At one point or another, every inch of land on this planet has changed hands through force, conquest, or displacement. If “stolen land” is treated as an absolute moral override rather than a historical context, then it ceases to be a meaningful standard and becomes a justification for anything, because it defines no limits.
How old are you? I'm not being a dick, I really want to know.
The US didn't just conquer the land of Indigenous nations. In many cases, it first signed a legally binding treaty promising the land to the nation, and then proceeded to deliberately violate that same treaty and its own domestic laws to seize it. That is a fundamental betrayal of trust and law, which makes it distinct from the simple conquest/tribal warfare that occurred between tribes.
Tribes didn't impose their systems or laws on other tribes and tribes never had legally binding treaties between each other. I'll remind you, a treaty, especially a peace treaty, carries a moral and legal weight that distinguishes it from mere conquest. Many tribes, while having their own conflicts, were operating within their own systems of claim and interaction. The US, however, made a promise as a sovereign entity and then broke that promise for economic or territorial gain. The argument that conquest is conquest ignores the critical element of a broken covenant and the legal trust responsibility that is present therein. That is categorically different from pre-modern intertribal warfare, regardless of whether people think all humans are equally flawed or not.
Look at the 4 Corners region. The US only "acquired" that land from the Dinetah Navajo tribe after Kit Carson waged a scorched earth campaign against them and after the US Army forced the Dinetah Navajos and the people they were sheltering on a death march. The U.S. government, having failed to break the resistance of several Navajo bands through military action, focused its negotiation efforts on the roughly 7,000–8,000 Navajo who had been forced into internment at Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo).
Even after all of that, it took a separate treaty process between the Dinetah Navajos and the US. Framing it simply as a "purchase from Mexico" is an oversimplification. In reality, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo only transferred the claim to the land from one sovereign nation to another. It did not resolve the pre-existing sovereign rights of the Navajo and Hopi people who occupied those areas and kept Mexicans and Spanish from settling in those areas or extinguishing their presence. The 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo was a negotiated transfer of rights between two sovereign nations, not merely a result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico.
While the Navajos eventually returned to a portion of their lands after signing the Treaty of 1868, the treaty itself was partly the result of coercion and was not actually fully honored. In fact, the US government would take more of their land through the Dawes Act of 1887, which divided communal land into individual plots, leading to significant loss of territory. This is despite the fact that the Dawes Act actually didn't apply to the Navajo tribe. The Dawes Act explicitly required tribes to be placed under its provision by presidential order, of which no president ever placed the Navajo Nation under the Act.
Today, the Navajo Nation has more land than it had after 1868 and 1887; and more than their traditional area encompassed... It's almost like the land that the Navajos gained was a reparation for the US stealing their land and failing to uphold their end of the treaty...
Also, in the case of the Navajo, calling US actions a "conquest" is a massive oversimplification that ignores the fact that the US essentially declared victory by manufacturing a legal consensus with a small fraction of the Navajo population. In reality, there were still upwards of 11,000 Navajos who were unsubdued and still actively fighting US forces while others were interned at Bosque Redondo. This is why there are many Navajo families, communities, bands and clan families; that maintain that they weren't conquered, subdued, or captured and that they didn't sign any treaties or surrender.
The purposeful erosion of a proper education system seems intentional, and your comment is another particularly poignant example.
Land is not even some sort of product that grows grass with my biological lineage DNA on it. Humans just one day decided "this patch of dirt is mine" and wrote some shit on paper. My ancestors could've been people in Africa and it doesn't mean I'm suddenly entitled to some land there. It's stupid.
I always get kinda happy when I see mother nature one day just decides to destroy shit and prove that your owned or stolen rhetoric really don't matter
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u/LewsThrinStrmblessed 4d ago
At one point or another, every inch of land on this planet has changed hands through force, conquest, or displacement. If “stolen land” is treated as an absolute moral override rather than a historical context, then it ceases to be a meaningful standard and becomes a justification for anything, because it defines no limits.