A selection of questions I’ve received by followers and have tried to answer
Yes. I wanted to take this moment to talk about why we use the words “stolen” and “theft” when we talk about the acquisition of Indigenous land on this account. The idea that Indigenous lands - the lands out of which America's #publiclands were carved - were won through Right of Conquest, not making it theft, is an argument I hear a lot.
This is a misconception.
First of all, Right of Conquest, the idea that territory won in war belongs to the victor, is deeply unethical. I think most people agree that just because you have the power to take something, doesn't give you the right to it.
However, even if you accept Right of Conquest, that isn't how Native land was taken by the U.S. Land was acquired through Treaties between the U.S. and sovereign Indian nations, not through war. Legal from a technical standpoint, these treaties were often coercive, misleading, or forced upon tribes. Translators and negotiators would often lie, cheat, intimidate, and even forge marks to get these treaties. On top of this, the U.S. failed to hold up their side of the treaties - letting settlers on land reserved for the tribes or not providing payment promised - effectively voiding the treaties.
Public Lands are part of this history of broken treaties. Many public lands have restrictions that result in tribes being unable to practice their treaty rights or encroaching on resource sovereignty. Military campaigns against tribes were mostly used to undercut treaties, to force tribes into signing treaties, or to "pacify" tribes who had returned to their lands after treaties were broken. The military was used in conjunction with outright lying, cheating, and intimidation by political representatives of the U.S. to Indian nations to underhandedly acquire land. This - even in its own time - is land acquisition through theft, not through conquest. Language and history are important. When Native people say "theft" they actually mean theft. The way these lands were illegally taken has political consequences today, so let's be accurate.
Was Indigenous Land really “stolen”?
The USA was the first on the moon, does that make it theirs forever? The Brits were the first people to get to the South Pole, is it theirs forever?
TL;DR - Property is not inherent, but is a philosophical idea, and we as a human community have the ability and responsibility to define our relationship to the earth and each other in new and more just ways while still acknowledging and addressing the realities of this history and how it continues to impact different people in different ways.
This is an important question because it gets to the heart of a lot of the conflicts around these issues and I want to try to answer it in two parts. So first, this question is essentially a philosophical one dealing with the question of how land becomes property. Folks like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume have written a lot on this, but there is no “right” answer to this question because property is not an inherent thing, but rather a cultural construct we’ve decided is helpful in organizing and managing society. Western nations historically accepted the Doctrine of Discovery which says that discovery grants property ownership - so under this, yes the moon would be America’s property. But at the same time, they also tend to honor property by mutual consent and recognition. So sovereignty and ownership over the moon is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the South Pole by the 1961 Antarctic Treaty System. The moon is not the U.S.’s even though they were there first because of these mutually agreed upon international treaties. This is relevant because in making treaties with Indian nations, the U.S. recognized these nations as independent, international actors with which they could engage in property negotiations about land - thus the history of treaties I talk about. The reason Indigenous people had Western style property rights was because they and the U.S. mutually agreed (to the extent that the power differentiation could allow for mutuality) to this idea of land property - which of course facilitated the ability of land to be stolen at all.
Ok, second, land as property is not an inherent thing. Many Indigenous people and anticapitalists reject the idea that land can or should be property at all - of the state or of individuals. In this way of understanding the world, the question of “if the U.S. was first to the moon, does it belong to them forever” becomes irrelevant because the moon can only “belong” to itself. I often talk in terms of land as property because that’s how it exists in our political system, but I think looking forward, it is important to look outside of this system and think about land justice and repatriation as a fundamental realignment of our relationship with land and with each other on that land from a colonial one that treats land as a commodity to be owned and exploited to one that treats land, animals, and humans as a connected community.
In this context, why do we look back? What does moving forward look like?
This is a really important question, so thank you for asking. I probably don’t have a satisfying answer to it, but I want to try. I think the focus needs to be less about stewing on past wrongs and more about how to justly move forward. You are right that there is no going back to some precolonial world and that much of colonial history involved theft, violence, and displacement among different peoples.
At the same time, the pervasiveness and long history of this doesn’t mean the consequences of these actions don’t still impact different groups of people today and the inability to perfectly restore things to how they were doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to justly address these past wrongs. In some instances this can mean addressing specific past events - like in the United States, we could uphold specific legally-binding treaties that have been broken or pay for known thefts of land and property (4th amendment takings for example). But you are also right that this is not possible everywhere and cannot address longer histories of colonialism and genocide.
So, instead of just accepting this and saying, “I guess this is the way things are now,” we move forward justly. What I mean by justice here is that we work to restore right relationships among different groups of people and yes - to your point about taking land from animals - between people and the natural world. Right relationships are built on respect, reciprocity, equality, and self-determination. While this seems easy, just a “everyone be nice and love each other” kind of thing, the problem is that it is actually pretty radical. It’s radical on an individual level with people, especially white people like myself, having to address internalized racism and colonial world views, and it is radical politically and socially - how would American society have to change if we seriously accepted the ideas that all people are inherently valuable and non-exploitable and the natural world is not a commodity but a partner to us that we need to respect and give as much as we take?
So repatriation - sometimes this literally means land back in a western, property ownership way, sometimes it means political jurisdiction as in the recent Oklahoma case, sometimes it means full co-management like at Bears Ears, but in all cases on all land, it means a fundamental realignment of our relationship with land and with each other on that land from a colonial one that treats land as a commodity to be owned and exploited to one that treats land, animals, and humans as a connected community.
You ask, “What is the solution?” The answer there isn’t a great one under our current political, economic, and social systems because these systems are built on the exploitation of land and people. But I see public lands as places where we can begin rebuilding relationships and trust, but it has to start by addressing this history, acknowledging its contemporary consequences, and working together to imagine what a more just future looks like.
Why does representation matter?
Recently I have seen a lot of discussion around representation and people struggling to understand or articulate why it’s important. Why does it matter how people and ideas are shown in film, photography, and the news? Aren’t there more pressing on-the-ground needs that we should focus on instead? Since this platform is about changing representations of land, I wanted to address it here. Representation matters because it creates the ideological conditions necessary for realizing on-the-ground change. Basically, the more we talk about something in a certain way, the more we hear it and see it represented in a certain way, the more likely we are to accept it as true, as natural, or as “common sense” regardless of its actual basis in truth. This is what psychologists call the Illusory Truth Effect - the tendency to believe information to be correct because of exposure rather than reason or evidence. This kind of ingrained belief especially across whole groups of people and cultures leads to what is called reification - or making REAL something that previously had only been imagined or talked about. In other words, we try to shape physical reality to fit our beliefs rather than allowing our beliefs to be shaped by reality.
A great example of this is the Wilderness Act of 1964. For a hundred years leading up to this act, views of wilderness were beginning to take shape. Writers like John Muir, photographers like Ansel Adams, politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, and painters like Albert Bierstadt were representing wilderness as empty, as pure, as authentic, and as a necessary part of America. Although there were in reality no such places as humans had long been integral to all environments in the U.S., the American public, lawmakers, and advocates believed it because they heard this message again and again and they reproduced it because it served their interests. By the turn of the 20th century, what had until then been an idea began to be reified with the creation of National Parks and by 1964 “wilderness” - this made-up idea - was written into law. Today we take wilderness, spaces that are considered pristine or untouched by man for granted and as natural, and we reproduce and reinforce this reality with every subsequent Instagram and advertisement representing nature as wilderness. But we forget it had to be intentionally created by violently removing indigenous people, breaking treaties, and writing laws. Wilderness and its physical impacts on people and the environment exist because of representation.
Once established, these realities are easy to perpetuate and incredibly difficult to destabilize. (Especially when, like wilderness, they intersect with entrenched power structures like colonialism and capitalism). But the whole idea behind Indigenous Geotags is that this process can go the other way, that representing these lands as deeply cultural and historical, as belonging to indigenous people, is the first step toward creating a more just reality.