Not Stolen Lands

 It is an article of belief  among many leftists in this country that all of the land in the United States and Canada is held illegitimately because immigrants and settlers stole it from the “indigenous peoples” who were there first. (This seems to be a specific opinion covering one case only rather than an instance of any general principle. The leftists  seem to have no such concerns, for example,  about China’s present activities in Tibet or its northwest, and they did not question the rightness of  the Russian Soviets’ empire in Siberia, central Asia, or the Baltic states.)

People acquire valid ownership to land in a wilderness by settling it – by building permanent dwellings such as a town or village on it or by farming , ranching,  mining, or otherwise developing it.  They acquire an invalid control over land by taking it away from the people who settled it or those who obtained it from them by (one or a series of) gifts or trade. Some parts of North America above the Rio Grande were settled by Indians before the first Europeans arrived. There were villages and agriculture in places, but most of the continent was unclaimed wilderness belonging to no one. The Europeans who settled that wilderness acquired valid ownership to it, stealing it from no one. Hunting or passing nomadically through a body of land does not establish ownership any more than Coronado’s marching through the American southwest made it the property of the king of Spain.

Cases where settled land of Indians was taken by fraud or force were crimes, but in most of them  it would be too late to do anything about them in the way of restitution. Finding out which present day individual descendants of which individual robbed Indians who lost which property under which circumstances and in which state of development at the time of the theft and what connection any present owners of that property have to those who committed  theft probably usually would be impossible. In the absence of specific knowledge to the contrary, the default should be that present titles to such land should be considered valid.

Some bad things were done along with a good many dodgy or shifty ones (often having nothing to do with Indians), but the continent was not stolen.