In short, I do think you are out of touch.

This person seems to be defending the exploitation of animals because some indigenous people do it too

I don't think this is what they are doing. I think what they are doing is highlighting how the conversation is not even including indigenous people, and reminding whites/settlers that there are ways of inhabiting this world that are outside of their own.

Animal exploitation is horrendous anywhere in any context, and just because marginalized groups do it doesn't mean it's ok.

I think that in many cases, indigenous interaction with the non-human world is not exploitation, including hunting. I think that hunting can be done in harmony with the non-human world, understanding that we are a part of it, and considering ourselves to have a sacred relationship to it.
Outside of removing humans completely from the equation, if we want to actually be in this world, looking to many indigenous groups for a model of how to relate to the nonhuman world is a good start towards thinking about minimally harmful lifeways.

For me, veganism is only desirable in the present world.
In another world, where we are minimally mediated from the things that affect us and the things we affect, and in a world where we understand our relation to the nonhuman as sacred, the little hunting that may occur would be ethical.

Finally, it's really not for others to tell indigenous people how to act or what is ethical. This kind of approach underlies a coloniality that harms people and nonhumans vastly more than many indigenous peoples' relation to the nonhuman world.

Hunting has been one of the most destructive activities humans have engaged in with respect to the environment. At this point, agricultural and industrial activity has certainly surpassed it in terms of the sheer scale of the damage, but as long ago as 15-10,000 years ago, human hunting activity was having a deletrious effect on the extinction rates, particularly of large megafauana. This is part of why horses, cows, and other large animals didn't exist in the Americas from that time until European contact-- they all went extinct due to a combination of climate change and overhunting.

Hunting is also related in prominent cases to settler colonialism, for instance with the near-extinction of Bison in North America being the result of settlers hunting Bison for sale in commodity markets. Of course, indigenous peoples also hunt, and they should be re-centered in conversations like this, but hunting is not something exclusive to indigenous peoples either. For instance, reactionary gun culture often overlaps and intersects with game hunting clubs, in my country.

To argue that hunting can be done in a "noble" way, but usually/only by certain ethnic or racial groups, is usually to center the abstracted ecological relationships over the particularized results for actual living things. Even in this perspective, this ignores the ecological consequences of hunting, which can easily be deleterious even when practiced by indigenous people. Furthermore, focusing only on the ecological consequences erases the very real suffering which individual living things go through as a result of these social norms, as well as the sociological consequences for humans societies which rely on or valorize the subjugation of animals to human skill, technology, and desire.

For example, the creation of trade routes as a result of colonization resulted in an increase in hunting, and associated social upheaval in indigenous communities. Many people of the North American plains in the 17th-19th centuries saw the emergence of greater social conflict, the erosion of the status of women accompanying the increase of the social importance of raiding and hunting parties, saw the introduction of greater personal property & husbandry (horses), and witnessed the loss of traditional cultural knowledge related to agriculture among other things.

Politically, i have no desire to use state power to coerce anyone into not killing animals, human or non-human. It is a totally ineffective way to incentivize or disincentivize killing, particularly systemic killing, and relying on the state to enforce these basic cultural needs (stigmatizing killing) signals the failure to meet those needs.

Nor am i interested in talking down to indigenous peoples-- there are plenty of conversations I can have with people of a similar background to me on this topic, which will do a lot more to challenge the industrial systems which produce the vast majority of systematic animal cruelty.

However, one would hope that animal liberation doesn't become or continue to be known as a "white people thing". There has been disproportionate indigenous participation in anti-civ animal liberation action, showing that this alleged tolerance for animal killing or subjugation is certainly not how many indigenous people feel, to the point of earning long-term arson sentences for non-violent direct action. I think that white settler people who are concerned about animal cruelty continue to focus on white settler institutions and white settler norms which enable animal cruelty to be systematically perpetuated, and not worry too much about indigenous practices, given that there are indigenous people much better positioned to enter into constructive dialogue about whatever moral issues therein, as well as the fact that indigenous practices are not usually a major contributor to animal suffering at this point.

I mean, whole oceans are acidifying, the air is poison, massive wildfires are burning entire towns, the extinction rate is through the roof-- is this really the hill that white vegans want to die on, whether to allow the Makah to hunt a few more whales?

edit: various spell mistakes

western white people don't have the same sort of relationship to animals indigenous people do, even ones who hunt. i don't like the trend of people using indigenous people as an argument against animal lib because it reifies real, lived relationships into pawns for idpol

prety mucch that. ur on track imo

To go against the general argument here, no, you're right. The argument is dumb. Arguments like these operate under the assumption that ""whiteness"" is evil, and since white people "invented" veganism (they did not) then veganism must be undesirable as well. In reality, India's indigenous peoples were vegan ~900 years ago and who gives a fuck if the whities can act with empathy?

Its like saying that you can't criticize human sacrifice because its "anti-indigenous". You can't criticize arranged marriages, or wife-owning, or wife-beating, or whatever because its "anti-indigenous". Yeah, white people have done that shit too, but so have indigenous populations. Why are we strawmanning an entire race again?

Animal liberation is a good thing, but in the past every society had to hunt and exploit animals to survive. That is no longer the case. Vegans offer a fairly simple solution to both the destruction of the planet and killing of animals-- veganism. Using Idpol to justify slaughter is pretty weak in my opinion.

This entire thread reminds me of something a tankie said to me once in an argument: "If you're going to embrace identity politics, you have to expect white people to embrace it as well". The thing is, they were kind of right. Why would we not expect white people to begin to take "pride" in their history, or "culture", or whatever if that's what we actively encourage everyone else to do?

Privileged people can still do good things and marginalized people can still do bad things. My ancestors weren't vegan, but I am. I'm not my ancestors and I don't live in their world. Collectivists love to circlejerk their excuses with one another.