The land I reside on, where I sit as I write these words, has a long history of human habitation, going back to the most recent major glaciation. Before Europeans came to Alaska, this general area, the Susitna Valley, was occupied by one subgroup or another of the Dena'ina linguistic grouping of the Athabascan people. The area started being settled by people of European descent in the late 19th century, when gold was discovered in the area (gold is a really powerful draw, it turns out).
At some point, the land on which I reside was taken up under the Homestead Act. The original homesteaded land was eventually broken up into smaller residential areas, including our 2 1/2 acre parcel. In the early '80s, someone bought this parcel and built a house, garage, and later other outbuildings. Then, decades later, they sold it to us. That's the story of this little parcel of land. Nobody stole it from anybody, and to suggest so shows nothing more than a profound ignorance.
Here's the thing: Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who were displaced by force somewhere in their lineage. Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who displaced other people by force somewhere in their lineage. It's an inevitable fact of human history. American natives fought with each other over land and resources, and some tribes, like the Dakota (Sioux), were notorious for attacking their neighbors. Europe's history is rife with such, from the Vikings to the Norman invasion of Britain. In fact, few if any of the people of Europe today are the original inhabitants of the land they reside on now; the one exception may be the Basque of the Pyrenees Mountains, but even they, at some point, came there from somewhere else. The French people we know now derive their name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and as for the British Isles, that motley group of islands has seen so many invasions, from Picts to Celts to Romans, Saxons, Anglians, Jutes, and Normans, that it would be difficult to keep track as they go by.
Since this is an inevitable fact of human nature, why is the political left in the USA and Europe so obsessed with "land acknowledgments" and "stolen land" statements?
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The left is big on virtue signaling, but this "stolen land" horse squeeze is one of the most egregious cases. Note that none of them - not one - ever proposes to surrender back their own property to the people they claim as the original owners. Note that many of them have quite a bit of "stolen" properties to give back - and yet they don't. Their claims, their "acknowledgments," are, as Shakespeare said, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This argument, this idea that some nebulous group of ancient people still has some claim to any of these properties, founders upon one rock in particular: All of the people who may have taken up these lands are dead now. The people who homesteaded lands in the American West are all gone. The people who took up and developed lands in the eastern United States are long gone. Even if we admit any wrongdoing in how land was occupied and how the original inhabitants were displaced, we are none of us liable for the transgressions of our ancestors. It's the same problem with the left's obsession over slavery: All those people are dead now. There is nobody alive today who was ever legally held in slavery in the United States. There is nobody alive today who has ever legally owned slaves in the United States. It's the same with these ancestral lands: All of the people that the left whines about, the people who may have displaced native peoples for their land, are all dead.
We can't return to that earlier time. And there is no reason why we should. Furthermore, the left's whining on this issue never makes the one acknowledgment that they should, by rights, make: That every person on the North American continent, regardless of ancestry, is better off now because of European settlement of the lands that are now the United States.
Here's the only fact that matters: This land I sit on, this land I live on, this little 2 1/2 acre parcel in the Alaska woods, is mine. I owe nobody anything for my ownership other than the property taxes I pay to the borough every year (and that's a complaint I will reserve for another time). I didn't steal this land. I displaced nobody. The people I bought the land from entered into a mutually-agreed-upon price and terms of transfer with us. They had not stolen the land and displaced nobody. The original homesteaders took up the land legally, under the existing laws of the United States.
This is our land. Our property. As an American, I am fortunate to live under a Constitution that guarantees my rights to my liberty and my property. This land is my property. I will not surrender it, and I do not acknowledge any other person's claim to it - and I will make no apology for anything. And anyone who would show up here and try to dispossess me had better come prepared for a scrap.
