I'm not sure if constitutional protections would apply. Do they stop the modern state from forcibly enrolling children into schooling? There have been plenty of hicks opposed to that since it started. Yeah there's carve-outs for homeschooling and private schools that meet requirements, maybe the Indian schools could have been held on reservations with indigenous workers so long as they taught english instead of distilling maple syrup, same kind of complaints about children being forcibly taught 'propaganda' we see today. Notwithstanding the whole question of how such constitutional protections even apply to pseudosovereign relations with tribes, its not like Gorsuch was around to take their side back then

children were removed from reservations, with force if necessary, and taken from their parents. thats not at all analogous to modern public schools, which have a home schooling alternative as you said. how would the 4th amendment look at a situation where the federal govt takes ur kids and u have zero legal recourse? not well. all so they could stuff them in white people clothes, force them to speak english and abandon native practices, behind threat of beatings or starvation punishment.

perhaps by the time the 1970s and 1980s rolled around they raised the standard enough to be only distasteful, instead of a travesty, but plenty of indian kids ended up mysteriously dead even in that era.

The vast majority of the schools were on reservations, I think the figure is 498 of the 523 schools, and the children kept relatively close to their communities, just boarded at the school. Separate from families, but in the same municipality. Both in that practice and the rate of disease, death, abuse, corporal punishment, it was not that dissimilar from schooling for white children around the nation. Wearing uniforms, strict discipline, beatings with rulers and belts, yeah that's the norm for the 1800s. And that education was compulsory in both cases. Granted boarding was not required for the non-indians, but at the time it meant children who would otherwise be working on farmsteads were attending primary education.

The federal government made a point of writing right into treaties that children would have compulsory education, and the only motivation we had for this was the humanitarian interest in improving their lives. The fort laramie treaty demanded children be schooled from ages 6-16. When the dakota sold their claims in Minnesota, the government invested their $300k in an interest-earning account guaranteed 5% per year and paid the tribes $15k dividends yearly with $5k allocated specifically for education. Congress held recorded debates in 1873 where they made the philosophical arguments about preparing Indian nations as self-sustaining individuals rather than special status welfare cases, taking a mantle of responsibility. Assimilation and elimination of native culture was the explicit intent, with the purpose of uplifting them. The very reason they criticized day schools where children returned to native-speaking families and cultures, and trialed both boarding schools and fostering children with American families. And then you have cases where Indians who benefited from such an education went on to extol it and seek to bring it to more Indian children. Is our hindsight through a lens of contemporary morals a more valid view than say David Brown who was raised by the early missionaries at a boarding school and returned to convert other Indians?

Tribal leadership making a treaty doesnt end around the 4th amendment right individual parents have, it was legal because it was never challenged. any program who's explicit goal is to destroy a culture is wrong, we can label that as historical lens hindsight, but this continued into the 1980s. 1969 was the end of it as a federal involved program, but it continued regionally later.

honestly if it were on res explicitly day time courses to learn english and western norms it would be far less objectional. the explicit targeting of native culture on an already fractured populace with a tenuous grasp on their culture after centuries of being forced to cede land and relocate is pretty gross stuff.

That's not something we can take axiomatically. Its something a contemporary lens definitely assumes, but is it really moral, ethical, legal, etc?
Is it better to preserve a backwards culture and let people languish, subjecting them to misery and deprivation, than to crush their culture and forcibly assimilate them?
Its an ongoing debate in the world and applicable to other cultures, like the Uyghers. Take the contrasting case where Israel has been pretty hands-off with Gaza and allowed them to keep their self-governance, keep their culture and lifestyle and beliefs instead of crushing them. Or the total handsoff the world has done for uncontacted tribes.

Take the example from the Alaskan tribe. The spiraling violence stemmed from an incident where a white woman saw how an indian man was cruelly mistreating his wife. In our culture, women were sacrosanct. In theirs, women were property. 1800s Karen got her finger bitten off trying to intervene and it wound up with a naval bombardment of a village. That impulse to intervene and set right an injustice, to protect someone from abuse- its every bit the same.

Its begs the question whats the measure of our morality, our right and wrong. Is the total net sum of abuse, violence, sexual assault, quality of life and length of life made better or worse for the Indian people by the boarding school program and forcible assimilation? The objective statistics get kind of skewed because the program was in full swing during (real) pandemics that wiped out tons of kids, and others are things we can only estimate and guess at. But generally, is it wrong to say that Indians who assimilated into American life have it better than their ancestors scratching in the dirt?

there is indeed debate, but i dont see any good argument for cancelling culture that doesnt violate the non aggression principal. and i dont mean interculture NAP, but also intraculture NAP violations. a man cant beat his wife because he's inuit, islamic, or irish. but a man can have pow wows or even sign up for a right of passage ceremony in which he mutilates his own body willingly.

which parts of non-alaska US culture of native americans was so problematic it needed to be shifted morally? we of course know the answer, they wore different clothes, spoke different languages, and buried their dead differently. a clear affront.

Human sacrifice & torture. The practices of pre-civilizational natives are well documented

This post was edited by El1te on Oct 29 2024 08:41am

sure, in the Aztec empire of mexico. that empire crumbled before america was even sparsely populated by white people.

spaniards came, made contact, turned an aztec vassal against the leaders, stole riches and bounced. when they returned 10 years later the whole place was a rotting graveyard where 90% of the people died, and the ritualistic torture and sacrifice was already gone before even the year 1600.

so in 1950 wisconsin kids were removed from their homes because 400 years before the most brutal and hated culture in all of central america (even by their contemporaries) used to commit sacrifices?

what does that have to do with souix, ho chuck, or even the far closer hopi people?

A lot of modern liberalism takes its maxim without me needing to exaggerate it. We'll judge a culture for its treatment of minorities, women, its civil rights, its representation in government, etc etc all the way until we judge as barbaric anything short of what we've dreamed up in only the past few years. America is projecting a demand for protection of transgender rights around the world today when Obama campaigned as an anti-gay marriage candidate. We'll use the leverage of the world bank, of US military aid, of shadow interventions and 'diplomatic pressure' to force our set of morals onto other cultures willy nilly.

So you can take it from a few different lenses. Quality of life metrics are a good case, like life expectancy, access to reliable food, shelter and education, personal liberties. Lots of subgroups living in America wore different clothes and spoke different languages, but Indians had half the life expectancy with how often they froze to death in the winter. Warring between each other, lack of self-sufficiency. The rules based order today demands we intervene to force our morals upon others because we know better than them, that we can improve their lives with a hot load of democracy dropped on them from 3000 ft. Maybe a NAP based worldview would say we're supposed to sit back and watch people live in squalor and refuse to help them unless they want to help themselves. Its just not a mainstream thought, and the mainstream thought isn't coherent.


only a few miles from here one indian tribe fought another indian tribe in some battle you can't even find on wikipedia. One group dressed in furs and walked slowly along the ice of a frozen lake, the other side mistook it as a peace negotiation and sent out a few to meet and talk to them, only to be cut down by their guns and arrows. The losing side was massacred, the men scalped. When the followers camp was overrun, they made a point of slaughtering the women and children too, save a few taken captive. One witness was a young daughter of the losing side, who climbed a pine tree and hid, saw all the scalping and field of bodies. They got control of valuable hunting areas for furs, maple trees for tapping. The wars went back and forth, one where they surrounded a lodge and fired bullets into it nonstop for an hour, one where a war party bunkered down on a cove behind a circle of rocks and held out for hours. One where a party was chased all the way to four frenchmen, only for the attacking chief to declare he "did not wish to sully the door-steps of the white man with blood". A lot of their wars were driven by interactions with the Americans- access to firearms, desire to get more furs and pelts, jockeying for power and extending the land claims. And even when left to their devices, they still fought wars with Americans on occasion.
all this to say-

Is it actually tenable to coexist with another culture without imposing upon them?
Is it immoral to impose upon a backwards culture that is clearly weak and suffering?

firstly, im not interested in even talking about what the liberals want or do. i could care less about that angle.

but to translate the rest, we beat the native american population which was thriving in the pre-columbian era, back to an untenable 10% of their population. then we moved them from their ancestral homes and forced them to copopulate with unknown other tribes. then gave back land in the worst areas we could find. then we used their lack of success in this new meta as pretense to support them but only under our terms, which they had no choice but to agree to. and now we're using their consent under duress as justification of practices that are pretty gross.

and all of this mental gymnastics to avoid saying sorry? the line for liberal idiocy is now drawn at a simple apology?

i dont want a govt that cant admit it's faults, good intentions or not.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Oct 29 2024 09:04am