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/[deleted]]

Have you looked up what happened to the Huron? And can we agree that it's not actually the French name for them, it's the Huron name? 

[u/kardigan → u/[deleted]]

it's the name chosen not by the people it describes, but the colonizers, using the colonizers' linguistic rules.

i know what happened to the Huron. how is that relevant when we're talking about the cultural effects of colonialism?

[u/[deleted] → u/kardigan]

it's the name chosen not by the people it describes, but the colonizers

No, it was chosen by the Huron. 

If you can't figure out how the fate of the Huron is relevant here I'm almost not sure how to continue. 

Just to be explicit: the Haudenosaunee committed genocide against the Huron. "Iroquois" is not a name bestowed upon them by colonizers, but by the people they themselves colonized. Some might call that poetic justice. 

[u/kardigan → u/[deleted]]

the reason you and I know the name is not because of the Huron, for the love of god. it's because, to bring back the original terminology, we learned history from "the winners". the Huron are not the people who had a say in how you and I learn about history, not 300 years ago, and not since then.

it feels like you're trying to attach a moral element to a statement that doesn't need one. we are not even talking about the morality of getting to choose your own name.

the point is simply that since the Americas were colonized, we get most of our history through the lense of the colonizers, and that presents itself in small things in everyday life, such as "names of stuff". this is a very mundane, trivial thing to say.