I would say that one should be very, very, very careful about thinking of people as beasts. That is precisely how atrocities get started.
I’m going to charitably assume that your usage of this phrase here is ironic. Perhaps not the best time and place for such.
Yeah, this gets me a little riled up.
Because Europeans killed most of the indigenous population through unintential germ contamination, then kill virtually the rest with conventional atms, then reneged on treaties between nations, then denied many nations from even being recognized…
The death toll isn’t the most heinous number. It is the way we treated the living that is ghastly.
I’m out.
I take it that, in your world, ‘sometimes’ is synonymous with ‘more than three times every day’. I reject your world.
It’s not my world. It is just the way it is. I don’t know how many are justified. You have to look at a case by case basis with all the details.
Only a small fraction of them is justified. But there are such cases. Few, but enough to muddy things up.
Why are you people insisting on living in all-or-nothing world?
That’s just a lazy-ass way of not addressing the problem.
“It’s just tooooo hard. Gotta judge on the individual merits. Let’s keep our guns and unaccountable police forces in the meantime. Because it’s sooooooo hard.”
Explain yourself.
Not at all. I am defending the statement that some of the shootings are justified. Certainly who ever is working to reduce these things in an official capacity needs to review each of these on a case by case basis and find out what lead to the unjustified shootings and what can be done to reduce the grey area ones. Is it bad training? Bad cops? Bad polices? All three? Two of the three?
On Reservations the land is sort of like its own little nation. They have their own police force that actually has similar powers to US Marshals in that they can go anywhere and enforce the law if it is one of the tribe suspected of a crime.
So if you have a break in or an assault on a reservation, you call the Tribal police, not the sheriff or the local town. My tribe even issues their own license plates.
There is a lot of weird interesting law with how Indian laws work. For example if a kid is neglected or in danger and normally SRS or some other agency would come in and put them into foster care, if they are enrolled in the tribe they tribe can actually claim the child and place it within its services.
But as others pointed out, most Native Americans don’t live on reservations.
I know all that, the explanation requested relates to the intent of the author.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that we won’t see #nativeamericanlivesmatter trending any time soon.
But we don’t count South/Central American immigrants among those numbers, do we?
All right, I’m going to be that guy.
The correct term is “First Nations.”
“Native American” is inappropriate because they were here long before Amerigo Vespucci ever drew breath, so calling their land by his name demeans their claim to it.
Edit: Disregard that. I looked it up, and this is a Canadianism. Apologies for the confusion.
Citation needed.
The analysis drew all of it’s data from the CDC, the CDC would count South/Central American immigrants among Hispanic, not Native American/Alaskan Native.
Right. It’s a perspective a lot of people are unaware of, though.
Many hispanics’ backgrounds are belied by the term ‘Hispanic’. There’s a lot of people of mixed native/european blood, or even people of pure native blood. Mexico alone has way more people of native heritage than the US–in the neighborhood of 3 times as many.
And because the story is similar down south as here–they are disproportionately affected by poverty–we mostly get the poor, and thus a large number of them are native. Consequently, the people watching Telemundo in my area don’t really look that much like the actual people on Telemundo.
It was a strange thing to realize one day when I was musing if I’d ever met a full-blooded native, since they long ago died off or got shuffled off to Oklahoma (at least where I live). The realization was Yes! And that they probably spoke Spanish.
Lineages dating to before colonization that do not include European intermingling are probably limited to only a few tribes in South America & perhaps not even then. 500 years is a long time considering that much of that time subjugation included rape & enslavement in various forms, and cultural genocide via forcing native populations to adopt colonizers cultural mores throughout it all.
But anyway the article is specific in identifying AI/NA as such because they are differentiated not just by the CDC but by police and our culture in general. No matter the genetic, cultural or heritage linkage between AI/NA & South/Central American immigrants, being identified or self-identifying as Hispanic is a tiny step up in police/civilian interactions.
Where AI/NA are identifiable as such their chances of a fair shake in the system are lessened for it more than any other group. It’s true up here in Canada too, if a body had a choice, no one would want to be FN/Inuit in a police interaction.
I’m not speaking for them, but the volume of hispanic immigrants in the US suggests that if a body had a choice, it’s better to be ‘hispanic’ here than poor or native back home.
I think Canada has the right idea on immigration, btw. Human beings are a resource; we shouldn’t shun a group of people no matter their origins. If they are a drain on the economy, we’re not utilizing them correctly. Fix the utilization.
Now if only we could get politicians to use similarly clinical terms…
For those of mixed blood, sure. It’s a similar problem in Anglo-North-America. But Latin America has a very different story when it comes to indigenous peoples. How different?
My current town I live in is outright half Hispanic, though. Lots of businesses display patriotic looking Aztec/Inca/Mayan type art (tbh, I can’t tell the difference). At ~15% of the official population of just Mexico, obviously some people know quite well where they come from.
I was a paramedic(shift coverage) on a large Pac-NW reservation.
The people are great and what a history, but as said above they have a generational crushing defeat problem with a long history of official Christian white supremacist occupation.
The main source of this is the government sleep-away gender-separated Christian school system which is run like a juvenile prison.
Rape and assault are more common in these schools than in adult prison and the rape happens as these boys are just defining their sexuality, violence is .
The way this system was managed(my experience is now about 20 years out of date) appears if not diabolically intentional then criminally negligent.
There are so many problems but the sleep away schools and tying minimal benefits to never leaving the res are a recipe for disaster, and no wonder that these desperate people act in an antisocial way which draws lethal force, most often by their brothers and sisters on the tribal police. It is a population where viloence of all types has been schooled as a part of life, no surprise the stress and PTSD hovering over the res.
I look forward to the day that the natives find a way to secede and take as much land with them as they can, I was in contact with Russel Means and until his death supported his struggle to free his nation and scrape off the ICBMs.
I am confused - what is your map showing? Percentage of “Native Americans” in each country? I don’t see how Brazil is so low. They still have people living in the Rainforest.
ETA - just an observation on a trip to Mexico, the real shit jobs were almost all done by the red-brown skinned people who had more Aztec/Mayan/etc blood from Central and South America.
Not a lot of people, obviously. Brazil is a huge melting pot, as I understand it.
Was my source. I cannot comment on their methodology, of course.
Yields some light on it. Apparently not super populous to begin with, is how I read it. Other weird details are that they have the largest Japanese expat population (per capita just behind Hawaii).
Exactly part and parcel of what I am saying. I’ve been meaning to make a trip down there to just see what it’s about, but it’s never quite worked out. Love the food, people. Can’t say Spanish is my favorite, but that’s not their fault.
