[objectivetruth]

The article provides a clear and detailed explanation of how the traditional inhabitants, who had settled there over a century ago, were forcibly re-settled by the British. The court decision in question calls for them to be returned to the descendants of those people.

I presume you got the quoted statistic from the Chagos Islands info box on that Wikipedia page. If so, I'd urge you to scroll down just a little bit farther to learn the info that the rest of us read in the article. Here's a link to help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago#Sovereignty...

[mherdeg]

My sense is that people mostly just don't want to hear or think about the sometimes messy way that things got to be the way they are (I saw "-2 points" when discussing this a few months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19626519 ).

This isn't unique to tech startups. I live in Massachusetts and do not regularly think about what exactly happened to the Massachusett people. It was not great.

[mrob]

If they get their island back, why don't the Native Americans get their whole countries back too?

[blibble]

it was also never their island, they lived there as employees only. their ancestors were brought to the uninhabited island by the French

it would be like claiming an oil rig or country estate as your family's property because you've had several generations of drillers/domestic staff employed by the owners

[bloak]

No, it's not like that at all, because an oil rig counts as a vessel, whereas an island is land.

[zaroth]

It’s a bit different when the territory is settled by non-indigenous people for a few generations, versus occupied, or just a few structures built and no one really lives there at all.