let's talk about "Land Back" for a second

is it a serious proposal to give the US back to the Indigenous?

there are some real world problems with that

/1

the first problem is that there are only about 3 million indigenous persons in the US and about a million in Canada

they are only a majority as you get close to the Arctic Circle

/2

so you could probably give "land back" in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Labrador, and the northern parts of Yukon, Alaska, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and parts of Arizona, Oklahoma and South Dakota with no problem

- you have majority Indigenous areas there

/3

however, what about Michigan, or New York, which are less than 1% indigenous?

how about states with hardly any indigenous people at all, like New Jersey or Georgia?

how do you do "land back" there?

/4

whom are you giving the "land back" too in areas where, tragically, the indigenous community were murdered or exiled a couple hundred years ago?

do you break out the treaty map and find the ancestors of the former Indigenous residents and hand over the land titles?

/5

also these land claims overlap - and there is the unfortunate fact that many of these nations were at war with each other at time of conquest - so who's land claims do we go with?

this century old ongoing dispute between the Hopis and the Dine in Arizona is typical

/6

a simplistic narrative of evil "settlers!" and innocent "colonized people" doesn't do justice to the reality of Indigenous nations that had conflicts with each other (like the above case, where the Navajo/Dine invaded the Hopi lands long before the US Army showed up)

/7

what about New York City?

the Dutch invaded what had been Lenape territory in 1624
(other indigenous groups had forced the Lenape to cede oyster fishing rights, and the Lenape were forced to do the same for the Dutch)

/8

the Dutch had broader ambitions - as did the English in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and the Swedes in Delaware - the Europeans started a war, they won and the Lenape were dispossessed

today there are few indigenous in NYC - and most of them are Mexican or Guatemalan

/9

the Lenape were deported to Oklahoma and Kansas, and made to live on the lands of another, larger, Indigenous nation, the Cherokees (who'd also been deported from their land) - their nation remains there to this day

/10

tragic story....but how do we hash this out now?

do we give New York City to the Lenape, who've been in Oklahoma for the past 170 years?

how does that work - a few thousand Lenape ruling over several million non indigenous New Yorkers and New Jersians?

/11

or... is "land back" just an exercise in performative White Guilt - upper class White kids having "living on stolen Lenape Land!" in their twitter bios

none of this resolves the present day racial oppression suffered by indigenous Americans

/12 - end