You can wrap it in as many words as you want. What you are saying is that I, and others like me, who were born here just like you were, and just like indigenous people were have less of a claim to this country as their homeland. This is the basis that seems to allow you to justify taking away the lives of other people.
The goal can only be harmonious coexistence, or it will be doomed to fail. If your project is built on the destruction of the lives of others, then it will not succeed.
I will say again - I first opened my eyes in this country. It is my home and I know no other. I and FN peoples are the same in this regard. I am not special nor do I hold an exalted position over you, and neither do you over me. In the end I’m putting demands on the government to recognize the true and full cost of reconciliation. I’m not putting demands on FN people. I’m not sure why you feel aggrieved that I’ve identified another group that is being impacted by this project.
You are asking for people to sacrifice to right the wrongs of the past. I want to do this, and others do to. But if you treat them as lesser and don’t try to understand the impacts on them, and you invoke academic concepts to justify why they should just ‘suck it up’, you’re going to be unsuccessful. Eventually you have to live with these people. And like I said before, they are no different than you, no less and no more.
This is not about wrapping anything in words. It’s about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.
You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That’s just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.
You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.
No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn’t the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn’t. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.
You didn’t read, or chose not to understand, what I wrote, likely because you’ve decided who I am and have responsed to your own construct.
For one I never said it wasn’t going to impact private property owners, nor did I say I diidn’t expect it to. What I am saying is if you see this as a zero sum game and refuse to acknowledge the injustice and pain that will be caused to other parties in this process, and you refuse to demand (or at the very least actively obstruct) government recompense to other injured parties then I would caution that you are not headed in a constructive direction.
You’re asking others to put aside their hate and move in a positive direction, but it doesn’t sound like you’re willing to do it. Thankfully I have hope that you are not representative.
I don’t care about history with respect to claims of homeland. This country is not more yours than mine. I don’t expect you to buy my cultural heritage or ancestry, and you can’t expect me to do it either. You don’t have a magical connection to the land - you took your first breath here and so did I. With respect to native land, this is ours, not just yours. There is a broken contract that needs to be reconciled, but this does not dictate who has more of a right to live here. If you can’t accept that then you are definitely going to gave a hard time, particularly since I’m broadly a supporter of reconciliation and you can’t even find a way to connect with me.
Edit I also said nothing about prioritizing one claim over another, or one compensation over another. I ask that you seriously reflect on what you’ve assumed about me.
I directly addressed the points you were attempting to make. What you’re saying is that you think your needs are more important than those of Indigenous people whose land you occupy. It’s very clear what you’re actually saying despite all the sophistry you’re using. You are a supporter of reconciliation entirely on your terms, that’s not what reconciliation is.
Your whole argument is inherently premised on prioritizing one claim over another. The fact that you don’t even understand the implications of what you said yourself is frankly hilarious.
I never said prioritizing. I said both expropriation if appropriate, but also compensation to those who lost land. I said both.
You clearly think of all of the people like me as second class citizens, at least with respect to homeland. But generally, you do not consider the people on the other side to be equals with their own value and their own pain. You have made it clear in the way you insult me and call me a clown, and misinterpret what I say. I have not insulted you once.
You seem to believe that this is a zero sum game and we must lose so you can win. I will not be able to understand that position. It will only lead to worse outcomes.
I’m sorry we can’t find a way to understand each other.
It’s like you don’t understand what the word implied means.
You clearly think of all of the people like me as second class citizens, at least with respect to homeland. But generally, you do not consider the people on the other side to be equals with their own value and their own pain. You have made it clear in the way you insult me and call me a clown, and misinterpret what I say. I have not insulted you once.
See, you’re just doing projecting here because you very clearly see First Nations people as second class citizens whose rights are superseded by your own. Nobody is misinterpreting anything you said here.
You seem to believe that this is a zero sum game and we must lose so you can win. I will not be able to understand that position. It will only lead to worse outcomes.
More projecting, because nowhere did I say anything of the sort. You’re just putting words in my mouth because you’re unable to engage honestly with what’s being said to you.
Nobody has any claim to any land. So if being born here gives no one the right why do Indiginous have the right? They stole the land from others before them. And there is no guarantee that they would have the land still if left alone. Reality is one tribe would have started taking over / killing the others.
Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡
You can wrap it in as many words as you want. What you are saying is that I, and others like me, who were born here just like you were, and just like indigenous people were have less of a claim to this country as their homeland. This is the basis that seems to allow you to justify taking away the lives of other people.
The goal can only be harmonious coexistence, or it will be doomed to fail. If your project is built on the destruction of the lives of others, then it will not succeed.
I will say again - I first opened my eyes in this country. It is my home and I know no other. I and FN peoples are the same in this regard. I am not special nor do I hold an exalted position over you, and neither do you over me. In the end I’m putting demands on the government to recognize the true and full cost of reconciliation. I’m not putting demands on FN people. I’m not sure why you feel aggrieved that I’ve identified another group that is being impacted by this project.
You are asking for people to sacrifice to right the wrongs of the past. I want to do this, and others do to. But if you treat them as lesser and don’t try to understand the impacts on them, and you invoke academic concepts to justify why they should just ‘suck it up’, you’re going to be unsuccessful. Eventually you have to live with these people. And like I said before, they are no different than you, no less and no more.
This is not about wrapping anything in words. It’s about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.
You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That’s just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.
You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.
No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn’t the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn’t. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.
You didn’t read, or chose not to understand, what I wrote, likely because you’ve decided who I am and have responsed to your own construct.
For one I never said it wasn’t going to impact private property owners, nor did I say I diidn’t expect it to. What I am saying is if you see this as a zero sum game and refuse to acknowledge the injustice and pain that will be caused to other parties in this process, and you refuse to demand (or at the very least actively obstruct) government recompense to other injured parties then I would caution that you are not headed in a constructive direction.
You’re asking others to put aside their hate and move in a positive direction, but it doesn’t sound like you’re willing to do it. Thankfully I have hope that you are not representative.
I don’t care about history with respect to claims of homeland. This country is not more yours than mine. I don’t expect you to buy my cultural heritage or ancestry, and you can’t expect me to do it either. You don’t have a magical connection to the land - you took your first breath here and so did I. With respect to native land, this is ours, not just yours. There is a broken contract that needs to be reconciled, but this does not dictate who has more of a right to live here. If you can’t accept that then you are definitely going to gave a hard time, particularly since I’m broadly a supporter of reconciliation and you can’t even find a way to connect with me.
Edit I also said nothing about prioritizing one claim over another, or one compensation over another. I ask that you seriously reflect on what you’ve assumed about me.
I directly addressed the points you were attempting to make. What you’re saying is that you think your needs are more important than those of Indigenous people whose land you occupy. It’s very clear what you’re actually saying despite all the sophistry you’re using. You are a supporter of reconciliation entirely on your terms, that’s not what reconciliation is.
Your whole argument is inherently premised on prioritizing one claim over another. The fact that you don’t even understand the implications of what you said yourself is frankly hilarious.
I never said prioritizing. I said both expropriation if appropriate, but also compensation to those who lost land. I said both.
You clearly think of all of the people like me as second class citizens, at least with respect to homeland. But generally, you do not consider the people on the other side to be equals with their own value and their own pain. You have made it clear in the way you insult me and call me a clown, and misinterpret what I say. I have not insulted you once.
You seem to believe that this is a zero sum game and we must lose so you can win. I will not be able to understand that position. It will only lead to worse outcomes.
I’m sorry we can’t find a way to understand each other.
It’s like you don’t understand what the word
impliedmeans.See, you’re just doing projecting here because you very clearly see First Nations people as second class citizens whose rights are superseded by your own. Nobody is misinterpreting anything you said here.
More projecting, because nowhere did I say anything of the sort. You’re just putting words in my mouth because you’re unable to engage honestly with what’s being said to you.
Nobody has any claim to any land. So if being born here gives no one the right why do Indiginous have the right? They stole the land from others before them. And there is no guarantee that they would have the land still if left alone. Reality is one tribe would have started taking over / killing the others.
Ah, the classic we’re all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you’re trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let’s unpack your masterclass in bad faith.
First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You’d be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor’s backyard. But you don’t. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it’s time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.
Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It’s like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.
Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you’ve invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It’s not history. It’s fan fiction for the apologist. You’re judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.
The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It’s only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn’t to debate land claims. It’s to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It’s a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡