this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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This would mean that like 99.9% of Earth's population has to move somewhere. Almost all land was fought over endlessly and changed metaphorical hands multiple times over. What we call "indigenous people" in a territory is usually just whoever was winning those wars before written history began.
What "landback" actually means is recognizing the systemic racism that was and still is perpetuated against the indigenous people by means of taking away their ancestral lands, slaughtering and enslaving their ancestors, and destroying their way of life; and addressing that racism by giving jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands back to them. It doesn't mean that everyone but the indigenous people have to move out; descendants of colonizers born there are technically natives of that land too. The difference is that they get systemic advantages from their ancestry whereas indigenous people get systemic discrimination. This is the thing that ought to be addressed. (well, the horrifying economic and governance system that the colonizers brought and festered must be addressed too, but all three are tightly coupled together)
In the case of Israel the difference is that a lot of colonizers are first gen, they are not natives, they do have somewhere to "go back to", and they are actively perpetuating colonization and genocide rather than simply getting an advantage from their ancestors doing so. In such cases it of course makes sense for the decolonization effort to focus on direct expulsion of invaders.
In the extremely unlikely event that indigenous people got direct executive control over what happens in the continental united states, I don't think they'd even want the mass exodus of all white people. Nor do I think they'd want full cultural assimilation. My entire life, the prevailing narrative has always just been the end of systemic oppression. Very frequently I've heard indigenous rights activists demand the free use of/free travel across land for things like hunting, which is a pretty small ask. Just because this or that action would be justified, doesn't mean it's the action people want. IMO the second minority ethnic groups feel safe and represented these kinds of mass exodus narratives will fade away. Doubly so if there was a transition to socialism that went with it, and some thought went into identifying the different national identities (so something akin to a soviet of nationalities could be formed).
Yes, this is exactly my point.
The best thing you can do is just never center white people. 99.999% of the time that's the wrong way to frame your argument.
I fully understood what you were trying to say, but I can't say the responses you got are at all that surprising either.
The last will be first. Landback and decolonization means putting the reigns into the hands of the indigenous people's hands, and letting go of the reigns, not just holding onto the reigns but giving the colonized people some of the reigns. The best settlers can hope for is to be treated kinder than they have treated the people whose land they stole. I myself was born in the US, and am still a settler here, just because I was born here does not absolve my role. It means I have a historic duty to help carry out decolonization and land back, from the back, not as a leading role.
Read Fanon.
Very few countries currently are based on native eviction, where settlers have nearly replaced the indigenous peoples. The US, canada, australia, new zealand, israel are the main ones.
I think it's projecting western colonial guilt to claim that all countries are equally based on indigenous eviction. Even colonial projects like Spain's in South America did not do to their indigenous peoples what the british did to north america.
As a founding point? Yes, I agree. I also agree that colonization scale done by British was greater than anything ever done before.
However, that wasn't my point. My point was: almost everyone on Earth lives where they do because their ancestors killed or evicted the people that lived there previously. This is in particular is not unique to any western country. Hell, reading the history of Russia, my home country, makes it pretty clear that my own deep ancestry did plenty of killing and evicting too, mostly of themselves, to get to where they all ended up (not even talking about Siberia here). It wasn't at the founding point of Russia though, and none of the peoples who lost their wars are culturally alive anymore. Does it matter if all the conquest led to the foundation of a modern country, or just different tribal lands (or later city states)? I don't think it does.
I think what does matter is justice for those descendants of the colonized who are still alive, and if there's noone left, at least understanding and recognition of the horribleness that lead up to the point of your birth.
Colonialist Spain formally recognized in 1542 Indigenous peoples as "free vassals of the Crown" as Spaniards themselves, not slaves. Of course, as in The Mission movie portrayed, many colonialists violated the Crown's laws (Columbus himself was imprisoned for violating a Crown law from 1495 banning enslaving Taíno people). The Spanish crown wanted conversion + integration whereas British sought *erasure * of the Indigenous. But it was not just the Crown laws, individuals from Spain easily intermarried from early on, the English did not.
This distinction of the Spanish colonist vs all their norther neighbors that were far more repressive. I attribute this to the Spanish experience under Islamic rule for 8 centuries, where differences were highly tolerated and conversion was 'only' mandatory for those not considered as "peoples of the Book" mentioned on the Islamic scriptures.
To conclude, Spanish colonialism, from the Americas to the Philippines, was abusive, sometimes heavily, but the centuries later the 'civilized' British one was plainly genocidal from beginning to finish and the independent United States, continued with the legacy if not increasing it. In word of historian James Axtell: "The Spanish asked Native people to become something else [Christians]; the British demanded they vanish."
What percentage of Israelis do you think are born there?
USAmericans are also doing this too. The overconsumption done by yankees would require multiple planet earths if everyone were allowed to consume as much as they do and the US government is guilty of exporting a capitalist system that causes climate change, not to mention the imperialism abroad. There is no functional difference between the US and Israel, just "Big Satan" vs. "Little Satan."
I mentioned this as another thing that needs addressing in a timely manner.
This is an extremely white washed version of land back. Pretty sure land back means full control over what happens on that land, including what kind of people can live on it, something that is currently controlled exclusively by the colonial government.
If they're feeling generous they might give you the option to stay on the condition that you assimilate into their culture.
You know, the thing Europeans forced Indigenous peoples to do. Not saying settlers should be forced through violence to do so, but I think it's more than fair that if you're going to stay, you have to assimilate.
But you're not entitled to even assimilation if they just don't want you here. And they have plenty of reason not to want you here.
I know that as a 1st gen Chinese immigrant to Canada (I came here as a kid so wasn't my choice), if all the Indigenous groups where I live unambiguously told me to GTFO. I would in good conscience have to do so and hope I can use my birth certificate to reclaim Chinese citizenship. I'm by every definition a settler so it's only fair. Whatever struggles I have in China (namely language barrier since I can barely read Chinese) I will have to deal with and it's not on the Indigenous people to let me stay just because I can't survive anywhere else.
Where you go back to and what happens to you isn't the problem of the people you colonized. And by transferring that problem on to them, you are in fact perpetuating colonialism.
Spot on comrade.
Pretty much this, you read my mind here.
I couldn't name a single ancestor of mine that wasn't born in America, so where would I get shipped off to?
Funny, when indigenous peoples from the americas asked that question, the US settlers just killed them.
Are you really doing a "reverse ethnic cleansing" rn? Lord free me from redditors.
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.
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.
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???"
Step 1: Steal something.
Step 2: Give it to your kid.
Step 3: The kid whines finders keepers, and that they shouldn't have to give it back.
Makes it a bit difficult when the kid whining is actually a 40 year old man living in a house that his family has lived in for generations. Good luck making the appeal to them.
As far as I know, my ancestors didn't steal anything. It's possible they did, and I'm sure they unfairly benefitted from systemic injustice and oppression of others, and I'm happy to help address that at the expense of my own privilege, but I don't see how that makes it okay to literally deport me to some strange country for their hypothetical crimes.
Bruh, coming here was the theft itself. What part of stolen LAND do you not understand?
Not the indigenous people's problem. If they tell you to leave, it'll be up to you to figure it out.
I don't have another country waiting to accept me, and I don't particularly want to leave the only place I've ever lived, so if they want me gone, it is their problem. Are they tossing me in jail because I have the wrong ethnicity? Deporting me to a place I have no connection to?
Basically, read it as "you should kill yourself if you're not exactly where your ancestors lived 10000 years ago". That's what these people seem to think, they just don't want to say the quiet part out loud.
I live in a country where we have a very large amount of Russians, many of whom completely lack citizenship because they moved here during the soviet occupation so didn't get automatic Estonian citizenship after our independence, but also haven't gotten Estonian or Russian citizenship after the fact. This number has decreased over the years because most people have acquired some citizenship, but we still have tens of thousands with no state at all. I can't imagine simply deporting all of those people. In fact, we're now giving out citizenship to children of non-citizen parents who have lived in the country for at least 5 years, to avoid creating more stateless people. This is despite the fact that a lot of those people getting citizenship are also the descendants of settlers, with roots in a country hostile to our own. Those people's entire lives are here, who are we to uproot them just because we were here first? It's too late now.
You're talking to someone from .ml.
You should probably choose your battles on this one, the amount of people there that can't see double standards or hypocrisy is astounding.
I have no right to say what they should do and neither do you.
Do you think all indigenous people can do whatever the fuck they want, as long as they are on their own land, and noone has any right to judge their actions?
1930s germans were indigenous people on their own land, after all.
I agree that cultural assimilation requirements and dealing harshly with white nationalists are ok; mass expulsion is not.
And I'm also pretty sure that most native Americans don't want mass expulsion, so this whole discussion is moot.
The aggressor, in the process of atoning for their atrocities, doesn't really have a right to say that the recourse proposed by the victim is unreasonable.
We are the colonial aggressors, Indigenous people are the colonized victims. I'm obviously not saying that eye for an eye doing the same to us as we did to Indigenous people is justified, but simply returning the land we stole is more than reasonable. And the logical extreme of returning stolen land is that if the rightful owners then wanted you to leave, you should.
Let's say a man and a woman live in the same house, and the man hits the woman. If the man is truly seeking to atone for his crime, and the woman tells him to move out because even seeing his face is traumatic for her, would it be reasonable for the man to complain that he has nowhere else to go? To ask the woman where she thinks he should go? To try and guilt the woman into letting him stay? If he does any of those, is he truly sorry for what he did?
You're right that most Indigenous people don't want mass expulsion. We should be incredibly grateful for that and it's a testament of their compassion and desire for equality among all people, even after all we did to them. What we shouldn't do is tell them that they can't tell us to leave or that we'd refuse to leave because we have a rightful claim to this land. Doing so is completely unproductive and will only serve to make us less deserving of staying.
As if indigenous societies never fought wars and claimed land between eachother. Send all of humanity to Africa and let the squirrels and birds take back their land while we're at it.
Not at the scale colonialism has, no. Skirmishes and even conquest between individual tribes is fundamentally different from the systematic genocide of an entire continent's population.
At what scale does a genocide become bad enough to deport everyone? Without written history, it's hard to say exactly how pre-colonial conflics in North America played out, but I've found a few sources that suggest that inter-tribe warfare can be just as bloody as any other war (as far as the technology allowed, of course). "Skirmishes between tribes" is quite an understatement.
At what scale? I'd say it's definitely closer to colonialism than it is to Indigenous wars. No doubt some Indigenous groups were capable of immense cruelty to those around them, but a continent wide ethnic cleansing is something utterly incomprehensible to even the most expansionist Indigenous groups.
Colonialism developed logistics, beauracy, and governing bodies specifically for genocide, which happened over generations. The people in charge of perpetuating it didn't even know all the people they killed, the concept of those people alone were enough to condemn them. By contrast, even the largest scale Indigenous wars had the combatants reasonably familiar with those they were fighting.
I've found a case of recorded genocidal conflict ("with intent to exerminate opposing tribe"), but it was obviously postcolonial (because there are basically no records of precolonial history). I'll note that both sides were supplied by respective colonial powers, so it could very well be considered a proxy war; however the conflict was waged by the tribes themselves, at their own will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars
We can't forget that since the population density of America was much lower than in Europe, it's hard to compare conflicts apples-to-apples. Killing 10 individuals in a small tribe/village could exterminate nearly 10% their population; a number that would be considered devastating, quasi-genocidal if it happened between european powers.
As for your second point, it brings up a problem I have with your general argument. You argue that Indigenous conflics can be forgiven since the individuals had "no interest in waging a multi-generational genocide". I can confidently say that I, an North American with European decent, also have no interest in "waging a multi-generational genocide"; why must I be punished for it, then? Nobody gets to choose their ancestry.
(That being said, I acknowldege that systemic racism is still a very big problem today where I live, and I give my vote to whoever can reduce it the most)
The goal is not to punish anyone, nor is the goal to kick everyone out. The only goal of decolonization is to give back control of the land which was forcibly taken. Like Cowbee said, you give them the reigns, and then you let go. The logical extreme of this is that if they wanted everyone to leave, they could in theory, but that's only a logical extreme and it doesn't mean it will definitely happen. The majority of Indigenous groups make it pretty clear that's not what they want out of decolonization.
Indigenous peoples are not interested in punishing you. Most aren't even interested in having you go anywhere. They're reasonable people with empathy and compassion. The notion that you were born here not by choice is not lost on them.
I think this thread is focusing way too much on the notion that Indigenous people could force you out of their land and many people are under the assumption that they will definitely treat you worse than the current government treats you for not being Indigenous. But honestly, the way the current government treats even non-Indigenous people is absolute shit and getting worse by the day, so there's no reason not to think our lives would be better under Indigenous sovereignty.
I recommend the book The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth if you're interested in what decolonization looks like from the perspective of Indigenous people. They certainly don't solely think about benefiting themselves.
I really didn't think I was being subtle here. I'm going to stop "just asking questions" and instead say that I'm surprised to see, in this of all threads, a sincere argument that there are some circumstances where it is okay for one ethnic group to systemically displace another, despite both groups only having that place to claim as a homeland.
Your claim isn't even close to the magnitude of their claim. They've been here for over ten thousand years. They. Own. This. Continent. And. Always. Will.
And again, we displaced them. We are the colonizing class. I am calling for the reversing of what was done to them, which necessarily includes giving them back control over the land. I'm not saying they should displace anyone, but they alone have the choice.
Instead of complaining that indigenous people don't have the right to remove you, maybe you should focus on contributing to decolonization so they have a reason to let you stay.
Ah the old "reverse ethnic cleansing"... all you white supremacists are coming out to play.
The absolute gall of westerners whose ancestors literally did ethnic cleansing, to then yell that at their victims at the hint of returning stolen land back to indigenous sovereignty.