Balderdash: The Myth of 'Stolen Land'

Thursday, July 08, 2021

The Myth of 'Stolen Land'

The myth of the ‘stolen country’ | The Spectator

"This ‘stolen country’ paradigm has spread like wildfire throughout the British diaspora in recent years. The BBC recently ran a piece on the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landings, whose author took obvious delight in portraying the Pilgrim Fathers as native-mutilating slave drivers. In Canada, in the greater Toronto school district, students are read a statement of apology, acknowledging European guilt for the appropriation of First Nations lands, before the national anthem is played over the PA system every morning...

What well-meaning liberals do not seem to realise these days is that democracies thrive or fail on the basis of national stories. This is doubly so in republics like the US, where there is no apolitical figurehead to unite people in place of a monarch. In the end, stories are all we’ve got as a glue to cement us together as a society. If that story says that our democracy is rotten to the core, then how do we expect anyone to retain enthusiasm for democracy itself? As history shows time and again, as soon as a republic does not believe in itself and its ideals — that it is better than the tyrannies and autocracies surrounding it — that republic succumbs very quickly to autocracy itself. The riots that have recently erupted across the United States, the new and unaccustomed boldness that characterises dictators around the globe, attest to the breakdown of the Western democratic order which is being accelerated by these self-inflicted wounds.

This is not an abstract fear. By many measures, support for democracy among younger people is plummeting around the globe. Many in the US seem to have no clue just how much of a ‘city on a hill’ the US is still perceived to be, and how important that American beacon is to millions of people living under autocratic regimes. The mere thought of Obama’s motorcade passing through my European province electrified schoolchildren across the region. For them, he was as close as you get to a real-life superhero. Such universal support for a politician is virtually unheard of. Even though republican regimes are historically less popular internationally, for billions of people around the globe the US still equates with democracy — it is ‘the good place’. If the image of US is fundamentally delegitimised, if it’s entire raison d’être is tainted, then increasing numbers of people wonder whether democracy itself is worth the trouble. So we have to be very careful what we wish for...

The narrative of the ‘stolen country’ or ‘Native American genocide’ does not stand up to scrutiny by any honest and clear-sighted historian. It is a dangerously myopic and one-sided interpretation of history. It has only gained currency because most practising historians and history teachers are either susceptible to groupthink, or else have been cowed into silence by fear of losing their jobs. Reduced to its puerile form of ‘statement of guilt’, this myth puts 100 per cent of the burden on Europeans who are held responsible for all historical evil, while the First Nations people are mere victims; martyrs even, whose saintlike innocence presumes that their civilisation and society were practically perfect in every way. This is no way to honour or respect the realities of First Nation lives and their agency. And it helps perpetuate the idea that the US and Canada are fundamentally illegitimate societies, and that by implication, every other country on Earth is legitimate. If we were to be honest, there is not a single country on Earth which did not displace natives, or which did not engage in nasty wars or ethnic cleansings at many points during its history. The current fad for holding up the US and Canada to special scrutiny and particular opprobrium is therefore distorting at best...

No matter who ‘discovered’ the New World, it is inevitable that a large proportion of New World inhabitants would have died within the first few decades after first contact. This is universally acknowledged by specialists in the field. The New World population was smaller and more homogenous than the Old World population. Thus, its people had less immunity to disease than the people of the Old World, where disease communities from Africa, Asia and Europe had been intermingling for millennia. Even though some European captains did try and spread smallpox around a few forts and villages from time to time, the effect of their efforts was almost negligible compared with the natural spread of disease. So the claims of genocide by disease have almost nothing to do with European actions, apart from their simply reaching the New World. And of course, Europeans of the time had no way of envisioning the continent-wide epidemic repercussions of their actions. Verdict: not guilty.

Let us also acknowledge that Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history. The anthropologists’ vision of Native Americans as peace-pipe-smoking environmentalists which gained purchase in the 1970s has long since given way to a more Hobbesian portrait of pre-Columbian reality. In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes. It also meant that chiefs were continually vying for power, creating confederations under themselves, and that the question of who owned the land was in a more or less constant state of flux. In most of North America, the idea that any one piece of land belonged to any one tribe, for more than 50 or 100 years, is therefore highly questionable. In short, if you looked at a map of Native Canada 200 years before Europeans arrived, it would have been entirely different. In the meantime, some groups of natives would have slaughtered, bullied or enslaved others. Should we not be grieving for those Native Canadians whose land was stolen by other Native Canadians? Or is that somehow OK? I don’t suppose there is an app for that.

The idea that the Europeans stole some land which had belonged in perpetuity to any one tribe is therefore ludicrous. The situation in most of North America was similar to northern Europe on the eve of the Germanic migrations, or western Europe as the Celts were moving across the landscape. Precisely to whom the land belonged in any given century at these periods in history was anyone’s guess. The very notion of property is a Graeco-Roman invention which most cultures found foreign until quite recently. But Europeans of the time had little chance of grasping this difference. What the Europeans did in the New World was insert themselves into a fluid power struggle which had been ongoing for millennia. Many Native American chiefs were ready to pledge allegiance to the Great ‘Chief of the English’, as a political expedient, just as various English colonies sided with this or that Native American ‘Great Chief’. Despite a few sensational cases of duplicity, most of the time, Europeans tried to buy land from Indians, just like they would buy an acre of land in England. If the local chief assented to this and liked the price, where then was the crime?... Musket use by natives probably depleted animal stocks at a higher rate than previously, meaning that the very introduction of firearms might have spelled the doom of hunting and gathering in North America in the long run, even if the Europeans had otherwise left the country alone.

Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it?

This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been...

It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.

The mixed farming/gathering economy of most Native Americans, coupled with their vulnerability to Old World diseases, therefore meant that North America was sparsely populated by the time Jamestown was founded in 1607, and unable to replace missing population at a very high rate. At this time, the New World was more sparsely populated than anywhere in the Old World apart from its subarctic regions and the Sahara...

Many people have been told by their friends on social media that Europeans destroyed Native Culture. The problem is this: whenever a good idea comes along, which clearly increases one’s living standards, one tends to adopt it. And who is to say that this adaptation is bad, especially if it results in higher living standards? Even as they discovered America, the Europeans were in the process of adopting dozens of superior Chinese inventions and ideas: paper money, gunpowder, pasta and fine porcelain are only the most famous. Should we accuse China of ‘cultural imperialism’ when they ruined ‘native’ Italian cuisine by introducing Marco Polo to spaghetti? Similarly, Native Americans were quick to adapt the many useful Old World ideas which Europeans happened to carry with them. To reiterate, most of these had not even been invented by Europeans, but had been adopted by Europeans from other Old World cultures. Why grind corn laboriously by hand for several hours a day, when one can use millstones instead? Why hunt with bow and arrow, when one can use a rifle? Why refuse to domesticate cattle, when they provide huge boosts in caloric intake for your family? Why refuse to adopt the wheel, for goodness sake?...

What about Columbus himself? Try as they might (and they have tried mightily), historians have been unable to find any evidence that Columbus was genocidal, or had any particular ill-will towards the Native Americans that he encountered. The guy lived in 1492. We could have forgiven him for literally ‘going medieval’ on any natives that he encountered. This was the same century in which the Mongols were exterminating every Russian, Muslim and Chinese person that they could get their hands on, sometimes slaughtering over 100,000 men, women and children at a go in some of history’s worst blood orgies. Instead, we find in Columbus’s journals a general sense of curiosity, of wonder even, and a genuine desire at many points to communicate and trade with natives, whose help Columbus realised he would need if his little expeditions were going to be successful. Let’s remember that Columbus was first and foremost a merchant. His main purpose was to open a trade route to China. Europeans realised that China had better stuff. Like expert businessmen everywhere, Genoese merchants had long since realised that attacking the people you want to trade with is counterproductive.

From the get-go, Isabella of Spain expressly forbade the enslavement of her New World subjects. Instead, she showed a genuine desire to bring them into what for her constituted the folds of civilisation, as Christian equals. So historians must grudgingly concede that the Spanish Crown, for its part, was likewise not nearly as bloodthirsty, genocidal or racist as they clearly hope to find.

The priest Bartholomé de las Casas wrote an eloquent plea to the monarchs of Spain as early as the 1540s, chronicling in detail how wonton adventurers had taken advantage of the lawless situation in New Spain to exploit and slaughter natives against the express will of the Spanish Crown. A few things are worth noting about this: A) at least some Spanish people already had a genuine sense of compassion for, and desire to save, the Indians. B) Las Casas assumed that there was enough sympathy for his story at the Spanish court that he presented his book to the crown. Las Casas believed, therefore, that compassion for the Native Americans was, or at least could become, the dominant mood at court.

Likewise, the relationship between English colonists in North America and Native Americans was never one-sided. To borrow a phrase from Facebook, the real historical relationship between these peoples is best described as ‘complicated’. The very first Native American chief who encountered the English, Powhatan, almost immediately expressed an interest to live in an English-style house. He considered it to be superior to the types of houses that his own people built, and he was ready to adopt whatever European ways made his life more comfortable. John Smith is supposed to have built him such a house in his capital of Werowocomoco, and to this day a monument called ‘Powhatan’s Chimney’ purports to be the remains of this house. Whether this is actually true or not, the fact is that many such acts of cultural borrowing were at work in English North America. We will say nothing of the many Native American habits that English settlers gratefully adopted, since this would be angrily dismissed as ‘cultural appropriation’ or some other such bad-faith nonsense.

The story of Powhatan is outshined by the biography of his daughter Pocahontas. Of course there is much legend attached to this and there will be a ‘whitewashing’ of the legend. However, we have eye-witness accounts attesting that Pocahontas and other native children were in the habit of turning cartwheels around the Jamestown fort and playing with the boys there. Pocahontas and her friends are credited at one point with bringing provisions into the fort when the colonists were starving. Like any other neighbours, the settlers of Jamestown and the natives of the region had individual personal relationships that lasted for many years. But frontier relations were often capricious, and friendly games could turn to war, and back again, in a matter of months. At one point, John Smith was captured and brought to Powhatan; it is believed that Powhatan thereby hoped to bring Jamestown into his own dominions as Great Chief. He also sent an agent to England with a mission to spy out the population of that country — thus quite resourcefully attempting to size up the competition. He might even have imagined conquering England itself. Should we call Powhatan a ‘cultural imperialist’? At a later date, Pocahontas was captured in war, kept under house arrest, and eventually freed. In 1613, she converted to Christianity and took the rather less interesting name of ‘Rebecca’. She was given away by her father Powhatan to the successful Jamestown planter John Rolfe, and the two of them were given an estate totalling thousands of acres by Powhatan himself. Was this land ‘stolen’ from the Native Americans? Sources relate that the marriage helped foster several years of peace between the Native Americans and the Jamestown colony. In 1616 Pocahontas accompanied her husband to England, where she was treated as a celebrity, and an example of how the natives could be ‘civilised’. One can read this suspiciously, as any good Liberal critic is now taught to do, as an act of ‘white superiority.’ Or one could accept it at face value, as proof that many English people believed Native Americans to have the same innate human abilities as Europeans. Arguably, this is the exact opposite of racism. (Notice we don’t even have a word for this.)

There is therefore little real mystery of what happened to the Native Americans as a culture. They were certainly not exterminated at the behest of any concerted ideology of hatred or European superiority. After the initial disease-caused die-offs, and in spite of a few sensational wars and small-scale massacres, remaining Native Americans adopted so many Old World ‘life hacks’ that most of them were gradually assimilated into European culture. Only a minority stayed ‘wild’ enough to be placed on reservations. Even after that, many enterprising people left the reservation for a better life elsewhere. This was done on an individual basis, for the most part peacefully and willingly, leaving no fuss or much trace in the historical record. The stories of Powhatan and Pocahontas attest to the presence of this pattern at the dawn of English-Native American relations, and it continues to the present day. Now, such a statement would cause an uproar in almost any academic conference room these days. But the majority of the evidence and experience all points in this direction...

Plaques attest to schoolrooms full of Native American children who were being taught to read and write German by the Moravian settlers. While modern-day anthropologists might recoil in horror at this act of ‘cultural imperialism’, it is likely that the parents of these children were grateful for the opportunities afforded to them (and the calories given to them) by the Moravian schoolteachers. It is also very likely that these children would grow up to marry and live on a farm, in European style. Who in their right mind would live in the woods, if they could live a far more secure life on a farm? This was the 18^th century we are talking about, when life was hard enough for the great majority of Europeans. The Native Americans therefore showed common sense by gravitating towards habits which enabled them individually to survive and thrive. Accordingly, the colonial-era graveyard in Bethlehem contains a significant percentage of native people who, like Pocahontas 150 years before, had converted to Christianity and adopted a new name. There is no evidence that the egalitarian-minded settlers thought any less of these new converts to the faith...

Let’s take a moment to look at the Moravians, whom our Liberal friends will glibly dump into the bucket of ‘European cultural imperialists’. First, the Moravians were, quite literally, communists; I will let that settle without further comment on the irony that entails in this context. In the lands bordering Moravia, ‘white privilege’ meant the privilege of sending an annual tribute of children to be slaves of the Ottoman Sultan: a practice which went on for 500 years, and was not discontinued until 1918. For centuries, Moravians therefore lived under threat of their homeland being invaded, and their people slaughtered or carried into Islamic slavery. (And though it is meant tongue-in-cheek, even pretending to use the lens of ‘race’ here is wholly distorting: in the Mediterranean context, religion and ethnicity mattered far more than ‘race’.) My point is that the Moravians and many neighbouring peoples hardly came from a position of cultural dominance.

But it gets much worse. Moravia itself was originally Slavic-speaking, but it was also in the process of being taken over by culturally dominant Germans. So the very people teaching Native Americans to learn German in Pennsylvania were themselves victims of ongoing cultural imperialism which threatened the extermination of their ancestral language. And within a few generations, German itself would be all but eradicated from Pennsylvania by the majority English-speaking population. To this day, a few Amish still speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a version of German. They still refer to non-Amish as ‘the English’ and think of them as foreigners. To pretend therefore that Native Americans were the only ones in 17th- and 18th-century America whose culture was being ‘erased’ is highly naive. It is pernicious even — and racist in itself. This is to say nothing about religion. The Moravians were only in Pennsylvania in the first place because they faced a threat of extermination for their religious beliefs at home. They were, quite literally, refugees seeking asylum from the most horrific conditions. They found refuge in the tolerant state of Pennsylvania, set up by the religious refugee William Penn.

As this piece was going to press, an article was published by the BBC on the occasion of the 400^th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower. After pretending neutrality at the beginning of the piece, the author launched with relish into all the worst possible assertions that can be levied against the Plymouth colonists. He implied that they were slave owners, when in fact, only a single Plymouth colonist is documented as having owned a slave. He implied that Plymouth ran on dirty money from the African slave trade, which is likewise almost entirely false. He mentioned every instance that can be found of colonists murdering Indians, and the image accompanying the article showed a representation of a native who was mutilated by colonists.

The article steadfastly refuses to mention any mitigating factors. It says nothing about massacres perpetrated by Native Americans on colonists, or on each other... It does not mention that the colonists usually attempted to purchase land from local chiefs. Nor does our BBC article mention the disease which had wiped out over 90 per cent of the Native Americans who lived on the site of the Plymouth colony in the year before the Mayflower landed (the disease had been brought by fishermen, who had been sailing off Massachusetts for generations)... The article in question says nothing about how Plymouth authorities sometimes hanged Englishmen, or hunted down English fugitives, in order to demonstrate to their Native American allies that they took crimes against them seriously. Nor would the author dare to address the fact that the protestant dissenters of Massachusetts were intellectual ancestors of the global abolitionist movement which he and most of his fellows now take for granted, and give European culture zero credit for.

The question becomes, what good purpose does this calumny against the Pilgrims and other European colonists really serve? I ask this question in good faith. What myth about the Pilgrims needs tearing down with such one-sided ferocity? During the Cold War and the Gulf Wars, liberal historians called out excessive nationalism and jingoism, based on the legitimate fear that military types might start a war for no good reason. (In the case of Gulf War II, they apparently did.) So there is always a place for liberal critique within history. But on this issue, it’s more difficult to see the value of Pilgrim-bashing to today’s Native Americans, apart from making them bitter and resentful, and everyone else feel guilty and ashamed. There are after all very few Native Americans who identify as such; they are generally not subject to racism in the way that, say, African-Americans are, most are mixed race anyway, and most of them do not live on reservations. Many who do, are better off than many other Americans. So what grievances are pieces like the BBC story really addressing? In Canada, I am aware that there are serious social grievances on some reservations, particularly in the far north, but it seems as though the Canadian government has gone a long way in recent decades to address these in a reasonable manner, by allowing Native American representatives to guide and execute policy as much as possible. Should this not be applauded and supported?

And whenever there are real grievances such as these, do we need to rewrite the entire history of European-Native relations in the most negative possible light in order to address them? Peel back the veneer, and we often find well-meaning white middle-class writers, whose cries of victimisation bespeak an essentialising racialism that they don’t even recognise themselves. Would it not be more productive to be more nuanced, to acknowledge that there have been points of goodwill, friendship, positive communication and — shudder the thought — even mutual benefit, since the very beginning?

The real reason to perpetuate such a disastrously one-sided view, it seems, is if one is in a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism — an ideology bent on bringing maximum embarrassment to Capitalism, Democracy, Western Civilisation and Europeans in general, in the vain hope that this will somehow bring about a sort of… what? Revolution? Really? Let’s not be naive. The only reason to be this consistently, this unreasonably angry about things which happened centuries ago, is if one sees the entirety of experience through the lens of perpetual racism and victimisation, and crucially, if one does not believe in the power of democracy to correct these wrongs.

At base, such people do not believe in the democratic process. Marxists have always believed that a handful of self-appointed intellectuals are better suited to creating a ‘good society’ than the rough-and-tumble of real-world parliamentary debate. Has history taught them nothing? The ones who will really lose out if Anglophone democracy is further discredited are surely those people in the world who are most vulnerable and in need of protection. Do you wish to provoke an even wilder right-wing reaction to your irrational hate-mongering than we have already seen? Do you think that the autocrats you are emboldening will treat minorities and homosexuals better than the United States, Canada, and Britain? The Cultural Marxist’s finger, once again, is pointed in precisely the wrong direction.

It is high time that historians spoke out against the dangerous misuse of history which supports the zealotry and iconoclasm currently emanating from our educational systems. This has become far too culturally dominant, far too damaging to global society, for us to ignore it any further. In the name of science, fairness, level-headedness, humanity, and democracy itself."

Naturally, liberals who claim to be for the accurate teaching of history (i.e. Critical Race Theory, in their book) get upset and block people who cite historical facts they don't like

Facebook - "Native Americans arrived as immigrants on the North American continent 30,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia. EVERY North American Indian tribe by genetic extension is related to the Athabaskan peoples who descend directly from the Altaian Siberian-Mongol DNA allele. This is proven anthropology. Don’t be a science denier. For the totality of those 30,000 years prior to Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, native tribes engaged in slavery, intertribal warfare and genocide, cannibalism and human ritual sacrifice involving the stealing and raping of the women and children of other tribes. Intertribal skirmishes decided land ownership and territorial dominance for the history of the continent that can only be properly summarized as an epoch of constant, viciously brutal warfare interspersed by rare periods of peace and truce. Entire tribes were wiped from existence by other native tribes. Genocide. Northeastern tribes like the Huron and Iroquois reveled in their elaborate and lengthy victory ceremonies lasting days by skinning and burning alive surviving enemy warriors, roasting their victims on scaffolding above roaring fire, eating the hearts of the vanquished and sating themselves with the naked flesh of captured wives of the conquered who were expected to be loyal concubinous property of the victors ever after. Perhaps those convinced of the modern romantic myth of the “Noble Savage” would care to explain why the name given for the Mohawk tribe is rooted in an Algonguin word literally translated “eaters of the dead,” or why overwhelmed opposing tribes of the Iroquois, warriors, women and children alike routinely committed suicide rather than suffer the infamous and well told savagery of becoming chattel to the Iroquois confederacy. So, the demonization of European arrival in the New World canonizes the warmongering land expansion of tribes, including the Lakota Sioux who claimed the Black Hills in 1776 by defeating the Cheyenne–who stole the land from the Kiowa–who stole the land from the Pawnee and Crow–who stole the same land from the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa tribes who occupied this land between 1000 and 1560 A.D. Any condolences cards exchanged between the Lakota Sioux and the Arikra on this Native American Day? Apology notes for arriving and taking a land already claimed by other peoples, at a terrible cost of lost human life? Is the Iroquois Confederacy issuing apology to the Algonquins for wiping them out of existence in 1640? Didn’t think so. In the lunacy of the present demonization of white culture in the main and white masculinity in specific, we’re now apologizing for the arrival of smallpox via exploration and conquest. Interesting. I wonder if the Chinese explorers who carried the rats infected with Yersenia Pestis up the Silk Road into Europe have ever apologized for the Bubonic Plague outbreak in 1340 that eventually would kill 60% of Europe in a death toll of 60-million….ten times larger than the Native American population of the America’s in 1492 and the single largest pandemic in human history... in this maniacally stupid era of history revision and virtue orgasm, America is the first nation in history to apologize for conquest. It’s stupid and unnecessary indoctrination. Unless you’re a social planner attempting to fractionalize and conquer through propaganda... Everyone on this continent from the beginning of time is an immigrant. Choosing to chop the timeline five hundred years ago rather than 10,000 years ago is the source of the inaccuracy and the stupidity of the present discussion... But then, all of human history is a tragedy of winners and losers, in line and chapter and verse for every race of people that has ever lived. And it can only be properly understood by reading the entire book, rather than fixating on chapters that now serve as handy political weapons for the reinstatement of the very brand of serfdom and classism and inescapable servitude that drove the exploration for new lands with free air and room to succeed by the sweat and toil of a man’s brow. New lands and nations found and founded by the bravery, courage and determination of giants of men who undertook impossibly dangerous voyages of great discovery and shook the foundations of the world. Men like Christopher Columbus. Happy Columbus Day."

WALSH: The Left Says America Was Built On ‘Stolen Land’; Here’s The Reality That Narrative Ignores - "As so many woke Leftists tend to do, Duckwork speaks of Native Americans as if they were one homogenous and unified group. Americans stole from “Native Americans,” generally, she says. Which is like saying the British “stole land from Asians” when they occupied India. No, they were taking from Indians, not the Chinese or the Vietnamese, and the distinction is important. Indeed, Leftists would usually be the first to claim that it is racist to erase or minimize such distinctions.Yet there is a reason why the “we stole land” crowd is hesitant to get specific on the matter of who we stole the land from. The problem is helpfully illustrated by this PBS article, which says the Black Hills were appropriated from the Lakota Sioux, who were “the original occupants of the area.” But the Lakota were the original occupants of the Black Hills in the same way that I was the first person to experience human flight when I took a plane from Baltimore to Charlotte in March. That is to say, I wasn’t. And they weren’t. Not by a long shot.There has been a human presence in the Black Hills since prehistoric times. From that era until the US “stole” it, many groups of people fought, often quite brutally, for control of the region. Slightly more recently, the Arikara tribe moved in around the time that Columbus first sailed the ocean blue. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and other tribes all arrived in short order to fight for their own share of the coveted mountain range. Finally, the Lakota — the alleged “original occupants” — came in the 18th century, drove all of their competitors away, and established control. It’s worth noting that, for Indian tribes, “driving competitors away” often meant violence and pillaging.The U.S. did not take the Black Hills from its original occupants. The original occupants had long since been exiled or exterminated by other Native American tribes, who received the same treatment from the next tribe, who received it from the next, and so on. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the U.S. took the Black Hills from the most recent tribe that had taken it from the tribe that had most recently taken it before them. This is not mere pedantry. The point is that white settlers and pioneers, by trying to claim and conquer new land, were not introducing some new horror to the continent. They were playing the same game of conquest that Indian tribes had been playing — that all people, everywhere, had been playing — since the dawn of human civilization. It is simply absurd to treat the “theft” of land by Europeans and Americans as a unique evil for which we must repent and take down our monuments in shame. Wars of conquest had been waged in this part of the world for thousands of years before any white man graced these shores. Slavery, torture killings, rape, pillage — all of these were common features of Indian conflict. The white man jumped into that fray, he didn’t invent it. This is just how the world worked, long before air conditioning and Taco Bell and Twitter accounts.And we certainly cannot say that white people were unique in their barbarism. Such claims are rendered absurd by even a cursory study of tribes like the Comanche, who were known to torture babies and roast captives alive; or the Iriquois, who committed a campaign of extermination against the Huron over a century before the United States was founded. As SC Gwynn explains in his book “Empire of the Summer Moon,” many Indian tribes in North America were brutal and warlike. And that is to say nothing of the Mesoamerican tribes, like the Aztecs and the Maya, who engaged in human sacrifice on a scale that is almost impossible to fathom. Archeologists are stll uncovering the endless and towering racks of skulls where the dismembered heads of the butchered victims were kept.This doesn’t excuse the many acts of brutality committed by the Spanish, or any other group of Europeans or Americans during the 400-year clash of civilizations between the white man and the Indian, but it does underscore the need for historical context. It was a harsh and violent age, and the world was being tamed and settled by harsh and violent men. We should be thankful that we have the luxury to feel squeamish about it now."

NPC Wars Reserve Corps - Posts | Facebook - "The USA stole the land where Mt. Rushmore is from the Lakota"
"And the Lakota conquered that land from the Cheyenne..."

The western idea of private property is flawed. Indigenous peoples have it right | Julian Brave NoiseCat | The Guardian - "While indigenous values, beliefs and practices are as diverse as indigenous people themselves, they find common roots in a relationship to land and water radically different from the notion of property. For indigenous people, land and water are regarded as sacred, living relatives, ancestors, places of origin or any combination of the above."
Ironically, the same people who romanticise indigenous people for not treating land like a possession and thinking it's ridiculous to think you own land, then claim that indigenous land has been "stolen" and this "stolen land" must be returned to the natives (i.e. the people who just happened to be on the land when white people first came to the area, even if they had just conquered it from another tribe)
Plus, the same people who gripe about stolen land and who want to return land to the indigenous people are clamouring for more (non white) immigrants