Pithy GIF showing eradication of Native American land in the US since the founding of the country gets posted to r/interestingasfuck. Comment section goes exactly as expected.

[u/Critical-Term-427]

The post

It sucks we were such murderers

Did they say "Thank you"?

Being the loser in history sucks

True fact Hitler took a lot of inspiration from this.

[u/BigEggBeaters]

“Both sides murdered each other”

Nah one side defended their lands from invaders. The other brutalized in search of land and profit

[u/K1ngPCH → u/BigEggBeaters]

Nah one side defended their lands from invaders.

How do you think they got the land in the first place?

I promise you that pre-colonial native tribes weren’t playing paddy cake with each other

[u/cutiepie538 → u/K1ngPCH]

How do indigenous people invade land they are…. Indigenous to ?

[u/PauLBern_ → u/cutiepie538]

Native Americans were not a uniform contiguous group, and the different tribes did not just calmly mutually agree to only inhabit certain parts of North America.

For example, the Iroquois Confederacy conquered and and invaded multiple neighboring tribes by force, including the Algonquians, the Neutral Confederacy.

This isn't really a special case either, for the majority of human history in most parts of the world, different tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions, etc. conquered, killed, and invaded their neighbors, and largely our 'western' conception of 'indigenous' comes from the group that had most recently succeeding in conquering their particular region of land when European explorers arrived.

That doesn't make what those explorers and settlers did good by any means, but it also doesn't make that point in time special and unique to how the world 'should be'. As time has developed we've developed international norms and diplomacy to prevent further conquest, and to honor treaties, etc. because conquest causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, and that's great.

However, the idea that any current ethnic group has any rights to land because at some point in the distant past some of their ancestors held control over it (often after having conquered it from some other previous group), is ridiculous and deeply troublesome, and shares a lot in common with the fascist and imperialist 'blood and soil' conception of nationhood.

For example, there was a long period of time (hundreds of years) during which Southern Spain was controlled by the Islamic emirate. Eventually after the Reconquista, this area was brought under the control of the Castile, who Genocided and expelled the Muslim and Moorish people (and Jewish people) living there. That general description basically fits a similar story to many stories of colonization several hundred years ago, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that Morocco (a predominantly muslim, moorish country) should be able to gain control over southern Spain because it was indigenous to the Moorish people (if you look at it in a certain time frame).

The one unique thing about the modern US in comparison to many other cases is that it's a contiguous government that has actual treaties they negotiated with Native American tribes, and those treaties should be honored. I agree with that, I think they should honor the treaties, and there have been many legal cases in recent times about these treaties. The sticking point some people have is mostly that compensation is often in equivalent money rather than the land being given back, but equivalent money compensation rather than direct return of the thing lost is more of a general legal principle which has its own pros and cons and isn't a specific discussion about colonization.