The first part of this podcast deals with the recent Māori chant that broke out during a New Zealand congressional session, although he goes on to discuss a bunch of other stuff. This thread can be used to discuss Indigenous issues overall. Over the past several years, we have been led to believe that North American Indigenous people were noble people who loved nature, nurtured it, and lived peaceably until the evil Europeans brought hate and violence to the continent. The reality is that there was a crapload of Indigenous people, many of whom were radically different from some of the others, and the greatest number of them regularly warred with neighboring tribes and even moved to other parts of the continent, slaughtering and conquering other Indigenous people along the way, carving a new place for themselves with the blood of those who were there before. Once one Native American tribe acquired horses or firearms, they immediately used these against neighboring tribes, conquering them through greater technology, much as the Europeans were able to conquer the Native Americans. Many of them held slaves, as did most people throughout the world, at one point or another. After the Europeans came to North America, Native Americans participated in the black slave trade in what is now the southeastern United States. Many Native American groups burned forests during hunts and drove buffalo over cliffs. Their concerns were for their own safety and well-being, not rescuing threatened species, being good stewards of the land, or making the world a better place for butterflies. My point in saying these things is not to say that they were awful people who deserved what they got but to point out that they were—and are—simply people, like any others. If there were good things about how they lived, there were also bad. I watched a movie last night about Sweden's Indigenous people, the Sámi. Although my DNA is entirely made up of Scandinavia and Northern Russia, I wasn't aware that Sweden had Indigenous people. Whether genuine or not, they were portrayed almost entirely as North America's Indigenous people are portrayed, except that they were whiter and wore more colorful clothing. You could have dropped them into any American Indian reservation, and they'd fit right in. The entire history of the world is the story of conquerors and the conquered. In my opinion, it is ridiculous to go back in history, arbitrarily point out historical facts that seem wrong today, and try to correct them by awarding special privileges, land, and money to descendants of the conquered. If applied across the board, the process would never end. Who claims England? Do we use DNA to search for descendants of the first human civilization to inhabit various parts of the world and return the land to them? Where do those who don't fit into any of these classifications go? They say that human civilization began in Mesopotamia. Do we all crowd into the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley? May God help us if we discover a remaining ancestor of the Neanderthals; he would own the world, while the rest of us would have to commit suicide.