> How do Americans deal with the fact that their country and way of life is a result of driving out the ones who originally lived there?
>
> I think what I find difficult is that I hear Americans claiming their freedom and country to be rightfully theirs, when it's a historical fact that all that was once taken from the natives.
>
> I'd like to hear some Americans' thoughts on this.

Since I'm not an American, I can't presume to speak for their country, but this is an interesting topic, so I will speak for its equivalent in *my* country. Who knows, maybe you'll be interested.

Your paragraph about "Americans claiming their freedom and country to be rightfully theirs" is what made me think about this. In your question, the important thing to note is that word "Americans". The people who were involved when America became America weren't "Americans", they were British and Indians and Dutch and French and Scandinavians and whoever. They are no longer around, and we don't live in that world anymore. But the descendants of all those people are Americans, and in my mind they all have an equal right to be proud of their country.

Now, New Zealand's summarised history would be: 1) A bunch of guys moves here, whups the previous bunch of guys, and takes over. 2) Repeat ad infinitum.



Today there is a tendency to act as if the British were the only people who ever did this, instead of merely being the most *recent*. There are a lot of issues, many of them very legitimate, about Maori land rights and other things arising from the Treaty of Waitangi (the founding document of New Zealand, between a large number of Maori chiefs and the British crown). However, I see these as being *completely separate* issues, which should have no bearing on the ludicrous idea that some people should have more "right" to feel like New Zealanders.

We hear a lot from the politically correct about how Maori are the tangata whenua ("people of the land", with overtones of a more significant spiritual/mystical belonging), how they feel more deeply for it than the Pakeha does, blah blah blah. Now, as a Pakeha (white NZer), I find this very offensive. I am as much tangata whenua as anybody else in my feeling for my country, and this feeling has nothing to do with my actual ancestry. Illogical as it may be, I find I can take equal pride in the unshakeable non-violence of the Moriori, the warrior culture of the Maori, and the achievements of European civilisation, because those are all somehow part of my heritage as a New Zealander, regardless of which ones are part of my genetic heritage. That's what being tangata whenua means to me, among other things.

All New Zealanders are descended from immigrants: *nobody* lives here whose family didn't come here from somewhere else, whether that was in the nineteenth century or the fourteenth. And because of that, I think we all must have inherited some sort of similarity. Up until very recently -- the second half of the 20th century, even -- everyone who came here did so at the cost of many months of travel, great hardship and risk of death. And once they got here, they had to change the land to survive, and while they were busy doing that, the land was changing them too. That's how we all became New Zealanders, belonging to this country, even if we only started *calling* ourselves New Zealanders a hundred years ago. And anybody who claims I'm somehow less of a New Zealander, because my ancestors arrived in a smelly leaky boat a mere few hundred years after *their* ancestors arrived in a smelly leaky boat, is out of their mind. In my opinion.

Right now, it's interesting to see how fast Maori and Pakeha forget their differences in the face of Asian immigration. There's nothing that brings people together faster than being able to gang up on an unsuspecting third party. And in another few hundred years, dyed-in-the-wool fifth-generation New Zealanders with surnames like Chan will be moaning about the government letting in all these idiots from wherever people are immigrating from at that time.

Like I say, this is a bit different from the American scenario, but I thought it might be an interesting comparison.

Brunnen-"political history has little to do with patriotism, I guess is what I'm saying"G