[throwaway894345]

> Because generally speaking the later arrivals view the earlier people as subhuman and engage in horrific acts of violence against them. So it's not really that "earliest known people = special." It's more that displacing, dominating, or eradicating a people ought generally be frowned upon, and that's what has happened to many (most? all?) indigenous peoples in places like the Americas, Australia, etc.

Many changes in people groups with respect to territory are simply migrations. Is there any evidence that violent conquest is the norm and migrations are the exceptions? My amateur understanding of history and archeology is that migrations are the norm and conquest is the exception (although posing this as a binary is itself misleading because violence is a matter of degrees). Moreover, lots of people who aren't considered indigenous have been brutally conquered, but we don't afford them special status (e.g., virtually any people which has been conquered by virtually any empire).

I certainly agree that many indigenous peoples in history have been brutally conquered, but considering they aren't the only ones and many of them haven't been brutally conquered, it seems like a crumby proxy.

> These aren't straightforward issues, you're right, and they deserve a candid and in-depth treatment. But let's not get too far from the fundamental point, which is that it's pretty awful to show up on the shores of a continent where a bunch of people live and then destroy them and/or their way of life.

Fully agree (who wouldn't? is this even controversial?), but I don't understand the "indigenous is a useful proxy for peoples who have suffered" argument.

[_moof]

All good points. The site is run predominantly by folks from North America, and I live in the United States, so there's a particularly North American flavor to this discussion. That's naturally going to focus on the specific experiences of North American indigenous peoples, which, at least in my reading, are unquestionably experiences of conquest. So in that context, I'm not even sure it's a proxy; it seems like it's actually at the heart of the matter. Whether it's a reasonable proxy at a global scale across all of time, or even an intelligible concept when removed from an American context, I don't know.

[throwaway894345]

Fair enough, but there are also global organizations that deal in the indigenous/other dichotomy, including the UN (which has a special department or council concerning indigenous peoples). So there’s clearly a more universal notion that does my make sense to me.