[Tiktaalik]

> But I always find the term "Indigenous" weird, because we all came from somewhere

Right but of course there is a difference between coming to NA less than 200 years ago and 15,000++ years ago.

When settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous Nations in North America were systematically stripped of their lands and titles and worse. In Canada at least the notion that 'everyone came from somewhere' is viewed as a settler rhetorical tactic to loosen and obfuscate Indigenous title to the land and this is not taken kindly by Indigenous persons.

Consequently in Canada Indigenous people will often state that they've been in NA 'since time immemorial' or more simply 'always'. This is not scientifically likely to be true, but it's essentially a strong assertion and underlining of the fact that the land is their unceded land and that settlers are settlers to it.

[jlawson]

If you apply the theory that any conquered land still eternally belongs to whoever it was conquered from, then almost everybody on Earth owes their land to someone else, since everyone is descended from conquerors. This includes the American natives, who warred and took land from each other frequently.

Does place X "really belong" to tribe A, who sold it to white people? Or to tribe B, who were previously conquered by tribe A? Or to tribe C, who were conquered by tribe B even before that? And so on.

It also shades quickly into nativist ideas that delegitimize immigrants since even after generations since they're not "really from" the place where they live. If white Americans aren't "really from" America, it's not hard to argue that e.g. black British aren't "really from" the UK and don't have a true right to exist there if the natives disagree.

If we're going to have any coherent framework around this at all, it has to include some duration of time after which people are considered naturalized to a land. I'm inclined to say that someone who was born in a place and lived there their whole life has a natural, native right to live there. But it's definitely open to discussion. What isn't open is the idea of eternal ethnic land rights. Nor is the unspoken but commonly-applied rule that whites have no exclusive rights to any place but everyone else owns the place they live in.

(The American example even ignores the complexities of settler/native interactions; it was by no means a one-sided conquest; they worked together, and traded, and involved each other in inter-white and inter-tribal conflicts on both sides for centuries. Whites acted very much like just another collection of tribes on the American political field for a long time; the only long-term diffrence was not moral at all, but simply the fact that they managed to succeed where the Lakota and Iroquois and others tried but failed.)

[perfmode]

> If you apply the theory that any conquered land still eternally belongs to whoever it was conquered from, then almost everybody on Earth owes their land to someone else, since everyone is descended from conquerors. This includes the American natives, who warred and took land from each other frequently.

This statement eliminates the necessary nuance.

[Tiktaalik]

lmao this entire passage is exactly what I'm talking about. A concrete issue is being muddled by vague generalities, in an attempt to obfuscate what really happened and defend settlers. I mean boy people have been conquering people all the time throughout history so who cares that white people stole land from indigenous people right?

No.

Settlers took over unceded indigenous land. Indigenous Nations are now attempting to re-claim specific tracts of land. This is a real and concrete issue.

[legostormtroopr]

> Indigenous Nations in North America were systematically stripped of their lands and titles and worse

Yes, and this was happening before Europeans arrived in North America. Indigenous cultures were at war before Europeans showed up.

Whats more in some cases they saw European colonisation as a potential strategic alliance against their longer term Indigenous foes.