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Comment by bequanna | Hacker News Reader

What you’re saying isn’t false, but I guess I don’t understand what you’re suggesting. That this article should take some white guilt detour to delve into this topic?

I think most are growing weary of having content about how terrible white people are injected into every possible thing.

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I explicitly said that I understood why they didn't include it - the article was meant to highlight the bizarre idea of hippo meat being introduced in the USA. I commented here because I just thought some HN'ers would like to know a bit more - and I said that too.

I'm not sure how else I could've worded my comment that wouldn't have triggered this kind of reaction :-/

I don’t read that as a cause for guilt as a white person. I wasn’t there and I wouldn’t currently support that kind of endeavour. I’d almost certainly speak up against it, and I don’t hesitate to speak up about injustices that are still occurring.

I read it as important history to take into account moving forward. There’s no need for guilt over a past you didn’t participate in. There is however a benefit from considering the past and how it affects the present, and an opportunity to be better for it. At no point does anyone need to feel guilty, though.

Is it really "injecting" to simply be accurate? "Had become extinct" is technically correct. As much as, "Jews had become less populous during World War II."

Teaching real history is not "injecting".

Bison had become nearly extinct due to extreme overhunting by European settlers would be fine. And if pertinent, you could add more reasons for the extreme overhunting.

Why not just call genocide what it is -- genocide? Wouldn't it be far more accurate, and just as concise, to say "Bison had become nearly extinct due to genocide by European settlers"?

"Genocide" applied to the killing of animals would be a very unusual usage. Something like "extermination" would probably be more appropriate.

The genocide in question is that of the indigenous people, not of the Bison

If we're adding detail to the story because we think the reader might not be aware of why there weren't many bison left, I'm not sure:

> Bison had become nearly extinct due to genocide by European settlers

is going to help. Any reader who'd benefit from specifying why bison had been largely wiped out, probably won't connect the dots here, and will instead read that as genocide against bison. Readers who read "genocide" as referring to "genocide against indigenous people, part of which was eradication of bison" didn't need any of this called out to begin with.

I don't think it's right to hold a comment on HN to the same standards as a magazine article, though. It's entirely possible to write that sentence you had a problem with in a way that describes what happened without any confusion.

The purpose was to force them onto the reservation, not exterminate them.

See "Empire of the Summer Moon".

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

An excellent read for anyone curious about the history of this.

I’m comfortable calling an extermination attempt the actions that would certainly destroy their culture and history and food supply and language.

I recommend getting the book if you have the remotest interest in the topic. It's only $3 on Amazon.

It's a great read, better than any novel.

Sure, I appreciate the recommendation. I’ve actually read a decent bit on the subject and having been born on an Indian Reservation and lived next door to them my entire adolescence (the impoverished kind, not the casinos-near-major-cities kind), participated in crown dances, etc it’s not all that alien to me.

Does this book explain how stealing children and sending them to boarding schools to be tortured, raped, murdered, and buried in unmarked mass graves is “not extermination” and is “an attempt to confine them” to the literal shittiest plots of land that settlers could locate on the continent?

I wouldn't want to spoil things for you! The Comanche were a lot like the Vikings. They were empire builders like the Vikings, and you wouldn't want to be their neighbor any more than you'd want to be a neighbor to the Vikings.

It's a great epic, and I don't know why somebody hasn't created an epic series about them. There have been a couple pathetic westerns about the Comanche, which are best ignored.

Check out the book. You won't be disappointed!

> I wouldn’t want to spoil things for you! The Comanche were a lot like the Vikings.

A myth based on mistaking an activity for an ethnicity?

???

Viking is a job title, not a people.

I don’t really understand the implicit argument you’re making here, could you just state it explicitly?

Is it that the Comanche were bad and therefore genocidal campaigns against them (and all other native tribes) were justified or somehow non-genocidal?

> The purpose was to force them onto the reservation, not exterminate them.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part is genocide.[1]

[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

No it really isnt, that is the most common usage besides ww2 history.

Got a source? Webster's and Dictionary.com both list a single sense, and it's to do with peoples and cultures, not any living thing. I'm sure it's been used that way on occasion, but I'm quite confident that's not a common usage, and employing it for a general audience would tend not to be the best choice.

(as another poster noted, the extermination was part of a genocide, that's true, but it remains weird to describe extermination of animals as "genocide" in this kind of context, where we're evidently concerned that the reader might not be aware of why the bison were few in number—it's strange to imply we committed genocide against bison. That is definitely not a normal way to phrase that.)

I don't think the Irish government did this, nor the Germans. And brown Americans' government did. You're the one bringing up white guilt here, and glossing over atrocities can be called out without any need for invoking the idea of racial guilt.

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