Looking for Trouble
A few years ago, I researched and wrote up a piece about a massacre of Native Americans and later edited it and moved it. Since then, I've thought a lot about what I learned in the process about how things started and likely went wrong.
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
Most people do this. They have baggage and they decide to cut to the chase and "bet" that if you fit a particular profile, (conclusion).
For example: You're white, so you must be a racist asshole.
I think of this as looking for trouble unnecessarily. You shorten the process of defending yourself against assholes but make it nigh impossible to establish allies because you are offending and rejecting potential allies because of some superficial trait that you mentally sum up as "not one of us."
This helps keep the problem intractable and actively grows it. Over time, it can grow to huge proportions because no one wants to be told "Your behavior is The Problem here." when they think they are the victim.
It's a common complaint by "minorities" (women, people of color) that even if you become the boss, people routinely assume that whatever white male employee is there must be the one in charge.
It's a "logical inference" because it's usually true but it helps keep racism, sexism etc alive and it aggravates the fool out of the people subjected to it. Minorities can readily see the problem when it is done to them but fail to see how they do the exact same thing and it amounts to cutting their own throats.
If you study social psychology, feuds typically start with both sides feeling "The other guy started it!" Both sides feel "No, YOU'RE the asshole. I'm the wronged party here."
It's common for there to be some fundamental misunderstanding or situational factor behind it and also a clash of cultures routinely fosters ugliness of some sort.
I did two college papers on date rape and the vast majority of date rape involves two things: alcohol and people from different backgrounds who have different expectations surrounding dating and sex.
In very conservative cultures, women are not "playing hard to get." They genuinely are hard to get. Men from those cultures have to work at it, in other words they tend to be pushy.
They date someone from another culture and either she allows more than he expects so he thinks he can have sex with her, she will allow that too and/or she isn't giving enough push back for him to think she really means it. This is likely the source of the essentially useless meme "No means no."
These are typically young people, not experienced, so rough around the edges anyway. Add in alcohol and it unsurprisingly ends badly.
Native Americans had apparently an entire continent of peoples who were generally nomadic and lived lightly on the land. I don't know what their legal framework was, but my understanding is they typically lacked writing and they probably had informal agreements as to territorial boundaries, not maps delineating "THIS side of the river is OUR land and THAT side is yours and you are trespassing if you set one foot on OUR side."
I have a Certificate in GIS (geographic information systems -- AKA online or database based map stuff). I once wrote an email titled "Georgia is an imaginary place" for a homeschool list.
Maps are real fucking hard to do well anyway. Back when Columbus was discovering America, it was common to have a large detailed map of England because you lived there, knew a lot about it and NEEDED the details and then sort of a little bitty depiction of France or some other country to indicate "It's over there, we trade with them but don't really know the landscape that well and don't need to. We just need to find the port city."
Maps are kind of a fiction and full of errors. We make perfectly round globes and the Earth isn't actually perfectly round.
Translating a 3D globe to a 2D flat map introduces even more errors and we have a zillion different ways to do that, each with different errors, such as making Greenland look freaking huge when it's not.
And one of the idiotic things "Westerners" do is they use rivers as borders for a lot of places. It's idiotic because rivers meander.
They wander. They don't stay in one place. The exact course of the river varies over time.
Natives lived more out in the world than more settled peoples, so they likely knew that saying "THIS side of the river is OURS and THAT side is YOURS" is stupid on the face of it. That piece of land you're standing on may be on my side next year.
So I'm guessing based on how they interacted with the initial trappers and traders that there was a general understanding of some tolerance of other groups hunting on their lands to some degree and they didn't make a big deal out of it if it wasn't excessive.
I'm guessing they had fuzzy territorial boundaries instead of clear bright line boundaries, like "This valley belongs to both/neither of us and marks the boundary between our lands." And if an animal they were hunting crossed into other territory, they pursued it and killed it anyway. As long as you didn't hunt in a way that threatened food security for your neighbor, no big because they were going to do the same thing.
Possession is nine tenths of the law.
So European trappers and traders began showing up and they related to the land similar to how Natives did. It never occurred to the Natives to say "Dude, this is our land. You can't be here hunting our animals and taking however much you want." much less "You need a permit for that. You need to apply for that permit at this bureaucratic office and there are limits to how much you can kill and take. Do you have your permit? Have you exceeded your quota yet?"
They likely assumed EVERYONE on the planet related to land rights and usage like they did because EVERYONE they ever dealt with did. And they valued the metal knives and other goods these people had to offer, so probably felt it was reasonable to allow them to do a little hunting as part of the necessary process for having trade at all. It's not like refrigerated trucks, microwave meals or fast food joints existed.
Since Natives didn't make a big deal of the point upon initial contact that "This is OUR land. You can't be here and can't take anything and everything you want." it set the (legal) precedent in the minds of Europeans that the land was not claimed by anyone.
It never occurred to the invading Europeans that there might be an entire continent of hundreds of nation-states that were all nomadic with little or no permanent structures, yet having legal claim to a particular territory and moving around within that territory regularly from summer camp to winter camp or following the herds to hunt.
I'm imagining that with language barrier and dramatically different mental framings for how to relate to the land, some European asked someone "Who owns the land?" and were told as politely as possible by people trying to not call them crazy to their face "No one owns the land."
Rather than hear "The land is owned by the TRIBE and we find the concept of individual ownership of land bizarre." they heard "It's not owned by anyone. It's up for grabs for free "
I mean how would you reply if aliens from outer space landed and asked "Who owns the sky?"
We do have legal rights related to the sky and where planes can fly etc, but we don't generally think of the sky as something you can legally chop up and sell off. So if aliens showed up and were trying to figure out where they can establish sky ports and sky bases and asked us, we might laugh and not really engage with the question, then freak out when they took over our world via sky-based development.
Without looking it up, I'm pretty sure the concept of "air rights" didn't exist until we had airplanes. So if aliens had a legal framework rooted in air rights and ASKED us "Who owns the sky?" and we laughed and walked off and then they took over the planet "because no one owns the sky" they might feel they did nothing wrong.
It gets worse. What happened to Native Americans is sort of like if aliens came down to planet Earth and asked the first random jackass they tripped across "Who owns this sky?" and he was some drunken smart ass tourist just passing through who thought it would be funny to say "Why, I do. I will sell you that patch of sky for a couple of six packs of beer."
"Who owns the sky?" is pidgen Earthling speak for "We would like to open interplanetary diplomatic relations and establish an outpost here for trading in the Gamma Quadrant. With whom do we speak to initiate this transaction?" and random drunken punk ass did not happen to be a lawyer in interplanetary law which he's actually never heard of and it never occurred to him to say "There is no governing authority for the whole of planet Earth, much less the Gamma Quadrant, but you should get in touch with the White House and speak to the president about THIS patch of sky and he can give you a list of international agencies to contact or other world leaders if you want sky elsewhere."
So aliens go "Wow. A couple six packs of beer. Best sky deal we've ever made. Dang." And then were offended when local primitives began buzzing their sky development with pathetic airplanes and sometimes killing members of the construction crew.
What the hell, man? We asked. YOU said "No one owns the sky." And besides we paid two six packs of beer for the sky over New York.
Thus hundreds of years later both sides are STILL going "No, YOU'RE the ASSHOLE here. I did nothing wrong!"
But the primitives are the ones sucking wind as multiple alien species pass through the sky ports and dump their trash on the land or waters below and give us alien diseases we don't know how to treat and refuse to hire us in the new economy because we don't have the requisite education and cultural context to do anything useful in their more complex society.
We didn't go to interplanetary kindergarten and most space port jobs require an interplanetary PhD. So fuck us and our whiny shit about them being species-ist and just not LIKING us.
When the traders showed up, Native Americans didn't have an Orlando Bloom to tell them "They're here." and rebut their ignorant dismissal that "It is only one man."
That's the point at which hundreds of years of tragic conflict might have been averted and wasn't.