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Originally Posted by station
I’m pretty sure the Doctrine of Discovery and the concept of terra nullius qualify as deliberate agency. Indigenous peoples, being non-Christians, were literally declared not human to justify the settlement and declaration of sovereignty of “unoccupied” lands by European monarchies.
I agree with your premise. Certainly there was an arms race of colonization by European powers that was unsurvivable by indigenous peoples. That doesn’t justify actual policies of sovereignty, cultural genocide, eugenics, and segregation though.
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Invasion and subjugation is hardly a behaviour peculiar to Europeans. In the same period the British and French were colonizing Canada, the Hmong were subjugated by the Chinese and the Bantu by the Zulu. The Aztecs brutally subjugated all their neighbours, which was why it was so easy for Cortez to find allies against them. There's evidence that the indigenous people in North America at contact with Europe had previously wiped out or absorbed earlier arrivals to the continent.
Declaring neighbours who have stuff you want to be inhuman and not protected by the laws that govern your people is the default stance of humans, only recognized recently (and by those same Europeans) as something to be ashamed of.
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Originally Posted by station
This has zero to do with Christian atonement which is about absolving personal transgressions so as to take part in the rapture. This is a now secular nation state coming to grips with the fact that a cultural genocide took place for 100+ years, and an attempt to built a better and more cooperative future with those peoples. Not everything has a clear historical precedent.
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Can you name some countries with a non-Christian heritage where we see collective expressions of guilt and atonement over historical depredations? You might want to compare the post-war public attitudes in Japan, for instance, with those in Germany.
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Originally Posted by station
If your argument is why should we bother, my argument is why shouldn’t we try?
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My argument is we shouldn't be deflected by sentiment and emotionally-satisfying narratives, and instead focus in the difficult, tangible work at hand.
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Originally Posted by station
40 years of gradual progress and awareness is not that long, really.
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No. But it's long enough that we've pretty much diagnosed the core problems. They just happen to not be easily fixed, or to fit into satisfying narratives.