Reparations: Should the Indigenous People's of North America

[whatthehey]

7. No. Because that way lies madness that will never stop

To whom should reparations be given? The tribe most recently displaced or the one they displaced themselves in pre-Columbian times? There was plenty of territorial conflict pre 1492 in the Americas as in Europe or Asia. Do the losers or victors in those conflicts deserve the reparations?

From whom should reparations come? Only those with direct line descent from families who took the land, or from all non-NA Americans, regardless of any benefit from the land grabs? Should black Americans, most of whom come from stock that was forcibly brought here after the land grab already started and who benefitted directly very little, pay or not?

What makes the American land grabs different from European versions? Asian? African? The Irish resent the English mightily, even though people migrated from England to Ireland long before most of the current Irish residents' ancestors did so, and actually displaced the English first. Who should owe whom? The Celts were originally mostly what is now German and French. So were the Angles and Saxons. Russians came from Scandinavia and displaced the decendants of those who are now Turkic, but their descendants in turn displaced Slavic people. Hell since "indigenous" people here migrated from various points between Lake Baikal and Mongolia and doubtless did so because others drove them out, what's wrong with seeking reparations from the real motherland? Human evolution does not contain an American source, only a waypoint and one that is difficult if not impossible to be precise about initial "claim". Should reparations be paid based on percentage of Clovis DNA? What about the Yungay-related Peruvian groups who must have passed before? Do Clovis descendants have to pay them reparations? You can't just pick an arbitrary date and say "we all need to get paid based on, say, 1700CE territory". Even if you did, does a person with roughly 50%, to pick an example, Iroquois and 50% Scots-Irish DNA pay themselves?

All of human history is migration and conquest. Unless we all crowd into the Rift Valley and live together, there will always be land that was taken by a from b, almost always by force. Anyone looking for reparations driven by ethnos is just trying to pick an arbitrary time when their ancestors were on the unpleasant side of that equation, but all thatr would do is start a snowball that logically could not stop until we are all fighting over who pays for a little bit of Ethiopia.