It is a simplistic slogan. I’ve certainly heard indigenous activists say some version of “I don’t want your acknowledgment. I want my land back.”
But maybe it’s also simplistic to expect a young artist to comprehensively address centuries of inflicted harm with a single remark.
Many Americans refuse to acknowledge the history or the harms and become angry and defensive when asked to do so. And we have a hard time remembering that indigenous communities aren’t in the past tense - they still exist, as do the reservations where their communities were forcibly confined more than a century ago.
And the harms directed at indigenous communities often continue to the present day. It’s so much more than who has a right to land. It’s also a question of domination and exclusion of people. And that is relevant to immigration enforcement today.
Eilish I assume was trying to poke at the hypocrisy of treating immigrants as trash while living on land once owned by Native Americans but the very idea of “stolen land” assumes some group has a right to determine who gets to come here….which is sort of what the immigration restrictionists believe. And the point is well taken that she’s living in luxury on that very “stolen” land and offering only empty words in compensation to those living on reservations. To quote Norm McDonald, “You’re not helping!”
It should be enough to call attention to the horrific way many immigrants are treated, especially under this lawless administration, but conflating it with how our country treated the natives is a mistake, not just because it gives Ted Cruz an easy talking point but because these are two very separate issues and expressing it in the hamfisted way she did managed to undermine both arguments (I certainly wouldn’t want a new group of immigrants to treat me the way the Native Americans were treated, and I wouldn’t have wanted Native Americans to treat new arrivals the way Trump treats today’s immigrants).
I don’t mind the land acknowledgements, they’ve become a form, a ritual part of a public event, even when they fail to acknowledge the native people who still live in an area. I can’t find them to be important or unimportant, they neither needle nor excite me. I do think we apparently need rituals to offer to people looking for them in public life, even if they make me suspicious. Without them, too many decamp from the neutral to the more partisan events.
But I was recently corrected in a forum in a way that made me want to say “who are you educating?” Not only had they picked out one thing I said (a comparison of ICE/CBP to the Gestapo) with no attention to how the metaphor I used related to the statement of the person to whom I was responding, but everyone there knew already what they were ostensibly contributing (that ICE/CBP parallels the slave patrols). I don’t doubt many of us need the education but it’s a sort of symptom of black & white thinking, a “oooh, someone said something I can _correct_ rather than engage with the whole of a scary truth: that it is both.
The commenter apparently felt anyone making a Gestapo comparison was denying a vast history of oppression in the US, while I was responding a. to someone referencing the Nazis and b. as someone with family members with lived experience of hiding from the Gestapo. I’ve never felt the phrase “virtue signalling” rise up in me so high as in that moment.
And I think that’s the feeling here. Like, yeah, the “stolen land” simplification is both correct and incorrect, simple and complex. It manages to alienate people acting in good faith who have no way to ameliorate the issue it seems to want to address as well as piss off the ones who don’t want to offer change. And in requiring a lot of soul-searching it makes work for people that allows them to feel they’ve done enough work rather than asking them to make a material change in their actions in future.
Nice deflection to the " but every country conquered and took throughout time. Lets just move forward" bullshit. Tell that to those on the losing end. Mom always taught that two wrongs don't make a right. Was Billy's statement hypocritical? Of course. But so is the self-serving crap about the settlers planting the tree that bore fruit for everyone. Study the anthropology of this country and wrap you brain around what became this country already had 10 -20 million people spread from coast to coast when the Europeans arrived. And their societies, governments, agriculture, and trade were well developed and very functional. In many ways more so than ours. So when those of us living here now brush off the fact that the land was taken from another, and in many cases, yes stollen, its just an attempt brush aside the guilt of their ancestors.
You probably know the general rules of the year of Jubilee, but for those that don't. It happened every fifty years. Some of the things involved were: setting slaves free, returning land purchased to the original family that owned it, forgiveness of all debts.
Now I'm not exactly how that could work in the United States, but I have some general ideas:
Returning land: We invest more money every year into Native American communities to pay down the debt of our past. We make housing a human right and provide pathways to home ownership for everyone.
Setting slaves free: reparations for slavery. Paying prison laborers a living wage. Paying laborers a living wage.
Forgiveness of all debts. All or some. I'll let smarter folks work out the details.
The goals would be the same: helping folks escape generational poverty, enacting overdue justice, and lifting people up.
Eilishis a 25 year old, further along in her radicalization than I was at that age.
You get some people into your tent with that phrase. It won't win elections, but elections aren't going to cut it. I sure hope we keep having them, but the best chance of keeping bloodshed to a minimum while trying to rid oursrlves of this turbulent priest is a general strike, real general strikes. This phrase gets some more people into the necessary buy in for that to work.
Celebrity is one of our economic system's way of keeping labor and consumerism happy enough to keep working and buying. Escapism. Lottery-level 'maybe it'll be me one day' daydreaming. She's doing pretty good for a 25 year old who's struck gold.
No reason to tsk-tsk the youth on their journey to a better world, rather encourage them.
As to accepting the past to move forward, yes, but not in a "good, now we never have to talk about how native people were murdered, raped, cheated, and torn from their families and traditions ever again" kind of way. That just reminds me if how when Obama was elected, they decided to destroy the voting rights act, and Americans bought into it because it was time to move on from talking about racism.
The bottom line is that liberals (or at least those who are visible) are the only ones that are responsible for ideological consistency, especially Democrats. Because Democrats get in the way of the fun.
This is why the ideological inconsistencies of rightwing figures are never a problem (and why a lot of folks need to stop appealing to hypocrisy and consistency when dealing with them). Might makes right over there; "I tell you (the people enfranchising the minorities I hate) what to do, you don't tell *me* what to do."
I don't even have to rely on an example of the pricktator, who eventually just becomes the "imperfect vessel" to achieve the grand plans of ethnic cleansing. Think about the number of cheats there, the people with sexual "immorality" who are still in good graces...like Newt Gingrich. To a person they're "elites" who also loathe their rank and file, but they have a media structure that allows forced memes and epistemic closure to protect them from criticism.
This is the way I see it. At a time when the federal government is actively trying to rewrite some history, and trying to erase even recent history, it remains for all of us to insure that real history is taught and remembered. The kind of entitled, performative public expressions like those made by Eilish don't help, but I understand the impulse.
We, as a country, DID destroy an entire culture and justified it to ourselves by calling the members of that culture ignorant savages. It doesn't hurt to remember the truth, that the people who call themselves Christians are capable of tremendous inhumanity, and we somehow absolve ourselves of that terrible ability of relentless cruelty. You cannot call yourself morally upright, when your morals are so easily and conveniently negated and ignored.
History must always be placed in proper context, but the thread of hypocrisy running through our own culture should be acknowledged, lest we will never learn to do better.
This, IMO, is how liberals *always* end up on the losing side of these arguments. Always! What is the average person watching extremely wealthy Billie Eilish-who sacrifices absolutely nothing by making a statement like that, btw-supposed to do about it? There is nothing I believe more strongly than Americans need to understand and acknowledge ALL our history-like all civilizations it is littered with good and bad-and work to be better. But the obsession with dividing people into permanent victims and permanent oppressors has caused a lot of harm. Remember the past, honor it, work to be better and, unless your plan is to turn the US landmass back to what it was in 1500, let it go.
Yes, and I think an uncomfortable truth is that this is one way the vocally left in this country turns away normie blue collar and middle class people AND why Trump could attract them, even if those people don't like his racism, sexism, sex crimes and corruption. Because he says "the elites are the ones stealing things, not you! You're just working hard for your family!" While most left wing people would hopefully never call a pipefitter or nursing assistant an evil colonizer, the type of discourse that Eilish was parroting DOES make people feel like they're getting blamed for just being born in a certain place.
There's a lot of bad faith arguments coming out of that side, too-they'll argue until they are blue in the face that wasn't what they meant, people deliberately take it out of context or don't understand it. Yet then nothing in the messaging changes to make it MORE likely that people WILL understand going forward, in fact a lot of piling on then happens. It's as if being misunderstood was the point! Being edgy and confrontational (not bad things in and of themselves) become the ends unto themselves, a fatal flaw in the “defund the police” rhetoric IMO. You can be virulently self righteous, or you can do the things that will actually change hearts and minds, but you can't often do both. I'm generalizing here of course, but it's a pattern that repeats itself over and over and those caught up in it really should make it clear what their end game is.
It is a simplistic slogan. I’ve certainly heard indigenous activists say some version of “I don’t want your acknowledgment. I want my land back.”
But maybe it’s also simplistic to expect a young artist to comprehensively address centuries of inflicted harm with a single remark.
Many Americans refuse to acknowledge the history or the harms and become angry and defensive when asked to do so. And we have a hard time remembering that indigenous communities aren’t in the past tense - they still exist, as do the reservations where their communities were forcibly confined more than a century ago.
And the harms directed at indigenous communities often continue to the present day. It’s so much more than who has a right to land. It’s also a question of domination and exclusion of people. And that is relevant to immigration enforcement today.
"As a nation, we should accept the past and move forward constructively not engage in performative self-flagellation that achieves nothing."
Exactly right. (Exactly what I think.) ;)
Eilish I assume was trying to poke at the hypocrisy of treating immigrants as trash while living on land once owned by Native Americans but the very idea of “stolen land” assumes some group has a right to determine who gets to come here….which is sort of what the immigration restrictionists believe. And the point is well taken that she’s living in luxury on that very “stolen” land and offering only empty words in compensation to those living on reservations. To quote Norm McDonald, “You’re not helping!”
It should be enough to call attention to the horrific way many immigrants are treated, especially under this lawless administration, but conflating it with how our country treated the natives is a mistake, not just because it gives Ted Cruz an easy talking point but because these are two very separate issues and expressing it in the hamfisted way she did managed to undermine both arguments (I certainly wouldn’t want a new group of immigrants to treat me the way the Native Americans were treated, and I wouldn’t have wanted Native Americans to treat new arrivals the way Trump treats today’s immigrants).
I don’t mind the land acknowledgements, they’ve become a form, a ritual part of a public event, even when they fail to acknowledge the native people who still live in an area. I can’t find them to be important or unimportant, they neither needle nor excite me. I do think we apparently need rituals to offer to people looking for them in public life, even if they make me suspicious. Without them, too many decamp from the neutral to the more partisan events.
But I was recently corrected in a forum in a way that made me want to say “who are you educating?” Not only had they picked out one thing I said (a comparison of ICE/CBP to the Gestapo) with no attention to how the metaphor I used related to the statement of the person to whom I was responding, but everyone there knew already what they were ostensibly contributing (that ICE/CBP parallels the slave patrols). I don’t doubt many of us need the education but it’s a sort of symptom of black & white thinking, a “oooh, someone said something I can _correct_ rather than engage with the whole of a scary truth: that it is both.
The commenter apparently felt anyone making a Gestapo comparison was denying a vast history of oppression in the US, while I was responding a. to someone referencing the Nazis and b. as someone with family members with lived experience of hiding from the Gestapo. I’ve never felt the phrase “virtue signalling” rise up in me so high as in that moment.
And I think that’s the feeling here. Like, yeah, the “stolen land” simplification is both correct and incorrect, simple and complex. It manages to alienate people acting in good faith who have no way to ameliorate the issue it seems to want to address as well as piss off the ones who don’t want to offer change. And in requiring a lot of soul-searching it makes work for people that allows them to feel they’ve done enough work rather than asking them to make a material change in their actions in future.
Thank you, Stephen, for the Weird Al clip. It’s always been my favorite and still cracks me up after all these years. I also adore James Brown.
Nice deflection to the " but every country conquered and took throughout time. Lets just move forward" bullshit. Tell that to those on the losing end. Mom always taught that two wrongs don't make a right. Was Billy's statement hypocritical? Of course. But so is the self-serving crap about the settlers planting the tree that bore fruit for everyone. Study the anthropology of this country and wrap you brain around what became this country already had 10 -20 million people spread from coast to coast when the Europeans arrived. And their societies, governments, agriculture, and trade were well developed and very functional. In many ways more so than ours. So when those of us living here now brush off the fact that the land was taken from another, and in many cases, yes stollen, its just an attempt brush aside the guilt of their ancestors.
I believe in Jubilee.
You probably know the general rules of the year of Jubilee, but for those that don't. It happened every fifty years. Some of the things involved were: setting slaves free, returning land purchased to the original family that owned it, forgiveness of all debts.
Now I'm not exactly how that could work in the United States, but I have some general ideas:
Returning land: We invest more money every year into Native American communities to pay down the debt of our past. We make housing a human right and provide pathways to home ownership for everyone.
Setting slaves free: reparations for slavery. Paying prison laborers a living wage. Paying laborers a living wage.
Forgiveness of all debts. All or some. I'll let smarter folks work out the details.
The goals would be the same: helping folks escape generational poverty, enacting overdue justice, and lifting people up.
There is something positive and constructive that can be done, and that people of conscience can contribute to, to help rectify past wrongs.
Land Back
https://youtu.be/7L2cSifRrLk?si=gH6eI37Kb7bkEBWr
Eh.
Eilishis a 25 year old, further along in her radicalization than I was at that age.
You get some people into your tent with that phrase. It won't win elections, but elections aren't going to cut it. I sure hope we keep having them, but the best chance of keeping bloodshed to a minimum while trying to rid oursrlves of this turbulent priest is a general strike, real general strikes. This phrase gets some more people into the necessary buy in for that to work.
Celebrity is one of our economic system's way of keeping labor and consumerism happy enough to keep working and buying. Escapism. Lottery-level 'maybe it'll be me one day' daydreaming. She's doing pretty good for a 25 year old who's struck gold.
No reason to tsk-tsk the youth on their journey to a better world, rather encourage them.
As to accepting the past to move forward, yes, but not in a "good, now we never have to talk about how native people were murdered, raped, cheated, and torn from their families and traditions ever again" kind of way. That just reminds me if how when Obama was elected, they decided to destroy the voting rights act, and Americans bought into it because it was time to move on from talking about racism.
And here we are.
"As a nation, we should accept the past and move forward constructively not engage in performative self-flagellation that achieves nothing. "
100%.
The bottom line is that liberals (or at least those who are visible) are the only ones that are responsible for ideological consistency, especially Democrats. Because Democrats get in the way of the fun.
This is why the ideological inconsistencies of rightwing figures are never a problem (and why a lot of folks need to stop appealing to hypocrisy and consistency when dealing with them). Might makes right over there; "I tell you (the people enfranchising the minorities I hate) what to do, you don't tell *me* what to do."
I don't even have to rely on an example of the pricktator, who eventually just becomes the "imperfect vessel" to achieve the grand plans of ethnic cleansing. Think about the number of cheats there, the people with sexual "immorality" who are still in good graces...like Newt Gingrich. To a person they're "elites" who also loathe their rank and file, but they have a media structure that allows forced memes and epistemic closure to protect them from criticism.
This is the way I see it. At a time when the federal government is actively trying to rewrite some history, and trying to erase even recent history, it remains for all of us to insure that real history is taught and remembered. The kind of entitled, performative public expressions like those made by Eilish don't help, but I understand the impulse.
We, as a country, DID destroy an entire culture and justified it to ourselves by calling the members of that culture ignorant savages. It doesn't hurt to remember the truth, that the people who call themselves Christians are capable of tremendous inhumanity, and we somehow absolve ourselves of that terrible ability of relentless cruelty. You cannot call yourself morally upright, when your morals are so easily and conveniently negated and ignored.
History must always be placed in proper context, but the thread of hypocrisy running through our own culture should be acknowledged, lest we will never learn to do better.
This, IMO, is how liberals *always* end up on the losing side of these arguments. Always! What is the average person watching extremely wealthy Billie Eilish-who sacrifices absolutely nothing by making a statement like that, btw-supposed to do about it? There is nothing I believe more strongly than Americans need to understand and acknowledge ALL our history-like all civilizations it is littered with good and bad-and work to be better. But the obsession with dividing people into permanent victims and permanent oppressors has caused a lot of harm. Remember the past, honor it, work to be better and, unless your plan is to turn the US landmass back to what it was in 1500, let it go.
Yes, and I think an uncomfortable truth is that this is one way the vocally left in this country turns away normie blue collar and middle class people AND why Trump could attract them, even if those people don't like his racism, sexism, sex crimes and corruption. Because he says "the elites are the ones stealing things, not you! You're just working hard for your family!" While most left wing people would hopefully never call a pipefitter or nursing assistant an evil colonizer, the type of discourse that Eilish was parroting DOES make people feel like they're getting blamed for just being born in a certain place.
Or maybe it's by considering blue collar workers and middle class workers different groups, you're creating the divisions in your mind already.
K
There's a lot of bad faith arguments coming out of that side, too-they'll argue until they are blue in the face that wasn't what they meant, people deliberately take it out of context or don't understand it. Yet then nothing in the messaging changes to make it MORE likely that people WILL understand going forward, in fact a lot of piling on then happens. It's as if being misunderstood was the point! Being edgy and confrontational (not bad things in and of themselves) become the ends unto themselves, a fatal flaw in the “defund the police” rhetoric IMO. You can be virulently self righteous, or you can do the things that will actually change hearts and minds, but you can't often do both. I'm generalizing here of course, but it's a pattern that repeats itself over and over and those caught up in it really should make it clear what their end game is.