If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers?
I posted this question before in A paradoxical consequence of considering animals, plants, and rivers people, but wanted to pose the question more directly:
If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers?
That is, if we consider animals people, doesn’t that they are indigenous and that humans who came into their territories are invading colonizers? I was reading about how humans crossed the Bering Strait, or at the time the Bering land bridge, then populated all of the Americas.
To clarify, I’m not trying to prove anything in this post, nor to say “I’m just asking questions,” then make a point with loaded questions, in the style of many media personalities. When I first heard the concept of making rivers and animals legal people, I doubted it. Then people pointed out to me that we make corporations legal people. Many animals seem closer to human people than corporations do. If this movement to make rivers and animals legal people works, I believe answering these questions will strengthen it, or at least considering them.
Today people call the Native Americans indigenous. Already we know that in many places the people in many regions where European colonists found them weren’t the first people there but had displaced others, who had likely displaced others, so we don’t know who was there first.
Many people paint those they call indigenous as wise, sustainable, and to-be-emulated. Humans also made extinct many species long before Europeans arrived. If those species had rights and those humans weren’t invasive and what they did genocide, why not?
If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers?
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