do so.

This even supposes that this is what the Natives want - which recent lawsuits demanding that the mainstream culture STOP using cultural appropriations, demanding that the names of sports teams, college mascots, and so on be changed to eliminate references to Native cultures would seem to put a lie to. You are the one who treats the Natives as something other than people, assuming they are in lockstep in views and opinions and that your views and opinions are theirs. And they aren't. Sure, some Natives think the way you do. A lot more of them do NOT.

"Just because you're unable to learn languages"

"How dare you, I am unable to learn languages because learning languages is soooo hard"

No comment.

Your argument here is probably your greatest settler move to innocence yet. "The powerful do what they want and the weak are crushed, but there is no moral component to this". If that truly is your view of the world, rather than a psychological effort to avoid feeling any responsibility for colonization, one wonders why you are talking and not trying to beat me to submission in person.

I mean, your historical argument ignores that the English speak English, not Norman French, and thus the invaders genuinely did adopt the language and culture of the people they conquered. Other examples would include the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the Norse in Russia and Ukraine, the Jurchen Jin, the Mongols, and Manchu in China... But that's not really relevant.

Because what you say next is that racist mascots are equivalent to what is being proposed with reindigenization. Either you are unable to see any difference, in which case you are not competent to participate in this discussion or any discussion on race, or you are arguing that cultural appropriation is righteous and good, which seems unlikely but which I must hold out as a possibility, or you are arguing for total segregation (which certainly is eyebrow-raising in context of your repeated use of your husband as a human shield and your argument that I am denigrating assimilated Native people).

Or, what I suspect is most likely, you are adopting an incoherent, waffling, insipid argument in order to try and get people to declare decolonization as the real racism. Contemptible.

The Jews waited, hoped for, and planned for nearly two thousand years to restore Israel. It wasn't some notion born out of the ashes of WWII. You are just fucking ignorant about what you're talking about. The only reason I still engage with you is for those in the audience who might read your bullshit and be misled by it.

I'll also point out that Jews are well known for not encouraging conversion and Israel is currently under fire for alleged ethnic cleansing of Arabs from their territory - precisely the thing you claim will not happen. Again, history puts a lie to your assertions.

(I'll also mention the longstanding moratorium on Israel v. Palestine disputes on SD.net - I mention it in passing but I have no intention of actually discussing that topic.)

This is literal anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing. Zionism, the political movement that called for the creation of a Jewish state in the face of antisemitism, emerged in the second half of the 19th century. The idea that there was a 2000-year effort to restore Israel is utter bunkum. It's less malevolent than the Blood Libel, but it's still attributing conspiratorial powers to Jewish people entirely absent any external signs of coordination to create a reformed Israel and Judah.

The actual shaping of the Israeli state took place in a few short years during the 1940s and 1950s. The entire point is that you are making comparisons that are not accurate because the proposed method of decolonization is laid out as a gradual process rather than a hurried effort to establish a new state after the end of the First Arab-Israeli War on the mix of local Mizrahi Palestinians, previous Zionist migrants, and the recent migrants. People have talked in terms of centuries, and absent utterly asinine beliefs about 2000-year conspiracies, we are talking at most in terms of 60-70 years when we discuss the formation of Israel.

It does sum up your post quite well that you invoke the question of Palestine and Palestinians only to inform me that I can't respond in order to conclude it. Not only dubiously relevant, but bad faith too!

[Straha]

Broomstick, I'm going to level with you.

You've engaged in a comical (and possibly deliberate) misreading of a post by Effie, and an act that falls somewhere on the spectrum between racist micro-aggression and full on racist with loomer. Until you correct the former and own and apologize for the latter I really don't see the value of engaging with you in this thread.

If you have a problem with my posting take it up with a moderator. I'm not at your beck and call either.

Look, Broomy. You're acting like you deserve to be treated with respect when:

A. You've not had the decency or respect to read posts that were in reply to yours.
B. Have shown what amounts to negative information about what you're talking about, for instance being flat out wrong in just about every aspect of your description of what happened with the Seneca in New York, and have reacted with vituperation when this is explained or when it is expected that you engage in any modicum of research on your own.
C. Engaged in an explicitly racially charged rhetoric (that even Darth Yan recognized as being problematic!).

All this combined with the fact that you refuse to engage in self-reflection is fucking astounding. The fact that this occurs when it's dealing with Native folks doesn't seem to be coincidental (and, frankly, this isn't the first time you've engaged in this sort of behaviour when discussing non-white folk). You're not a good faith actor at this point, you are a BBQ Becky or a Permit Patty acting as if your privilege fucking entitles you to be an authority and the fact that it isn't seems more upsetting to you than anything else in this thread.

So, in short, check your privilege or fuck off.

[Darth Yan]

I largely agree with broomstick in the grand scheme. She did reply as well. You’re arguments were just utopian nonsense. Another issue is that she’s busy and has a life

The fact is that
1.) due to the fact that natives are diverse no solution will be clean (even the Cherokee don’t fully agree on what to do. Some are fine assimilating into American culture. By effie’s Logic they’re race traitors). You arrogantly presume to speak for all of them.
2.) certain groups do not accept outsiders. So some of the new nations will certainly want to expel outsiders or at least discriminate if new nations are formed.
3.) Natives are a minority. If they’re to have meaningful control of the process (ie whites blacks Latinos don’t crowd them out) they’ll have to be an ethnostate. It’s why Israel forcibly expelled 80% of the Arab population back in 48. This isn’t hyperbole. Any state that’s run by a minority is going to be discriminatory.

Also Effie missed the points about language. Learning ONE language can be challenging, let alone hundreds. Secondly the languages are dying out for the most part (even many natives don’t speak them anymore). Third given that English is an easy to use international language there’s no reason to discard it and in fact it makes things worse.

Her point was very clear. Just like white people natives are complex. They can be kind generous and intelligent....and greedy and selfish. A lot of the land natives were expelled from was land THEY took from other tribes. By decolonization logic the land should be returned to the very first tribes.

[Broomstick]

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Nativism is idiotic regardless of who preaches it.

Like it or not some progress was being made in regard to native rights so decolonizing is hardly the only option. You seem to think that as long aaa it’s not white people nativism is ok.

Please go back, read my post, then actually respond to it instead of repeating yourself.

And here we once again have Effie dismissing something he doesn't agree with as (take your pick) irrelevant, "babbling", incoherent, a repeat, or otherwise dismissing what isn't his own viewpoint.

Keep this up, Effie, and sooner or later you'll find yourself violating a board rule on debate.

I honestly don't know where to begin here.

And yet, you go on and on...

If you "don't know where to begin" you could try "shut the fuck up" until you figure it out. But, of course, you won't.

"Restored" just straight-up tells me you're being disingenuous here. Bringing up a group of people who are all dead and who we know very very little about because they were exterminated by Californian settlers, in order to argue that Native people just would have to ethnically cleanse "outsiders" because of said group and because of policies that you very obviously don't understand the context of in contemporary Native national laws, is, well, evil. There is no better word for such a twisty use of American history to make your point. It is akin to people who argued against women's suffrage by pointing to the domination of women by their spouses in law to conclude that women would thus provide an additional vote for their husband rather than voting their own conscience.

Once again, Effie mistakes stating the existence of something for approval of something.

One more time, because you are so monumentally dense, stubborn, stupid, and vapid: The Yahi are an EXAMPLE, not mentioned as a universal. You DO understand what the word "example" means, yes?

Let me write it in crayon for you:

1) Some Native groups are open to outsiders coming into the group
2) Some Native groups are not open to outsiders coming into the group.
3) The Cherokee are an example of #1
4) The Yahi are an example of #2
5) Neither state - open or not-open - is a universal among existing Native groups in North America
6) The open/non-open status of any one group should not be assumed to be the case for all groups

I cannot speak with full authority on the precise context of said laws.

You could shut the fuck up until you do more research.

I will merely note that some of them are in the same context as blood quantum laws- an effective imposition on said nations with genocidal intent, and others are in the same context as Native-focused intellectual property laws, attempting to limit people claiming national status in order to practice plastic shamanism or exploit traditional art for money.

Do you have any conception at all of what "blood quantum laws" actually are? How they are actually applied? How they interact with long-standing tribal custom/law? Who imposed them? Who maintains them?

The concept was not even widely or consistently applied until the 1930's, and is certainly neither required under Federal or tribal law and far, far from universal in determining tribal membership.

Documentation on US Census data and genealogical information has historically been more common as a determinant of tribal membership than blood quantum laws, and is often not only required but given more weight than blood quanta. Current blood quanta rules are established by the tribes themselves, which is why they vary all over the place, from "none at all" to "more than half" (the Ute, requiring 5/8). They are not imposed from the outside any longer and indeed in the 21st Century many Native groups have redefined their own rules on this matter.

As for the intellectual property laws - yeah, Native groups are pissed off at the long-term practice of people from outside their group profiting off their culture, their names, and stereotypes while they suffer discrimination and grinding poverty. Good for them, it's past time they get redress for exploitation.

They are not, in fact, what you are intimating them to be, an effort to maintain a clean and total separation between the particular nation and all other human beings, (well, I suspect you may well mean between the particular nation and white people, but never mind that) as you would, if you had the level of social intimacy you claimed, understand, because the Navajo Nation does not allow for formal legal adoption into tribal membership but does not ban mixed marriages, does not exclude children of mixed marriages from tribal membership, does not restrict outsiders from travel through Navajo Nation land except on religious grounds that apply to everyone.

First of all, fuck you for calling me a bigot again. Stop fucking reading shit into my words that aren't there.

1) Never said there was a "clean separation" - if there is a Native American group anywhere that doesn't have some admixture of non-North American genes by this point I am unaware of their existence.

2) I've been speaking about... let's see... Cherokee, Hopi, Yahi, Navajo... a whole shitload of different groups. Yet you (once again) try to extrapolate a specific case (Navajo) to the universal, which they are not. What rules the Navajo live under is fucking irrelevant to what rules the other 500+ Native groups live under.

You listed the Navajo - bravo, you can Google.

I'm a little more familar with the Cherokee, so let's contrast two of the three groups with the Navajo

Cherokee Nation, in Oklahoma: no blood quantum required for membership, in fact, they ignore it completely. Membership is based on establishing lineal descent from census records, the Dawes Roll, and genealogical information.

Eastern Band Cherokee, located in the ancestral Cherokee lands of North Carolina and nearby areas (more on that in a bit). Require BOTH documentation of lineal descent from census record, genealogical information, and the Baker Rolls AND 1/16 blood quanta.

Two more differences: The Cherokee Nation have a reservation. The Eastern Band do not - they have a land trust, which is a different legal structure of land claim. In addition, many people who either are formal members of the Eastern Band or could claim such membership if they wanted to do so own land under as American citizens under the same rules as everyone else - they saved up money and bought it. So... do they count as Natives or Colonials? If an Eastern Band Cherokee buys a house in Chicago area they part of the "colonials" or a Native?

Indeed, even if said laws were to be continued infinitely, that does not prevent reindigenization, that simply requires the creation of new categories, perhaps new national groups, in order to retain any such distinction while still recognizing the efforts to integrate with the rightful residents of the land and live with them rather than over them.

You still haven't explained how this works with extinct tribes and their former lands.

And it sounds like you want "re-arrange" Native groups that don't fit into your scheme to fit YOUR notions of how things should be rather than asking the people involved.

Even if you just limit the conversation to Native peoples, WHO is to be the "rightful owners" of a piece of land? Who is the "rightful owner" of, say, Kendall, Florida? The Seminole? Or the Calusa, who were displaced in the 1700's by the people who became the Seminole? Who owns the disputed lands in Arizona, the Hopi or the Navajo? There is a long-standing conflict between the Sioux and Pawnee groups as well. Those are just the ones I know about, with 500+ groups there are surely more than just those.

You don't have an answer for these problems. You assume there is some neat correlation between "Native group X" and "area of land Y" and not only isn't that the case today, it has NEVER been the case.

Which is the key problem here. You are presuming a kind of formal neutrality that does not exist. You are presuming that the Native hostility to white people participating in their cultures which you perceive (never mind that it really doesn't exist to the same extent you're inventing) is a cultural black box, rather than being predicated on the problem that white participation is often done from a position of superiority, or even appropriation. Thus, to suggest that the hostility would remain even in a context where white superiority was explicitly disdained and a formal position of humility and accommodation was adopted is a rather enormous settler move to innocence, though not the largest one you engage in in this post.

There is extensive documentation at this point of various Native groups not wanting outsiders regardless of race or ethnicity to become part of their group. Unlike you, I take them at their word. I don't assume they're all going to be equally welcoming of outsiders due to some magical transformation of "decolonization". Why the fuck WOULD all of those people move in lockstep? You're making assumptions about Native cultures that are completely baseless.

It's not even about "hostility", sometimes it really is about belief and culture. To take a small trek to the opposite side of the world, Druze do not admit outsiders, either. Other cultures strongly discourage converts/immigrants not because of animosity towards others but because their belief system/requirements make a strong barrier to admission.

Another settler move to innocence. "I can't be racist, I'm married to a Native person, and anyways you clearly can't possibly know any Native people yourself if you advocate this silly decolonization business, you must just worship and fetishize them!"

Being married to someone in a group doesn't bar having a racist attitude, but it does make it considerably less likely than in someone who didn't.

And to clarify, I don't think "decolonization" is "silly", I think it is stupidly based on ignorance.

And you can stop typing "move to innocence" since by context you clearly mean "lying" - if you're going to call me a liar have the balls to actually call me a liar.

And yes, you DO "fetishize" Native groups if you think that they are going to make decisions in unison, be universally enlightened and peaceful, and not have unsavory individuals willing to use this "decolonization" bullshit for private ends and exploitation of others.

So your argument here is that "actually, the vast majority of the world's people LIKE the world order in which tourism primarily flows monodirectionally and laws are written and enforced to favor tourists and expatriates from more powerful countries, such that they can in some cases get away with literal murder. If they want anything at all, they want stronger barriers, more nationalism, and unending hatred and suspicion."

One more time: THE RECOGNITION THAT SOMETHING EXISTS IN NO WAY CONDONES OR APPROVES OF ITS EXISTENCE. Historically the powerful have fucked over the weak. Short of genetically re-engineering the human race (if that is even possible) I don't see that changing. That's not approval, that's not "liking" something, that's history you ridiculous moron.

I have no real comment here, beyond you missing the point that within the world that decolonization advocates want to create, this would be quite practical.

Yeah, pure communism would be grand too except in the real world it doesn't work. Your proposal requires human beings who are different than all human beings that have existed up to this point. While individual human beings might be kind, generous, etc. in large groups they tend to range from bullies to out-and-out conquering assholes. Again, that is not approval, that is history.

"What about the people who chose to assimilate" is a really fascinating question. If you were inclined to respond honestly and openly, I'd wonder what exactly you think would happen in the process of reindigenization. Do you think that baseball would be criminalized?

Where the FUCK do you get that notion? Why would baseball be criminalized? That makes no sense whatsoever.

People thrown in jail for playing catch?

Dah fuck? Seriously, what mushrooms are you eating? EVERY culture on Earth plays "catch", it's part of human behavioral repertoire.

Would rock and roll be outlawed, in your mind? It's a fascinating question in what it implies about your perceptions, but it's also so plainly stupid I regret acknowledging it now.

I don't know where the fuck you're getting these ludicrous notions. Again, are you eating magic mushrooms or something?

1. The current state of affairs is, if not good, so much better than decolonization with reindigenization that there is no comparison.

>sigh<

THE RECOGNITION THAT SOMETHING EXISTS IN NO WAY CONDONES OR APPROVES OF ITS EXISTENCE.

3. Because your opponents support decolonization with reindigenization, they obviously have no social intimacy with Native people. No friendships, no fuckbuddydom, no romantic or sexual long-term relationships.

No, it's not because you support decolonization, it's because you clearly have no understanding of Native Americans as human beings in every sense of the word. And a very superficial understanding of their cultures.

4. Adopting the language and culture of the people you live among is a recognition of their superiority (!!!) and as such reindigenization is impossible because it would involve white people recognizing the superiority of Native people and that's just not going to happen because history offers no examples of people assimilating voluntarily (?).

Uh, no - adopting the language and culture of those who have conquered you (because lets not mince words here) is usually required by economic forces if none other, and frequently additional pressures in the form of physical coercion are applied.

And you are betraying your own racial bias/biogtry by constantly harping on about "white people". In reality this is going to affect millions of people of African and Asia descent as well - do you simply "forget" about them or do you think they're all going to be somewhere else when your proposed paradise is voted into existence?

Even when there is NO coercion minority languages have a tendency to die out. As an example, Yiddish in the US is dying out because young people are simply not interested in learning it. It serves no economic advantage, and young Americans would be better served by learning, say, Spanish or Mandarin. As long as there are some ethnoreligious enclaves that use it remaining it probably won't entirely die out, but it's getting to be less and less important. German dialect among the Amish is suffering the same fate, becoming more and more a liturgical language rather than an everyday one as the young Amish speak more English even in the home. Again, as long as the Amish continue to exist it is unlikely to die out completely but it's in a sharp decline. As such languages decline in number of speakers and daily use they also fail to keep up with things like changing technology and thus tend to lack words for many modern things... which is often bandaged up by the speakers importing words and phrases from the surrounding dominant language(s).

This has happened again and again and again around the world and throughout history. It has nothing to do with what I think or approve of.

I will make no comment here about what exactly 4. implies about assimilated Native people and whiteness. I think it stands for the critical reader to simply look at the chain of "What about Native people who've assimilated to white culture, aren't they valid"

Well... DO they count?

Or do they have to be coerced converted to your viewpoint as well?

MOST Native Americans don't live on reservations. Plenty of folks with actual documented Native ancestry aren't interested in learning their ancestors' language(s), or reclaiming property thousands of miles away, and enjoy living in the mainstream culture. Just as there are non-Native who learn/study Native languages and cultures and in some case marry into/join such groups. You want the latter group but wholly discount the existence of the former group.

I "blast past" them because they're just irrelevant noise you're using to try and summon up an ability to speak for Native people as a white person, while I, and Straha, and Loomer, are constructing our arguments not on any kind of presumed closeness to Nativeness (itself yet another settler move to innocence) but on broader questions of law, justice, and equity.

Yet you have NO protection for people who would be displaced by Native groups who decided they don't want outsiders on their land - what is just or equitable about that?

"Just because you're unable to learn languages"

"How dare you, I am unable to learn languages because learning languages is soooo hard"

The fact that adults are seldom able to achieve true fluency when learning a language past adolescence is well documented. The fact that learning languages unrelated to your own is more difficult than learning related ones is also well documented. This is not my opinion, it's something that's been observed over and over.

Some of the Native languages are considered extremely difficult by linguists, you know, people who study and learn languages professionally. Among them, Navajo is often held up as an example of an extremely difficult language to learn unless one grows up speaking it.

Your scheme requires that 300 million people give up internationally useful languages like English, Spanish, and French in exchange for obscure languages unknown outside North America (except, perhaps, to a tiny group of academics), some of which, like Navajo, are widely considered extremely difficult languages to learn.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

Your argument here is probably your greatest settler move to innocence yet. "The powerful do what they want and the weak are crushed, but there is no moral component to this". If that truly is your view of the world, rather than a psychological effort to avoid feeling any responsibility for colonization, one wonders why you are talking and not trying to beat me to submission in person.

It's not my opinion, it's history. It's what has happened again and again and again over time. Moral component? I think it's awful but again, recognizing that something happened is in no way an approval of what happened.

I mean, your historical argument ignores that the English speak English, not Norman French, and thus the invaders genuinely did adopt the language and culture of the people they conquered.

Except that many English kings spoke little to no English for centuries after the conquest, and the English that survived was so divorced from prior Anglo-Saxon that we invented a new name for the language. It wasn't just vocabulary changes but changes in grammar and syntax as well. No, the invading Normans did not adopt the native language for centuries, and the culture they "adopted" was so altered by their influence as to be something new and different.

Or, what I suspect is most likely, you are adopting an incoherent, waffling, insipid argument in order to try and get people to declare decolonization as the real racism.

I'm not the one constantly screaming "racism!" here. I do think that what you propose as decolonization would result in ethnic cleansing in at least some portions of North America because not everyone is nice or kind or generous.

This is literal anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing. Zionism, the political movement that called for the creation of a Jewish state in the face of antisemitism, emerged in the second half of the 19th century. The idea that there was a 2000-year effort to restore Israel is utter bunkum. It's less malevolent than the Blood Libel, but it's still attributing conspiratorial powers to Jewish people entirely absent any external signs of coordination to create a reformed Israel and Judah.

You are really accusing me of being anti-Semitic? That would be a laugh if it wasn't so sad. "Zionism" is a new manifestation of the desire of a return to Israel but that's not the whole of it. Since the middle ages (based on various written versions of the Haggadah) Jews would say "next year in Jerusalem" at the end of the seder, and that sentiment started a hell of a lot earlier than "the second half of the 19th Century". Then there are the Hebrew terms "aliyah" and "yerida" about moving into (aliyah) and out of (yerida) Jerusalem and/or the land of Israel which have been around for, again, thousands of years. The notion of a restoration of the nation of Israel to Biblical lands is far, far older than the 19th Century. It's nothing to do with a conspiracy - indeed, most of the time since the destruction of the Second Temple the Jews took no overt action towards that goal - but it's laughable to declare that such a sentiment has only been in existence since the 1800's. Zionism was basically a group of Jews who got tired of waiting for the Messiah to "fix things" in their view and took upon themselves to do it, which move was controversial among Jews in the diaspora. There are still Jews who disapprove of the "modern state of Israel" because it wasn't put into place by the still-awaited messiah, and plenty of Jews who do not approve of the government of the modern state of Israel.

Criticizing Zionism or the modern state of Israel are not inherently anti-Semitic acts, even if such criticism is often seen among anti-Semitics. If they were, about half the Jews on the planet would be decreed "anti-Semitic" which is farcical.

It does sum up your post quite well that you invoke the question of Palestine and Palestinians only to inform me that I can't respond in order to conclude it. Not only dubiously relevant, but bad faith too!

You can respond all you want, but I had wished to caution you that there are specific rules in place on this board about discussing that conflict. Please, do review them before responding so you do not run afoul of them. I would prefer to defeat you by mercilessly crushing the so-called "logic" of your arguments rather than "win" by you being booted from the board for rule violations.

[Broomstick]

A. You've not had the decency or respect to read posts that were in reply to yours.

How do you know I didn't read them? Because I didn't respond individually to each and every single one? If I had done that I would have been criticized by you for three pages of nothing but replies to your posts.

This gets back to you resenting the fact that responding to your bullshit isn't my highest priority in life. How dare I absent myself form the forum for a few days while attending to real life instead of being at your beck and call, right?

[Straha]

A. You've not had the decency or respect to read posts that were in reply to yours.

How do you know I didn't read them? Because I didn't respond individually to each and every single one? If I had done that I would have been criticized by you for three pages of nothing but replies to your posts.

Because you're acting as if your recent posts haven't already been comprehensively answered? Like, if you want to advance the argument that you've read those posts then... sure... but then you're basically conceding the "Broomstick doesn't understand how to read" arg that I made above on this page. Which, fair, I suppose (and seems to mesh perfectly with why you didn't respond to point B of my post), but if your argument for why I should take you seriously is "I'm an idiot who can't remember what was said in previous pages" well... I'm still not going to take you seriously.

Also interesting to note that you cut out of this post the discussion of the racial invective you've engaged in. Just because you keep ignoring it doesn't mean it's going to go away, and frankly the fact that you're acting like it will kills any good will I might have had in reading that exchange. You engaged in a racist act, when are you going to own it and apologize?

[Effie]

I largely agree with broomstick in the grand scheme. She did reply as well. You’re arguments were just utopian nonsense. Another issue is that she’s busy and has a life

The fact is that
1.) due to the fact that natives are diverse no solution will be clean (even the Cherokee don’t fully agree on what to do. Some are fine assimilating into American culture. By effie’s Logic they’re race traitors). You arrogantly presume to speak for all of them.
2.) certain groups do not accept outsiders. So some of the new nations will certainly want to expel outsiders or at least discriminate if new nations are formed.
3.) Natives are a minority. If they’re to have meaningful control of the process (ie whites blacks Latinos don’t crowd them out) they’ll have to be an ethnostate. It’s why Israel forcibly expelled 80% of the Arab population back in 48. This isn’t hyperbole. Any state that’s run by a minority is going to be discriminatory.

Also Effie missed the points about language. Learning ONE language can be challenging, let alone hundreds. Secondly the languages are dying out for the most part (even many natives don’t speak them anymore). Third given that English is an easy to use international language there’s no reason to discard it and in fact it makes things worse.

Her point was very clear. Just like white people natives are complex. They can be kind generous and intelligent....and greedy and selfish. A lot of the land natives were expelled from was land THEY took from other tribes. By decolonization logic the land should be returned to the very first tribes.

"Demographics are destiny" is just straight-up Nazi rhetoric. I'm not going to engage with someone who's either a Nazi or is so immersed in Nazi sludge, shoveling it so eagerly into their mouth, that they point to birth rates and population percentages as determinative of national character.

[Effie]

And here we once again have Effie dismissing something he doesn't agree with as (take your pick) irrelevant, "babbling", incoherent, a repeat, or otherwise dismissing what isn't his own viewpoint.

Keep this up, Effie, and sooner or later you'll find yourself violating a board rule on debate.

I'm a woman, bitch. I am also a trans woman and a lesbian, which I have referred to in conversations where you were present before. And you have also indicated that you loathe me on a personal level, and that you consider it acceptable to engage in deliberately offensive behavior towards marginalized people using their marginalization if you dislike them enough.

So I must conclude that you are deliberately misgendering me, and that you are doing so with the intention of trying to provoke me into breaking a board rule so you can get me banned. I should think that any board which actually does say that misgendering trans women, lesbians, or trans lesbians is absolutely OK and anyone who reacts poorly is in the wrong, is really a rather horrifying place for any kind of reasonable debate to take place, but I strongly suspect your interpretation of the rules is rather in the wrong here.

I will not, however, continue to take part in even the disgusting sham of a reasoned discussion which has been going on with you if you are simply going to misgender me and play games around rules lawyering rather than engage honestly, not least because the body of your response consists almost entirely of wanton illiteracy. So if you have a response which doesn't begin with a sincere apology for misgendering, then I suppose you can chalk this up as a win in whatever notebook you record your presumed intellectual victories in, and label it "won by disgusting my opponent too much for them to continue."