This quote smells like BS. I can’t find any actual attribution for it. I bet it was a white person claiming 1/64 Cherokee who made the quote, and the “great threat great great great great granddaughter of a Cherokee princess” made the picture.
The reason I think that is it’s just a whole lot of negative Indian stereotypes and red flags. No attribution to an actual person or even a tribe. It reinforces old English paranoia about Indians worshipping Satan. It’s mostly portraying Indians as hapless victims that no longer exist.
Compare it with this actual speech by a Walpanoag Man: https://penncapital-star.com/commentary/national-day-of-mourning-the-suppressed-speech-of-wamsutta-frank-b-james-wampanoag-2/
Notice how he talks about the present? Notice how he clearly calls out the attrocities, and then comes to the conclusion that all humans are equal. Notice how he’s not just resigning himself and his tribe to hell, to escape the white man?
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There’s really worlds of difference between these things. Of course, humans fight and kill each other, but what colonists did is far different than what indigenous people did to one another.
The settlers were and are devoted to the eradication of a people. Much of their culture, language, and achievements were outright destroyed in the name of God and racial superiority. This is not something that you can accuse indigenous people of. Scientific racism is an invention of Europe. Capitalism, too, emerged out of the historical context of Europe which requires colonists to support. These are not universal human traits.
Settlers took the names and languages and children and tried to “assimilate” them (read: erase). To this day, these people are being strangled out of existence. There are people here on Lemmy who live on reservations and discuss the struggle to this day.
I’m responding to you in good faith here, but to be honest, I don’t think there’s any other way to read this than justification for genocide because “they would have done the same.” That’s not a grounded claim. You should reflect on why your knee jerk reaction is to respond this way and consider if you’d rather stand with the colonizers or the colonized.
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If we can’t talk about these things with nuance then that’s the real problem. We can bring some nuance to this and realize that what happened this is wrong and we can enact policy to change that.
No, I think the real problem has very little to do with our discourse. I think the real problem is that there are indigenous people to this day being stamped out and suffering under colonialism and imperialism to this day, and that the dominant western ideology is to respond “well, this is human nature, and you would have done the same to me.”
If you want to talk about nuance, your view is not nuanced. Your ideas hinge on “human nature” (a claim) and ignore the differences in the way civilizations have interacted over time. It doesn’t have anything to do with “white man bad” or “red man benevolent.” It has everything to do with the system of natural and social incentives that cultures have. The economic systems that emerged in Europe created the groundwork for the colonization of the world. Yeah, it COULD have emerged elsewhere, but it didn’t, and these crimes fall squarely on the colonizers, not the colonized for commiting an imaginary crime. This worldwide colonization had a particular character that is not the same as what happened before it.
you had to choose between your family, starving to death or killing the “others”.
Another hypothetical situation stacked in favor of justifying the “human nature” argument. Colonization is not a matter of life and death. People won’t die if they don’t colonize other people. There are plenty of people throughout history who didn’t just go along with their nations crimes and attempted to stop it.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter. One must either imagine that all of the killing, murders, and genocides throughout history were either a product of a historical moment or the nature of humanity. If one believes that this is all human nature, I can’t imagine that they’d be fit to solve the ongoing genocides today because it’s all “survival of the fittest”. By that logic, we’re just figuring out who deserves to live.
And that’s the real problem. These things are ongoing and regardless of how you interpret the past or whether “they would have done the same”, we cannot change the past and there are things we can do now for colonized people.
Btw, knock it off with “I’m gonna get downvoted for this” and “you’re just farming upvotes”. We’re on a 2 day old communist Lemmy post with like 4 upvotes. Nobody is paying attention to this except us.
Edit: god dammit I spent so much time writing this and by the time I got reply, they got banned lmao
