Be very careful with slamming people with comments like it being a “ridiculous question”. Unless the person is an obvious troll you don’t want to turn them off from asking questions. It is much better that they asked the question and then had it answered and explained what they were missing in their perspective that lead to the question being necessary. Calling it ridiculous will turn off the person from asking more questions which will only serve to perpetuate their lack of understanding and potential insensitivity towards other cultures.

A lot of people are raised and educated in very homogeneous environments. If their exposure to history has only been to big topics like Greek and Roman culture where we have a massive amount of data, they may not realize how lacking we are in North and South American indigenous history. Their question may have been more along the lines of thinking someone was showing concern over losing a bit of Roman graffiti or a Greek city-state’s local variation of deity worship. Sure loss of that sucks, but they aren’t likely to be revolutionary in our understanding of the cultures.

From that perspective they asked a legitimate question. Is there something in particular we have lost with indigenous history that is significant or is it simply the loss of another longhouse that is fundamentally the same as a dozen others. The response they received was great as it was polite and explained that not only is all cultural history significant but in fact we have lost so much indigenous history that we don’t know far more than we do know.