Given that the content described in the partnership here is part of a DLC, I wonder if the Tribe is party to any profit sharing agreement with the game company.
Yes and no. The history is pretty fucked, but on the other hand nobody currently alive screwed them over. In a lot of cases, people's ancestors weren't even living here back then. I think that it's not as fair in light of the lack of culpability.
There are still many current issues; eg: the Dakota Access Pipeline was routed to pose a threat to native water supplies and avoid being a threat to non native water.
There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures) while having appendixes removed, kidney operations, and straight out made up procedures as an excuse to carry out eugenics ideals of breeding out Indians. IIRC some of those "doctors" are still alive.
You know how in the first half of 20th century there was this big scare about overpopulation? There were books, films, studies, and lot of that leaked into the medical profession, often with a eugenics involved. Lot of experts, and highly educated people, believed that it is necessary to stem the number of births, in interest of the ignorant masses. This included Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood in US.[1]
To make things worse. Supreme court legalized forced sterilization with Buck v. Bell in 1927.[2] All in line with consensus of medical professionals. It didn't really get overturned by the way, just sort of overridden by later laws.
Add some racism into this mix, and guess who will get hurt the hardest?
This didn't just happen in America. Entire world embraced this, because it was seen as modern and progressive.[3] And medical professionals, trained to believe it, performed procedures for decades, even after the mores have changed, basically out of habit.
And it's still happening today, in UK for example, it's still perfectly legal for state to enforce sterilization.[4]
The article describes a case where over the course of ten years more than a dozen of Russian women living in a facility for people with mental development issues were tricked into consenting to sterilization. It created a nationwide scandal when became public and was under investigation by law enforcement authorities.
> The article describes a case where over the course of ten years more than a dozen of Russian women living in a facility for people with mental development issues were tricked into consenting to sterilization.
Unfortunately, asylum inmates getting sterilized is a very common and sad thing to happen...
Pick a country, pick a time frame, it varies. _very_ common might be a stretch, but that it happens at all is a problem.
For interest, in California in the USofA,
By 1979, long after the peak of the 1930s eugenics movement, California sterilized an estimated 20,000 people, deemed unfit to reproduce, without their consent. The practice ended in 1979 for state hospitals and in 2010 for state prisons, when eugenics laws were finally repealed.
An exposé from The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2013 revealed 148 women were sterilized without proper approval from 2006 to 2010, and a separate state audit found that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation oversaw the illegal sterilization of 144 inmates from 2005 to 2013.
shows that eugenic type sterilization procedures continued after the laws allowing them were repealed in 2010.
Yes, I realise that "the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" isn't an "asylum" but given the nature of modern US mental health treatment there is now considerable overlap.
As others have pointed out this was a practice that continued into the 1960s and 1970s .. hence my statement that "some women that had these procedures w/out their consent are still alive" and that "some of the practitioners are also".
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians sustained a practice of performing sterilizations on Native American women, in many cases without the free and informed consent of their patients. In some cases, women were misled into believing that the sterilization procedure was reversible
I would point out, though, that any child sexual abuse happening right now, any sly sterilisations going on today is likely to remained buried for a couple of decades .. just going by a century or so of history on this type of thing.
Reporting of shitty behaviour is getting better and more immediate in the digital age, which gives us hope .. but lack of current reporting isn't always evidence of lack of current activity.
https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2022/08/25/an-indige... contains paperwork from a legal case from 1974. Given that a lot of this happened back then, I don't think you'll find any "recent reputable" sources, but are you willing to accept older material?
This still does not excuse punishing third parties to the facts you mention. By that logic we can cheat and exploit Germans, including people not alive during the holocaust, because there are still victims alive. Collective punishment is against the Geneva convention. What times we live in...
You are of course not personally culpable for what was done to them (and many other tribes), but you still indirectly benefit from it and they still suffer from it. You can’t disentangle history from the present.
This makes a nice sound byte. How do I benefit? How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty?
I'm adopted. I've had people ask me if I have native blood just from features. Not since I moved east of Texas, but all the time on the west coast. I could be part native.
Tell me how I benefit and why I should feel bad forever?
Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
White people! Feel bad forever because your ancestors fought, killed, warred!
note: I'm a white person that tans very dark. I'm not gunna demand anyone else feel bad. Oh, i take back my "east of texas" people think i am a Mexican-American sometimes in Louisiana.
You benefit by living in a prosperous country that was in part built on the backs of people who were enslaved or egregiously mistreated.
Personally I have no direct connection to much of that because all my ancestors arrived in the US around 1900. My point is you can't extricate what the US is today from what was done to people in order to make it what it is today. I still indirectly benefit. I think my ancestors benefited from having white skin in the US as opposed to dark skin, when they arrived.
> Just being part white and alive today means your ancestors won lots of fights over thousands of years.
Being white has nothing to do with it. Everyone's ancestors probably did terrible things if you go back far enough. That's not the point. You're not guilty and you don't need to feel guilty. But you should at least be aware of how the modern context in which you live was derived. It was derived from the suffering of others. How far back do we need to go? I don't think it matters, really, but just as far as is substantially relevant to the present. So for the US today, I'd say it's worth considering at least as far back as the founding of the country because we can still draw direct lines from the way things are today to events that happened from then until now. I mean, it was only in 1967 that many people realistically gained the right to vote, unfettered from schemes like poll taxes and more which were used to disenfranchise them.
> How far back in history are you willing to go, to make everyone feel guilty?
The goal is not to make anyone feel guilty. And there's no benefit in delving through ancient history. Because many of the problems that still exist in this country today are persistent effects of what happening in what is really only very recent history.
Do Italians need to feel bad about the Romans keeping slaves? I don't think so, I think it would be a stretch to say that modern Italian society was built by the slaves of Romans, let alone the Romans themselves.
But if you look around the US today you can easily find buildings that are still in use, sometimes in their original capacity, that were built by enslaved people. So I think it's still relevant. Likewise you can find the direct ancestors of native people who were forcibly displaced and mistreated, and by direct ancestors I mean really only a handful of generations, still very much recent, by historical standards.
Why is it that some former colonies of this power have done exceptionally well for themselves, and others, nearly a century on, still think about it every day and use it as an excuse for their lack of development?
There's always an excuse. Many countries around the world and throughout history have been completely destroyed and then re-built by their people. They would also have a lot of excuses to remain in misery, but they decided to strive forward.
The principal thing I wonder is doesn't get boring to not move forward? If you live in squalor, what does it matter if you blame yourself or blame somebody else? You're still stuck there in the dirt.
Last year's Nobel Prize on economics was given for this very research!
The TLDR; is that the countries where colonizers moved in to settle are doing better than the countries where colonizers moved in to exploit the natural resources.
This assumes the genocide has ended, which it very much has not. In what year did Native American parents receive the right to choose not to send their kids to a boarding school?
1978.
Until 1978, Native American families were being separated against their will.
To say that no one currently alive screwed then over is absurd. This month, the President made motions to try and remove birthright citizenship for indigenous people.
No, there are absolutely people still alive who screwed them over.
This is some bizzaro world logic, as if causality stops when a new generation is born. Europeans waged total war and stole resources for themselves, directly benefiting their ancestors. So the rule is - theft is ok if you wait long enough and give it to your children?
White Americans want it both ways: keep the stolen treasure but take no responsibility for it.
If I stole your car, then gave it to my son when he turned 16, would you just sit back and say "Oh well, his son didn't do the stealing so I guess it's his now"? No, you'd demand the car back.
That's exactly what's happening here. The privileged ancestors of thieves may not be thieves directly, but they don't get to claim ownership either. You don't get to nullify a crime with the "I didn't personally do it" defense, knowing full well it was stolen while refusing to give it back. Insisting on hoarding the stolen treasure is indistinguishable from theft.
Eh. We've accepted adverse possession of real estate since the Code of Hammurabi. Continuous possession in good faith eventually conveys ownership.
If you steal my car, kill me, forge the title transfer, give it to your kid who believes they got it in good faith and century goes by, then their descendants get to keep it and mine are out of luck.
How? If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court. Who do you think is going to win? The chief sits on the court as the judge and jury.
> Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
Tribes are sovereign under U.S. law. In most cases when you sign a contract with a tribe (or under tribal law), the tribe is free to modify it ex post facto.
Looks like they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties.
> they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties
No, the New World figured out empires, exploitation and abrogration of treaty obligations all on its own. The Maya are notorious. But there is a reason even e.g. the Navajo call the ancestral Puebloans the Anasazi [1].
The USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times. Anyone who signs an agreement with the USA should really expect at most 3-4 years of validity, depending where in the election cycle it was signed.
> USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times
Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.
The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is a massive war crime and against international law (specifically, it's against the international law of aggression, the specific one for which the Nazi leadership were hanged). But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade - Russia last promised in a treaty not to do this in the 1990s, when Ukraine agreed to renounce the nuclear weapons the USSR kept there. So it's *not great", to put it extrmelet mildly, but at least that treaty lasted for 20-30 years.
In contrast, look at the Iran nuclear deal. That went into effect in 2016, and the US unilaterally withdrew from it and reinstated sanctions in 2018, not even two years later (they claimed some breach, but no other party to the treaty agreed that the breach existed, and the EU even tried to block the US sanctions to try to keep the deal going).
Or look at the Paris climate accord, which the US has signed twice and withdrew from twice in the last few years.
Or the USMCA agreement that replaced NAFTA in 2020, which the USA has violated in 2025 by seeking to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
And these are just some of the bigger, better known ones, with the clearest terms. Even Trump's actions on Ukraine right now are a clear breach of some less formal deals made by the previous administration a few years ago, when they were urging Ukraine not to seek a quick peace treaty with Russia - but it's less clear there what the deals were and to what extent they've been breached.
Whenever you'll look at a US deal, at least in the past few decades, you'll have a better than 50% chance it was broken by the USA within at most a decade.
Again, this is separate from the new era of ignoring international law by many powerful countries, and it coexists with the times when the USA was one of the biggest proponents of the rule of international law.
> But, it doesn't break any treaties that Russia signed with Ukraine in the last decade
I don't think that's true. In fact, I think in the last decade (or, 11 years), the russians have done this ~25 times.
A standard russian tactic appears to be to ask the enemy to lay down their weapons, and then when the soldiers comply, the russians shoot them in the face anyway.
Those are slightly different things than treaties (as the articles you quote show, many of those ceasefires were unilaterally declared by Russia, not the result of an agreement between the two parties). Still, I don't mean in any way to praise Russia here, or even to claim that the USA is just as bad as Russia on this.
As bad as many of the US unilateral cancelations of treaties I mentioned are, they do not in any way compare to the horrifying aggression that Russia is showing in Ukraine, both at the basic level of invading a neighbor to steal their land, and in the details of how they are pursuing this illegitimate goal. Putin and his general are war criminals to a degree that few others in the last decade could be described (Netanyahu and Assad probably being the main "competitors", and Assad was only able to do what he did with Putin's help).
you can expect a country that is controlled by its people voting to be a bit schizo to some degree when it comes to treaties. surely, you cannot expect something that is meant to have large effects on domestic policy like the Paris climate accord to be stable in the US when there is a lot of difference of opinion domestically over it.
Of course you can. If a country commits to signing an international treaty, the normal expectation should be that it considers itself bound by that treaty, for some time at least. A normal president can't just go and overrule the previous president's words unilaterally, for the very simple reason that I illustrated: it makes it impossible to take anything the country signs seriously. Why would anyone accept a compromise deal with Trump on anything that has repercussions beyond 2028 knowing that the next president will just ignore it?
I should note that, on this particular ground, I don't necessarily blame Trump as the one who backed out of the deals. It's very much possible that the blame should rest on Obama for signing a deal he knew had insufficient support in his country and wouldn't be followed through by his successors. If he were an honest man, he wouldn't have signed the deal in this case, even if he believed (as I do) that the deal is critically important for the future of the world. Falsely committing to do the right thing is no less dishonest than going back on a word you gave.
Treaties specifically have to be approved by Congress and have approximately the same force of law and durability as the Constitution. Lately we mostly do "executive agreements" instead, which do not require Congressional approval and can pretty much be ignored on a whim by the next president. We could go back to treaties but considering Congress has given up so much of their responsibility to executive agencies because they can't even pass laws, it seems unlikely.
I couldn't find details on any such agreement, I'd be curious to see it. The only treaty signed between the two countries from that period I could find was the leasing to Russia of the Sevastopol naval base in exchange for preferential gas prices to Ukraine.
Still, to be very clear, I don't mean in any way to claim that Russia has any justification whatsoever for invading Ukraine and stealing their land, with or without some treaty.
Not really, unless there is some higher jurisdiction that can assert power over both parties. Maybe america can do that to the tribal nations, but no one wants go near that quagmire, unless there were huge issues at stake like the survival of the country or something of that magnitude.
I highly doubt that the poster did anything other than try and conduct business with the tribe.
Thievery is thievery--if it's okay on a small scale now, it must've been fine on a large scale then. At which point, we're just scoring who was more effective at it. Sucks to suck.
genocide survivors [.. that] operate in a landscape that is existentially hostile to them [..] from an immeasurable disadvantage.
and you've now declared calling them "genocide survivors" as "making them out to be pretty terrible people" while casting no judgement on the description as "flat out thieves" ?
"essentially confirmed" with airquotes is what escalates them from alleged thieves to permanent and irredeemable thieves in your mind?
That's interesting.
Their comment reads more as someone still angry about stolen land, stolen children, Indian boarding schools, stealth abortions, and other events which still touch living people and cause them to be upset when reading allegations of theft.
Funny, I expect that if one marketed such services as "customized therapy videos," one would confront immediate objections that the service was facilitating heinous pornography.
[RESOLVED] Network Connectivity 07:28 AM PDT Between 6:47 AM and 7:10 AM PDT we experienced increased launch failures for EC2 Instances, degraded EBS volume performance and connectivity issues for some instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
edit: looks like this message is now on the status page
It's also worth considering that private prisons, once established, create perverse incentives to intensify those same retributive policies. A vicious recursion.
It's a thought but I suspect it's incorrect. The harshness of prison policies peaked in the 1980s to 1990s. Private prisons really started booming in the late 1990s and the 2000s. But the trend since then in policy has been a softening (somewhat) of retributive policies. California's involvement with private prisons for example is largely in this decade, in response to court orders requiring reduction in overcrowding. But it past the country's harshest three strikes laws (where people were getting life sentences for a third non-violent felony) in the 1990s. But it softened that a bit a couple of years ago.
I think the most you can say is that private prisons (and public prison guard unions, which is probably a much bigger force) are slowing the retreat from 1980s/1990s retributive policies.
Awesome projects, and I love the civic spirit from which they arise. Any others worth checking out?
Other than chat bots, just making forms and bureaucratic processes more accessible online seems like an arena that still has vast potential for improvement.
"For both symbolic reasons (that the technical position then is the technical position now) and to better ensure that IETF specifications reflect the spirit of RFC1984, a number of participants in the discussion felt it would be advantageous to recognize the substantive content of RFC1984 as a BCP."
