Pro Gun Rights Billboard Angers (some) Native Americans

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Not to wade hip-deep into the argument. I do not find it offensive.
The first time I saw the billboard it reminded me of the T-Shirts, like the Homeland Security picture, sold at Pow-Wows displaying similar pictures and captions and wondered how long before that one would show up.

If you look hard enough there will always be someone offended by something. But, in this case I think it has less to do with the mistreatment of Native Americans than it has to do with some peoples negative emotional responses to firearms.
 
I'm in a bit late....but for the record, my American wife is 1/2 Wendat. She has a 5 relatives still living on the reservation in Oklahoma which we visited 3 years ago. She likes the ad and thinks it is very much to the point.

Yes, it is 2013 and a Frenchie and an American Indian married and had kids....the reconquest has begun, or so we like to joke. ;)
 
My family is littered with native Americans. Myself, I'm 1/4th and I think this is the best progun add I've ever seen. The only thing that offends me is progressives trying to take my god given rights away.


Boomer
 
The Billboard is true. And it is offensive. Sometimes the truth is offensive.

Someone could just as easily come up with a billboard showing Nazis shoveling Jews into ovens with the same slogan. Offensive. True.

The real truth is that humanity has a very evil, ugly, offensive side to it, which tends to rear its ugly head on weak, defenseless people. The drafters of the 2nd Amendment in their wisdom realized that.
 
Before this gets too far afield, lets keep to facts. There never was a policy of genocide to eliminate Native Americans. There were terribly unfair incidents, such as at Wounded Knee, but the policy of the colonialists, and then the Americans, was never genocide. Certainly Native Americans were forcible relocated, and many did die from disease, starvation and exposure, but that was not the intent of the action. I am not denying that white European descendants settled this country, sometimes at the expense of the aboriginals, but that is not genocide. The same thing has happened countless times as one cultural or ethnic group, with superior technology or numbers moved into a geographic area already occupied by another group, and forced the original occupants to move, be assimilated or otherwise deprived of what had once been theirs. And it is undoubtedly true that had the Native American tribes been better organized in their opposition to the white invaders, and had they the weaponry that the invaders introduced to the land, their loss of what is now the 48 contiguous states would have been much slower and probably less complete.
 
Certainly Native Americans were forcible relocated, and many did die from disease, starvation and exposure, but that was not the intent of the action.
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If you prefer to call it "ethnic cleansing," be my guest. There is no question that forcible relocation of Indian tribes was the policy of the US government, and it was often carried out in ways that guaranteed large-scale deaths from the causes you mention. It's also easy to document that terror tactics were used to force compliance with this policy.

In 2000, the head of the BIA, Kevin Gover, offered a formal apology for his agency's role in what he himself described as ethnic cleansing:
As the nation looked to the West for more land, this agency participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the western tribes. War necessarily begets tragedy; the war for the West was no exception. Yet in these more enlightened times, it must be acknowledged that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life. This agency and the good people in it failed in the mission to prevent the devastation. And so great nations of patriot warriors fell. We will never push aside the memory of unnecessary and violent death at places such as Sand Creek, the banks of the Wa****a* River, and Wounded Knee.

Nor did the consequences of war have to include the futile and destructive efforts to annihilate Indian cultures. After the devastation of tribal economies and the deliberate creation of tribal dependence on the services provided by this agency, this agency set out to destroy all things Indian. ​
While Mr. Gover said in this speech that he was speaking only on behalf of the BIA, and not the Federal Government as a whole, he made it clear that the agency was participating in an official government policy.

Many authors have noted that the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide is problematic. Some have argued that genocide is one of many tactics used in ethnic cleansing, while others have argued that the term "ethnic cleansing" is merely a euphemism for genocide. The latter interpretation is supported by the origin of the expression: it was invented by the Serbs as a "nice" way of describing the genocide they committed against Bosnian Muslims.

That said, "the destruction of all things Indian" was in fact the policy of the federal government.
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* And the language filter strikes again... :rolleyes:
 
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The term Ethnic Cleansing was not invented until the 1990's, to describe what was happening in the Balkans. The Serbs thought they were being enlightened and benevolent because they chose to forcibly relocate the Bosnian and Croatian populations... as opposed to the prior attempts at genocide, enslavement, and/or forced religeous conversion which had been the standard operating procedure for the prior 600 years in that land. The Serbian leadership was quite shocked when world opinion was united against them. They mistakenly thought that as long as they did not resort to Nazi-like levels of atrocity, they would get a pass. They thought that the use of large-scale rape as an instrument of terror, combined with selective small scale mass killings (hundreds at a time) would be ignored by the rest of the world. If the year had been 1890 instead of 1990, they would have been right.

So what is my point? When we look at the treatment of the Native Americans by the English, then by the American settlers, and later by the US Government, we need to keep this in context of what was going on in the rest of the world.

Slavery in the US did not end until 1865, and as bad as the Native Americans were treated, it was no worse than slavery, and often much better. Slavery continued in Brazil until 1888. Slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, and there were ~ 300,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia at that time.

During the Napoleonic wars in central Europe (1795 - 1813), civilians were used as canon fodder and human shields. The British were brutal in suppressing the Boers (1900 - 1915). The Turks tried to genocide the Armenians (~1900). All manner of slavery and sexual bondage existed in China, Japan, India, Arabia and Persia and was both legal socially acceptable(up to ~1940).

The Aztecs brought human sacrifice to a whole new level. To consecrate their new pyramid temple, they basically painted the entire pyramid with human blood. By their own account, 84,000 captives were slaughtered in a matter of days. Even allowing for exageration, it was probably at least 10,000 people.

So let's keep things in perspective. The Native Americans were brutalized by the US government, and the American people just didn't care about it. Hard truth, but truth nonetheless. But the brutalization was not exceptional, or unprecedented. In fact it was an average, or even mild-level of brutalization compared to what was going on all over the world.
 
If your point is that these practices have ended, you're mistaken. If it's that the moral standards that led to their condemnation are a recent development, this is also incorrect. For example, the idea that slavery is abhorrent can be traced at least to the mid 1500's, when the first laws prohibiting it were issued. It's true that the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" belong to the 20th century, but that's no reason to avoid using them to describe earlier events and policies, any more than it's inaccurate to say that Leonardo Da Vinci designed the first machine gun.
 
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In 2000, the head of the BIA, Kevin Gover, offered a formal apology for his agency's role in what he himself described as ethnic cleansing:
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This is so wrong. First, who can offer an apology for what others did over a hundred years ago that no one is alive to speak about? It's useless foo pah, an insincere statement of condolence.

An apology is useless unless it comes from the ones who did the wrongs.

That said, "the destruction of all things Indian" was in fact the policy of the federal government.
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This is a far departure from George Washington's policies toward the Native Americans expressed here.

George Washington formulated a policy to encourage the "civilizing" process.[2] He had a six-point plan for civilization which included,

1. impartial justice toward Native Americans
2. regulated buying of Native American lands
3. promotion of commerce
4. promotion of experiments to civilize or improve Native American society
5. presidential authority to give presents
6. punishing those who violated Native American rights.[6]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native_Americans
 
Yes, it is a departure from what Washington would have wished. However, he probably never envisioned the kind of westward expansion that took place in the 19th century.
 
If your point is that these practices have ended, you're mistaken.
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I can't speak to the current issues with Native Americans. If you were to take a position that the Government continues to oppress them, I would be inclined to believe you.

If it's that the moral standards that led to their condemnation are a recent development, this is also incorrect. For example, the idea that slavery is abhorrent can be traced at least to the mid 1500's, when the first laws prohibiting it were issued.
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I agree... I would even argue that nearly all of our understanding of Right and Wrong was quite well defined by philosophers and religeous leaders who lived thousands of years ago.

However, a couple of very significant changes in the evolution of morality happened in the 1800s, starting in Britain. The British middle class began to take a very dim view of the slave trade, and pressured parliment to end it. The Slave trade was a significant economic activity for the British and it generated a lot of wealth, so ending the trade was a real sacrifice. But the Royal Navy had the power to do it, and the people demanded it, and so it was done. In my opinion, it is the first time in human history that a powerful nation made a democratic decision to sacrifice economic gain and risk blood and treasure for the sole purpose of fighting evil. Following this, we seemed to have benefited from a slow flowering of ethical and moral courage among various western nations. The American Cival War for instance...

Democratic nations behaving in a moral way (most of the time, more or less) is a new phenomenon. It is not that our ancestors were bad people, but they did not have the institutions of good government, media, education etc that we have. It is not fair to say "why didn't my anscestors end slavery?", because they did not have the tools, they did not know how to go about it, and they did not have past examples to show them that it was even possible.

Jim
 
Thank you for the civilized discourse on this very emotional topic. There are so many ways of looking at these issues and each perspective may lead one to different conclusions. It is undoubtedly true that the descendants of Africans pressed into slavery in the U.S.A. are greatly advantaged in every way over their non-enslaved cousins' descendants. The slaves of course suffered great deprivation, loss of freedom and sometimes their lives, but the African Americans today are clearly doing better economically, as well as in terms of personal and political freedom than most black Africans in their own countries today. You could say that the end result of slavery was positive for the black people. Similarly, the degree of benevolence shown to Native Americans, poor as it was, has served to create a permanent poor underclass of individuals who are overly dependent on government and for the most part, unable to benefit individually from the value of the resources given to them on a tribal basis. From this perspective you could conclude that had the U.S. Government done nothing for the surviving Native Americans, those that remained would have long assimilated into American society and culture and would be better off in many ways from the situation of Native Americans today. These are complicated as well as emotional subjects. And judging the behavior of our forefathers by the cultural standards of today is both intellectually dishonest and a true disservice to those who lived before us. A final note: my grandparents on both my maternal and paternal sides fled the religious persecution endemic to Czarist Russia, and their early years in this country were marked by discrimination, poverty and governmental neglect. The end result of this is that much of my family are successful and loyal Americans, with a far better life than those who remained in Russia and endured Communism, World War I and II, and the stagnated plutocracy of Russia today.
 
While the discussion has by and large been well considered and polite, I'm thinking it has been pretty will exhausted and has really dipped far into the historic aspect, which is largely off topic for this forum.

Thanks everyone, but closed.
 
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