wild: baa, baa, black sheep

There's one cousin who I am forced to continually educate about things he doesn't know any better about. He drives me bonkers, but I'm calm and as close to persuasive as I can be to inform him of how things really happened. I'm winning repeatedly, because he can't be stubborn against repeated and clear use of actual fact.

Today's discussion--prompted by his status--was so maddening that I want to write it down. I want to remind myself that I really think my heart knows what is fair, and whats to fight for it... that I can still be a warrior if other people need me. So (even though I will purposefully remove his name), here is our "talk".

His initial post (a status): "I dislike when "native" Americans say they're the "real" Americans when it's proven they're not even native to here. More like eastern parts of Asia and Siberia, Soo there's that."

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• • me:  Closer to native than us. They moved here over many years and made the land theirs; we took it with guns, shared diseases and mass genocide. We treated Native Americans like dogs and tried to completely assimilate their culture. So..... there's that lol

    Like · Reply · 1 hr
  • him: Civilizations rise and fall. We will too in time but not now. I just don't like all the bs I keep hearing about them

    Like · Reply · 51 mins
  • me: It isn't bs. We literally came onto land that didn't belong to us and took every valuable. We forced them away from nearly every arable resource and cheated on our treaties. It's all documented on both sides.

    Like · Reply · 41 mins
  • him: That's happened all through history, you can go anywhere in the world and that's happened.

    Like · Reply · 20 mins
  • me: It's also unwarranted and deeply terrible. Native Americans have every right to complain. White settlers literally decimated everything about their entire way of life. It's no different than somebody killing everybody in your family and taking everything from you. Not just you, either, but your neighbor, and his neighbor--whole towns--because somebody else decided you didn't deserve your own home.

    Like · Reply · 16 mins
  • him: It didn't start out like that

    Unlike · Reply · 1 · 12 mins
  • me: Nope. It started with the Native Americans trusting us. As in, White Settlers asking for land. Native Americans granting them the use of as much land as a man could walk in a day--so white settlers sent their fastest runners. Or perhaps you'd prefer the example where they said we could use a single deer's worth of land--so the White settlers took the deer and strung his body, hide, muscles, you name it, into one long-ass rope. We literally fucked them over from day one. If you don't believe me, you should definitely check it out. The White settlers all but gloated and beat their chest like apes over it... it's all publicly available from independent government sources. Don't even get me started on the Trail of tears, dude. It just gets worse from day one. We're still doing nothing to acknowledge that they're suffering from our actions, and nothing to help them. There was a HUGE amount of Native American people when we arrived... and now there are hardly any of them left. White settlers and the subsequently poor choices of our government has literally murdered 3/4ths of a nation's worth of people... because settlers wanted their land. Again, and again, and again.
  • He has yet to respond. We'll see....