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What is people's opinion on indigenous land usage and special rights? I feel a sense of cognitive dissonance, where I find myself supporting such policies as I highly value preserving and promoting indigenous culture. But there remains a tension between indigenous land rights and the liberal notion that land usage shouldn't be based on ethnicity and that the resources should benefit all of society. Particularly now with the extreme electricity prices, where people are literally dying and is being weaponised by Russia, I wonder whether indigenous people should have the right to prevent building power plants on "their" land. A related issue is exceptions to societal rules, eg. wrt animal welfare where they might get dispensation for the laws that apply to animals for the rest of society. Or in other cases laws applying to rights of their children. It's a conflict between the rights of the individual animal or member of the indigenous group, compared to the rights of the indigenous group as a whole to live according to their traditions, which I find difficult to navigate and reconcile.
When you say
Which land are you referring to? Land they claim was their historically, or land they are currently given via treaty?
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Indigenous land usage (here I take to mean reservations and the like) has resulted in some serious issues in how it is current functions in many countries. This is mainly because they tend to take a really wishy-washy middle of the road solution where the native reservations are both simultaneously mostly autonomous but also theoretically subject to federal law, and receive significant federal funding and support. The delineation of authority and responsibility is really poorly defined, especially in the context of contemporary politics where any serious federal government involvement is seen as highly circumspect and often gets accusations of colonialism.
Many of the issues with this system is exemplified with 'First Nations' politics in Canada. Many of the Indian reservations in Canada have huge problems, including persistent problem with clean drinking water. The Canadian government provides funding to the reservations for their water infrastructure, which is then largely managed by the reservation itself. The problem is that many of the 'First Nations' governments are heavily corrupt and very little of the money actually ends up doing what is supposed to. They also heavily resist any audits of their financials. So the end result is that the Canadian government continues to funnel money into reservations with no oversight, then get blamed for the water problems in the reservations and accused of racism/discrimination, or they can step in forcefully and manage it from top-down, in which case they will be accused of overriding the autonomy of 'First Nations' and accused of racism/discrimination. A similar situation also occurs with the high rates of child abuse in these communities - don't intervene and get blamed for not doing enough to help native children, or remove these kids from abusive homes then get accused of cultural genocide.
The system should go in either direction, I don't really have a strong preference which. Either 1) the native reservations should be given more autonomy from the federal government and become all-but-independent, with little support or control from the Federal government, managing their own affairs (then don't get blamed when shit goes bad), or 2) they should be given no special legal status and be subject to the exact same laws, oversight and status as every other Canadian (well, Québécois weird legal system is a discussion for another time). The middle half-arsed solution currently creates a lot of ambiguity and opportunities for abuse. For 1) I'm thinking something akin to the British Overseas Territories, or France's weird setup with New Caledonia.
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In the American case we should probably re-negotiate treaties that are still in force with the tribes. It's been over a hundred years and there's probably some efficient moves to make to improve the well-being of both parties. It'd also be nice to get a definition of tribal sovereignty down on paper instead of leave it up to the courts to figure out.
I'm guessing we don't because relations with Native Americans are an afterthought in the grand scheme of American politics, and tribal leadership don't want to jeopardize their position. If treaty ratification comes down to a popular vote, tribal members might opt to sell their reservations back to the federal government.
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I don't have any strong feelings about native american tribes until they ask for more than they've been given.
Yeah, they got the short end of the stick, but there is no limit to the number of things they could make credible claims for.
At some point its time to write off the losses and move on, which they have no incentive to do, but damn I have no sympathy left. It's as absurd as Poland's recent request for renumeration from WWII. This stuff is history.
Big exception: If a person was discriminated against, or of their parents were discriminated against while they were children, I'm okay with one time cash compensation for that event.
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Well, that's an instance of a more-general tension, I think:
You can believe that:
Diversity is good,
Integration is good,
Good things should last-
-pick at most two, courtesy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A fully-integrated society will homogenize with time, and its diversity will be lost. A society that preserves its diversity indefinitely will require some maintenance to keep it that way, probably looking like some sort of segregation, which is a concept that doesn't sound too appealing, for historical reasons. How to resolve this is no small question, but it's a question so big that I think most people can go their entire lives without having to think about it too much.
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I don't think indigenous people in the US should have any extra rights to anything, nor should they be allowed their own ghetto enclaves in which to live. It's embarrassing. They lost the war(s) and now live in cattle pans while a select few get rich because they get to have casinos. It's absurdism.
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Indigenous people are treated as special snowflakes that were untainted by conflict and aggression until corrupting white people arrived. In reality, they're like any other people on the planet albeit they were less technologically advanced and had fewer written records when they made contact with the West. Warfare was just as common as it was anywhere else at equivalent tech levels, so the people we met could more accurately be described as the "penultimate conquerors" of the places they were living. For a while after colonization, history proceeded in the same way as in almost all conquered areas, i.e. the conquerors tried to consolidate their hold through aggressive policies of assimilation and resettlement. Eventually though, white guilt became a dominant moral force which led to the reservations system in the US. Reservations of today are mostly just fronts for rent-seeking where individuals (who are often quite assimilated to the dominant US culture) get paid their racial spoils for having the correct genealogy.
As for building power plants, that should be viewed more as an issue of the reach of eminent domain, i.e. how far you can take "public interest" of broader society to inconvenience individuals living there. It'd be really annoying to have to move if the government wanted to build something near where I live, but I also appreciate living in a society that has interstate highways and the like.
Yeah, the romanticisation of natives is incredibly blatant. I've seen people genuinely argue that the reason as to why Native Americans were conquered was not because Natives had less technology, it's not because their societies and social structures were less developed and less cohesive on a large scale, it was because they had no conception of kicking other people off their land unlike the evil Europeans!
The idea that the Europeans came in and "stole" land that belonged to any one tribe is ridiculous. Tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes, and the question of who "owned" the land was often in a constant state of flux. The Black Hills region is seen to have been taken unfairly from the Lakota by the US, but that region was actually taken by the Lakota from the Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne took that land from the Kiowa. And during all this conflict, it's likely that a lot of groups would've just disappeared and been outcompeted.
And of course, many atrocities were committed. The Iroquois tortured prisoners of war and famously practiced cannibalism. Not only is this documented multiple times in the historical record, there's also archaeological evidence showing evidence in favour of this. Mayans were thought to be peaceful up until it was found that they were routinely enslaving and subjugating their neighbours. In the central Mesa Verde of Southwest Colorado, "90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."
You have archeological sites like the Crow Creek site, wherein they found the remains of at least 486 people killed during a massacre during the mid-14th century AD between Native American groups. "Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment."
In my opinion the very idea of "native" itself is very arbitrary and inaccurate, used primarily as a political bludgeon to try and imply that those groups designated as native have a moral right to the land that the "settlers" don't. It ignores that no group is really "native" to any patch of soil at this point and that pretty much every piece of land has likely been taken from someone else.
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The relationship between the federal government and the indigenous tribes is complicated. And yet don't forget that they are entities that have some form of sovereignty over their land. So if someone has a right to prevent power plant construction in a land he owns in a state, the tribes have even more of that right since they are closer to states than to state citizens.
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This does not strike me as a "liberal" notion.
I believe the OP is referring to this definition of "liberal."
So am I. I don't think the idea that "resources should benefit all of society" is a liberal notion. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but that sounds like a rejection of private property in favor of a more collectivist approach.
Oh, that is not how I read it; I see "land usage shouldn't be based on ethnicity" as an endorsement of private property, as opposed to non-market based arrangements, such as feudalism.
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The word 'liberal' may need to be taken out back behind the woodshed with 'socialism' as term that's suffered too much linguistic erosion to be useful. People's aesthetic associations dominate their usage of the word. Not a shared definition.
Traditionally the "liberal" perspective of land use is that you gain ownership over land by working and improving it. If natives are not improving the land, but merely hunting on it, they don't own it. This was the justification of indian removal that early Americans used. For example, IIRC there was usually a provision to pay for any improvements on repossessed lands such as tilled fields or buildings.
Nowadays I try to use the term "classical liberalism" when talking about this kind of thinking, unless I know I'm in an audience that already has this background.
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I don't think that indigenous people are inherently special, I don't think their culture or rights are any more or less deserving of consideration or privilege than those of any other human being, and I don't think they should be legally treated as meaningfully distinct from any other group of people. They're regular people, just like you or me, and they deserve the same dignity and respect for their rights that you and I deserve.
Personally, I think if they made a stronger effort to integrate and adapt to modern society they would probably end up with better economic and life outcomes, but I feel that way about most minority and/or immigrant communities. The ones that value education, technology, respect for the rule of law, tolerance of others, and stuff like that, end up doing just as well as white people, while subcultures that obsess over their race and origins, and refuse to adapt end up poor and angry. Maybe I'm mixing up culture with class, but there's not always a meaningful distinction there, a lot of subcultures feel like variations of "lower class behavior", but I think there's something extra damaging about going off into a separate physical and legal area and preventing the natural spread of ideas and behaviors that the rest of the first world uses to great success.
Which, they're free to do. And in some cases it works out fine, I think the Amish are pretty happy. But if they end up unhappy, which they often do, then I can only shrug and point out that they could at any time be regular citizens like everyone else, and instead choose to be special.
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Of course the indigenous people should have the right to prevent building power plants or anything else on their land - and so should everyone else. It’s called private property. Offer them enough money or other incentives and they’ll agree to let you build it, this is the only moral way to resolve the situation.
The issue is that indigenous peoples might have controlled an area for centuries, but before the notion of private property was applied.
Should the state treat the land as private property of the indigenous people?
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The question wasn't about their land, it was about "their" land in quotes--that is, land that they don't legally own, but which they've made some sort of claim to.
I think these claims should be given about as much respect as Muslims' claims that it's wrong to draw Mohammed, which is to say, none. Generally, you either own it or you don't. If you want to claim rights to something you don't own, I want to see a treaty or other document spelling that out. And if you just say "well, it was conquered from us", either challenge the entire conquest, or don't--don't selectively challenge the aspects of the conquest that you think you're most likely to get away with challenging.
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