oh and we're gonna carve giant pictures of white presidents who helped enslave you into your ancestral grounds.
I think we need to stop being so focused on the past. I was born in Canada, and instead of complaining and trying to change the world to suit my needs, I accepted the way the world is now, and used it to my advantage as well as I could.
Do I have all the same cultural elements of my ancestors from 500 years ago? No. Do I still own the land my ancestors did 500 years ago? Nope. But I've got a career, a home, a car, and a smartphone. It's more than a lot of people have.
Sometimes you have to accept that this is the world you were born into. You can either choose to complain and be miserable, or make it work for yourself.
What would you tell to Spanish people glorifying Hernán Cortés' conquest of Mexico and the subsequent destruction of countless cultures in the region?
It's possible to maximize and enjoy your outcome in a system while still opposing the atrocities that system did to your ancestors. I'm a Cherokee living in Oklahoma within the Cherokee Nation and we have to constantly fight to keep what rights we still have as a federally recognized sovereign nation. It's not about "complaining and being miserable" it's about holding onto our culture and doing the best we can to take care of our people. What the US government did to our ancestors still has ramifications and affects today. Native people are the poorest ethnic group in the US and a lot of it can be attributed to the treatment of our ancestors and the abuse that still occurs from state governments even today.
An important distinction to make here is that the indigenous people of North America did not own the land themselves before the Europeans came, they coexisted with the land and held spiritual connections with it. One reason why they thought it was a good idea to sign the land over in those treaties is because they thought the notion of any persons "owning" land was ridiculous - no one could own land since the Earth was it's own free spirit
(Not an expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong)
Eh, varies tribe to tribe on the ownership thing and the "coexisted spiritual connections with the land" thing is damn near the Noble Savage stereotype. Which kinda infantilises natives. They were fully realised peoples who sometimes lived peacefully and sometimes fought brutal wars with each other over the land. And some of them probably lived in a good balance with nature for some time and some of them probably would have run into ecological crises of their own making.
You should really do some more research. The federal government made false promises and deceived/abused the tribes involved in the forced removal. It was in no way an agreement made because "no one owned the land"
