What Those Who Accept The ‘Stolen Land’ Myth Don’t Understand

With respect to North America, it’s true that the Native American tribes that lived on the continent were dispossessed by the Europeans who began arriving there 500 years ago. This process involved larcenous sales of land in which tribe members often had no idea what this meant, in addition to treaty infringements and outright theft, generally accompanied by military aggression and slaughter. What traditional American histories called the “winning” of the continent involved tragedy for the Native American losers.

But few of those now signaling their virtue by paying homage to indigenous tribes who once lived on such “stolen land” are planning on giving their property and homes to their descendants, if any can be found. Indeed, even recognized Native American tribes, some of which are actually interested in getting back some of the places where their ancestors once lived or roamed, have noted the emptiness of these woke pronouncements.

Cynics with perhaps a better understanding of the history of these tribes than those who proclaim their devotion to their memory might also point out that those “indigenous peoples” themselves waged war continuously on each other. Many of the “sacred lands” that some tribes now claim were once sacred to other tribes who were defeated, dispossessed and slaughtered, much in the same manner that white Europeans would ultimately do to them.

The notion that this process of dispossession was immoral rather than merely the way groups of human beings had always interacted with each other since time immemorial—with the strong subjugating the weak—was a modern invention that didn’t become widely accepted until the late 20th century. That change in thinking, of course, is a good thing, even if the retrospective pronouncements that some who did it were evil while others were not is both anachronistic and lacking in both context and historical background.

After all, the idea that the world would have been a better place had Europeans never arrived in America—and that the republic that would help rid the world of Nazism and defeat Soviet Communism should not have been created—is absurd as well as ahistorical.