“Stolen Land”

The claim that America was built on “stolen land” is not only a politically-loaded oversimplification, but a deliberately narrow framing that keeps America — and America alone — under perpetual moral scrutiny. It collapses fundamentally different actors, motives, and historical processes into a single accusation, thereby obscuring more than it explains.

At a macro political level, land claims have always been in flux. Long before European contact, tribes across North America routinely warred over territory, resources, hunting grounds, and waterways. Claims were seasonal, contingent, and often overlapping, shaped by migration patterns, environmental conditions, and intertribal treaties that themselves shifted over time. Had Europeans never settled in America, this dynamic would have continued to dominate; it was the prevailing condition of the continent.

From this perspective, “ownership” has never been an abstract moral constant but a function of enforceability under a recognized system of rules. What European settlers brought with them — particularly under Anglo-Saxon and Protestant influences — was not merely force but a radically different and more formalized conception of property: one defined by permanent settlement, continuous use, development, demarcation, and legal codification. The emergence of surveys, fencing, deeds, registries, and eventually barbed wire crystallized ownership into clearly bounded private property in a way that had not previously existed on a continental scale. 

As with the friction between tribes, these settlements and subsequent westward expansion met with their share of conflicts. Yet formal definitions and codified systems of ownership do not automatically translate into moral culpability for those who acquired land under them. Distinguishing between state action and the behavior of ordinary settlers is essential before assigning blame.

Critically, it is a mistake to conflate state action with the behavior or moral posture of ordinary settlers. Much of what is rightly criticized today (although not rightly understood) — broken treaties, forced removals, military campaigns, and legal bad faith — was undertaken by governments, not by the individuals who later occupied land under the legal frameworks those governments claimed to establish. The vast majority of settlers were not agents of conquest but civilians: people fleeing religious persecution, political instability, poverty, famine, or lack of opportunity, responding to incentives and assurances offered by recognized authorities. They did not design territorial policy, negotiate treaties, or command armies; they acquired land non-violently under the prevailing rules they were told were legitimate.

 

To describe such settlement as “theft” in any ordinary sense requires retroactively imposing a modern moral framework while ignoring the contemporaneous legal and social contexts. It also denies settlers the same latitude historically afforded to Indigenous tribes themselves, who likewise migrated, savagely displaced rivals, aggressively controlled travel routes, and asserted claims based on access and necessity rather than permanent, exclusive ownership. In fact, it is also true that, generally speaking, the tribes of the North American continent didn’t even have a concept of “ownership” — at least not in the form of “private property”. Per most tribal customs, property was regarded as what we might call a “collective good”. Thus, it was the “Americanization” of the continent which brought the most foundational aspects of civilization westward — the spreading of ‘American liberty’ and ideals born of the Enlightenment era, among them the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. The latter of these rights, that to property, represents the most tangible and elemental condition for individual liberty: the right to own oneself and his own property. If not for the determined migrations westward, the development of these rights in the farthest reaches of the continent might have been greatly delayed, or thwarted altogether.

Moreover, the notion that North America was broadly “owned” prior to westward expansion is historically untenable. Outside occasional tribes, trappers, trading posts, and military forts, in America’s infancy the continent was — and even remains, to a lesser extent — largely unmitigated wilderness; indeed, even despite the alternating political claims on the various territories (up until the point that the United States government acquired them), the whole of the continent was largely unexplored, unmapped, and fraught with territorial disputes. Where tribal claims existed, they were often oriented toward travel routes, seasonal hunting grounds, or resource access rather than continuous, settled occupation. Even these claims were frequently contested by rival tribes and altered by environmental conditions. In this sense, much of the land lacked provable ownership even by the standards of the time, let alone by modern ones.

Thus, to assert that Americans today are living on “stolen land” is not merely to criticize historical state actions; it is to deny modern Americans the same moral standing historically granted to all migrating peoples. The primary distinctions, beyond race, are reduced to differences in motive for travel and the scale of the journey — hardly a coherent basis for assigning unique or inherited moral guilt.

The purpose of this article is not to deny that injustices occurred, nor is its purpose to absolve governments (and this includes the tribes) of wrongdoing. It instead seeks proper attribution of responsibility, historical symmetry, and conceptual clarity. When those are restored, the rhetoric of “stolen land” reveals itself less as serious historical analysis and more as a contemporary political instrument — one whereby the politically-motivated select their “victims” and conveniently exclude themselves when casting shame on everybody else, particularly those who disagree. And, miraculously, so long as they are supporting the “victim” narrative, it apparently doesn’t even matter if they are, in the most ridiculous of cases, proven to actually be living on “stolen land”. As it turns out, so long as they are parroting the “correct” opinion and using America as the popular punching bag, the narrative (which they control) can be expanded to excuse their hypocrisy. So, in reality, the problem isn’t “stolen land” at all — it’s a hijacked narrative they won’t give up.