Australia's Aboriginal Communities - Beyond Hope?

[Túrin Turambar]

I (and most other Australians who pay close attention to current events) know that conditions in Australia’s remote aboriginal communities (in which about 200,000 of the nation’s 400,000 aborigines live) are shocking. However, over recent days news stories have started breaking out which show that it is far, far worse than I had thought.

The original story from Tuesday involved a four-year-old girl who drowned because a man held her under water while he anally raped her. A huge cross-media debate broke out about sexual abuse and violent crime in these remote communities, with stories such as this showing up, confirming many of our worst fears.

It appears that child rape is nothing unusual in remote aboriginal communities. It is almost at the level of an acceptable fun pastime, and the perpetrators are rarely charged. When they are, they are usually given nominal sentences. For example, a man who brutally assaulted and anally raped a 14-year-old girl was given one month in jail. Men who gang-raped a three-year-old where not charged at all (IIRC). The ‘white’ courts are reluctant to involve themselves in these issues, and 20% of aborigines are in jail as it is (40% of young men). Witnesses who come forward are often threatened or killed, and police in these areas are few. A breakdown of society has meant that traditional laws are also often no longer enforced.

I started a thread on talk discussing the issues facing indigenous peoples in general, both in Australia and overseas, and looking at broad issues like poverty and substance abuse. Here, though, I want to look at something more specific.

This story makes a controversial claim – that sexual violence in aboriginal communities is not simply a result of dysfunction and poverty but has some cultural basis. Naturally, aboriginal culture has not accepted child rape in the past (no culture does) but that a complex set of factors has led to it becoming acceptable based on existing social norms (eg: girls being married young in arranged marriages and a patriarchal society).

There are a lot of questions raised by all this. To start off with, I’d ask how we deal with the fact that sexually abusing children has come to become a fact of life for the people in these areas.

For reference, the broader TORC thread.

[Jnyusa]

Very interesting, Lord M. I have a bit to say about this, actually, but it will have to wait until this evening. Thanks for posting this.

Jn

[narya]

I'm just amazed that a post that mentions anal rape has lasted this long on TORC! You've seen my comments there. It is certainly a conundrum.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Lord M, I honestly don't know what to say about this.

[Whistler]

This has certainly been a day for threads that defy comment!

[Túrin Turambar]

It is a pretty horrifying thing to consider, but horrific conditions in indeigenous communities are a fact of life in many countries. As the final article noted, both sides of politics have traditionally side-stepped the issue - the right tends to view the abuse and violence as 'just an aboriginal thing' and tends to believe that they should help themselves while the left doesn't want to bring it to public attention for fear of reinforcing racial stereotypes.

[Hachimitsu]

Well I get pretty ticked off when people use "cultural differences" as a free pass on abuse. Also I wish people wouldn't accept that "excuse" either. That is just like using religion as an excuse for despicable things too.

I do not know too much about Mormons (I apologize for using them as an example), but didn't they give up polygamy? It seems in fact that bringing it up is a quite hurtful and it's a part of their past they .. well are not proud of.

I have said more about this on other boards so I'll stop myself here before I get too riled up.

Edit: I read your post on TORC, I think I will take an extended break on this but I would like to get back to it.

I would like to ask the question, why are their living conditions so poor? Who is responsible for paving the roads? The availability of schooling? Does Australia have reserves like Canada and the US does?

I do think things can change, but thinking regarding aboriginal people has to change. *stops self*

[Jnyusa]

Wilma: Well I get pretty ticked off when people use "cultural differences" as a free pass on abuse.

Right you are, Wilma. This is the new face of discrimination, and even extermination.

The incident this article reminded me of ... well, two incidents that I've personally experienced in the past 25 years living in Philadelphia ... The first was the attack by the City of Phialdelphia on a radical African-American organization called MOVE. (We had, by the way, a Black mayor at the time.) Under the aegis of reclaiming their African heritage, the members of MOVE all changed their last names legally to "Africa" and lived communally. Originally they were a small group of families (possibly one extended family, iirc) and a legitimate alternate lifestyle for people from an impoverished neighborhood trying to 'bootstrap' out of their socio-economic-cultural circumstance. I've heard, from friends who knew the founder well, that he was something of a visionary.

But as the movement grew, they bought up several houses in a west Philadelphia neighborhood and started to attract a real fringe element. The neighbors began to complain about the condition of MOVE properties and that the children were often found rooting for food in the neighborhood garbage cans, apparently unwashed and unfed.

City social services and police department ignored these complaints for years.

I don't recall now what triggered the actual showdown, whether neighbors went to the press, or whether negative facts came out because of publicity sought by the MOVE members themselves for their movement, or because of a lawsuit over the way their properties were maintained ... in any event, the City tried to evict them and the MOVE members refused to vacate. At some point guns were brought into two of these houses that were either right next door to each other or on the same. The arsenals were either created earlier (as the City claims) or at the time of the attempted evictions time for self-defense. SWAT teams were called in to lay seige to the houses. The seige lasted for several days. The mayor ordered a full scale assault, and ordered it to begin with the dropping of incendiary bombs from a helicopter. The fire could not be contained, and not only were all the people in the houses - men, women and children - killed but ten city blocks were destroyed.

The name of the mayor was Wilson Goode, and to this day I hear the occasional joke on TV about him being the only Mayor in U.S. history to bomb his own city.

The excuse given for letting the situation get so far out of hand was that it would have been 'discrimination' to challenge the alternative lifestyle the Africas had chosen.

Please! The neighbor who looks out her kitchen window and sees a naked, half-starved child going through her garbage - that neighbor is Black. That child is Black! The whole neighborhood was Black .... oh wait, now I'm gettting it.

The other situation was quite recent. A Black child was found looking for food in a garbage can in New Jersey and the Black property owners called the police. This time the police showed up and took the child into custody. At first they thought the child was eight or nine years old, and they took him to the hospital because he was obviously malnourished. At the hospital it was determined that he was eighteen years old, and weighed 40 pounds. At this point he is going to be crippled for life by starvation. Social Services is ordered to try and identify him and locate his parents and then comes the big surprise. <cough, mumble> Social Services knows his identify because he is already in the system. He's been in foster care most of his life with the same (Black) parents, who are also raising two other foster children. Police go to the home of these foster parents and find the other two children also crippled from long term starvation.

Who the heck is their Social worker? She's White, just by the way. And the head of Social Services is also White, just by the way. The SW has been turning in phony reports for years, decades, pretending to have done routine checks on this foster family when in fact she has never been to visit these children. The head of SS has been looking the other way because, oh gee, the problem is so huge you can't really expect us to deal with everyone effectively. Well, they were both fired, thank goodness. There was talk of criminal prosecution for them along with the foster parents, but I don't know if that actually happened. The children go into a new foster home where .... God wil ahve to be with them because it's pretty obvious that no one else will be.

But then comes the really bizarre twist. The foster parents were very active in their (Black) church, and immediately the church begins a hue and cry in the press in their defense. They're good parents, they're being prosecuted for racial reasons, and so on. And I'm thinking ... when is the last time one of those church members actually saw these children? It is unimaginable that a whole community would look the other way. But maybe not, if the threat of White slander is so fierce that any crime will be covered up.

Where indigenous Peoples are concerned, the one thing we have to remember and never forget is that we have no idea what their cultures looked liked or how they functioned prior to colonialism. When they were conquered, their communities were wiped out. In South America, the indigenous population was an estimated 200 million. The indigenous population of Brazil today is 200 thousand. Brazil is roughly the same same as the U.S. There are 1 million native Americans living in the U.S. today as native Americans (2 million who claim partial descent), compared to the estimated original 60 million. I don't know offhand what the figures are for Canada, perhaps vison knows.

Compared to this genocide, the Holocaust was a spit in the bucket. Which just goes to show that when persecution really gets a head of steam, there's hardly anyone left to tell about it. What Lord M. describes in Australia looks exactly like what a Guarani tribe attempted in Ecuador. They resolved to commit mass suicide. They wanted to do away with themselves because there was no hope.

You cannot destroy a culture and then say, "oops!" And then decide to bother them no further while they languish in obsolete reservations whose ostensible purpose is to "preserve" their culture. Kvatch and nonsense. Their culture has already been destroyed. What a shred of respect would look like would be serious reparations - not short term income transfers such as narya describes in Alaska - and a demonstrably remorseful commitment to helping these people self-determine how they will emerge into the 21st century.

It is not true that those cultures remained unchanged for thousands of years. Is our culture the same today as it was in 200 CE? They were evolving, just like us, up to the point of extermination, because that is what humans do. They have no more chance of reclaiming their pre-1492 culture than we have of reclaiming our own pre-1942 culture, and why on God's green earth would they want to? That is certainly not what they want.

This 'leave them alone' strategy is the very last nail in the coffin. It is exactly what Adolph Eichmann proposed at the Wannsee Conference when the cost of bullets was acknowledged to be prohibitive and they needed a Final Solution. You don't have to kill every single Jew, he advised. If you kill two-thirds of them, that should be enough. The rest will disappear by themselves.

That is exactly what we are doing now with Indigenous Peoples just about everywhere - watching and waiting for them to disappear by themselves.

Jn

[axordil]

Has there ever been contact between technologically disparate cultures that did not end in:

a) genocide, deliberate or disease-assisted
b) slavery
c) assimilation into the "stronger" culture by the weaker

Or some combination?

I'm not saying I approve of this, but that we have no other examples to look at that I know of. Which makes it more complicated.

[Túrin Turambar]

This might sound like a bizarre thing to say, but I’m not immedatley concerned with the poverty in the communities. Poverty can be fixed and has been fixed in a number of cases. For example, there’s an aboriginal community in South Australia that runs a vineyard, and one in the Northern Territory that runs a crab farm. With expertise, starting capital, networking and hard work other communities could make a living doing the same sort of thing.

My immediate concern in this thread is the widespread violence and abuse. There are many, many communities where the children are assaulted every night. See, for example, this article, which is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read in a newspaper.

We have always known that the aborigines live in poverty and practice widespread substance abuse. It is only emerging over this week that the communities that they live in are also afflicted by widespread sexual abuse.

I would like to ask the question, why are their living conditions so poor? Who is responsible for paving the roads? The availability of schooling? Does Australia have reserves like Canada and the US does?

In general, there are no sealed roads, no utilities, no schools, no hospitals, no police and few (if any) proper buildings in these remote communities. These things are traditionally state Government responsibilities in Australia, but there are many problems here again – a school in the Territory had to be shut down because the students were threatening the teachers with axes and machetes.

The problem here is that there is a vacuum. To explain why, I’ll probably need to briefly go over the history of indigenous policy in Australia. Originally, of course, the aborigines looked after themselves, under traditional custom and law.

The English began colonizing Australia as a penal colony in 1788. Early relations with the native people were generally good. Colonial policy at the time mandated good relations with indigenous peoples, and convicts who committed crimes against the aborigines were often punished.

The problem began after about 1810. Prior to that, there had been few free settlers in the colonies, and their boundaries were set tightly. Over the 1810s and 1820s there was an explosion out from the original settlements by free settlers looking for land. They ignored the laws about where they were allowed to settle and simply took any land they wanted. It was here that the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people began. You can see some urgent letters from the colonial authorities back to the colonial office begging them for help to stop the massacres, but not help was forthcoming.

In the 1870s, the churches began to step in and establish reserves to keep the aborigines in. There, they would preach and offer health and education services. Local authorities began to pass laws making shooting aborigines illegal (in many parts of the country their official status was ‘pest animal’). It was two late to save the Tasmanian aborigines, who were all killed in a complete genocide, but about fifteen to twenty percent of mainland aborigines survived and were moved into the reserves. The aborigines went from feral pest to endangered species. The 1870s to the 1930s saw the ‘protectionist’ approach to indigenous policy.

1901 – Federation. The new Federal Parliament passes the White Australia Policy. This creates an obvious problem – it’s easy to keep non-white people out, but what about the non-white people already living here? It was decided that they would probably die out, so they were left on their reserves in the care of the church and state and local Government.

1937 – A shift in Government policy. The indigenous people are at crisis, and so it is decided that perhaps they can be assimilated into white society. State Governments pass laws ordering that all part-aboriginal children be removed from their reserves and placed in state care. The 1930s to the 1960s saw this assimilationist policy pursued.

1960s – Aborigines gain Australian citizenship and the right to vote. Over the next ten to twenty years they leave the reserves. Laws enforcing formal discrimination (eg: in pay) are overturned and a policy of self-determination is taken.

1992 – the High Court passes the Mabo judgement, meaning that aborigines can claim native title over the land that they live in.

[if anyone would like to offer a similar timeline for the US or Canada or NZ it’d be interesting for comparison]

You can see the issue – traditional society has been broken down, and now there is no more direct state or church authority over these communities. This has left a vacuum.

The current issue now is that self-determination may not have worked. Many people, especially on the progressive end of the political spectrum, would hate to admit this. For example, this article talks about attempts to cover-up these problems for fear of promoting racism. Some 200,000 aborigines have been integrated into white society and generally reasonably well off, but another 200,000 remain in remote communities on welfare.

The big question then is – what now?

NB: There is a difference between indegnous policy in Australia and that in NZ, US, Canada and South Africa. The indigenous people of Australia were not held to have achieved a level of social order sufficient enough to be considered sovereign in any way. As such, there were no recognised authority figures in aboriginal society and the white people never attempted (or have attempted now) to make a treaty with them. US cases where the Indians were found to be domestic dependant nations have been considered by rejected by Australian courts. The indigenous people were considered to part of the local fauna.

[Jnyusa]

Ax, this is a generalization and there are certainly examples to the contrary, but I think that there are historical incidence of what I would call 'mutual assimilation' as opposed to cultural annihilation. Generally the stronger culture 'exports' more than it 'imports' but the disappearance of the colony culture does not necessarily result.

I would say that Greek and possibly Phoenician colonizing activity had this character in the large.

There are also cultures that manage to trade widely and confer parts of their culture on their trading partners without indulging in conquest. I would point to the Scandinavians as an example of this. The period of Viking conquest is uncharacteristic of the thousand years of trade that preceeded it and has specific economic antecedents that make it logically defensive rather than aggressive.

I will try to think of some other examples, but I think that the tendency to annihilate is culture-bound. It is not a universal human characteristic as we try to tell ourselves.

Jn

[axordil]

The examples you cite, Jny, do not strike me as having real technological gaps the same way that, say, any of the European colonial powers in the 16th and 17th centuries had with the inhabitants of the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa. The Greeks, for example, during the Hellenistic period, were advanced organizationally in comparison to their tribal neighbors, but they all had pretty much the same kind of muscle-powered weapons. A sword is a sword is a sword.

What I'm saying is not that destructive cultural contact is limited to situations where one culture is significantly more advanced than another, but that when that condition does exist, there has never been anything less than a catastrophic outcome.

Of course, pretty much all the examples of such contacts involve Europeans, don't they? Although there are the Islamic/Subsaharan Africa contacts, which are similar, minus the smallpox.

[Jnyusa]

The examples you cite, Jny, do not strike me as having real technological gaps the same way that, say, any of the European colonial powers in the 16th and 17th centuries had with the inhabitants of the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa.

I would argue that the indigenous weapons were superior. A bow and arrow is more accurate than a 16th ce musket.

The difference was not in the weaponry they possessed but in the way they viewed the purpose of conflict/warfare.

Daniel Quinn has an interesting hypothesis about this (My Ishmael). He suggests that indigenous warfare takes the form of "erratic retaliation" rather than "annihilation" and that this differing approach to warfare is a cultural marker, so to speak. Based on what anthropologists and missionaries have written about their experience with South American tribes I am inclined to give this hypothesis some weight.

It is also consistent with business research into the management of creative organizations. Successful organizations seem to settle into a pattern similar to what Quinn has described, where conflict is erratic and resources are on the whole negotiated and shared. (The erratic conflict seems to be necessary to sustain long-term cooperation.) The alternate scenario, where there is continuous competition for resources causes the business to be relatively unproductive.

Jn

[vison]

Jnyusa, I believe the figures you give for pre-conquest populations are wrong. There were never 200 million native Americans in all of South and North America combined. I wonder where you got those figures?

I have never read such numbers before, even in Ronald Wright's book. I don't have time to look it all up right now, but I think those numbers are very wrong.

Not that that makes any difference, mind you. It doesn't.

[Túrin Turambar]

The examples you cite, Jny, do not strike me as having real technological gaps the same way that, say, any of the European colonial powers in the 16th and 17th centuries had with the inhabitants of the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa.

I would argue that the indigenous weapons were superior. A bow and arrow is more accurate than a 16th ce musket.

It isn’t so much a case of bows vs gunpowder IMHO. If we use the Americas as an example, the colonists had horses and the natives didn’t. More importantly, the colonists had iron and the natives didn’t. It’s also worth remembering that gunpowder weapons have a terrifying psychological affect on those who have never encountered them before. The conquistadores did manage to defeat native armies thousands strong in their conquest of the Aztecs and Inca (eg: the defeat of the Texcalteca by Cortez). Also, while I don’t know about the Inca, the Aztecs were a colonial power in their own right.

Still, the nature of the military conquest of the native peoples isn’t that related to the topic at hand. Not every conquered people turns to alcoholism and sex abuse.

[narya]

The Russians killed, enslaved or assimilated (raped) all of the Aleuts as they made their way along the Aleutian Chain from Russia to Alaska. But when they came to Southeast Alaska (present day Sitka) and tried to do the same thing, the Tlingit Indians routed them out, despite the fact that they were pitting spears and wooden armor against cannons. The Tlingits let the Russians resettle some time later, peacably, because they wanted their trade, and the Tlingits were highly developed traders. The Russians later had the audacity to sell all the land they had settled upon, plus all the land to the north they had never seen, to the Americans. It wasn't until the 1971 that the US government admitted to being the receivers of stolen property, and made restitution: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which gave 1/5 of Alaska back to its original owners, plus monetary reparations which were administered through local and regional native-owned corporations. I'm a shareholder of Sealaska, the Tlingit's regional corporation. Here's more on ANCSA:

http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/NPE/ancsa.html

Unlike the problems I discussed in bush Alaska, in the TORC thread, Tlingits have always been more urban, and therefore more able to blend into white culture. The question remains, though: What is a Tlingit? or what is any Aboriginal, once that person is a mainstream American or Australian? I'm of Swedish ancestry as well, but I don't call myself a Swede, or a Swedish American, or even a European American. I'm just an American.

Aboriginal peoples are being absorbed into wider cultures all over the world. The transition is very painful because there is a period of time in which the people are without any cultural identity, without anything that makes them part of a civilization and therefore civilized men and women. We need society to keep us in line. Take a group of people and refuse them entry into your civilization, while ripping away their civilization, and see what's left.

About the sidetrack issue about one civilization conquering another: I highly recommend "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. Fascinating read.

[Jnyusa]

Lord M., I'm sorry that I missed your long post earlier. We cross-posted (1 minute apart) or I would have thanked you for that thorough history.

You can see the issue – traditional society has been broken down, and now there is no more direct state or church authority over these communities. This has left a vacuum.

The current issue now is that self-determination may not have worked. Many people, especially on the progressive end of the political spectrum, would hate to admit this.

I have two thoughts about this. The first is that it depends on how one defines "self-determination." It does not sound as if sovereignty is any longer an option for these people, but that does not mean they should not be given a full voice in their own disposition. What is true in the few countries where I have bothered to know something about this issue (mainly Nicaragua and Brazil) is that the national government creates agencies or passes legislation without any input at all from the Indigenous Peoples themselves. It continues to be true in the U.S. - the State of Pennsylvania, in fact, expropriated Indian land during the 1990s and gave to the United American Indians of Delaware Valley (which functions as a sort of legal representative for multiple groups) an office building in Philadelphia as compensation. That may or may not have been an equal value exchange, but the swap was not voluntary. The Indians really did not want or need an office building in Philadelphia and they would not have agreed to this exchange if they had been given a choice.

My second thought about this is that Progressives can be horrible closet racists. My experience with people purportedly acting out of solidarity with Indigenous Tribes has not been very good. A story for another day.

vison,

Well, I had no trouble finding encyclopedic information to support your incredulity - from a Mexican encyclopedia actually.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761 ... ca.html#s2

Here's excerpts:

Scholars vary greatly in their estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived in 1492. Estimates range from 40 million to 90 million for all of the Americas, and from 2 million to 18 million for the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico.

That would be 2-18 million for all of the U.S. and Canada, and 20-70 million for South and Central America (using the upper limit for the north).

Today, as scholars explore the magnitude of the Native American population decline, they are finding that the issues are much more complex than was previously assumed. Archaeological evidence indicates that illness was increasing in the Native American population in many regions before the arrival of Columbus, probably in response to problems of population density, diet, and sanitation.

See, here's the problem. When you look at something like this which reports estimated population for all of the Americas, you get rather low figures.

But if you start going into the research on the population of individual civilizations, a slightly different picture emerges.

The source that I used when compiling Native American language groups for my students was the Native American Encyclopedia. I'm pretty sure that my general impression of population numbers came from that, and from reports published by government agencies in Brazil when it was part of my job to read that kind of thing. I tried to access the NAE online but I need my school code for the publisher, which I don't happen to know by heart. But my local library has a copy and if I can find the time during the week I'll have a look at it again.

(The following results are just from cruising the web)

The number that seems to be widely accepted for the Aztec population alone at the time of the Spanish conquest (mid-16th ce) is 25 million. Aztecs were spread over northern Mexico and the Southwest U.S, interspersed with numerous other tribes that have much lower population figures (tens of thousands). I found the estimate of 25 million quoted in several places

"Question of Conquest" by Mario Vargas Llosa in "American Educator" (Spring 1992, pp. 25-27, 47-48 )

Another article (that I forgot to copy) cited the following source for the same number: Ponting, Clive. “The Changing Face of Death” in A Green History of the World. St. Martins Press, NYC, 1991, pp. 224-239.

And a website of unknown provenance stated 20 million and gave the following three sources:

The Lost Temple of the Aztecs by Shelley Tanaka, 1998, Madison Press Books, Toronto Canada.
 
The Aztecs by Robert Nicholson and Claire Watts, 1991, Scholastic Canada Limited, Richmondhill Canada. 
 
Aztecs: the Fall of the Capital by  Richard  Platt, 1999, Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto Canada. 

I have not read these books, personally.

For the Inca population at the time of conquest, an article published by UCLA gave 10 million. It is put at 8 million in "A History of Ayacucho," New Internationalist, Issue 321 - March 2000.

The Mayan population for Guatemala alone at the time of conquest is put at 2 million in "The Maya Population of Guatemala," Demographic Diversity and Change in the Central American Isthmus, edited by Anne R. Pebley and Luis Rosero-Bixby. 1997. 117-32 pp. RAND: Santa Monica, California. In Eng.

These three nations alone take us over the minimum number for all of South and Central America, and we are talking here about a small percentage of the total land mass involved. No corner of the Americas was uninhabited when the Europeans landed, not even the islands of the Caribbean.

I think that I am probably mis-remembering the number 200 million for South America alone because this also seems now too high to me given how much of that land mass is tropical (leading to lower population density). To be honest I could not pull a publication from my shelves today that would give that kind of demographic information. I would have to do some searching to get the recent thinking on early Indian populations, but I would be very surprised if the numbers turned out to be less than 20 million for Brazil.

What happens, I think, is that scholars (or popularizers) for whom the demographic information is not the object of the research would like to use the most conservative population estimates available when they have need of such data. By conservative I do not mean the lowest numbers but those for which the best verification exists. That information will nearly always be the written record of white settlers coming into contact with the Indians. There are some instances where those numbers are larger than they should be; for example, I came across one article in which the Spanish reports regarding a tribe in Belize were compared to Mayan records of the tributes paid by that same tribe. The conclusion was that the Spaniards had exaggerated to make the threat posed by that tribe seem larger. But generally, written records are easier to defend, and nearly all of the written population records that we have are those of the White conquerors.

One of the things we are learning from archeological excavation is that the Indian populations were in fact much larger than we supposed. The population density of one Mayan city is now thought to be greater than modern Los Angeles. But there were 93 pandemics that swept through the native populations between the mid-16th ce and the mid-19th ce (link at the beginning of this post) and it is very likely that populations were already decimated by the time white settlers (in the U.S.) began to record their encounters, and also that as the Indians were pushed farther west they engaged in internecine warfare over the remaining lands.

For the whole of the Americas, it is only under duress that I would guess a number lower than 200 million, because every time a new avenue of research opens up, it turns out that there were more people here than we thought there were.

Jn

[Faramond]

There is no way Europeans could have deliberately killed 200 million indigenous people in the Americas, or whatever the accurate number is. They may have wanted to, but they certainly could not have done it. It was disease, of course, that did it. And even if the Europeans had visited with the best of intentions, it would have happened anyway. I don't think the true fact that Europeans were hostile to indigenous cultures should be mixed up with the myth that they, rather than pathogens, wiped out most of the indigenous people.


I find reparations to be the worst sort of "solution". I am at a loss to describe how much I despise this sort of inherited sin. Well, no matter. Reparations don't have a chance in hell of happening anyway.

[Jnyusa]

And even if the Europeans had visited with the best of intentions, it would have happened anyway. I don't think the true fact that Europeans were hostile to indigenous cultures should be mixed up with the myth that they, rather than pathogens, wiped out most of the indigenous people.

Yes, you're right, Faramond, that these two issues should be kept separate.

I find reparations to be the worst sort of "solution". I am at a loss to describe how much I despise this sort of inherited sin.

Well, I take the same view about these reparations as I do about slavery reparations. If one is unwilling to go all the way to genocide to get rid of the remaining populations, then appropriate reparations are the cheapest way to make the social problem associated with an underclass go away fast.

One need not think of it as inherited sin. It's like any other problem which I might find intruding on my life even though I did not personally cause it. There's no point in discussing the fairness of something that is already a fact of existence. The only issue should be finding the most effective solution.

There are economic reasons why I consider reparations to be way more effective than welfare as a long term solution.

Jn

[Túrin Turambar]

I have two thoughts about this. The first is that it depends on how one defines "self-determination." It does not sound as if sovereignty is any longer an option for these people, but that does not mean they should not be given a full voice in their own disposition. What is true in the few countries where I have bothered to know something about this issue (mainly Nicaragua and Brazil) is that the national government creates agencies or passes legislation without any input at all from the Indigenous Peoples themselves. It continues to be true in the U.S. - the State of Pennsylvania, in fact, expropriated Indian land during the 1990s and gave to the United American Indians of Delaware Valley (which functions as a sort of legal representative for multiple groups) an office building in Philadelphia as compensation. That may or may not have been an equal value exchange, but the swap was not voluntary. The Indians really did not want or need an office building in Philadelphia and they would not have agreed to this exchange if they had been given a choice.

My second thought about this is that Progressives can be horrible closet racists. My experience with people purportedly acting out of solidarity with Indigenous Tribes has not been very good. A story for another day.

I think the issue is something like this –

Any change in Government Policy to the indigenous people now can only mean more intervention. For example, fairly recently the Federal Government introduced a policy whereby aborigines would only get their welfare payments if their children were washed and in school. A lot of people complained that this was paternalistic, demeaning, and a step backwards towards the old system of reserves and licenses.

By the way, what do you mean by reparations?