Billie Eilish was just doing her job as a pop star – Latest News
Billie Eilish might be forgiven for being inconsiderate — as a pop star, it’s virtually half of her job description.
But her anti-ICE declaration on the Grammys that “no one is illegal on stolen land” — met with rapturous applause — pungently expressed a level of view that has important assist on the left and in academia.
The sentiment is a distortion of the historical past of North America, and more than a shot at President Donald Trump’s immigration coverage, an attempt to delegitimize the American project at its root.
There is no doubt that we have been, at our worst, brutal and duplicitous in our dealings with Native Americans, and that we have been a land-hungry people.
The misapprehension of the simplistic “stolen land” narrative, although, is that, previous to Europeans exhibiting up, peoples in North America had clearly delineated territory with a provenance stretching back into the mists of time.
In truth, all was battle and flux.
Billie Eilish, winner of the Song Of The Year award for “WILDFLOWER”, poses within the press room during the 68th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 01, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. WireImage
The context for competition between Europeans and Native Americans over land was set, tragically, by the unfold of illness that catastrophically diminished native populations.
In the early nineteenth century, in response to Jeff Flynn-Paul in his ebook, “Not Stolen,” much less than 100,000 Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi, whereas the population of the United States was 5 million and quickly growing.
Early on, Europeans by and enormous accepted Native American land claims and thought buy was the best way to gain new land.
The offers may strike us as lopsided — Manhattan for some trinkets — however the Native Americans had plentiful land on offer, whereas European commerce items have been extraordinarily helpful to them.
It was when energy disparity between the United States and the Native Americans grew more stark within the nineteenth century that we see essentially the most notorious incidents of forcible dispossession.
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But if we’re guilty of “stealing land,” so is sort of everybody else in historical past, together with Native Americans, who always fought and dispossessed each other.
The Iroquois, as an example, gained army superiority by buying firearms from the Dutch and English within the seventeenth century and proceeded to wipe out or displace the Huron, the Neutral Nation and the Erie.
They established what is known as the Gunpowder Empire, with its locus in Eastern and Central New York.
For their half, the Comanche originated within the northern Rocky Mountains, then moved into the Great Plains.
Their prowess as mounted warriors allowed them to displace the Apache, subordinate the Wichita and set up dominance in a huge area identified as Comanchería.
And so on.
The historian Elliott West describes how the rise of horse tradition amplified battle.
In the West, he writes, “Two great coalitions — Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas north of the Arkansas River and Comanches and Kiowas south of it — clashed bitterly until making peace in 1840, then both preyed on sedentary peoples on the fringes.”
Further South, he continues, “Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches launched wolfish raids” into Mexico, in search of to grab “horses, mules, and slaves.”
The Southwest, in the meantime, had been a persistent cauldron of violence: “Navajos and Apaches had long preyed on Pueblos and Hispanos, Apaches on Mexicans and Navajos, Utes on Navajos and Plains tribes, and Comanches on Pueblos, Hispanos, and Mexicans.”
In short, it wasn’t precisely “Dances With Wolves.”
As it occurs, American management created a post-World War II world the place the integrity of sovereign territory and borders was strengthened.
If it’s true, as Eilish stated, that no one is unlawful on stolen land, then mainly no nations world wide — nearly all of which have been “stolen” sooner or later — can have borders.
Of course, Eilish shouldn’t be taken too severely.
It presumably issues to her that she lives on her plot of Los Angeles land, not that of her neighbor; that she lives in California and never, say, Nevada; and that she lives within the United States fairly than Mexico.
None of these distinctions can be potential with out the type of borders that she and her compatriots profess to be so troubled by.
Twitter: @RichLowry
