Thanks for your input on this, @robto . I am glad to hear about your positive life experiences in Portugal and the country's major anti-racist trend in its history. It's nice for me to talk with you about this.
In looking for articles on the topic, I came across one that said that relative to other west European countries,
Portugal had a pretty low portion of its politics being on the ethno-supremacist right wing scale.
"A Portuguese Exception to Right Wing Populism."
A Portuguese exception to right-wing populism - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Some of the articles that I found in a brief search focused on a dry anthropological perspective about Portuguese heritage and ethnicity, whereas the rest focused on specifically measuring the scope of right wing ethnic supremacist factions in Portuguese history. Certainly these are two different categories. You can identify people as belonging to different ethnic categories, and if you do, then should without being particularly xenophobic or discriminatory.
Here is a bit of my own impression: If you are talking about a subject nation under colonial or imperial rule, then nationalism can take a progressive, humanitarian form. For instance suppose that Portugal as an empire was harvesting slaves from an African nation like Angola. It seems natural that if the African nation had a nationalist movement that was trying to gain independence from Portugal and stop the slave trade in the country then the movement would be progressive.
On the other hand, Portugal, the country where you are living, in that relationship would be the colonizing, enslaving nation. For Portugal at that time as a colonial power to have an ethno-nationalistic movement aimed at empowering the empire of the "Portuguese people" would seem to be not particularly progressive or egalitarian. So for instance, Michele A. from Italy wrote:
Now, since all national constructs are ex-post and artificial, including obviously the Puebloans' and the Romans', we're left with the alternative - based on present-day state borders - of saying that the Portuguese monuments in Angola are actually Angolan monuments...
Sorry, I don't find that useful for one who, for instance, just wants to understand who the heck actually built those.
If you take the ethno-nationalist approach to Portugal, then you end up thinking that Portugal, a nation in Europe, built Angola's monuments, and thus the monuments are not just part of Portugal's history, but also not part of Angola's, the subject nation. This rationale looks different than the Lusotropic ideology that you talked about, and for that matter you could construct a narrative whereby colonial Angola's history is prt of Portugal's history and of course also part of Angola's own history.
If one supposes an ideology whereby subject peoples and their territory are part of the nation (like colonial Angola belonging to the nation of Portugal), then why wouldn't the nation's achievements in that minority territory belong to
both the ruling nation
and to the colonial territory?
Clearly this is a multi-sided issue with multiple points of view and ideological frameworks, and it's hard to be really neutral. It wouldn't be right to deny the damage that the US army did to the Native Americans, like with the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but nor would it be correct to portray the history as absolute ethnic cleansing - otherwise the Cherokee wouldn't have reservation land today in North Carolina. Oklahoma is a large state, and traditionally it's been deliberately dedicated to the Cherokees. I had an uncle who was Cherokee from Oklahoma. He was really a very nice and good person. I love him. He was an amazing athlete too. His son as a football player raced across the field like a panther - amazing physique.
And that's just one example. If you say "America has belonged to the Native Americans since the first time that they came here", you would seem to be talking about it in some Amerindian geographic heritage sense. It would be a different framework from the concept that "America began at Jamestown." The standard American history narrative in the sense of textbooks does actually begin American history with the arrival of the Amerindians in North America. But the problem with strictly thinking of it in those terms is that America also has a major english colonialist and post-colonialist supra-ethnic aspect.
I can see that someone would consider the narrative that Amerindian history is part of US history to be a denial of the domination and subjugation of Amerindians. However, there is also the problem that if one denies that pre-colonial Amerindian history is part of American history, then the denial can match Eurocentric denials of pre-colonial heritage in general. If you say that "America is one of the top leading nations" and that "Amerindians only belong to that major nation's history to the extent that they were subjugated", then depending on the interpretation that one gives, Amerindians' heritage's worth may depend more or less on their status as a subjugated people.
I get the sense, and I could be wrong, that commonly Europeans are disconnecting Amerindian history from American history out of concern for Amerindians because they don't want to deny the genocide of Amerindians and ethnic cleansing. At least that's the sense that I get from a lot of the posts above.
But classically, denials of Amerindians' connection to America and their pre-columbian importance came from a Euro-centric perspective, ie. the perspective that American history began at Jamestown has the possible negative implication that pre-Jamestown Amerindian history is not part of American history, and so it's not particularly important for national history. So if you're an American kid, the implication would be that learning about American Indian culture is not really important, or anyway it would be like learning about the history of Canada or Mexico - someplace at hand geographically but still not really that important. And of course if you actually happen to be an Amerindian, then the implication is that America is not your ancestors' country, at least not until it took in or subjugated your ancestors.
So from a progressive humanitarian standpoint, you could legitimately want to see and emphasize Amerindians' connections to America, so that they would be welcomed, have a sense of belonging, have a sense that the country and land belongs to them as well, and not just in a subjugated sense. Considering the self-governing nature of Amerindian reservations and tribes whose history precedes Columbus, I get the sense that this could even be framed as a chicken vs. egg debate. In terms of geographic human society, the peoples that lived in what we call "America" today preceded the arrival of Columbus. That is, they made up the collection of people living here, even though they didn't specifically designate the land along those borders. Then later the government that we call the US took over that land, but the Amerindians didn't stop living in US territory per se. The top government changed from an Amerindian one to the US one that ruled over the Amerindians, but the Amerindian people were still in the territory that we call America like they were before.
So this topic looks like it can be legitimately argued different ways depending on one's framework, biases, etc.
What do you think?
