The 68th annual Grammy Awards resurfaced a historic debate in American history.
While the evening was full of surprises, Billie Eilish’s statement made during her acceptance speech for the Song of the Year award sparked a historic debate.
While criticizing ICE, she said: “f*** ICE. No one is illegal on stolen land.”
Although Billie’s sentiment was clearly to sympathize with the victims of ICE in Minneapolis, her “stolen land” statement sparked a debate on social media.
The question of whether the United States is built on “stolen land” is a deep and polarizing historical debate that has been reignited in modern political discourse.
The argument essentially rests on the violent expulsion of Native Americans and the constitutionality of the country’s westward expansion.
In the eyes of the indigenous community, the simplest word stolen is used in reference to a known history of systematic eradication, broken agreements and war.
From the earliest days of colonization, and then gaining strength through 19th-century policies such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears, Native nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands.
The forced relocation of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 to 15,000 natives due to disease, exposure, and starvation.
Researchers note that indigenous peoples lost more than 98 percent of their land to treaties signed under duress or some form of deception, and only about 2 percent of reservations remain today.
Another frequently cited perspective of conquest holds that the world of the time was characterized by the transfer of land by all means of war and by changing power relations.
Some historians have echoed this view, arguing that European powers, and then the United States, entered a continent already plagued by intertribal warfare and territorial issues, and participated in the conquest rather than the plunder of a united, peaceful society.
A key area of fault is the legality of treaties. Because the United States government existed under a legal structure of making treaties, most treaties were obtained either through coercion or fraud and then violated by the federal government; thus, they did not carry significant weight among most indigenous tribes and historians.
Finally, the American conception of the United States as a nation based on stolen lands is largely conditioned by the emphasis placed on the ethical and coercive aspects of American expansion or on the martial and legal law of conquest in force today.
Although the mass relocation and cultural eradication of Native American cultures is an undisputed historical reality, the explanation of this past is one of the nation’s most characteristic arguments.
