Trump's Wall: total fantasyland says engineer

None of that changes the fact that we stole their land.

So what would you have done instead, stay in Europe? Do you think you could convince everyone in Europe to stay in Europe, or would someone else have come over and done the same thing, if not something far worse?

In what universe of possibilities would an entire, fertile, lush continent be left virtually empty of inhabitants? And by virtually empty, I mean virtually empty. Kentucky is larger than South Korea and well over twice the size of Switzerland, Denmark, or the Netherlands, yet had a native population of zero. As colonists first started arriving Indians throughout Ohio banded together to retake it. Their invasion force amounted to about a hundred people.

If Europe had some crazy plague that reduced the population of France from 60,000,000 to about 5,000, do you think everybody in Germany, Holland, the UK, Switzerland, and Poland would just leave France that empty for a couple centuries? Would that be "stealing" the land of the last 5,000 Frenchmen, who never at any time owned more than a dozen farms and a thousand or so houses?

And of course the Indians on the land stole the land through brutal warfare, slaughtering other tribes to get it. That's the way life is among stone age hunter gatherers. Well, fortunately for everyone, including the stone age hunter-gatherers, we showed up with a vastly superior way to doing things. We don't have to live in the woods, knapping flints to make arrowheads so we can eat an occasional rabbit or turkey. Like us, Native Americans can now run down to the store and buy anything they want to eat.

The stone age was not going to last - unless of course people like modern liberals figured out a way to keep the Indians living in abject poverty so white college kids could use hidden cameras to watch them like zoo animals.

The Statue of Liberty is actually French.

And I'm a fascist? Seriously? Is your ass getting jealous of all the shit that's spewing out of your mouth? I think maybe you shouldn't use that word unless you're clear on the meaning. So, by all means, equate what I said with anything in the fascist philosophy. Back to grade school with you, as, if you were any less intelligent, someone would have to water you three times a week.

Yes, the European colonisers of the new world often said that stealing the natives' lands, destroying their societies and even murdering and exterminating them was for their own good as well.

I agree wholeheartedly, hence my joke about the natives not having title deeds to their lands.

Sometimes. Sometimes it was given, sometimes it was bought, sometimes the previous owners were simply all dead and gone, and, yes sometimes it was stolen just has that tribe or band had originally stolen it from a different tribe or band. You don't seem capable of understanding these differences or of admitting numerous other truths about history simple because you want to maintain the fiction of some sort of collective white guilt. Sorry, dude, but the real world doesn't work that way however if such over simplification and even out right deceptions help you sleep better then I guess that is ok. Just stop pretending you know jack shit about this period and please stop lying and trying to contradict those of use who do. I am especially pissed off at how you lied about what is or is not in those two books because clearly you have no idea.

I think a good metric for deciding how full of shit Dinner is on a particular topic is the number of references he makes to 'the real world'. There's an unmistakable correlation.

Seriously. It also correlates pretty well with how many extraneous references he tosses out there. Take post 216, for example. He mentions all manner of things that nobody is contesting, as if to imply that stating the truth that some land was stolen by Europeans automatically means disagreement with the rest of the list. He wants to talk about anything other than the actual point, because that one single historical fact invalidates his entire artifice.

Wait, weren't you the one saying they had no ownership concept and that that meant they didn't own the land? If there was no previous owner, the previous owner could not have gifted, sold, or died and left their property. But of course you really understand perfectly well that they owned their land, otherwise none of this would have occurred to you. You just tell yourself that the people you clearly identify as the owners didn't "really" own the land.

So go get some Chinese "wall builders" to give us some advice on just how to accomplish this construction. They have a pretty good wall over there...

In most cases we did not regard Indians as land owners because all they did on it was raid other tribes. Often they did this over an area almost the size of Western Europe. If a thousand or so wandering natives regarded all of France and Germany as "their" hunting ground, would anybody be obliged to stay off their turf? Is it moral to allow bands of stone age warriors to stay in the stone age, killing each other's women in surprise raids to show how brave they are?

What couldn't continue wasn't allowed to continue. Whereas you would have left Native Americans in the stone age, without access to modern medicine, shelter, and technology, other's decided that they were just as worthy of living a modern life as we were. So we taught native Americans how to do anything we do, including flying fighter aircraft and commanding aircraft carrier battle groups. In contrast, you would put them in zoos so white children could laugh at them.

That was GT, I believe. You could try to keep things at least a little straight if you wanted to.

Right, sorry. You were the one saying they couldn't own land because they had no federal government.

Where'd they get those ponies?

Bronycon?

Yup. In the East ownership was more clear cut because it didn't take such a large area to support a tribe. We simply upgraded their villages with two-story clapboard houses and taught them European farming. By the time we started expanding into Ohio and Kentucky the more eastern Indians were almost entirely settled. They'd become church-going farm folks who sometimes held jobs high in the government, often running the Bureau of Indian Affairs and deciding the best course of action for Indians on the frontier.

The transition was rapid, especially out West. Indians who had been born as nomadic hunters and raiders who wore animal skins and knapped flint for weapons retired as school teachers, publishers, and machinists, or their children did. Sometimes it was a bungled and painful transition. Sometimes it wasn't done very willingly. But it was done.

For example, chief White Plume was born in 1765 in what was to become Kansas. His tribe hunted buffalo. They sold some of the hides to French traders (who his daughters married). He was invited to DC by Lewis and Clark and met with President Monroe in 1821, and then he went on to visit New York and Philadelphia.


Chief White Plume

Lot's of good and bad things happened as White Plume signed over Kaw land and settled down to farming. His daughters' kids kept marrying other mid-Western Indians, and one of their grand kids married a guy who was of English/Scottish descent, producing a son in 1860, Charles Curtis, who grew up on the Kaw reservation, raised mostly by his grandparents because his mother died young. He helped fight off a Cheyenne raiding party when he was a boy. He got elected to Congress, where he sponsored various Indian policies in the late 1800's and early 1900's, such as the Curtis Act of 1898. He wasn't completely happy with it, but it disbanded five tribes in the Oklahoma territory by giving them individual lands under the American property system. After all, what good is it if your tribe owns lots of land but you don't own any? Curtis, who was an Indian who grew up on a reservation, continued to pass Indian legislation as he moved to the Senate, where he became majority leader.

He of course got to meet with many Presidents, whereas White Plume only met one. Americans even figured it would be a good idea to give him a special office.



The "we" who "stole" Indian land also includes the Indians who set our Indian land policy.