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Notes -
What is people's opinion on indigenous land usage and special rights? I feel a sense of cognitive dissonance, where I find myself supporting such policies as I highly value preserving and promoting indigenous culture. But there remains a tension between indigenous land rights and the liberal notion that land usage shouldn't be based on ethnicity and that the resources should benefit all of society. Particularly now with the extreme electricity prices, where people are literally dying and is being weaponised by Russia, I wonder whether indigenous people should have the right to prevent building power plants on "their" land. A related issue is exceptions to societal rules, eg. wrt animal welfare where they might get dispensation for the laws that apply to animals for the rest of society. Or in other cases laws applying to rights of their children. It's a conflict between the rights of the individual animal or member of the indigenous group, compared to the rights of the indigenous group as a whole to live according to their traditions, which I find difficult to navigate and reconcile.
I don't think that indigenous people are inherently special, I don't think their culture or rights are any more or less deserving of consideration or privilege than those of any other human being, and I don't think they should be legally treated as meaningfully distinct from any other group of people. They're regular people, just like you or me, and they deserve the same dignity and respect for their rights that you and I deserve.
Personally, I think if they made a stronger effort to integrate and adapt to modern society they would probably end up with better economic and life outcomes, but I feel that way about most minority and/or immigrant communities. The ones that value education, technology, respect for the rule of law, tolerance of others, and stuff like that, end up doing just as well as white people, while subcultures that obsess over their race and origins, and refuse to adapt end up poor and angry. Maybe I'm mixing up culture with class, but there's not always a meaningful distinction there, a lot of subcultures feel like variations of "lower class behavior", but I think there's something extra damaging about going off into a separate physical and legal area and preventing the natural spread of ideas and behaviors that the rest of the first world uses to great success.
Which, they're free to do. And in some cases it works out fine, I think the Amish are pretty happy. But if they end up unhappy, which they often do, then I can only shrug and point out that they could at any time be regular citizens like everyone else, and instead choose to be special.
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