Nobody Is ‘Indigenous’ Anywhere. Deal With It.

Last month’s Columbus Day — or as some re-label it, Indigenous Peoples’ Day — followed by this week’s Thanksgiving Day — offer some of the defining demonstrations of the fruits of our fatally broken public education and corrupt media institutions.

The desire to reimagine the history of European settlement and create a narrative of the Americas as “stolen land” has reached absurd heights, competing with the “1619 Project” in its attempt to rewrite the nation’s founding.

Manufacturing new histories to replace known history is a deliberate exercise aimed at aligning with the prevailing political radicalism in the humanities taught in American and Western colleges, universities, and even seminaries.

It’s a testament to the doggedness of the Frankfurt School’s multi-generational seeding of “critical theory” and “social critique” (and personnel) into educational methodologies and classes, aimed at bringing about mass sociological change through a cultural revolution to end capitalism and collapse traditional Western value systems.

Marxist Conspiracy Theories

Ironically, a key component of critical theory is to demonstrate how capitalist systems legitimize the domination and subjugation of citizens – ironic because in the last 100-plus years, every Marxist-based experiment from the Soviet Union onward has turned to murderous totalitarianism, of which China, Venezuela, and Cuba are the most current examples.

But, as always with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist dogmas, the real target is to eradicate God and personal faith from the human story. Co-existence is impossible.

The attempt to reframe Columbus Day and Thanksgiving and delegitimize the history of the Western World has been accompanied in the last decades by the violent defacing and destruction of historical icons, such as statues, artwork, books, and buildings, as well as constant pressure to rename events, buildings, schools, military bases, and whole cities. No institution is exempt.

If we can no longer see or have a touchstone to our history, or if we have no physical reminders of the past that have shaped us, then truth itself becomes indistinct—an impression instead of a certainty.

“No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land”

The diminished truth was reflected in last month’s Columbus Day weekend, replete with reports and photos of signs—including some that served as body art! – that claimed that the Americas are “stolen land.” Another favorite proclaimed, “No one is illegal on stolen land.”

Even members of Congress got into the sloganeering. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) wrote, as an example, “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! We are all on stolen land. And while Republicans try to whitewash American history, we acknowledge our country’s role in inflicting trauma on our Indigenous neighbors.” (The Congresswoman ignores or is unaware of the history of the state in which she lives and represents, like a bank robber ignores the law.)

Thanksgiving is another day that draws out the crazies. Already, snipping postings are up, talking about the Thanksgiving myth, stealing land, and genocide. Others have called Thanksgiving a national day of mourning and remembrance, involving the stealing of land and the decimation of native, or indigenous cultures.

The complicated reality is that the very suggestion of original land “ownership” and who is and isn’t an original inhabitant, and how one people displaced another people, leaves little room for “indigenous” people. Over much of the world, it’s often a toss-up who the original inhabitants were.

Let’s Look at the Science

In the past decade, a scientific tsunami of new DNA extraction methods has emerged, providing new evidence of the immense complexity of human migrations. The latest DNA discoveries and the mapping of who migrated and interbred with whom are constantly changing.

Depending on your level of trust in the reporting and your worldview, the tracking of modern human DNA dates back far longer than previously thought. Now, early humans are supposed to have migrated out of Africa into the Levant, Arabia, Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and Central Asia in successive waves. Even the last Ice Age only redirected more migration, not less.

As hunter-gatherer peoples began growing crops, they established permanent settlements and found themselves fighting to the death to keep the land they lived on. The history of the last 10,000-plus years, at least, is a violent story of one people supplanting or conquering another. City-states and empires rose and fell across the entire globe, and the victors became the inhabitants — until they weren’t.

The Right of Conquest

In what is now Europe, the United Kingdom, and across the entire Asian and African continents, various tribes, barbarians, warlords, Emperors, Kings, and empires have come and gone, leaving their DNA. Violence and conquest have been the means of acquiring land “title” since the dawn of history.

Might may not make right, but it more often than not makes “landowners.”

In the Americas, migration waves also began far earlier than previously assumed, predating the Clovis culture, long considered the earliest human population. DNA now suggests that the “Ancient Beringians,” who had East Asian roots in a small area of what is now Russia, among others, crossed the land bridge of Beringia into Alaska, arriving in waves punctuated by the Ice Age and later the Little Ice Age.

These groups of people spread rapidly throughout the Americas. Just recently, a people group’s bones were discovered in what is now Colombia, and their DNA is not linked to any known people group. Other Siberian people groups migrated into Alaska’s North Slope in several waves, and these groups now represent the Iñupiat and Inuit populations across the North American Arctic, extending as far as Greenland.

Yet another people group, identified by the 24,000-year-old bones of a boy, originated from the Siberian city of Mal’ta and shows that up to one-third of their ancestry can be traced back to Europe.

In addition to these migrations down the length of the Americas, Pacific Islanders and Polynesians (who reached Hawaii perhaps as early as 400 AD) landed on the west coast of South America at least 500 years before Columbus arrived on Hispaniola, perhaps much earlier. There is also DNA evidence of Australasian ancestry dating back much earlier still among current populations in the rainforests of South America.

Based on ancient tools and artifacts found in the Southeast of North America, some have suggested that people groups from what is now Spain and France may have migrated to the Americas using the extended ice packs in the Northern Hemisphere. Others point to petroglyphs found in the state of Georgia that are identical to those found in Southern Sweden during the Bronze Age.

And, of course, there are the Vikings, led by Eric the Red, who settled in Greenland (first visited in the 800s by others) in the 900s and also established a settlement on Newfoundland, possibly even exploring the coast of what is now New England. With a thriving population of Norsemen, they traded with nomadic subarctic hunters on the island, and some speculate that they traded with tribes on the mainland.

Nobody’s Really Indigenous

However, unlike modern times, the concept of land ownership and who owned it over the course of human habitation was most often determined by “rulers.” Precisely to whom the land belonged was at the discretion of a king, warlord, chieftain, or assorted aristocrats who parceled out land to farmers and woodsmen on what today would be called a barter-style lease. These arrangements survived only as long as the ruler or landed gentry did.

Individuals and family groups also migrated to empty or remote land and created settlements. It, like all property in the ancient world, was kept by defending it.

In the Americas, where most tribes were nomadic or moved from one place to another with each season, land was not owned in any sense; instead, it was used. Other tribes with more permanent locations considered the land communal, and the elders or the tribe’s chief would determine who lived where. Even the great Inca, Mayan, Aztec, and Mississippian civilizations had no concept of the specific ownership rights we understand today. And as those great civilizations collapsed, the citizenry dispersed into history.

The New World adventurers, who first arrived with the Spanish, then the French and English, and later others, stepped into the ongoing, ever-shifting power struggles among tribes that had been ongoing for centuries.

It turned out that peace in the Native American world was no more prevalent than in the rest of the world.

The Indians Were Conquerors Too

The various tribal people groups in the Americas were doing exactly what the rest of humanity was doing. In truth, they were particularly violent and bloodthirsty. Virtually all of them enslaved their enemies if they could. The Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs all practiced mass human sacrifices by the tens of thousands (the Incas particularly practiced child sacrifice), slavery, and cannibalism. In North America, tribal wars were spectacularly vicious and ongoing. Slavery and horrific torture were ubiquitous, and cannibalism was commonplace among all the larger tribes, such as the Mohawks and Iroquois.

Tribal wars were common, and defeat meant the loser lost territory. The Locota people became the prominent buffalo hunters on the Great Plains only after losing their hunting grounds in the Mississippi River Valley to other tribes. The Seminole, who were part of the Creek Confederation—a group of various tribes in the Southeastern US formed for mutual protection against frequent attacks from northern tribes—were driven out of the Confederation and went into Florida and Georgia.

We Bought Much of the Land from the Indians

Despite instances of dishonesty and what we today would call land-squatting, Europeans often tried to buy land from various tribes. Parts of Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, among other states, were purchased from willing tribes. Many individual Europeans believed that, according to the norms of both parties, they had a “legal” right to the vacant land they were working, not dissimilar to how various tribes acted with other tribes.

None of this means that the way the various tribes were dealt with was always virtuous or upright. It clearly wasn’t. It only means that those of us alive today can’t comprehend life in a wild and wide-open continent – or what it took to survive a week, much less a year or a lifetime.

We look to our founding generations as great and admirable people. They were. But they were also just people. They had to make accommodations they didn’t like. Today, too many ascribe to the Founders and the first generations of Americans the moral acumen they claim for themselves, and, finding them wanting, defame them. No, they were settlers, farmers, shop owners, and adventurers who built a new world out of a vast continent with their bare hands and grit.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.