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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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As far as I can tell, I'm being told that in this hypothetical scenario, it's okay for me to be jailed or removed from my home because I'm not indigenous. Am I misreading it?
If you're so concerned about it, maybe go talk to some of the Indigenous people in your area and work with them then. Give them a reason to let you stay. You complaining to two other settlers on Lemmy certainly won't help your case.
Thanks for your concern, I'll make sure to double check my standing with them but I think I'll be alright. Maybe if I'm lucky, I can do a DNA test and find some indigenous ancestry that I didn't know about, the thresholds would probably have to be pretty low but it's possible I could squeak in there and get to be on the ruling side instead.
Tbh if you're ever told to leave, this kind of mentality will probably be why.
Every Indigenous person I've ever met has been super nice and welcoming. They're not out for revenge like you seem to think they are. I obviously can't and shouldn't speak on their behalf, but just from my limited experience talking to Indigenous people where I live, they're perfectly willing to work with the people living here, Indigenous or not. Indigenous peoples have also been some of the first groups to advocate for the government to accept refugees, using the fact that it's their land as an argument for people from elsewhere to live here. Your strawman notion of the racist, exclusionary Indigenous person who seeks to do to white people what they did to them is just that, a strawman.
You're also working under the assumption that they will treat you worse than the current government treats you. News flash, even with white privilege, you're currently being treated like you don't have a right to the land. How much is your landlord charging you to live here? Do you have a right to a home under the current laws? No you don't. If you lose all your money, you will become homeless, and plenty of jurisdictions outright criminalize homelessness and will throw you in jail because of it.
I never said I thought they'd treat me like this. In fact, I don't, for exactly the reasons you're listing. You are the one saying that it would be okay to treat me like this, which is why I've been talking to you about your statements, not them.
I'm not saying it's okay or not okay to treat you like anything. I certainly don't want you to be treated badly. I'm saying it's not my place to say what Indigenous people want out of decolonization.
I admit I was being snarky in a lot of my replies because I was ticked off by your comments. You mentioned deportation and jail and I just said "yeah those are possibilities." Reading it back I can see how I should have put more nuance into this.
I should definitely have stressed this in my previous responses, but Indigenous people are naturally extremely diverse and there is no single agreed upon narrative of what decolonization will entail. There will be some Indigenous groups that only want to be left alone on their land, but there will be others that don't have a problem with anyone living on their land. You can see some of this diversity in the different Indigenous groups' views on immigration, but those views are likely different from the views they will adopt after decolonization. The notion that all the Indigenous groups will either unanimously let you stay or tell you to leave is not the correct way to think about it.
Also, Indigenous territories overlap and Indigenous people generally have more nuanced ideas of "territory" and "ownership" compared to European cultures and their strict borders for property and sovereignty. Go to native-land.ca and see for yourself. Indigenous peoples tend to focus more on mutual agreements and understanding between neighbors as to who uses what resources, agreements which are fluid and based on the needs of the people living there, as opposed to drawing lines on a map. Concepts like citizenship and deportation are based on the European framework of sovereignty, not Indigenous ones.
As to what all this entails for the settlers living here? I can't say. Everything in North America is built around colonialism and we settlers can't really imagine what it will be like for all of that to be removed with any degree of accuracy. But I highly doubt there will be large scale forced expulsions. I'd say it's more likely that the notions of property and land titles dissolve in favour of a more nuanced and community oriented approach to where people live. We will have to adopt this paradigm if we want to continue living here.
Hey, now we're finding common ground! Sincerely, I agree with basically all of this, and the other stuff about the current capitalist regime not really respecting the rights of people any better than the hypothetical indigenous totalitarian government that wants to kick out all the white people. The only thing I really wanted to push back on was the idea that it'd be totally okay for mass deportations or imprisonments to happen as long as it was indigenous people doing it. Even keeping in mind that I've got a lot of white privilege and that I can never know what it's like to be in those shoes, I feel like it's still legitimate to say that there is a point where it would cross over into """reverse oppression""" or whatever; of course that point is essentially impossible to actually reach in practice so it's not worth worrying about other than bickering on a forum. We should be so lucky to be worrying about "geez, are indigenous groups gaining so much power that they might actually be a threat to the American government???"
This hits the nail on the head. Settlers fear, above all, being treated anywhere near as badly as we've treated indigenous peoples, when they have been infinitely kinder. The last shall be first, that doesn't mean they will kill of us or deport all of us, but it means the decisions will be driven by indigenous people first and foremost.
It's telling of the settler mindset that they immediately assume decolonization entails being treated almost as horribly as settlers have treated indigenous peoples.