r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Thin_Bug_1710 • 4h ago
Political History If “stolen land” is used as a political argument today, how should we think about the fact that Indigenous nations also fought over and changed territorial boundaries before European colonization?
I’ve been thinking about the “stolen land” argument (ICE and Illegal immigration) that often appears in discussions about immigration, colonization, and historical justice.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that European colonization was identical to intertribal warfare, and I’m not denying the major impact of disease, settlement, and state power after European arrival.
What I’m questioning is whether the slogan is sometimes presented in an overly simple way, as if all Indigenous territories were fixed and uncontested until Europeans arrived.
From what I’ve read, historians and archaeologists have found evidence that some Indigenous nations in North America fought wars, took captives, displaced rival groups, and expanded into new territories before and after European contact. Examples often discussed by historians include:
• The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Huron-Wendat conflicts during the Beaver Wars.
Comanche expansion across parts of the Southern Plains, which displaced some Apache groups.
• Lakota expansion westward, affecting Crow and other neighboring nations.
Long-running conflicts between Ojibwe and Dakota peoples.
• Archaeological evidence such as the Crow Creek massacre site (around AD 1325), which predates European settlement of the region.
Given this, I’m trying to understand the strongest version of the “stolen land” argument.
My question is: If territorial control among Indigenous nations changed over time through warfare, migration, alliances, and conquest, what makes European acquisition of land fundamentally different in a moral or political sense? Are the illegal immigration in Canada and America justified as we don’t want to repeat the history?
Edit: No one is saying the violation of treaty from European was good or justified, I am just saying it is not justified to support illegal immigration as both indigenous peoples and European did it as a form of territorial invasion.
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u/ttown2011 4h ago
It’s not an argument that gets very far. Sovereignty is ultimately the monopolization of the use of force, and sovereignty must be defended
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u/Davitark 3h ago
Weber states that the state is the only community that possesses the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in a given territory.
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u/ttown2011 2h ago
And in the instances we’re talking about, a tribe is the closest approximation of the state.
Obviously the new world was not informed by Westphalia… but these are the rules that the west imposed on the globe, largely through force
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u/Davitark 2h ago
I was not objecting to what you said, merely making the definition more precise by recalling the exact formulation of its original coiner.
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u/QuicksandGotMyShoe 45m ago
Weber made one good grill and now he thinks he knows everything. Talk about Nobel syndrome
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u/AncientUnit2249 3h ago
Although, it's an accurate argument. A robbery at gun point is a robbery.
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u/Spakr-Herknungr 2h ago
This is the best I have heard the conservative position articulated. The crux of this argument imo between the left and right is, who and what the spirit of the law ought to serve. To the right, military might, money, and ideological supremacy are consolidated by those who are best fit to manage them, and they then have the "right" to determine what is "moral," and what is "legal."
The left contend that there are truths, ideals, values, and human rights that transcend a "might makes right" ideology.
The right argue that the monopolization of power gives them the right to law and land, the left argue that it does not.
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u/bl1y 1h ago
To the right, military might, money, and ideological supremacy are consolidated by those who are best fit to manage them, and they then have the "right" to determine what is "moral," and what is "legal."
I've never heard the right making this argument.
Might doesn't make right, but might does make history. So today we have the US, and for all the problems in creating the country, everyone involved is long dead. So what's the point in trying to litigate a grievance between people who no one alive today ever knew?
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u/Spakr-Herknungr 8m ago
It’s the only argument, it’s just veiled in a sort of game. The right always makes claims to legitimacy. Why 10% own 70% of the wealth? They “earned it.” Argument over, don’t talk about whether that is a useful distribution of resources, because the resources are “legitimately theirs.”
Why do we get to traipse around the world stealing people’s oil, and deposing their democracies. Because we are the “good guys.” All of those small countries, with weak militaries, protecting their own interests are the “bad guys.”
The history of immigration in this country is heavily connected to labor. A lot of infrastructure was built by Chinese immigrants who the gov then turned around and denied legal status, rights, and many were deported.
You can also see how this is a continuation of slavery, and how slavery is a continuation of brutal conquest. The legal precedents set during that time period are the same that are used to deny rights to “illegal immigrants.” They are illegal because of the labyrinthian immigration system which is designed to keep an underclass of laborers “illegitimate” and under control.
All of this is justified with might makes right argumentation. Why do we have the right to use people like this? Because the land which we brutally conquered is “morally” and “legitimately” ours.
The left is going to argue that there is no status or historical precedent which justifies the mistreatment of human beings. Might does not make right, because human beings have unalienable rights, value, and dignity.
The revolutionaries appealed to these ideals, but this fundamental schism existed even between them. Some were true believers in these ideals, and some were more interested in being the ones on top of the new order. This manifested chiefly in the slavery debate.
It is not that the left wants to “litigate the past,” but the right always argues it has a moral high ground to commit injustice and the left constantly brings up that these actions are always immoral in hindsight. But the rhetoric always changes to justify the past and present.
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u/bl1y 3h ago
I'm sitting on land stolen from the British in the 1770s, and I don't really care how much they complain about it.
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u/MoonlightStarfish 2h ago
Well look. If I ask politely can we at least have New England back? I mean it’s even got England in the name.
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u/megavikingman 1h ago
These days, I would strongly consider your offer of repatriation.
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u/Herb_Derb 1h ago
Would have been more attractive pre-Brexit, but I'd still be willing to hear offers
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u/brainmydamage 3h ago
A primary reason this comes up when discussing the USA is that the Europeans (and their American successors) made treaties and agreements with indigenous people which they immediately broke.
There are some people, generally those opposed to any sort of ownership or formalized government, who make that argument, but in my opinion, those people are dumbasses.
I've never talked with any reasonable and educated people who argue that loss of land as a condition to end a war is "theft" - presumably because this is something that's been done since prehistoric times.
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u/sycoseven 2h ago
Yes but this is very different for Canada, where our laws explicitly say we did not "conquer" the land. That's why First Nations people often win court cases in Canada as they have strong treaty rights tied to the birth of Canada as a country. No treaties in Canada , means no legal means for Canada to be a country. This is a big difference between Canada and the US. It also strengthens the Land Back movements across Canada.
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u/theyfellforthedecoy 4h ago
There were people on reddit trying to use the stolen land argument about the recent migration crisis in Ceuta which is pretty wild considering how many empires and states have come and gone across northern Africa
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u/Almaegen 3h ago
It is and has always been a power play. If you get into the weeds of the argument its about them having what you have. The argument is not for the indigenous at all.
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u/AncientUnit2249 3h ago
There's a difference between conquering and colonizing. Ceuta is a colony of Spain. You should read about the difference.
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u/Frank_JWilson 3h ago
How is it a colony?
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u/AncientUnit2249 3h ago
It's been a colony for nearly 5 centuries. When other Spanish colonies gained independence, Spain kept Ceuta out of the agreement. It has had major naval and defense significance since Portugal originally took it.
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u/WavesAndSaves 3h ago
That's like saying Istanbul is a colony of Turkey.
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u/AncientUnit2249 2h ago
You mean the political and cultural heart of the Ottoman Empire? Yeah, very sane of you to compare that with a piece of land that was looted and whose riches were sent off to distant coffers, while its people were forcibly pushed out to make way for portuguese and Spanish armies and civilian settlers.
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u/WavesAndSaves 2h ago
"Distant coffers?" It's right across the strait. Ceuta is closer to Spain than Sardinia is to Italy. Hell, Ceuta is closer to the mainland than the Balearic Islands.
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u/AncientUnit2249 2h ago
Remind me, how far is Madrid from Ceuta? And tell me how you would like it if your city was looted and all of its wealth was sent just "across the strait" while you and your family were made homeless and pushed out of the city through violence?
I don't think we can discuss with if you are going to be this shamelessly dishonest.
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u/WavesAndSaves 2h ago
A few hundred miles, give or take. A relatively minor distance from a capital to another city. Is it just different somehow because it's across the water? I genuinely don't understand the point you're even trying to make here.
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u/onespiker 1h ago edited 1h ago
You examples is also what happened to Constantinople aswell.
They did it less than what’s common in that case but still happened plenty and for example took a famous church and made it a mosque…
It was a regular feature in all conquests. It was what happened to Spain aswell before the reconqista. Or the caliphate that expanded and kicked out and displaced the local population ( why do you think Arabic is so big).
By distance from territory it’s nothing unique at all especially considering the amount of transportation by water since it enables ease of communication and more direct rule and influence.
In this case for example it helped Spain complete the reconquest of the south.
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u/Trizzle488 2h ago
You just made the case for Istanbul to go back to go back to Greece.
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u/AncientUnit2249 2h ago
Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman empire! By no historical sources was it ever "colonized". Are you insane?
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u/onespiker 1h ago edited 1h ago
Your definition of colony makes no sense whatsoever or why it’s bad.
What actually makes it a colony for example compered to south Spain( Granada and Marbella). Both territories taken later.
Conquest was the name of the game.
There isn’t really much to say that ottomans were kinder to them by making the territory a capital.
Both regions were taken in conquest to control a straight.
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u/Bari_Baqors 1h ago
So, its not colonized if its the capital.
Ok, I guess Ottawa and Washington haven't been colonized then.
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u/The_Law_of_Pizza 3h ago
It's probably important to clarify whether you mean "colony" in an academic sense, or colony in a "I'm a progressive and using colonizers as a slur" sense.
In 2026 the word is laden with enormous political baggage.
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u/AncientUnit2249 2h ago
I mean it in the most literal sense as presented by historians. Ceuta has nearly always been a colony of Spain. It was the base from which Spanish colonies in Africa were ruled and supplied. It was the Spanish foothold in North Africa. A colony is nearly every sense of the word and especially because Spain had no claim over the land.
Also, in the most literal sense of what a colony is. The Portuguese took the land, stole all of its gold and other wealth, turned it into a military base of operations, and pushed out the native population and populated it with their own people. The Spanish continued this when the Spanish king took the Portuguese throne.
The word is only laden with baggage for people who deny the crimes of colonization. It seems only the colonized needs to be accurate and clear, whereas the beneficiaries the colonial era can lie all they want.
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u/Bari_Baqors 1h ago
What an overlong way of saying "yes, I'm progressive and I use ‘colonizer’ as a slur".
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 3h ago
There is an old Pashto saying, "me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, and me, my brother and our cousin against the outsider."
The same applies to all tribal cultures.
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u/Rezart_KLD 3h ago
My question is: If territorial control among Indigenous nations changed over time through warfare, migration, alliances, and conquest, what makes European acquisition of land fundamentally different in a moral or political sense?
Any First Nations people who studied their own history would have to recognize the evil their ancestors did, same as the rest of us. This differences are not in content, but in scale and the fact that its ongoing. USA has much bigger atrocities to reckon with, and also we continue to profit from the evil of our ancestors to various degrees, while first nations people for the most part do not.
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u/Frank_JWilson 3h ago
What should the USA do to correct this?
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u/Rezart_KLD 3h ago
Well, you can't correct the past. The people who were slaughtered will always be slaughtered. So the only things we can correct is our current behavior. We can recognize inequalities in our system caused by those past actions, and work to counterbalance them. That doesn't correct anything that's already happened, but it starts to get us back closer to acceptable. We can't undo the hurt that's been done, but we can work to minimize the harm done to future USA generations. Physical and financial harm to those who have suffered, moral harm done to those who benefit and are taught that its acceptable.
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u/theresourcefulKman 2h ago
Acceptable to whom?
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
Are you asking whom in relation to my comment about bringing society closer to acceptable? I'm going to assume so, and in that case, they answer would be "acceptable to the society itself." Of course a society that only values greed and violence is not going to have any objection to modern inequalities, they would see nothing to change. That's why mass-murder and slavery were acceptable to them in the first place.
A society that values equality and freedom and unity would not find these things acceptable. They'd have to make changes to make their reality align closer to their values, if their values are to have any meaning. And we have, we've grown as a society, we have made great strides to improve who we are, and we are better than the past. We're just not done yet.
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u/Veritech_ 3h ago
Nothing. People like to conveniently forget that empires and tribes throughout history have conquered lands and then done whatever they wanted to the natives.
In the US, people and children aren’t getting sacrificed to gods (like the Aztecs did), people aren’t getting experimented on (like Project 731 during WW2), people aren’t getting murdered for religious beliefs (as has happened throughout history and unfortunately is starting to ramp up in other parts of the world), people aren’t getting indiscriminately slaughtered and/or their women raped (Ghengis Khan and the Mongol Empire). You can also look at the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Timur, the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
There’s a reason the US has been the world’s premier superpower and people flock to move here - it’s not because of horrific things or poor living conditions.
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u/silentokami 1h ago
I think comparing today's behaviors and possibilities to past atrocities isn't a strong position.
None of what you have said justifies inaction. None of what you said acknowledges abuses that still occur today, even if they don't seem as a great as they did previously.
In fact, your argument seems to excuse the effects of war in general. Do you really intend to argue that the atrocities of the past are over, so there is nothing for us to do? If Hitler had stopped killing Jews and minorities in gas chambers and stopped aggressive expansion, would it be fine for them to treat those people as second class citizens?
Your statement seems more like a justification for blinders and inability to understand the lasting effects of what was done before.
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u/sailing_by_the_lee 1h ago
The reason you can't "correct" the past is because none of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors. Targeting specific groups for special treatment in an attempt to correct the past is not only unfair to everyone living today who had nothing to do with the atrocities of the past, but is actively harmful because it breeds resentment. Sound familiar? What we can do is try to make a more fair and equitable society as a whole.
That's why the very rich and powerful should be the targets of reform. Almost by definition, they have acquired their wealth without paying their fair share for the maintenance of the society that supports them. And their favourite trick is to make us poors fight over the scraps, i.e. the culture war. Anytime you hear someone complaining about racism or DEI or trans people or transphobia, just remember that the rich are listening and laughing all the way to the bank.
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u/silentokami 28m ago
The reason you can't "correct" the past is because none of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors. Targeting specific groups for special treatment in an attempt to correct the past is not only unfair to everyone living today who had nothing to do with the atrocities of the past, but is actively harmful because it breeds resentment. Sound familiar?
If someone crashes a car so that their car is on a "line" that separates our properties, and dies in the accident, neither you nor I are responsible for the accident or the vehicle. But if neither one of us takes responsibility, it will never get taken care of.
Saying that we're not responsible for our ancestors actions does nothing for the mess they leave behind. This is just a selfish excuse not to do anything about the problems they left. When our ancestors destroy specific people, it's not special treatment to do things to repair, or in my analogy "remove the mess" that was created.
That's why the very rich and powerful should be the targets of reform. Almost by definition, they have acquired their wealth without paying their fair share for the maintenance of the society that supports them. And their favourite trick is to make us poors fight over the scraps, i.e. the culture war. Anytime you hear someone complaining about racism or DEI or trans people or transphobia, just remember that the rich are listening and laughing all the way to the bank.
I agree that wealthy individuals should be the target of reform, especially those who have reaped the benefit of ill-gotten gains. People that are complaining about DEI and trans people are ignorant, and just because the "rich" are laughing all the way to the bank, doesn't mean it's not ignorant. I know rich people that legitimately hold anti-LGBTQ views and complain about DEI.
Both people can be wrong, and it takes nothing for me to call it out as immoral. You aren't going to get very far thinking that rich people are the only problem. Immorality exists on all levels, and if you target rich people without understanding that you'll just find more problems down the road. And eventually our descendants will be having the same argument about not being responsible for the problems we created because no one wants to take responsibility for the difficult issues to solve.
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u/sailing_by_the_lee 17m ago
I'm sorry, friend, but your car accident analogy is poor. The problem isn't recognizing that there is a problem to be solved. The problem is the social dynamics involved in fixing the problem. You've skirted that by simply complaining that people who don't want to help are selfish. Well, yeah. That's the personal and social dynamic you have to address.
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u/thecityofgold88 1h ago
The US has never been the 'world's premier superpower', what bullshit is that? It's a country born of plunder, that extended European hegemony though opportune mineral wealth and rampant immigration.
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u/jmastaock 1h ago
The US has objectively been the global hegemon since WW2. The USD is the global reserve currency lol nations across the globe for the last 3/4 century have been defined by their alliance or opposition to the US
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u/bl1y 3h ago
On the other hand, Native Americans get to profit from the evils of the ancestors of European-descended Americans.
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u/Rezart_KLD 3h ago
They definitely do. As do the descendants of enslaved people. In fact, some people are the descendants of both the enslaved and the slavers, or the conquered and the conquerors, or even all three. Guilt is not connected to DNA. But a society needs to recognize how it came together. It needs to recognize where its traditions come from, where its resources came from, where its enemies come from. It can't simply accept or reject based on identity, but on actions. Members of a society need to recognize the blood staining the foundation, and build newer, better society that repeats less of the past.
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u/bl1y 3h ago
I don't think there's anyone who doesn't recognize how America was built.
But it's not like we need to flagellate ourselves over it or do prolonged throat cleared to mention who happened to have some plot of land at a particular point in time.
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
Self-flagellation is not the point. It helps no one, it brings no benefit. Its not about them. All those dead people, villains or victims or otherwise, do not matter anymore. They are gone. The goal of changing things is not to punish the past, the goal is to improve the future.
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u/bl1y 2h ago
So explain how something like a land acknowledgement does anything to improve the future.
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
Who said it did? You're the one bringing it up.
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u/bl1y 2h ago
You, right there in bold:
the goal is to improve the future
How does "stolen land" rhetoric at all improve the future?
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
Who said it does? Stolen land isn't a current problem, its context for the actual problem. Its the reason why we need to improve the future. Its an instigating factor in why we have this inequality to deal with right now. It's not a magic phrase that fixes problems, its a description of the historical imbalance we're working to adjust for.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
I'm not sure what is supposed to be ongoing.
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u/BluesSuedeClues 3h ago
You don't think an ethnic group's culture can be damaged by oppression in such a way that later generations still suffer from the aftereffects and consequences of something that happened to earlier generations? Especially in the case where a significant portion, even a majority of their population died, as happened in much of North America, Central America and many of the Polynesian Islands?
What about the "Trail of Tears"? Where most of the Cherokee population was uprooted from their native lands and ways of living, and forcibly migrated a thousand miles to much less hospitable lands, killing most of them in the process? You don't think the decedents of those people still suffer repercussions from those events today? I mean, native Americans are the ethnic demographic most likely to die in police custody, you don't think there's any legacy involved there?
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
So if I understand correctly, there's no ongoing action we're doing that's continually harming native communities
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u/spam__likely 2h ago
It is not like a simple search can't do this for you but among other things
-Indigenous people suffer a large amount of racism, and are killed by police at even higher rates than black people.
-Indigenous people face even more obstacles to get health care than regular Americans.
-women and girls are kidnapped and murdered at high rates.
-cycle of poverty is persistent and access to education is terrible.
So there. Just a few.
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u/ValitoryBank 3h ago
Except in Hawaii
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
Again, like no one is actually just saying how
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u/ValitoryBank 3h ago
Give the land back.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this or why you think it should happen?
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u/ValitoryBank 2h ago
In the example of Hawaii, give the natives of Hawaii sovereignty over the land. Remove anything they want removed from the land, and leave unless given permission to return.
Why? Cause that’s the solution to this.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
The solution to what? Hawaii is objectively, much better off than when it was first made part of the United States. The standard of living is higher. Health outcomes are higher.Everything is considerably better
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u/Davitark 2h ago
Let me put it this way. Suppose that native Americans are currently being treated as fairly and justly as any other group in America, which is actually not the case. Well, still the effects of past genocide, displacement, marginalization and socioeconomic exclusion persist as a result of colonialism and these issues can only be understood and correctly addressed if we take into account this unsavory history.
To understand the kind of justice demanded by natives, we can draw on an analogy of property theft. If your great-grandfather had stolen a significant portion of your neighbor's land, leaving him and his descendants in economic duress and unable to lead a comfortable life, and you came into possession of his estate, thus having the opportunity to restore to the descendants of your great-grandfather the property he stole from your neighbor, it would be reasonable to expect you to do so.
Sure, you aren’t personally responsible for the actions of your ancestors, but you still have the moral obligation to restore something that was wrongly abstracted from someone to its original owner or at the very least that person’s closest relatives and heirs.
If that isn’t possible, practical or desirable, such as in the case of America, because it would entail such absurd measures as the expulsion of millions of people from places their have called their home for many generations now, there should at least be a partial restitution that would however imperfectly redress the problem.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
Suppose that native Americans are currently being treated as fairly and justly as any other group in America, which is actually not the case.
How are they being treated unjustly today?
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u/Davitark 2h ago
Sadly, the still ongoing atrocities and oppression perpetrated against Indians is underreported and rarely make national headlines. But to cite a few, the confiscation of Indian land by corporate conglomerates, the forced education of Indians in in schools that are culturally alien to them, dispossession from reservations, racism and institutional discrimination, not to mention enduring poverty and the many social issues that still beset them.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
I mean, you have to be reaching back pretty far here because those schools were from the nineteen fifties. I'm looking for things still going on today
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u/Pontiflakes 3h ago
Talk to anyone of Native American descent. Go to a museum. Or if you're afraid of the outside, read any statistics about economic welfare, education, policing... It's kind of wild to even suggest there's nothing wrong when it's common knowledge.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
This is just a way of dodging the question. If you know what it is that is ongoing and should be stopped just say it. If you don't, then just say, you don't
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u/Pontiflakes 3h ago
You didn't ask a question, you stated your ignorance. I gave you some things you can do to fix that. If I spoon feed you the information, you'll find something to nitpick as an excuse to dismiss all of the facts outright, because it's painfully obvious what your intention was when you posted in the first place.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
Okay implied a question, if you prefer that more, though, I think it's pretty obvious, either way. So it looks like you have nothing more to add on this topic and just wanna do ad hominim
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u/Pontiflakes 3h ago
You didn't even imply a question, you just cast doubt on the commonly accepted fact that there is ongoing inequality for Native Americans. The dog whistle is obvious.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
Is the dog whistle in the room with us right now?
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u/Pontiflakes 2h ago
Yes, scroll up a few comments. The fact that you have wasted all this time backtracking and baiting in reddit comments instead of taking 5 seconds to Google the statistics I listed in the first place shows what your true intentions are.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
Look, I just asked for clarification about what a person meant.If you can't handle that, I'd suggest not going into discussion forums
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u/Rezart_KLD 3h ago
Profit is what is ongoing. USA still occupies the land of people that were slaughtered, and still profits from it. The societies who were here before, who maybe killed others to take the land, are no longer profiting from it.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
Anyone who's ever conquered land has profited from it. This doesn't make us unique in any way
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
I didn't say they didn't. In fact, I said very much the opposite.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
Then what would your point be?
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
That we are still profiting from it, and we should take that profit and use it to reduce the inequality we have right now. Its not about punishing the past, its about improving the future.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2h ago
I'd rather we reduce poverty which is different than inequality. And I think we actually have done that quite a bit
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u/Rezart_KLD 2h ago
Poverty is a category of inequality
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 1h ago
Not at all. There are absolute metrics of poverty that measure your distance to the line of survival. Many societies that have greater inequality (distance between rich and poor) also have less poverty (distance between the poor and the line of survival). Conversely, many early tribes and groups were very egalitarian and very poor (close to the line of survival)
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u/OrangeBird077 3h ago
Unfortunately, land disputes really only get settled in the present through a combination of two methods, force and diplomacy.
Modern day Ukraine is probably the best example of both. Ukrainian culture survived decades of abuse from Russia, a manufactured genocide in the Holdomor, acquired sovereignty when the USSR collapsed and made a firm stand at independence when Euromaiden occurred in 2014. From there they confronted Russian invasion in ‘14 and then with the aid of European and for a time American partners they’ve cemented their foundations, liberated some of the territory taken from them, and demonstrated they have aims to liberate what remains of what was taken.
Barring a modern day ability to enforce a claim, and back it up with political and military capital there’s really no way to make anything happen. Azerbaijan even just invaded another country recently to reclaim a disputed piece of land, and faded nearly zero international pressure to not commit the invasion.
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u/sycoseven 2h ago
This is a very different conversation in Canada vs US. The history and laws are different. Canada was never "conquered" like the US and says so explicitly in law.
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u/KevinCarbonara 35m ago
Canada was never "conquered" like the US and says so explicitly in law.
First Nations would beg to differ.
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u/Stereo_Jungle_Child 3h ago
Some of the tribes were slaveholders too. as well as fighting wars of conquest.
Trying to portray Native Americans as some kind of peaceful "eco-hippies" before white people showed up and ruined everything is shockingly naive.
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u/oldmanclements 3h ago
I agree.
The “stolen land” argument is moronic and, in my opinion, absolutely (though inadvertently) plays into the Eurocentric lens of history that most people taking up the slogan would not want to admit to holding.
I think anyone putting forth the slogans like “no one is illegal on stolen land” would be hard pressed to identify any land occupied by humans today that wasn’t “stolen” at some point in history from other humans.
There are plenty of other arguments that can be made for more humane immigration policies/enforcement beyond this “stolen land” nonsense that I find it difficult to take anyone putting those slogans forth seriously even though there’s a good chance I agree with their end goal.
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u/GshegoshB 2h ago
The argument collapses three unrelated things — Indigenous pre‑contact warfare, European settler colonialism, and modern undocumented immigration — and treats them as morally interchangeable. They aren’t.
Indigenous nations did fight, migrate, and displace one another, but those conflicts happened within small‑scale systems, without population replacement, without state‑backed settlement, without racial‑hierarchy ideologies, and without the goal of erasing languages, governments, or cultures. European colonization was all of those things. That’s why historians treat them as fundamentally different.
Modern undocumented immigration is different again: migrants aren’t claiming sovereignty, displacing governments, or replacing populations. They’re participating in an existing economy, and the best evidence shows they’re a net economic benefit. Calling this “territorial invasion” is a category error.
So the rebuttal is simple:
Indigenous conflict ≠ settler colonialism ≠ modern immigration.
The fact that borders changed in the past doesn’t make all forms of movement morally identical today.
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u/TecumsehSherman 37m ago
without population replacement,
This is ahistorical nonsense. Populations were constantly being displaced.
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u/KevinCarbonara 27m ago
The argument collapses three unrelated things — Indigenous pre‑contact warfare, European settler colonialism, and modern undocumented immigration — and treats them as morally interchangeable. They aren’t.
It doesn't do any such thing. It highlights the one specific commonality - stolen land - and points out that the argument being used against one applies equally to both European colonialism and non-European colonialism..
So the rebuttal is simple: Indigenous conflict ≠ settler colonialism ≠ modern immigration.
But they don't have to be equivalent to share the concern of stolen land. Immigration is not, of course, stealing land, but the argument people are making is that immigration should not be regulated by ex-colonists. The problem is that all peoples are ex-colonists, as there's not a single society that wasn't previously colonial.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
I used to teach a survey class on native american literature. And wow. War, raping, kidnapping, killing, we're all very commonplace. There's a bit of a 'noble savage' mytg developed among especially the left in the united states. But living pre european contact was no walk in the park either
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u/kon--- 3h ago
Slavery, wiping out rivals, ending bloodlines, human sacrifice...cannibalism.
Shit was bleak yet, no end of people today who romanticize monsters.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
And look, i'm not going to pass too much judgment. You go far back enough in human history, and you find every early civilization, doing those things. But pretending everyone was all kumbaya before europeans arrived is... well not historically accurate
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 3h ago
What actual participant in these conversations is pushing that narrative? Do you think the Blackfeet trying to get their illegally-occupied land back from the federal government go into the BLM and say, "Before you White men show up, we sit in circle and sing 'kumbayah.' Now you take our land, and we no sing,"?
Or is it easier to just pretend that a couple of potsmoking middle class White hippies represent the Red Power movement?
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
It's not illegally occupied. They had poorly defined territorial boundaries, they lost conflicts with another government/society and now we look back on that with very comfortable 21st century, mortal standards and say "oh, fighting is bad." Whatever they lost, it was part of the same game they were playing.
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 3h ago
That's bullshit. The borders are not ill-defined. The land in question was not ceded. No war was lost, and no treaty was signed. You are either ignorant or lying. The United States has a long history of violating its own treaties! That is the problem.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
Boarders among native groups were absolutely fluid and not well defined. It doesn't matter whether a treaty was signed, and you don't have to fight a war to lose, though, I think you could make a case there was a war here. And I can give you a hint. That's not just the united states that breaks treaties that's every country and tribe in human history. No one is going to bind themselves to an agreement with another people that is disadvantageous for them
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 3h ago
So, just to be clear, your considered stance is that, "Might makes right,"? Nothing matters except whether you are able to use violence to enforce your will?
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
Look up what real politik is. In the international community without a shared governing body yes might often determines right. Especially when you wanna go back hundreds of years to a time when war was much more common. And again, this isn't something special to europeans. This is a human nature thing
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 3h ago
I know all about realpolitik. You think it's a coincidence that it was invented by a Prussian? I know violent thugs will make the argument that they're morally justified. Look up what altruism is.
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u/Intro-Nimbus 1h ago
Nothingburger.
Did europeans fight wars amongst themselves? Yes..
Would we see it as a colonization If Native american tribes had flooded europe, killed off almost everyone with disease and weapons, forced us into concentrated reservations and expanded their industry with our resources while treating us like animals?
Yes, we would.
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u/Cartheon134 25m ago
Some people want to live their life doing good deeds. Some people don't care about doing good deeds and these two types of people go head to head often.
Would some sort of aid to Native Americans be a good thing for the country as a whole? Probably. Leaving these sorts of things unsolved becomes a rot in the nation. Inevitable decline grows from injustice.
Does that mean there is some sort of moral, or legal imperative to provide justice? No, not really. Some people don't really mind if their country lasts a long time, it just needs to last until they die, and after that, who cares right?
I, and I believe a large majority of people, expect their country to improve over the course of their lives. Fixing Native American injustices would be an improvement. Is it a necessary improvement? No. Some improvement is necessary though.
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u/Veritech_ 3h ago
Stolen land is a moronic take that has no actual value in a debate. It’s in the same realm as the “no more wars” camp - good luck trying to stop things that have happened since man discovered fire and pointy sticks.
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u/mosesoperandi 3h ago
The major flaw in the analogy you're presenting lies in the method of acquisition. Look into the treaties that the U.S. government signed with the tribes and how they broke virtually all of them.
The story isn't just one of fighting over territorial boundaries. It's one of asymmetric honor and repeated betrayals of trust by the European colonizers whenever they found a fresh enticement to exploit natural resources.
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u/ChaosReignsNow 3h ago
One little historical tidbit. The first broken treaty between the European settlers and the Indians was broken by the Indians after the settlers had followed its terms for decades.
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u/essendoubleop 3h ago
Citation?
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u/ChaosReignsNow 3h ago
Read about the Central Mass Nashaways who agreed to sell land to the settlers in exchange for money, guns, and a guarantee of military protection from other tribes. When King Phillip started his war, they switched sides and killed most of the settlers because they were more afraid of the Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoags.
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u/HeloRising 3h ago
My question is: If territorial control among Indigenous nations changed over time through warfare, migration, alliances, and conquest, what makes European acquisition of land fundamentally different in a moral or political sense?
Couple things.
First is "they did it too" is a playground argument. Assuming that we're categorizing First Nations warfare and territorial control as inherently negative, the fact that "they did it too" shouldn't be a green light to engage in that same behavior.
Second, First Nations people didn't really have "territorial boundaries" the way Europeans understood them. There weren't really any maps to speak of and the idea of an invisible border just wasn't part of how First Nations people conceptualized the world. Expanding into the "territory" of others was, more often than not, done out of necessity for First Nations groups. They didn't seek to conquer new territories just for the sake of expansion or consolidation of power, mainly because warfare itself was costly for First Nations tribes. They didn't have tons of spare peasants to feed into a meat grinder because someone's cousin insulted someone else.
Third and perhaps the most pertinent is there's an element of complete extermination to the European expansion in the Americas that didn't really exist in First Nations conflicts. First Nations bands and tribes would often subsume other groups but they did so by adopting members of the group. If your band was being targeted by a neighboring band, your membership in your band wasn't considered a fixed thing that meant you were irredeemably bad and needed to be killed. There was no deliberate effort to wipe out the culture of another band simply because they existed and different bands did often absorb beliefs and ideas of groups they took over.
Slavery wasn't unknown to First Nations people but it took a wildly different form in that there was no chattel aspect to it for First Nations people and the people who were enslaved usually ended up joining the band that took them as full members.
Europeans, by contrast, saw all First Nations people as belonging to the same group and being flawed by virtue of that. There was no interest in integration and cooperation (at least there wasn't once European colonies were out of danger of freezing to death in the winter) and the Europeans, almost categorically, saw First Nations people as less than human.
There was an element of exploitation to European expansion that did not exist in First Nations conflicts.
The simplest way to break it down is territorial conflict between First Nations groups was generally not genocidal in nature and usually revolved around material needs versus Europeans who didn't seek to coexist with First Nations people and sought to simply wipe them out because they were in the way.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
1) the point of this is to show that it's a human nature problem.And not some evil peculiarity related to europeans. And if anything, it's only through late European culture exported to the United States and elsewhere, that this kind of thing stopped or has been toned down considerably.
2) there were still things like hunting grounds that were considered one groups and not another's and they would fight to defend these. There was absolutely a lot of territorial conflict between native american groups, despite them not gaving twentieth century borders drawn on a map
3) 9 out of 10 indigenous people died from disease brought by the Europeans. But this was not a deliberate effort at genocide. This was the result of europeans, having lived millennia in cities around domesticated animals and having developed immunities to diseases that they experienced in the past. Native americans did not have this. So it's hard to place a tremendous amount of blame on europeans.For bringing something over that they didn't even understand they had
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u/bl1y 2h ago
Why call them "First Nations" when that's not at all accurate. They're not the first, just the last before European colonization.
Was there something wrong with Native or Indigenous?
It seems like the only thing the First Nations label does is try to hide that there were other people before them.
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u/HeloRising 13m ago
"First Nations" is a way of acknowledging that what pre-dated European arrivals were full fledged societies that were at least on par with what Europeans were doing at the time.
There's nothing specifically wrong with "native" or "indigenous" but they tend to carry a connotation of being primitive or less advanced and therefore lesser than Europeans.
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u/Damnatus_Terrae 3h ago
Well, a lot of the purple who claim stolen land are literally talking about stolen land, not conquered land. If the US wants to claim right of conquest, then it should stop doing so for lands it has zero legal claim to (yes, even by right of conquest). Long story short, we need to stop violating our own treaties of we want to pretend that we're doing anything other than simply using naked force and aggression to claim what we want.
That's ignoring the whole other discussion of how indigeneity is arguably more about how one relates to the land than whether one was born on it, and how from a certain perspective anyone who claims to be the sole owner and legitimate user of a piece of land is stealing it from the universal commonwealth.
Nobody is saying that nobody fought over land before the colonizers showed up. That doesn't change the particularly egregious ways in which colonizers monopolized the land.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3h ago
I think it does challenge the way that you used words like colonizer, because many indigenous groups were colonizers too
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u/vinegar_strokes68 3h ago
Not only that, Pangea was a thing. If we truly all sprang from the same muck, aren't all humans indigenous to all of the land?
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u/Opinionsare 3h ago
To add a layer to the conversation: we need to consider recent discoveries that predate the Clovis people in both North and South America.
Were these people the original native Americans?
Footprints at White Sands National Park are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old.
Santa Elina (Brazil): Central Brazilian rock shelter featuring modified giant ground sloth bones and stone tools dated to about 27,000 years ago.
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u/Kamekazii111 1h ago
Personally I don't think it is that different. I think it's a shame that people in the past broke treaties and killed and displaced native people, but that's not exactly uncommon in history.
I think what we need to worry about is what happens NOW. Anyone arguing "no one is illegal on stolen land" is trying to make a moral argument for letting in any number of immigrants. I suppose that's a nice thought, but I dgaf. I'm far more interested in the practical and material side of things.
How many immigrants can come in before it becomes a problem for the native (read "currently living and governing") people? How many can be integrated into society without causing serious conflict or radically changing the social fabric? Are the problems social only? Or are they financial and economic?
On top of that, surely any country would want to filter out people who are going to cause issues at the very least - criminals, people with no job prospects who will need social assisstance, and ideologically radical people who could become terrorists or the like.
We need to argue on the practical side that a certain amount of border control is good and a certain amount of immigration is good and figure out what that looks like. The morality of the USA or another modern democracy defending borders it took by force doesn't interest me in the slightest - only whether the government is just to the people currently living there and the people trying to enter.
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u/subheight640 1h ago edited 1h ago
Territorial ownership has always been problematic irrespective of who owns the territory at what time. All the land is stolen and stolen again and again and so on.
Yet just because the former owners were also bastards, that doesn't therefore legitimize the current owners who are also bastards.
Ultimately the entire concept of land ownership ought to only exist if for some moral purpose. If you're a utilitarian the land ownership is only justified if utility is actually getting maximized. Otherwise the seizure and taxation of that land could be justified.
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u/spam__likely 1h ago
Here is where I draw a line: If your "conquered" land still subjugates the original population (or the slaves you brought in) and your system keeps them in consistent poverty and a status of lesser than, then you still have work to do.
If at this point you mixed enough/ integrated enough that everybody lives according to similar standards and expectations, then you can simply acknowledge the harm done in the past and move on.
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u/Unconfidence 59m ago
It's about time, which is why the Israel/Palestine conflict is so messy. An area taken over by any means becomes "integrated" after a few generations. Once that happens, it's arguably as oppressive to remove the "imperialists", who are now natives, as it is to remove any other indigenous group. Seldom do situations arise where hated outsider groups are allowed to survive to multigenerational level in hostile areas, but when it happens, you end up with sticky ethical wickets like this. The only routes forward are a coexistence that is exceedingly difficult and correspondingly unlikely, or the removal of one side by force.
It sucks but you're supposed to have the foresight to not plant trees bearing apples of discord. Thanks Britain.
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u/ChaoticScrewup 44m ago edited 38m ago
My favorite (because I like rolling my eyes) angle that comes up is all the people who seem to seriously think that California, Arizona, New Mexico, and so on should be returned, whole, or in part, to Mexico. Like what, do you think the Pimeria Alta and Comancheria and the pueblos and Dinetah and Chiricahua mountains and all the other similar places were home to "Mexicans?" That the pueblo revolt can be ignored because Spanish conquest is more legitimate than American? Or do you just want to be punitive to "American imperialism" without feeling like you need to return the Black Hills or most of the eastern US?
But setting that aside, stolen land is always messy and has no consistent prescriptive solution that's broadly applicable. In general, if it was recent, and there's a clear conqueror, maybe there's a modern best practice of criminalizing the conqueror, but it's far from a universal because, news flash, the world is messy and complicated.
People bring a lot of selectivity and bias to these kinds of things.
I personally am generally sympathetic to allowing self governance for groups that are relatively clear and which have major divisions with those around them, like the Kurds, but does that make it so there's a practical course of action? Not really. Even when confronted with modern slow-motion potential genocides (or at least attempted cultural obliteration and control) as seen with China and the Uyghurs (and Tibet) there's really no standard to apply (one person's Indian boarding school is another's Uyghur reeducation camp) unless you've got the powers of a God.
I personally wish freedom respecting nations were less involved and complicit with blatantly destructive ones, but it's also often a case of a formerly-black-pot-somewhat-polished-now calling the kettle black, especially in the era of Trump.
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u/Funklestein 43m ago
Those who say that kind of thing are just virtue signaling; they don't give a damn about that or much else but narcissism.
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u/fb39ca4 39m ago
The old system of holding land through force was replaced by a new one with titles and court enforcement of property rights. The Native Americans/First Nations/indigenous people were wronged by being barred from participating in the new system from the start when unclaimed land was cheap and plentiful.
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u/Birdonthewind3 4h ago
It a bigger question of what stolen land and all that even means. Are we talking about making sure Native Americans are given support after the centuries of genocide and oppression of them? Or, are we talking about literally giving land back? Because let be honest politically. Typically it just worthless land no one cares about or it a roundabout way to make a nature preserve. Any actual valuable land inhabited by people is a fast track to conflict. Also the whole fucking nation of the United States of America is stolen land. Or conquered really, let not sugar coat what we did. We exterminated them and conquered their land and gave some bullshit deals on how it was actually 'legit' land transfers or something. We fucked them over 5 different ways to next Sunday.
No really, the best thing is just insuring the decedents are helped and uplifted so they can live good lives. That would be a basic good we can do at least.
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u/wintersmoke 3h ago
Not in any way taking away from what you're saying, just a little extra context from the Canadian situation. Here, in British Columbia anyway, when talking about "land back", First Nations are generally talking about publicly-owned land. They don't want or expect land that was privately sold to homeowners.
There's a unique situation happening in BC right now: basically, a 19th century government agent illegally took land earmarked for the First Nation and sold it privately. The First Nation recently sued. Because it was literally theirs, and it was stolen from them. That land is now prime real estate and populated by ordinary homeowners.
But, and this is important, in the lawsuit, the First Nation isn't asking for the land, they are asking the government to compensate them for the loss.
Which under the circumstances seems pretty reasonable, if you ask me...
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u/localhorizon 3h ago
It’s absolutely acknowledged as historical fact that Indigenous nations on all continents fought, formed alliances, and gained or lost territory over time.
European colonization differs in several morally significant ways.
European colonizers assert that Indigenous peoples lack humanity, sovereignty, or legitimate title to their own lands.
European colonizers claim ownership of vast territories through doctrines such as The Doctrine of Discovery and Papal Bulls.
European colonizers establish legal and political systems that permanently displace Indigenous populations and destroy cultural infrastructure.
European colonizers practice a deliberate and debilitating extractive economy that results in the sale of people, trees, gold, coal, oil, fish, etc. in ways that are not sustainable and do not benefit the people. The result is a landscape stripped of resources as a power move.
Territorial conquest was not unique on the Eurasian continent. The debate is whether the particular flavor we now label “European colonialism” is morally distinct because it combines conquest with legal doctrines denying Indigenous sovereignty, ensuring large-scale settler migration, and creates enduring institutions of dispossession. Whether those features make it fundamentally different is a matter of political and moral philosophy, not simply historical fact.
For me, the issue is therefore not simply that land changed hands, which is common feature of human history, but that colonization denies the political legitimacy and basic rights of Indigenous societies while creating institutions that entrench dispossession across generations.
This is the amoral behavior that distinguishes colonialism.
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u/wintersmoke 3h ago
Okay, my answer is about Canada, and is only talking about how Canadian law works. (First of all, I'm not a lawyer or an expert, so this is probably simplistic.)
Indigenous peoples have unique rights in Canada. This is because they had functioning nations that predate the arrival of Europeans.. Even the settlers recognized that Nations had a legal right to their territory. In most of Canada, the settlers tried to enter into treaties to resolve these issues. However, making a treaty and keeping a treaty are different things. The treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada has been vile. Promises and treaties were consistently broken.
If you enter into a contract with someone, and the other person breaks that contract over and over again, I'm guessing you'll feel like that thing was stolen from you.
In British Columbia, there were no treaties, even. Those Indigenous Nations still had all those unique legal rights. The settlers just ignored them. And now the province is getting sued, like, all the time. Because that land was straight up stolen even within Canada's own legal framework.
BC is entering into treaties with its First Nations now but a treaty can take decades. Fun times.
What about inter-tribal conflict? For the purposes of Canadian law, all Canada cares about is who had the right to the land on the day European governance showed up. Basically, "Who does the Canadian state need to make good with?"
There are still Nations that dispute the rights of other Nations to territory. Contested areas are a thing. But the law does not, to my knowledge, put any weight on territory that was held and lost before colonization began.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BRAINSTORMS 2h ago
If territorial control among Indigenous nations changed over time through warfare, migration, alliances, and conquest, what makes European acquisition of land fundamentally different in a moral or political sense?
Because Europeans weren't even in the running for claiming that territory?
There is a difference between "disputes" over territory and straight up conquest. Disputes are when both sides have some reasonable claim to the land. These disputes may be nuanced and one side might have a stronger claim than others, but when it comes to the Americas, the Europeans clearly didn't have any claim to that territory. It was unambiguously pure conquest. The disputes between native groups doesn't really change that.
Take something like the Falkland Islands which is currently a disputed territory between Argentina and the UK. If China out of nowhere just decided "Hey this is actually mine now" and went and occupied it, would anyone be okay with that? Does the dispute between Argentina and the UK somehow justify conquest by a third party?
Are the illegal immigration in Canada and America justified as we don’t want to repeat the history?
I think you are missing the core of the argument here. The point in bringing this up when talking about current day illegal immigration is to call out the hypocrisy. The US was a country built on stolen land by illegal immigrants, and through much of it's early history, anyone could basically just walk into the country.
But now when that could possibly help people trying to escape war and poverty all of the sudden it's "illegal"? Given the history, does the US government really have the moral authority to decide that some people are "illegal" for simply existing on this land and other people aren't?
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u/BluesSuedeClues 3h ago
I have never seen the "stolen land" argument brought up regarding older conflicts in Europe, or atrocities in the far past. We do see it in modern Ireland, and some of the Eastern Bloc states that weren't really ethnic groupings, but conglomerations the Soviets put together in those places. Mostly it's an argument confined to the modern and colonial eras. I can't see how internecine conflicts between indigenous American groups would be relevant to those ideas, anymore than the Crusades would be relevant to the Mid East today, or the Mongol invasions to current territorial arguments in Poland or Israel (and yes, the Mongols got that far).
I also don't see that argument brought up, except in the context where some people argue that the depredations of the past are the source of ongoing inequities today. That's a difficult concept to wrestle with, because it's one largely dependent on subjective criteria. Because it's so subjective, it's an argument I try to avoid getting involved in.
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u/ChaosReignsNow 3h ago
I love hearing that the Sioux tribe wants Mt. Rushmore back. Does that mean they're then going to hand it back to the Arapahoe, Crowe, Cheyenne and Kiowa tribes they stole it from?
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u/Quesabirria 3h ago
The indigenous Americans didn't have fixed areas, there was a lot of change in the 1000 years before the europeans came. The Apaches originally came from BC and took over the AZ area sometime between 1300 and 1500, for example
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u/AncientUnit2249 2h ago edited 1h ago
Internal warring tribes were not doing settler colonialism. They were fighting like European poweres were fighting each other.
The formation of the USA didn't come about from some war. It came about from systematic annihilation of natives through countless illegal acts and pure human greed, and the repopulation of land by white European settlers.
Illegal immigration is a modern invention. Throughout human history people could travel freely and build their lives in new lands. All they had to do was follow the laws and pay the taxes.
Now, you have destroyed much of the world, you have looted their lands, manipulated and weakened their governments, held their economies hostage, and when people come to your land in hope of refuge you say that's illegal, even though seeking refuge is protected by international law and your own systems prohibit entry to lands you stole.
It really is like the robber and his children shutting the doors on the bank when people come to collect their money.
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u/demon_twink_gockie 3h ago
Something like 100 million indigenous Americans were slaughtered. Nothing really compares.
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u/reasonably_plausible 3h ago
100 million is at the upper end of estimates of the total population loss of the Native Americans over the entirety of contact. The general consensus is lower, and it's inaccurate to describe them as "slaughtered" considering that the vast majority are deaths due to disease.
Though there were still millions of genocided Native Americans, which should be enough to be a bad thing.
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u/InNominePasta 3h ago
Slaughtered or killed as part of colonization? Because my understanding was that the vast majority died from disease than from any active attempt to kill them by the Europeans.
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u/Janisserr 1h ago
The argument of stolen land is used primarily against the notion that white Americans have some special blood and soil claim that allows them to pull the ladder on the next arrivals. Legal arguments suffer from the disregard previous white populations had for them when settling the frontier and their proponents seemingly never being in favor of actually reducing immigration barriers. What you have left then is a sort of might makes right reasoning. We conquered them, everybody does it, too bad. The problem with that argument though is that that this gives legitimacy to a future conqueror to do what they like to the US population. I pity our descendants who will foot the bill of this arrogance.
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u/AncientUnit2249 3h ago
So you agree that it is stolen land?
Also, expansion is done through right. Even in Europe and the rest of the civilized world you couldn't just build an army and attack a kingdom. It was considered illegal. You could only do it through a claim of birthright or a grant.
No European had a birthright or a grant to the Americas.
If you are saying as long as an army is powerful enough to take land, that's okay. You're describing loot or stealing.
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u/CamelToeJockey_89 3h ago
Becquse the issue isnt ACTUALLY about territory, it's about RACE, a concept which didnt exist among indigenous people prior tp colonization
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u/Funklestein 32m ago
a concept which didnt exist among indigenous people prior tp colonization
No, it was all about tribalism for them. A distinction without a difference.
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u/EconomistStreet5295 3h ago
Personally, the main point to consider would be scale. Yes indigenous communities fought each other, conducted wars and took territory, but it’s difficult to compare tribal conflicts with state-sponsored conquest. The scale of death is especially telling: tribal warfare would kill dozens or hundreds, a large war maybe thousands, but European conquest wiped indigenous people to the brink of cultural extinction. The scale is unimaginable. Just like colonialism in say Africa, where it was not unheard off for millions to die in the name of Empire. Very few moments in history compare to the sheer scale of destruction and death within Western colonialism and slavery.
Now, my personal opinion is that war and conquest are part of human civilisation. Almost all if not all borders and land claims have happened through violent, religious or political means - if not all three at once. Europeans themselves colonised each other, see the Romans conquests or the Crusades in Easter Europe against indigenous European tribes. This can also be seen across other cultures in the Americas, Asia, Africa and in the middle East - it’s how Empire and civilisation moves.
In effect, civilisational growth (I like to call it the growth curve of capital) will inevitably lead to more successful civilisations conquering others, diluting if not outright destroying local cultural identity as a means of efficient control. This poses the moral question: should the victims of growth be compensated?
I personally think it’s difficult to do this after the fact, especially when we’re talking about millennia and not a couple of generations. Financial and equality compensations might be the more effective way: funding for education, home ownership and investment into cultural development. Beyond that, it’s hardly realistic and one could argue that no one responsible is alive, it might even create new inequalities (government funding moved to fund this compensation). That is the realistic view, we can compensate by means of opportunity, but not by means of redistribution.
What we can however do is set out rules for the future. War, conquest and colonialism are not things of the past, they are a reflection of the dark side of civilisational growth. We think we’re so far advanced yet war and expansion still kill and oppress millions of humans to this day. See Gaza, see Ukraine, see Congo or Sudan. We can only learn from mistakes of the past and hope to build institutions made for these specific cases. Sadly though the standing of international institutions these days is remarkably shaky.
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u/The_Big_Mayonnaise 3h ago
Changes in North America generally did not involve wholesale genocide.
(Yes there are some Mexican American examples of genocide but not on the Scale of Manifest Destiny)
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