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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.
Indigenous people are treated as special snowflakes that were untainted by conflict and aggression until corrupting white people arrived. In reality, they're like any other people on the planet albeit they were less technologically advanced and had fewer written records when they made contact with the West. Warfare was just as common as it was anywhere else at equivalent tech levels, so the people we met could more accurately be described as the "penultimate conquerors" of the places they were living. For a while after colonization, history proceeded in the same way as in almost all conquered areas, i.e. the conquerors tried to consolidate their hold through aggressive policies of assimilation and resettlement. Eventually though, white guilt became a dominant moral force which led to the reservations system in the US. Reservations of today are mostly just fronts for rent-seeking where individuals (who are often quite assimilated to the dominant US culture) get paid their racial spoils for having the correct genealogy.
As for building power plants, that should be viewed more as an issue of the reach of eminent domain, i.e. how far you can take "public interest" of broader society to inconvenience individuals living there. It'd be really annoying to have to move if the government wanted to build something near where I live, but I also appreciate living in a society that has interstate highways and the like.
Yeah, the romanticisation of natives is incredibly blatant. I've seen people genuinely argue that the reason as to why Native Americans were conquered was not because Natives had less technology, it's not because their societies and social structures were less developed and less cohesive on a large scale, it was because they had no conception of kicking other people off their land unlike the evil Europeans!
The idea that the Europeans came in and "stole" land that belonged to any one tribe is ridiculous. Tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes, and the question of who "owned" the land was often in a constant state of flux. The Black Hills region is seen to have been taken unfairly from the Lakota by the US, but that region was actually taken by the Lakota from the Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne took that land from the Kiowa. And during all this conflict, it's likely that a lot of groups would've just disappeared and been outcompeted.
And of course, many atrocities were committed. The Iroquois tortured prisoners of war and famously practiced cannibalism. Not only is this documented multiple times in the historical record, there's also archaeological evidence showing evidence in favour of this. Mayans were thought to be peaceful up until it was found that they were routinely enslaving and subjugating their neighbours. In the central Mesa Verde of Southwest Colorado, "90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."
You have archeological sites like the Crow Creek site, wherein they found the remains of at least 486 people killed during a massacre during the mid-14th century AD between Native American groups. "Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment."
In my opinion the very idea of "native" itself is very arbitrary and inaccurate, used primarily as a political bludgeon to try and imply that those groups designated as native have a moral right to the land that the "settlers" don't. It ignores that no group is really "native" to any patch of soil at this point and that pretty much every piece of land has likely been taken from someone else.
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