Indigenous Land Acknowledgement
Lifted from the comments, more pretentious agonising:
Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist.
Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.
The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.
It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.
Likewise, the demographics of Cambridge are skewed rather significantly by students, who make up about a fifth of the city’s population, and of which more than 40% are students from overseas. Which, again, may tilt one’s view of what constitutes “representation.”
But apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
Update, via the comments:
It’s worth noting that the museum apparently had its annual Arts Council funding reduced – from £1.2M to £637K – on grounds that the institution “hadn’t fulfilled its targets of diversifying its audience.” Hence, one assumes, the new signage, the fretting about “representation,” and the stern moral warnings about “nationalist feelings.”
It’s not clear to me how one might “diversify” the racial makeup of visitors to the museum, which is what is meant, albeit coyly. And it occurs to me that part of that problem – if indeed it is a problem – might be a “diverse” immigrant demographic that by and large shows less interest in the artistic and cultural history of the country to which they have moved.
See also, the British countryside.
Update 2:
Regarding the urge to correct the racial makeup of museum visitors, Julia asks,
Which isn’t entirely out of step with the general air of farce. The supposedly corrective fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to. Those doing the fretting then set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they have travelled to see, and with which they may feel some affinity, may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness. By liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption.
Andy adds,
Indeed. It’s very often a condition of taxpayer subsidy, as illustrated above. And of course such ham-fisted measures, along with the encroachment of wokeness more generally, may strike some visitors as inapt or patronising, or vaguely alienating, thereby deterring further visits. While the sought-after “diverse” demographic continues choosing not to visit anyway.
But hey, progress.
This blog is kept afloat by the buttons below.
By equating everything good with fascism, the left might make fascism seem more attractive. It’s certainly true that some fascists are taking advantage of this.
This might be a metaphor for something.
It seems every regional and local museum has been infected with this madness. Last year I visited Cardiff and went to the National Museum of Wales, which was making a big deal of the fact that it had a portrait of a local notable who had been the governor of one of the Caribbean colonies. Yet they had a piece on display by the notorious incestuous nonce Eric Gill, which seemed to go unremarked on.
There’s also the conceit that, without such stern warnings, visitors to Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum might unleash their “dark” and “nationalist feelings” and suddenly begin to harass any Foreign-Looking Johnnies.
That chart at the link… Is London still even part of England?
It’s worth noting that the museum apparently had its annual Arts Council funding reduced – from £1.2M to £637K – on grounds that the institution “hadn’t fulfilled its targets of diversifying its audience.” Hence, one assumes, the new signage, the fretting about “representation,” and the stern moral warnings about “nationalist feelings.”
It’s not clear to me how one might “diversify” the racial makeup of visitors to the museum – which is what is meant, albeit coyly. And it occurs to me that part of that problem – if indeed it is a problem – might be a “diverse” immigrant demographic that by and large shows much less interest in the artistic and cultural history of the country to which they have moved.
See also, the British countryside.
It seems more than a bit curious that those claiming to embody progress in thought, word, and deed work so assiduously to remove any evidence of said progress.
Seems unlikely he’ll he post videos of the subsequent rabies shots.
This seems to stem, at least in part, from the notion that the country to which they have moved can expect nothing of the immigrants but is expected to do everything for the immigrants.
[ Post updated. ]
Might be. You would have to play it in an endless loop though. That guy sounded like he might have been in danger of actually learning something. Maybe. Shame that Timothy Treadwell is not available for comment.
Indeed. It’s often and increasingly a condition of taxpayer subsidy, as illustrated in the update. And of course such ham-fisted measures, along with the encroachment of wokeness more generally, may strike some visitors, especially white ones, as inapt or vaguely insulting, thereby deterring further visits. While the sought-after “diverse” demographic continues choosing not to visit anyway.
But hey, progress.
Well by decreasing the number of white visitors your ratio “improves”, plus fewer visitors equals less work. Actually trying an honest outreach to the PoC community would require a far more serious effort. This way is a win/win.
Happily, widespread mockery is underway.
I did chuckle at the idea of “hard-right shed tidying.”
Hail lobster!
Also, “I’ve been walking in the actual [countryside] – I’m feeling charged with national socialist sentiment and the fire of racial division.”
And,
Fascism, countryside…I just remembered this Austrian thing and then I didn’t feel so bad.
Communist traitors all tied up with strings, these are a few of my favorite things.
Sound of Music: some twits objected to the movie because it showed actual nazis…who in the movie are the bad guys…FFS. I believe I had more reading (and other) comprehension in 3rd grade.
Remember when some twits objected to a man reading about how a university defeated the Klan? A janitor and student at Indiana University Purdue was reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. His black coworkers were offended and reported him for racial harassment, even though he explained that the book was on the side of Notre Dame. His union joined in the witch hunt. The school, too. Only the embarrassment of nationwide publicity forced the school to back down and apologize.
No word in the news coverage if those coworkers ever apologized. But given the degraded and depraved state of black America, I doubt it. Far too large a fraction of black Americans are know-nothing racists, irrespective of education and income.
Looks like comment spam.
Chimps shocked to see man’s artificial leg.
Is this accurate?
Brits win with 95 percent. (But who are the other 5 percent? Immigrants or natives?)
Between 40,000 and 20,000 yrs ago, modern humans moved into Europe from the Middle East with probably several waves up until 10,000BP. About 8,000 yrs ago, farmers from Turkey began to move in and largely replaced the hunter-gatherers there. Then around 5000 yrs ago, the Yamnaya (from the area centered on Ukraine and eastward) because they had the horse, chariots and wagons, livestock, and bronze smelting traditions had a big advantage and moved in first to N. Europe and then moved south. They replaced remaining hunters and farmers in all except S. Italy.
So who is the “original” inhabitants?
Same Story in the Americas. There were at least two and maybe 3 waves of migrants. Locally, tribes came and went. In the area of New England, studies have found a particular culture (can’t remember the name) that had distinct pottery and genes that was completely replaced–such studies can no longer even be done because native tribes won’t allow them.
Yet more comment spam!
Oh dear Lord. I hope it will be quick and easy to block this spammer.
fitspresso looks like an AI account
fitspresso looks like an AI account
I thought it was David’s mom
Heh. There was a philosopher at FAMU whose blog I and about three or four other people used to follow until we all got fed up with his sophistry and BS. We all dropped him about the same time. Every few months or so I would check in to see if any of the other guys whose thoughts I enjoyed hearing had returned. Never saw any of them again but he did pick up one sycophant and additionally…his mother would comment when no one else did. Sad.
From what I’ve read there were something like 15-30 million people living in the Americas, both North and South, when Columbus arrived. These two continents currently hold about 1 billion people. Similar to something I said on the previous thread, in what sense did those dozens of millions of people “own” these two entire continents? How? In what sense did they “own” for example the entirety of say Birmingham, AL or Bethlehem, PA?
One other thing…I was hunting for something under the kitchen sink and smacked the back of my head seriously hard on the counter top above. Hurt like a MF’r. Anyway, I got to thinking…I haven’t heard anything here about Laurie Penny in quite some time.
Without double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
[ Purges spam, slurps coffee. ]
I’ve previously mentioned one of many visits to the nearby Peak District National Park, during which The Other Half and I ran into a visiting East Asian chap, a dad with his young son. The dad was beaming and eager to share his appreciation of the landscape, even with random strangers, which was rather sweet, a memorable encounter.
And I have to say, “dark… nationalist feelings,” or some desire to exclude, were not part of the experience.
Ditto the common sight of visiting minority students, whose visible enjoyment of the place is rather affirming. And compared to which, the ostentatious fretting of our betters seems both contrived and sour.
And around 97% were wiped out by disease in a 100-year timespan. That’s absolutely staggering.
The arrival of Europeans was devastating for the native Americans. In the English colonies, the remaining 3% were not treated well, and eventually we commandeered the land they were using and confined them to barren patches of undesirable land.
And. The current push to “decolonize” the continent will do jack-all to improve the lot of natives. Leftists won’t treat them any better than the original colonials. It’s not about restoring the natives to their former places; it’s about fomenting revolution.
It’s always about the revolution.
“It’s not clear to me how one might “diversify” the racial makeup of visitors to the museum…“
Press-gangs?
Sorry, not buying this Narrative. Now perhaps 97% (or perhaps 90%, or …) of groups that encountered Europeans directly, in specific time periods or specific tribal groups were wiped out. Perhaps. But 97%** (or 90% or whatever) of the entire continent? No. Too many isolated groups with their own unique DNA signatures that had evolved over tens of thousands of years. And let’s not forget that there were diseases that went the other direction such a syphilis.
And that’s putting aside the suspicions one should have about the accuracy and faith in data from a period of low reliability amongst populations with essentially no writing capacity. Current data gathering using most modern technology has been shown to be highly suspect in the Covid era.
Again, these are two huge continents possessing tremendous quantities of useful land. The native populations were not using ALL of it. Neither were ALL of them pushed onto reservations. Neither was it necessary to push native tribes off of land that they were not using anyway. Otherwise there would be no place for the 970 million additional souls who currently inhabit this hemisphere nor room for the many that continue to arrive and/or are born every day.
** 97% is a popular SWAG number, like “97% of all climate scientists…”
Geordies.
Well, the fretting starts with a dubious, arbitrary assumption – that all racial groups should be visiting the museum in some given ratio, even though they choose not to – and then those doing the fretting set about insulting the people who do visit the museum by claiming that the things they wish to see may result in “dark… nationalist feelings” and other unspeakable beastliness.
[ Post updated again. ]
The diseases spread rapidly from tribe to tribe, well ahead of the Europeans. There is archaeological evidence of how populated various regions were, and historical accounts of regions being depopulated before the Europeans arrived.
The reverse pattern was seen in Africa, with Europeans showing great vulnerability to local diseases.
Hey – there’s absolutely nothing wrong, and definitely not sad, about a blog that only has comments from the host’s Mum, and occasional friends. Nothing at all.
Or so I’ve been told by, er, his Mum.
Anyway.
RACIST!
The deranged narcissism of the “woke” mind:
Woke pastor: “What if God worships me?”
He begins by pretending to ask “what if” but ends by asserting the truth of what he failed to demonsrate. This is a common rhetorical device in preaching, but rarely does one see it used so dishonestly.
Bellevue, by the way, is a suburb of Seattle. Of course.
Found via the Babylon Bee/Not the Bee.
[ Slides bowl of fatigued leaves and grated carrot to Karl. ]
On the house.
I visited Kashmir once, and the worst thing about it was it was absolutely covered in brown people. I don’t know how they can expect white visitors to feel comfortable when they make no attempt to redress the obvious lack of racial diversity in the region. It’s a completely jingoistic disgrace.
No wonder their tourist industry is dying.
Well, that and the war.
Thanks 🥹
For those who missed it, from the linked piece,
And yet some variation of the conceits above appears every few months in the progressive media. It’s a go-to template.
I recall in old TV shows Bellevue was often the name of the local mental hospital.
Yes. Very apt.
The ultimate expression of luxury is to live one’s life in complete disregard for reality.
Instalanch. [ Sounds klaxon. ]
Squirt some bleach round the loo.
[ Eyes clientele. ]
Better keep the bleach on hot standby.
MPs.
Hubris is an essential element of left/progressive/woke thought.
If the locality was New York.
Professors of education and grievance studies?
Bellevue is Microsoft HQ. So, yeah, crazy.
One often wonders what the indigenous would do if “the land” were ever returned to them. Well wonder no further. Here in the Great White North, Vancouver, to be exact–the fruity and nuttiest part of Canada–recently returned (sold?) a large swath of undeveloped land to Squamish First Nations. Said natives have angered the local lefties who fought for this outcome. Why? Because the Tribe is planning to raze the land and build an ultra-high density condo development of 11 towers with some as tall as 40 stories. The density will be 3 times greater than Hong Kong.
As one twitter user put it, “They really thought we wanted our land back to leave it as a dog park.” More here.
BUT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE PRIMITIVE AND CHARMING.
And yet still, nowhere near 97%. Archeological evidence itself quite unreliable from that time period. This smallpox thing being quite the distraction from my main point. I really would rather not go into extended detail but I found this to be a rather sober analytical presentation of just one example of the degree of reliability of such information.
https://www.historynet.com/smallpox-in-the-blankets/
So back to my main point…ahem…by what reasoning would 15-30(?) million people have claim to an entire hemisphere consisting of 30% of the world’s land mass, about 18 million square miles? Especially the parts that those people never even knew existed?
It’s been bruited about for years here that natives could make a mint by operating for-profit medical centers on their lands.
Silly question: if they didn’t own it, you wouldn’t feel guilty about occupying in now, would you? Since you must be made to feel guilty, they must’ve owned it. Simple logic, innit?
And on a different topic I think you raised, I was wondering about Laurie Penny, too. Did she quietly adopt the bourgeois lifestyle she affected to disdain, and can we hope that will be enough to shut her up?
To be accurate, replace the book with an upraised finger and the torch with a gun.
How many people are in that dress?
WTP, I appreciate you going into detail on our behalf. I don’t know what to believe, since I haven’t done the reading (shame!), but it’s fascinating to speculate. Like the new understanding that the “old growth” Amazon is not really old growth at all, because the natives did quite a lot of farming before the Spanish arrived.
BUT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE PRIMITIVE AND CHARMING.
People are blissfully unaware of how active Native Groups are in local and regional development markets. They are active buyers and sellers in the real estate market too. They love to hide behind the “Chief Big Screen” image because it covers their involvement in multi-million dollar developments. But the Noble Savage…
The gun should be pointed at someone and held sideways.
Thx. I stumbled around on this a little bit because I was curious how the “knowledge” may have changed since last I looked. One other page that seemed reliable but I lost track of indicated that a certain tribe which I never heard of (go figure) was 100% wiped out. Others in the 40’s to 70’s, etc. I would guess 60% might be an upper limit across North America. South America seems would be more complicated due to how it was conquered and yet not so much. The black death in a much more population concentrated Europe was about 50%. Or so they say. Today. My general concern is the certainty with which these sorts of things are stated when we can’t even get Covid right.
Alas, she’s been very quiet of late, thereby robbing us of inadvertent comedy.
Well, obviously they can’t press gang PoC to visit the museum, but what they *can* do is have attendance caps for White people. Only admit White people on a sliding scale proportionate to the number of PoC that have visited the museum that day! Problem solved!*
*Except for the problem of nobody actually visiting the museum anymore. Details, details.
Is anyone shocked that Vicky Osterweil is a man pretending to be a woman?
No? Nobody? I didn’t think so.
I imagine the relationship, should there be one, is more along the lines of, “Let’s see what happens this time…”
Liberal judge sentences violent criminal only to probation for stabbing 94-year-old woman multiple times:
Such a report ought to show the necessity of locking him up, but “progressive thinkers” always want to give monsters another chance.
Speaking of which, have you seen the Bobby Fingers Jeff Bezos video?
By their wooden language shall ye know them.
“It reminded me of North Korea, except that the inescapable was loud music, not political propaganda.”
Bravo to Dalrymple for cleverly associating this Muzak noise with North Korea. I am usually able to tune it out, but the mediocrity of the renditions sometimes pierces the bubble.
Native americans in the USA have reservations. They are no longer required to live there. I have had native amer friends and neighbors. Some reservations make a business out of logging (upper Midwest), salmon fishing (PNW), others have casinos. Those who stay on the poorest land (e.g. Navajo) really can’t blame the rest of us for being in the middle of desert nowhere.
As to the Americas and disease: it wasn’t one disease: smallpox killed 80-90% in an epidemic but also typhus and others were introduced. It really was a shit-show.
My source is the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann. He said some estimates put it as high as 97%. Could it have been lower? Yeah. Maybe 90%.
Americans were vulnerable to European diseases not merely because they hadn’t been exposed to them but because their immune systems had evolved away from infectious illnesses and toward parasites. Apparently, the human immune system can evolve one way or the other, but the paths are mutually exclusive. That’s why they died in such staggering numbers. Both Europeans and Americans saw it as the judgment of God, it was so drastic.
Also, black plague was in the mix, not just smallpox. No wonder they were devastated.
It’s true that land usage among the natives was spotty. And conquest by the Spanish was a whole different animal from the English settlers. But the stronger, more numerous nation did forcibly displace a lot of natives because the two theories of land use (hunter-gatherer vs agriculture) can’t occupy the same space.
It’s possible to recognize that the natives were mistreated and still not feel guilt for it. There was no way that the oppressed classes of Europe were going to stay in Europe while there was all that land just Sitting There, the natives having vacated the place by dying in droves. Someday, another wave will sweep over America and the demographics and government will change, and history will march on as it always does.
I can’t stop laughing. Good for them.
1491 goes into that, about the extensive canal system you can see from the air. Lots of fruit-tree cultivation.
Also, the Yanomami, whom anthropologists like to see as “untouched,” living their primitive lives unchanged for 1000s of years? They are the descendants of natives who were cultivating the Amazon (using slash and burn) but had to flee into the jungle to escape the Spanish slave trade, so their lifestyle is basically “camping” compared to their previous life.
I often think the same thing. Oh, he wasn’t quite in control of himself? He couldn’t help it?
Fine, his culpability is lessened. But if he couldn’t help himself, then he’s just that much more dangerous than someone who has all their marbles. Definitely lock him up.
If someone is supposedly unable to inhibit their alarmingly predatory, violent and homicidal urges, even while on probation for other crimes – behaviour indulged in repeatedly and described as “senseless and horrifying” – this is not a good reason for pretentious leniency. It sounds like a very good argument for bricking them up in a dungeon for as long as necessary.
And a very good argument for bricking up those who would release him.
[ Contemplates how much “current wisdom” has changed since my childhood. ]
We didn’t do the oppressing and we are not oppressing today–quite the contrary. This is in marked contrast to the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia, where Muslims are still oppressing the surviving remnants of the peoples they conquered and genocided.
It’s also possible to recognize that their dying, even their mistreatment is a separate issue from questioning what it means for 15-30 million people to have “owned” and entire hemisphere just because they first stood on land connected to land much of which they never even saw. That smallpox, etc got dragged into my point is its own manifestation of guilt. Let me try to get back to my point without beating a dead horse…
Before 10, 20, 30 thousand or whatever years ago (we can’t even get that right), whatever point that was, let’s assume that we can agree that there were no humans in the Americas. So there was at some point a band of say 200, 700, a thousand, two dozen, whatever people who wandered across the “land bridge” or ice bridge or whatever. Did they then “own” the entirety of both continents? Of course not. Well, hopefully we can agree on that but…anyway…repeat this process for how ever many succeeding waves as you wish until the “land bridge” or whatever becomes effectively impassable. Assuming that moment itself ever happened. There being a cutoff point there is not irrelevant to my point but let’s just play that for now. In what sense do those people “own” the Americas? Would those later waves of nomads have less of a claim? Were the Scandinavians attempting to “steal land” in their medieval attempts to settle here? Is arriving 10,000 or whatever years later in boats somehow different than arriving second or third on whatever 10,000 years earlier by walking? Surely it’s not the boats that are the problem, but then again I could see some “intellectual” making that an issue.
To be clear, I am not trying to justify the killing that went on as a result of these clashes of extremely different cultures. That itself is a separate issue whose inevitability is itself another issue. I am just disputing this idea of who “owned” all this land and in what sense they “owned” it. Another separate issue being the land disputes that popped up amongst those tribes themselves.
AIUI, there’s a similar argument for Europeans in south/southern Africa. Again, I haven’t looked into the details of that much but if so, that’s some mighty fertile, useful land that was not being physically occupied. Was it just supposed to sit there because there were a bunch of darker skinned people living north of there that weren’t even using it?
To be further clear…my personal view on much of this goes deeper into the current contexts of land ownership. Unless you have independent violent means of defending it from local hostile persons, you do not own your land. You are at best simply licensed by the greater violence enabled entity, government in our context, to use it in line with that entity’s limitations. Possession of real estate is something completely different from other forms of ownership. This is reflected in real estate law in ways that cause many libertarians and even conservatives to go into conniption fits. This isn’t a terribly unique understanding of these things but people get very worked up over it because it is not widely thought about, thus not widely understood.
Getting back to the world of art and the violent inequity of the lack of inclusion in old paintings, London is about to be culturally enriched by this representative of a Person Of Colour™ to be placed on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square.
In 2028, however, it is planned that it will be replaced by “…a life-sized equestrian statue covered in a shroud and cast in slime-green resin…” It is unclear if that is ordinary slime-green resin or glow-in-the-dark slime green resin.
My source is the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann
Yes, well, that was your first of many mistakes.
One of the reasons I never pursued pre-modern history beyond a minor is that the corpus is so mean and the pressure to publish so intense that historians will blatantly make shit up if it means getting another foot up the rung of the tenure track. The more controversial and faddish the central conceit, the better.
Mann’s work is of that ilk. He starts with some interesting developments in Central and South American archaeology and promptly hares off into fantasy.
Can you suggest any good books on the subject?