The theft of Native Americans' land, in one animated map

[Cassius]

I think that some pretty outrageous double standards are applied when we talk of Europeans supposedly stealing the land of 'native peoples'. Let us remember that these very same native peoples were once invaders too, muscling in and taking the land from its previous occupants. The Mohawks and the Mahicans are a perfect example of this. The Mahicans were gradually driven eastwards by the Mohawks. Surely that counts as theft of land. If we take another, non-American example, surely the great migrations of the first millenium AD, migrations which helped forge Europe, were pretty blatant examples of the theft of land. Yet we don't have people calling for reparations for the descendents of the Tervingi Goths from the descendents of the Huns. I'm not going to say that what European peoples did in America, indeed, across much of the world, was 'right' as such; however, I'm not going to condemn it as wrong either, because these types of things are just how humanity works. This may be something of a tired argument, and I can understand the reasons for thinking so, but the European settlers were in no way morally inferior to the 'native' Americans, whom, I'd imagine, would have ended up doing exactly the same thing to us if they'd had the capability.

Of course its not nice if a bunch of settlers armed with muskets start building big wooden houses all over the place where you used to fish or to hunt. Of course its not nice if you get shot at by these settlers after attempting to set fire to these wooden houses. But, I repeat, that's simply the way things work. The Native Americans did not have the wherewithal to resist these settlers, and ended up getting both metaphorically and actually chopped. To throw in a cliche, there's no use crying over spilt milk, throwing around terms like genocide, theft, even Holocaust to describe events that were, in reality, a good deal less organised (and often less effective) than these terms imply.

[Cassius]

Don't be an idiot. Individual Native tribes were neither technologically nor organizationally capable of mass existential land-grabs ala their European inheritors. There is no ethical - the word 'moral' tastes like indigestion in my throat - equivalency between an attack by one tribe upon another and the systemic takeover of the continent by Europeans, any more than the murder of a handful of Jews during the Romanian Iron Guard revolt of 1940 compares to the German Holocaust. Make up your mind whether you're a moral absolutist or a relativist and stick to it.

I hate liberal aboriginal worship. But I utterly loathe conservative Dead White Manism.

Well, certain Meso and South American cultures proved quite capable of undertaking large land grabs to form empires (in the process pissing off a lot of people, as with the Aztecs and the Tlaxcalans). Indeed, technological capacity is no barrier to being able to do so as long as your opponents are weaker than you are (the Mongols were positively primitive, at least towards the beginning, and yet were able to establish a vast, albeit short-lived, empire). Its simply a question of scale, and, yes, this was performed on a much grander scale by European powers in the 16th-20th centuries, but, that was only because of their technological superiority, not some 'ethical' differences. I'd also dispute your characterisation of the European conquest of the Americas as being systemic. A stronger case could, perhaps, be made for the American move westwards as being systemic, but not the haphazard, often random, development of European empires in the Americas. I mean, the Spanish didn't plan out in detail exactly which parts of the Americas that they were going to seize; they simply took what they found and could hold. Much as more 'primitive' native groups had done for millenia prior to that.

Theft is theft.  Whether you think theft is justified in certain situations, or you're shamelessly going full Social Darwinist here, let's not delude ourselves into thinking it was anything other than that.  And I highly doubt the "That's the way it is" folks would be so nonchalant about it if it were their countries being invaded and imperialized.

There was no international law regarding the treatment of the native peoples when Europeans blundered onto the scene in the 16th century. Native concepts of land ownership simply did not compute with the European concept of it. In that sense, it almost certainly can't be regarded as theft, because there were no laws governing land ownership that bound Europeans in that part of the world (not that they would kept them if there had been anyway). Its simply incongruous to describe it as theft, almost as if you were comparing it to the theft of a car or a computer. As to the latter part of your point; well, my country, such as it is (or at least its antecedents), has seen about five successive waves of invading peoples during its history. These groups made this country what it is today. Of course people object to having their homelands invaded. Its a perfectly normal and rational thing to do. But treating it as some sort of 'gotcha hypocrites' moment is not particularly helpful.

[Cassius]

There was no international law regarding the treatment of the native peoples when Europeans blundered onto the scene in the 16th century. Native concepts of land ownership simply did not compute with the European concept of it.

Since when do we use international law as the basis for whether something is moral or not?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Again, the absence of a law on something does not imply that the act in question is moral.  And even if it did, the idea of a 'UN' or international governing body would be ridiculous for a time when few people knew what lied beyond the hills.  I fail to see why theft of land cannot be compared to automobile theft in a moral sense.  If anything, it's worse than automobile theft.  But I can tell you're likely turning this into a weak semantics debate, so why don't you stop before you make an even bigger fool out of yourself?

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Nor is it the point.  Obviously it's absurd to demonize someone for what their ancestors did hundreds of years ago, but so is your relativist attitude toward what is no different than me breaking into your house, raping your wife, seizing your property, swindling you into giving up everything you may have left, and then forcing you and your neighbors into desolate "reservations," sealing you and your grandchildren in a never-ending spiral of poverty and suffering.

My point wasn't that international law should be used as a basis for morality. But, when people introduce the term theft, which is a term with largely legal connotations, into the debate (often with the assumption that there must be some form of recompense for the descedents of those whose land was 'stolen') then law must be brought into the debate. My point is that retroactively classifying the European conquest of the Americas as 'theft' (which is a rather big generalisation, given that much of the land was won fairly and squarely by purchase or through battle) is not helpful, as the concept had no real meaning with regards to the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised. Conquest is an appropriate term, one which would have had meaning in the time period. Theft is not.

Theft of land can be compared to automobile theft when there are legitimate grounds to call it theft. If the landowner is recognised as the landowner by legal procedures, and then his land is somehow taken from him, that is theft. Where no established legal procedure other than some bizarre invocation of natural law exists to determine ownership, then the appropriation of land by another cannot be regarded as conquest.

As for your last point, of course, such things are basically bad. But, the fact is that such arguments about European 'theft' of native land are used to demonise the present day descendents of those people. The very idea of reparations and apologies implies moral responsibility on the part of those people. More to the point, this argument about the colonisations being 'theft' only stands up if one applies it to every similar action in human history, and this becomes very problematic as these type of acts are the layers upon which our present society was built. To argue that the Cherokee deserve reparations for American treatment of them, but the Welsh and Irish do not for English treatment of them, does rather smack of selectiveness. I'm not pointing the finger at you here, but more generally at those who look upon the colonisation of the Americas as some great, stand alone moral catastrophe, when really it was simply a continuation of what people have been doing to each other since the dawn of time. I'm not on anybody's side here; there were plenty of good, decent native Americans, just as there were plenty of good, decent colonists, including some of those who ended up waging war against the native populations. I'm simply arguing that a largely black portrayal of the European colonisation as something largely negative is, in my view, wrong.

Don't worry, Cassius, white people have done plenty of awful things since this happened. There's no need to act like white people are being unfairly demonized for this.

Of course they have Xahar, of course they have. Just as blacks, Asians and indeed, Native Americans have done too. In our fallen state as people, we are all equal.