Posted on 02/20/2020 12:06:29 PM PST by karpov
Speaking at the Oscars earlier this month, Māori director and writer Taika Waititi told his audience they were “gathered on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and the Chumash”—Native American groups who lived in and around modern Los Angeles. “We acknowledge them as the first people of this land on which our motion picture community lives and works.”
This may have struck many American viewers as unusual. But such “land acknowledgments” have been common for years in Australia, New Zealand and my own country, Canada. Originally intended as a tribute to the legacy and rights of Indigenous peoples, they quickly became assimilated into the rote protocols of public life, from school assemblies to town-council meetings. Some university professors now post them on their office doors, much like a secular mezuzah.
The practice is rooted in good intentions, and originally had real educational value. Indigenous lands in what is now Canada often were seized through a mixture of brutality and theft. In many cases, the reserves on which Indigenous peoples now live don’t even correspond with traditional territories: Tribes typically were expelled from fertile lands for the benefit of white farmers, and often were left to languish in remote flood planes with little economic value. As Canada urbanized, these communities and their histories became invisible to most Canadians. Land acknowledgments were conceived, in part, as a means to remedy this ignorance. As Toronto officials put it, the goal is to remind us “of the enduring presence and resilience of Indigenous peoples.”
Predictably, many conservatives have criticized land acknowledgments as a form of institutionalized progressive activism—especially when it comes to the more elaborate variants, which urge us to be “mindful of broken covenants” and the need to “strive to make right with all our relations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at quillette.com ...
Indians were at constant war with each other.
Slavery, genocide and ethnic expulsion were common.
So who really owns it?
Nah... it can't be owned by all of them. Which of these tribes owned it first, and which killed the other for it?
Tut! Don’t you go asking those questions like that! You might make their heads explode!
Indeed, its a stupid, meaningless comment, made to elicit PC applause.
Its like someone saying of France - "you stand on the ancestral lands of the Romans, the Gauls, the Teutons and the Normans.
How dare you! You have ruined my childhood!” But I digress….
If they’d ever advanced beyond a neolithic society, perhaps they could have held their land.
Exactly. Except all of the above were evil white people; the bottom of the oppression hierarchy.
Generally, Indians did not recognize individual ownership of land. Since many were nomadic, it made sense. But they didn’t hesitate to lay claim collectively to whatever land they wandered onto.
I thought Los Angeles was the ancestral lands of the Dodgers and the Lakers. :-P
The single cell ameoba is the original life form in California. So you so called native people can stuff it.
“While Waititi’s acknowledgment at the Oscars was concise and understated, the more ambitious land-acknowledgment rituals that have become fashionable in Canada present a much broader message. In many cases, they convey the idea that Indigenous peoples retain a real—if vaguely defined—moral ownership over the entire country, not just the areas that they control through treaties or other legal instruments.”
It’s the inevitable conclusion if you start down that road.
In reality you only own that which you are willing and able to defend by whatever means at your disposal. Nothing else supercedes that.
Admitting off the bat that you don’t own something simply means you’ve exposed to everyone that you are not willing to defend that something as your own, which means you won’t own it for much longer.
No human beings are indigenous to the western hemisphere. Humans came here from Asia. Claiming that the first to arrive are native while the rest of us are not is more BS from leftists.
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