Did Anglo settlers steal land from Mexico and American Indians?

Nah….land is for winners, man.

“White people stole our land.” - common comment on social media.

“The Anglos stole their land.” - common trope in academic histories, mostly written by white historians, in reference to American Indians and/or Mexico.

If you’ve ever stood on land, you know a few basic things about it. For instance, land, unlike grandma’s good silver or a twenty dollar bill, isn’t portable. It’s big. It’s fixed. It’s Earth.

And, more often than not, land is occupied by humans.

Ownership and occupation of land changes in one of two ways: (1) conveyance or (2) war.

If a people go to war on the soil of others and win, then occupy the land where they won that victory, that’s called “conquest.”

Up until about ten minutes ago, in the historical scheme of things, that was the natural way of the world. The right of conquest was a recognized part of international law.

Land was for winners.

Losing a war sucked for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which was the probability of losing territory and sovereignty.

The old ways aren’t always the best ways, of course. We humans used to chain smoke filterless Camels in hospitals, saw bloodletting as a perfect panacea, and carried on slavery on a global scale for millennia. But we do the best with the knowledge we have, we learn, and we find better ways. We once were capable of seeing conquest as a historical norm, but that understanding vanished. Here’s what happened to it:

The right of conquest fell out of favor internationally after World War II. Know what else happened right after WWII?

You, probably!

If you’re a Boomer, you were born into the first post-conquest generation.

Baby-Boomers entered a world remodeled by war, to parents who had seen the horrors of combat abroad and privations at home. The landscape this new generation saw was one of abundance, of huge cars with massive engines, interstate highways, home ownership, suburbs and, of course, the absence of conquest. The America they were born into was officially a Super Power.

Sure, they were the first generation to live with the specter of nuclear annihilation, but into each life some rain must fall, right?

In the new American landscape, WWII vets flooded into universities and trade schools thanks to the G.I. Bill, creating a new class of educated, middle-class folks. These parents of the Boomers, like all parents, wanted their progeny to have more opportunities than they’d had. So they sent their kids off to college, too.

Listen closely and you’ll hear the death rattle of the context of conquest.

A crop of kids, spoiled by the relative abundance into which they were born, were restless. The recent unpleasantness in Europe and the Pacific seemed well under control. The Cold War wasn’t one you could actively fight. There was no frontier or Great Depression or world war to bind this generation together. There were no dragons to slay anymore.

Young America looked inward.

The Civil Rights Movement happened. The Pill happened. The Summer of Love happened. The Moonshot happened.

When a new dragon did make its appearance, in the guise of a conflict in Southeast Asia, about a quarter of those inward-gazing kids simply declared it unjust and pronounced America a big mean bully.

Meanwhile, in universities, historical context was eroding at the activist hands of the Baby-Boomers, some of whom became historians. The generation for whom conquest was no longer a reality began to feel that conquest had been a net evil all along, rather than a rule that all people everywhere had understood.

On the heels of their 1960s smash, “We’re the Moral Arbiters of the State”, they followed up with “Why Don’t We Retcon History Based on Social Justice?”

Boomers retroactively annulled the rules of a time they didn’t live in.

These professors taught the next generation that conquest was theft - not land won, but land stolen. They excised the part about past men knowing well the rules of war and conquest, then they passed on an interpretation that men of the past wouldn’t recognize could they read it.

This broken “stolen land” device is why it’s a no-no to view Christopher Columbus as anything but a genocidal psychopath. The settlement of Texas and the Texas Revolution were all about stealing land to perpetuate slavery, by their metrics. In historical reality, though, conquest was a way of life in the Americas, and in Texas, long before Europeans set foot upon it.

The Tepanec didn’t willingly deed their lands to the Aztecs, nor did the Apache cede their hunting grounds to the Comanche in a fit of philanthropic zeal.

But those conquests aren’t called “theft” because no Europeans were involved. See how that works? This is the road the Boomer historians sent us down…an intellectually crooked thoroughfare dotted with billboards of permissible bigotry. It’s a one-way street and it has no off ramps.

If Anglos won it, it’s “theft”. If anyone else won it, it’s simply victory.

So the next time you encounter some college kid speaking in haughty tones about stolen land, know that nobody ever taught the poor kid that land was for winners… winners of every race all over the planet. He lacks context and has but a small chance of ever finding any. It’s gone unless educators stop teaching imaginary history, applying rules created in the 1960s to fights settled centuries ago by another set of rules entirely.

Land is for Winners