This Land Was Bought, Not Stolen From Native Tribe

It’s very offensive to some progressives to point out the inconvenient fact that much of the land transferred by Native Americans to whites in the United States was sold by Native Americans, not taken by force. The Native American population was so depleted by disease in the 17th Century that Indian tribes could afford to sell some of their land to whites, because they weren’t using most of it. Selling land they didn’t need made sense — they could use the money they got for the land to buy firearms or metal-tipped arrows to defend themselves against hostile tribes, and to buy other useful things, like pots and pans, cotton and wool cloth, and metal tools needed to improve their agricultural output.

A great deal of land was voluntarily sold to settlers by Native Americans. Legal historian Stuart Banner’s book “How the Indians Lost Their Land” explains this. Some land changed hands through “consensual transactions,” and other land through “violent conquest.” You can also learn about this subject by viewing the educational video, “Are We Living on Stolen Land?”

But some progressives want to leave the false impression that all the land was stolen from the Indians, to make America appear more racist. That’s what they imply through the “land acknowledgments” that they recite in academia and progressive high-tech firms, where people will recite that they are on the land of this or that Native American people, often claiming that a tribe lived on that land “since time immemorial.”