The left says America was built on ‘stolen land’; here’s the reality that narrative ignores
But the most interesting part of the belated Mount Rushmore backlash is the repeated claim that we must repent of the monument and somehow remove it because it was built on “stolen” land. Senator Tammy Duckworth also echoed this theme over the weekend, pronouncing the land “stolen” from “Native Americans,” who acquired it “during a treaty.” As so many woke Leftists tend to do, Duckwork speaks of Native Americans as if they were one homogenous and unified group. Americans stole from “Native Americans,” generally, she says. Which is like saying the British “stole land from Asians” when they occupied India. No, they were taking from Indians, not the Chinese or the Vietnamese, and the distinction is important. Indeed, Leftists would usually be the first to claim that it is racist to erase or minimize such distinctions.
Yet there is a reason why the “we stole land” crowd is hesitant to get specific on the matter of who we stole the land from. The problem is helpfully illustrated by this PBS article, which says the Black Hills were appropriated from the Lakota Sioux, who were “the original occupants of the area.” But the Lakota were the original occupants of the Black Hills in the same way that I was the first person to experience human flight when I took a plane from Baltimore to Charlotte in March. That is to say, I wasn’t. And they weren’t. Not by a long shot.
There has been a human presence in the Black Hills since prehistoric times. From that era until the U.S. “stole” it, many groups of people fought, often quite brutally, for control of the region. Slightly more recently, the Arikara tribe moved in around the time that Columbus first sailed the ocean blue. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and other tribes all arrived in short order to fight for their own share of the coveted mountain range. Finally, the Lakota — the alleged “original occupants” — came in the 18th century, drove all of their competitors away, and established control. It’s worth noting that, for Indian tribes, “driving competitors away” often meant violence and pillaging.
The U.S. did not take the Black Hills from its original occupants. The original occupants had long since been exiled or exterminated by other Native American tribes, who received the same treatment from the next tribe, who received it from the next, and so on. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the U.S. took the Black Hills from the most recent tribe that had taken it from the tribe that had most recently taken it before them. This is not mere pedantry. The point is that white settlers and pioneers, by trying to claim and conquer new land, were not introducing some new horror to the continent. They were playing the same game of conquest that Indian tribes had been playing — that all people, everywhere, had been playing — since the dawn of human civilization.
It is simply absurd to treat the “theft” of land by Europeans and Americans as a unique evil for which we must repent and take down our monuments in shame. Wars of conquest had been waged in this part of the world for thousands of years before any white man graced these shores. Slavery, torture killings, rape, pillage — all of these were common features of Indian conflict. The white man jumped into that fray, he didn’t invent it. This is just how the world worked, long before air conditioning and Taco Bell and Twitter accounts.
