Apples and Oranges
The Dollmaker is a 1984 made for TV movie. I saw it long ago and really enjoyed it. I don't think Wikipedia does it justice.
Jane Fonda plays a homemaker who follows her husband from their rural life to a job in the big city. He dreams of making better money and giving the family a better life but their lives are vastly worse in the city.
Ultimately, she gets fed up and comes up with the funds to take the family and move back home. And he goes along with it.
If you can find a copy of it, maybe you would get something out of it with regards to understanding the concept I want to talk about here: Money isn't everything and we currently do a poor job communicating the value of a great many things that could rightly be called priceless.
I'm a former military wife and my father was also career military. Although my father retired when I was three, I grew up shopping on base, going swimming at free pools on base, getting free medical care on base and on and on.
During the two decades that I was a military wife, I spent substantial time trying to find some means to make the apples to oranges comparison between the military compensation package and other jobs which typically paid higher wages but had far less benefits.
If I needed a power of attorney as a military wife, that was a free service. If I needed to mow the lawn or replace dead grass for my on-base housing, I could flash my ID card to check out a lawnmower or get free sod (sometimes) or free grass seed (reliably).
This is tagged Native because I believe this is a source of friction between indigenous peoples and others. White colonizer types frequently want things for FREE that cost other people something and which they aren't paying for.
Natives frequently live in small communities where social capital is a big thing. Navarre once told me "A relationship is an exchange of energy." which was his takeaway from three years in prison, during which time he learned to speak better French than I learned from high school and college classes.
So Natives have a lot of cultural stuff rooted in who does what job, when and where and why and it benefits the community as a whole. Then outsiders want to purchase some piece of it, often for dirt cheap, with zero understanding of what it takes to CREATE this thing.
It's only "cheap" if the entire community arranges to make it possible to happen "cheaply" and outsiders who want to PAY for it -- and want to pay a pittance, typically -- are frequently actively destroying all the pieces that make this "cheaply available" to local members of the tribe.
It's very much like when ignorant poor people in underdeveloped countries get enticed to sell a kidney for a few thousand dollars so some rich asshole can get a functioning kidney. The money sounds like a princely sum, more than they have any hope of earning some other way, but it runs out all too soon and they find they are permanently crippled by the loss of the kidney and cannot work as hard as they once did, etc.
In a word, they are permanently impoverished by this transaction that they thought would put them on easy street.
My experience as a military wife suggests it's extremely hard for most people to make this apples to oranges comparison between something like a high paying job in the city versus all the social capital they will lose when they leave all their friends and family, ability to grow their own vegetables and myriad cultural pieces of country life.
People enamored of money frequently seem inclined to sell their soul for a big payday and frequently seem oblivious to what that really costs them.
What colonizers did to Natives wasn't simply taken their land. They actively destroyed their cultures and way of life, intentionally with malice aforethought.
They sent them to schools intended to "westernize" them and forbade them from using their own languages. They actively made it impossible for these people to live comfortably on relatively little by using what the land provided efficiently, such as using ALL parts of any animal they killed for meat.
They didn't just eat the meat. They turned the hide and bones into useful items as well.
A lot of knowledge was permanently lost by the European assault on the very culture and social fabric of these peoples and the cultural differences means Natives were disadvantaged in even trying to argue for the preservation of things European colonizers didn't see as "valuable" or didn't understand how that was essential to the health and welfare of these people and didn't care to understand any of it.
Natives trended towards having less architectural infrastructure and it's only relatively recently that it's being recognized that they were active stewards of their lands and not merely lazy uneducated animals with no culture living on the fat of the land and "lucky" to happen to be living someplace with an abundance of thriving plant and animal life that just happened to provide for their needs.
The mix of plants and animals on their traditional lands were created or fostered intentionally over many generations by people who then took as little as they needed to be ABLE to "live on the fat of the land."
When Europeans showed up and created settlements, they consistently took the richest lands FIRST and then acted like local Natives were attacking them without provocation and refused to acknowledge that actually you assholes stole our most productive lands, leaving us with dregs to try to live on.
Natived cannot get some kind of justice in part because of this apples to oranges comparison that is both inherently hard to make at all and mostly NOT even being attempted when Natives try to engage with others in communicating about exactly what was taken from them.
The Land Back movement is a movement focused on the tip of the iceberg and framed in a way that fits the invaders mental framework of what was valuable and it defacto agrees that the culture, language, knowledge etc. that was actively destroyed isn't really of any particular importance.
When you destroy part of a rain forest for any reason, it tends to not recover because unlike European forests, the value is in the living plant matter, not the soil.
You can clear cut a European forest and turn it into farmland and thereby improve the wealth of the community because MOST of the organic matter is in the soil1. Clear cutting rain forest doesn't get you rich farmland because rain forests exist in places with extremely poor clay soils die to the high levels of RAIN, so once you clear cut the forest, you permanently impoverish the land.
I've been trying for many months to figure out how to talk about this and I added a tag elsewhere for Money.is.not.Everything because I think you could probably do a LOT for the poorest of the poor on planet Earth by using fruit trees as basic water infrastructure.
But then what? They get healthier and stronger and better educated and...take a job in the big city for seemingly big bucks only to find that EVERYTHING costs money and there's no more "free" produce from fruit tree urinals?
I encourage you to watch The Dollmaker if you can find a copy of it and think about how in the hell to get people to see the value of things money can't buy.
No, I'm not satisfied with this piece. Not by a long shot.
Let me end it with talking about Lawrence of Arabia who is defacto credited with making sure the Middle East didn't end up just another set of British colonies. He supposedly did that by telling the Arabs and bedouins of the area -- who were enamored of the British Navy and how it let them go anywhere and strike anywhere -- that camels are the ships of the desert and they allow the bedou to go where they want and strike where they want in an ocean of sand.
He also supposedly told them "If you take British engineers, you take British rule."
Knowledge is power. It's the REASON Black slaves in the historic Deep South of the US were legally forbidden from learning how to read.
Learn to do it yourself if you value your freedom. And if you can't supply your own engineers, then find some solution that doesn't give power over you to people you KNOW will be happy to turn you into their bitch and take all the best stuff for themselves and not care about your welfare AT ALL.