Re: [OT] The mass graves that never were?

The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:

Mon, 3 Jun 2024 14:19:11 -0000 (UTC), Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

Why do you doubt it? Of the land acknowledgements I've heard, they
typically say "stolen". Land typically changed hands throughout human
history due to war and conquest, including among Indian tribes. How is
this in dispute?

I know my home neighborhood well and both the neighborhood where I
grew up and where I've lived for the last 30 years were built in the
1950s and 1970s respectively and in both cases were forested before
that.

I also know the local aboriginal people never lived more than a mile
from the shore line which both cited neighborhoods were well beyond.

Our town goes from the shoreline to a chain of mountains that are
roughly 4000' high with building stopping about the 700' level. These
mountains were climbed from time immemorial but were not hunted or
farmed with logging not started till the 1920s.

So unless you're suggesting living 3-4 miles from virgin forests
constitutes ownership, no - my forebears did not steal it from anybody
but settled where no one previously had lived.

I have no idea what the history of settlement was where my first house
was (and still is) but that was in a section of Ontario settled at
least 200 years ago. But no question, both my present home and my
childhood home neighborhoods were built during my grandparents'
lifetimes.

The "land acknowledgement" statements typically include a line about
land being "stolen". It's generic. It's a cliche.

Yes, it's possible that there are some parts of the world colonized by
Europeans in which they are the first human inhabitants (or the previous
inhabitants left), including portions of the greater Vancouver area. The
land acknowledgement bullshit by your town council may indeed be entirely
irrelevant given known history.

Land acknowledgements are said because that's what all the cool
politicians do. They are meaningless in their entirely.

Land doesn't create economic rent till it's used. Stolen from the
Indians by conquest or not, there were too few of them to have created
much in the way of economic activity.

That's the important bit THAT'S NOT BEING ACKNOWLEDGED. Economic rent
being created today does not belong to dead Indians.

I've pointed out before that much of Chicago's lakefront is unnatural.
It's landfill. There are a number of museums on landfill. One of them
did a land acknowledgement despite the Indians have built no landfill
whatsoever. In their time, the land was lake bottom.