TNG - The Ensigns of Command

[Nealithi]

See I would give this a decimal. 4.5 because there are weaknesses that do not age well.
But I hold this next to Peak Performance for something missed. In Peak Performance Data is cornered into a game against Kolrami. He kept being told what to do and how. Which he did and it was all bad advice. The same thing happened here. He kept being told how to handle the colonists and each way failed. Till Data did things his way. Against Kolrami, Data is a machine he will never tire and never stop. He does not have to go for quick wins to beat someone.
Here he looks at the situation and gets a weapon working. Just enough to show these people that it would be futile to resist the Sheliak. No one else on the crew could have adapted the phaser and been so cold to show them what was there. One line omitted was that the Sheliak would fire from orbit. The colonists would not even see their killers. It was that bad a situation.

[Nightbeat74]

i kinda like this episode because it shows(for the first time i think?) that Mr.Data has just a bit of a devious,high risk all or nothing planer streak in him that pops up when things get rough and lives need to be saved. we see this later in a few other episodes and in First Contact.

[CharlesPhipps]

I think this is my favorite of the "forced relocation" episodes because it doesn't attempt to take a great moral stance on the issue but simply deals with the cold unsympathetic realities of the matter. The Sheliak are coming, they aren't people the Federation will go to war to protect, are technically squatters, and their bluster over it being their land is not going to change any of that.

I also think this episode deserves an extra point for the fact that a large portion of it is about honest-to-Roddenberry diplomacy. There's some humor value in Picard being hung up on twice but what saves the colony is lawyer-fu as well as actual use of the treaties.

Troi also gets to explain how linguistics works in a way that should have been in "Darmok"

[Frustration]

This isn't a case like Insurrection, where it's the exploitation of a natural resource that would have a byproduct of destroying their immortality - hell, it's not even comparable to the Natives in Journey's End, where they purportedly had representation at the treaty negotiations. The Sheliak are very different from the Cardassians and were willing to bend the treaty a little bit - the Sheliak were more than happy to wipe out the humans if they didn't get them off the planet, and the complexity of the treaty meant there was no chance of getting the diplomats out again.

Yes, exactly! We're not meant to be sympathetic to the Sheliak, who don't even view humans or humanoid aliens as people and who are willing and able to exterminate the accidental colonists regardless of Starfleet's feelings on the matter. Insurrection featured the Federation trying to steal a resource from its lawful and rightful owners.

If the planet in question hadn't been in the territory of a very powerful alien species, I can't imagine the Feds trying to force those people out.

[Fianna]

Are there any forced relocation stories in Star Trek where the people being forced out aren't colonists (even if a few generations removed) occupying a very small portion of an otherwise uninhabited planet?

That always seems to diminish their plight, especially considering there are plenty of uninhabited worlds they could move to en masse with seemingly little difficulty. Of course, in real life, displacing even just fifteen thousand people is going to cause all sorts of horrible problems (poverty, breaking up of communities, forcing them to live in foreign culture, logistical issues with the relocation itself), but the Federation's technology renders those non-issues..

[Zatman]

I agree with the OP, I don't think a 7 is warranted, but I could definitely see 5 and maybe 6. As to whether a treaty with a lower lifeform could exist, think about dogs. They are scientifically a lower lifeform than we are, yet we still train them to follow commands well. Perhaps the Sheliak to Humans is a smaller gap than Humans to Dogs, but the concept is the same. They acknowledge we can understand, but still consider themselves superior. Also for the record, I consider dogs superior to us in every way!

I also agree with several comments here that this isn't like Insurrection or the Native American tribe. In the former, Chuck makes a very good point about the needs of the many. Making 600 people live a normal lifespan, is worth possibly saving billions, they wouldn't be killed, their culture wouldn't even be destroyed as they could replicate everything they had on any other world.

The Native American relocation, yes, it's got unfortunate historical parallels, but this relocation wasn't simply a one-sided drive for expansion by one superior group, it was more like they were unfortunately caught in the middle, and the decision was arbitrary. The Cardassians and Federation simply ceded each other planets based on...what? Dorvan V (no I'm not that much of a geek, I'm looking it up on Memory Alpha) just happened to be on the wrong side of a seemingly arbitrarily decided line, and human settlers violently resisting the Cardassian occupation forces, could spark an open war between the Federation and Cardassian Union, the Maquis almost did several times. Trying to force them out, was a way to keep millions of others from potentially dying. Look at what happened with World War 1. One random guy got shot by one other random guy, and the whole world started shooting. Even the final compromise could have led to war if one of the human colonists had assassinated a visiting Cardassian Legate or something, even done of his own, individual, accord rather than organized resistance.

Are there any forced relocation stories in Star Trek where the people being forced out aren't colonists (even if a few generations removed) occupying a very small portion of an otherwise uninhabited planet?

That always seems to diminish their plight, especially considering there are plenty of uninhabited worlds they could move to en masse with seemingly little difficulty. Of course, in real life, displacing even just fifteen thousand people is going to cause all sorts of horrible problems (poverty, breaking up of communities, forcing them to live in foreign culture, logistical issues with the relocation itself), but the Federation's technology renders those non-issues..

Could there be any other? At a certain point a colony transitions from "colony" to nation in its own right.

[Linkara]

In all these forced relocation stories, it always boils down to two issues: cultural destruction and theft of property. The problem with comparing it to real life forced relocation in history is that 9 times out of 10 it's done for the sake of racism/prejudice/etc. i.e. these lives are less important because they are not the same as our in group so they can be destroyed en masse. The cultural devastation follows FROM the physical extermination because there's no one to carry on the culture or said culture is beaten down via forced assimilation into the oppressing culture.

But in these Trek examples, all the relocations are being done to either protect them or in the case of Insurrection, a natural resource that is beneficial to people in a time of war, basically an example of eminent domain - the government is seizing private property for presumably a greater good and the compensation is in the form of moving their entire settlement to a different planet. It can be argued that immortality itself has BECOME a part of their culture by virtue of there being no worry about aging, but by the same token that's not necessarily a culture when these are not descendants carrying on a culture from a distant past, but rather most of these are the same people who first arrived to settle it. Their culture changed once, it can change again.

And that brings us to the Maquis and the Native Americans. Because changing the location of their home will not destroy their culture (admittedly, the Native Americans argued that it would because of their spiritual beliefs, but arguably they cannot prove that it would in a tangible sense), it comes down to a matter of seizure of their property. And thus we have why the ethos of this episode clashes with that of the other two - the idealized Roddenberry future says that property is irrelevant, that we don't hold value to material possessions anymore. Sure, we want stuff but to give up one's life for property is absurd - Data's assertion at the end: "This is just a thing. Things can be replaced. Lives cannot." Whereas once we get to the Native Americans and the Maquis, they argue that their property, their homes have a tangible value that should not be taken from them because it belongs to them. Despite the fact that the technology exists to recreate all the physical objects of their colonies, the Maquis argue "We don't care, it's our property regardless and you can't have it" and the Native Americans argue "It took us 200 years to find this place and when we did, it mattered to us on a spiritual level so it holds value to us beyond just another location."

I don't know, I think I'm just rambling here but I find it fascinating the different thought processes of the writers and what they feel is important values to the culture of the future.

[Fianna]

Trek does have a long history of ignoring or handwaving away how their advanced society/technology should make the conflict of the story irrelevant. Whenever the writers want characters to struggle with limited resources or to fight over a MacGuffin, simply replicating what they need is never an option.

I think the Maquis stories were built from the notion that if they're forced out of their homes, they are now homeless (I think they even refer to themselves once as "homeless refugees"), and we're meant to assume that would be as harrowing as it would be in our reality. Or that, if they did try resettling their colony on a new planet, it'd be as arduous and fraught with peril as historical examples of trying to build a colony from scratch.

[Jonathan101]

But in these Trek examples, all the relocations are being done to either protect them or in the case of Insurrection, a natural resource that is beneficial to people in a time of war, basically an example of eminent domain - the government is seizing private property for presumably a greater good and the compensation is in the form of moving their entire settlement to a different planet. It can be argued that immortality itself has BECOME a part of their culture by virtue of there being no worry about aging, but by the same token that's not necessarily a culture when these are not descendants carrying on a culture from a distant past, but rather most of these are the same people who first arrived to settle it. Their culture changed once, it can change again.

There have been cases where Native Americans were forced off their land not simply due to prejudice or racism, but because that land happened to have a precious resource- for instance, the Lakota people were forced off of the Black Hills despite a treaty forbidding White settlement in that region forever, because four years after the treaty was signed gold was discovered there and the US was in bad economic shape due to the civl war. The Lakota had only taken residence of the Black Hills by force from the Cheyenne about a hundred years earlier, and this was one of the arguments used to justify kicking them off and seizing it.

In most cases, the land itself was the precious resource since the population of the US was growing and there was a strong desire to expand and it would have caused social and economic difficulties if they didn't.

[CMWaters]

Is it weird that I see Gosheven's denial of wanting to leave in a slightly different light nowadays with a certain real world, very real incident we're dealing with that they didn't in the 1990s? Only we don't have a Data to make that forceful a point at the end.

[Look at what's bolded if you don't get what I mean.]

Also, slight aside: with how much they dig up from the past Treks (including a recent TNG season 1 example), what are the chances that "Lower Decks" somehow brings up the Sheliak?