No, you are not on Indigenous land

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The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

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But respect for Native American tribal organizations doesn’t have to stop at ancient obligations. There are ways to incorporate those tribes into the modern American nation that both respects them and their history and helps them prosper in the present.

Vancouver, Canada shows us an example of how this can be done. Part of Vancouver’s downtown urban area is officially under the governance of the Squamish Nation, rather than the city itself. The Squamish Nation, realizing they could do whatever they wanted with that land, decided to build a giant high-rise housing development:

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Hilariously, Vancouver’s NIMBYs are complaining, claiming that the developments are not in keeping with Indigenous tradition. But Canada’s First Nations seem to have little interest in hewing closely to other people’s view of what their traditions are. Modern people do not want to live like premodern farmers. They are not mystical Tolkien elves. They would like to have shiny new apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods.

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