"Who did we steal the country from and what was this previous nation called?" If there was "nothing" there, who did the United States sign hundreds of treaties with?
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2004238502322667610
Your question answers itself if you listen to it.
"Who did we steal the country from and what was this previous nation called?"
If there was "nothing" there, who did the United States sign hundreds of treaties with?
Who was removed on the Trail of Tears?
Who was marched, starved, confined to reservations?
Who had to be put into boarding schools to "kill the Indian, save the man"?
You do not sign treaties with empty land.
There was no single prior "United States of Somebody Else" because that is a European way of seeing the world.
North America was not a blank map waiting for one flag.
It was a continent of nations:
Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Cherokee. Muscogee. Seminole.
Dakota. Lakota. Nakota.
Diné. Apache. Pueblo peoples.
Countless more whose names you were never taught.
The United States itself called them "nations" in its own treaties.
Then it broke almost every one of those treaties and pretends today that nothing was taken.
You also ask, "What nation on the planet didn't do the same or worse?"
This is the oldest dodge in the book.
First, it is not true.
Most countries did not cross an ocean, declare an entire continent "empty," and build a legal system whose explicit goal was permanent replacement of the original peoples.
Second, even if everyone else had done it, that would not make it less of a crime.
We do not excuse murder because "other families also fight."
We do not excuse kidnapping because "other people also take hostages."
There is a difference between wars inside a shared world and an industrial settler project that turns land into real estate, people into a racial underclass, and entire cultures into museum pieces.
Indigenous nations fought each other. So did Europeans. So does everybody.
What made the modern colonial empires different was not that they fought.
It was that they turned conquest into a permanent property regime backed by race law, theology, and global finance.
You keep reaching for this line:
"Everyone did the same or worse."
What you are really saying is:
"If we admit what happened, then the story I was raised on collapses.
So I would rather claim that history itself is guilty than accept that my country is."
But history is not on trial.
Specific acts are.
Land taken by broken treaties.
Labor stolen through slavery and convict leasing.
Children taken to boarding schools and stripped of their language.
Resources extracted under occupation and threat.
You do not make that vanish by refusing to say the names of the nations that were there before you.
You just prove that the erasure worked.
posted by Satish Sharma at
04:40
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