No, You Are Not On Indigenous Land
No, You Are Not On Indigenous Land . (MENAFN - Asia Times) 

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 US came; ...
América - MenaFN
(MENAFN- Asia Times) 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 US came; the US 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 US is stolen land.

This was also true before the US arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the US 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 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.

But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons?

Of course, you can assign land ownership this way - it's called an“ethnostate.” But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen - a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.

The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I'm not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism - there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through

institutions

rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate.

And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth. Here's one from the ACLU of Nebraska:

And here's

an Instagram post

from Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib:

This isn't just something you see on social media around Thanksgiving.“Land acknowledgments” have become ubiquitous in progressive spaces and institutions - just the other day I saw one at my friend's community dance recital.
Jordania
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2024-11-30
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(MENAFN - Asia Times) 

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 US came; ...
No, You Are Not On Indigenous Land