“No one is illegal on stolen land.” This was the declaration that earned Grammy winner Billie Eilish thunderous applause at the music awards last week. Since then, the millionaire singer has faced intense backlash, including calls to return her $3 million mansion – which just so happens to sit on the “ancestral land” of the Tongva tribe, an indigenous people of California.
Eilish’s Stolen Land
The Tongva tribe, self-described as the “First People of the greater Los Angeles basin,” confirmed that Eilish’s home “is situated on our ancestral land,” noting that the outspoken performer has not contacted the tribe.
“[W]e do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country,” a tribe spokesperson told the Daily Mail. “It is our hope that in future discussions, the tribe can explicitly be referenced to ensure the public understands that the greater Los Angeles basin remains Gabrieleno Tongva territory.”
Eilish believes the United States was “stolen” from indigenous people, but she apparently has no intention of returning her own share of the spoils. Was her declaration at the Grammy’s just a master class in virtue signaling?
Notably, her statement stemmed from criticisms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is tasked with deporting illegal immigrants.
Just to be clear: Eilish believes the United States was stolen from indigenous people, and to rectify that, her plan is to remain in her home on tribal land and speak out against the removal of foreigners.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was one of many to point out the performer’s hypocrisy, writing on X, “Oh, gee, this ‘stolen land’ nonsense again? Maybe she should step up and forfeit her southern California mansion since it is supposedly on ‘stolen land.’”
Stolen or Conquered?
One of the constants of human history is conquest, with land around the world passing from one group of people to another through overwhelming strength and unmatched strategy. The Roman Empire conquered lands from England to Egypt and around the Mediterranean Sea. Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire for Spain. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire conquered so much land that it eventually controlled roughly “9 million square miles (23 million square km) of territory, making it the largest contiguous land empire in world history,” according to Britannica.
Reducing conquest to theft is an insult to the conquerors and the conquered alike. It strips the victors of their complexity and transforms the defeated into pathetic victims rather than warriors who resisted and rebelled.
Indigenous tribes in the United States were hardly the passive losers of history that Ms. Eilish implies. Long before European settlers even set foot in America, native tribes frequently engaged in warfare, battling each other for resources and territory. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Encyclopedia of the Great Plains highlights the brutality of indigenous tribes:
“Warfare was most intense along the Missouri River in the present-day Dakotas, where ancestors of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras were at war with each other, and towns inhabited by as many as 1,000 people were often fortified with ditch and palisade defenses. Excavations at the Crow Creek site, an ancestral Arikara town dated to 1325, revealed the bodies of 486 people–men, women, and children, essentially the town's entire population–in a mass grave. These individuals had been scalped and dismembered, and their bones showed clear evidence of severe malnutrition, suggesting that violence resulted from competition for food, probably due to local overpopulation and climatic deterioration.”
The assertion that indigenous Americans were victims of petty larceny aside, and since Eilish brought it up, perhaps she can explain to whom the United States rightfully belongs. To keep things simple, she can start with the Missouri River region mentioned above. Which native tribe owns that land: the Mandans, Hidatsas, or Arikaras? It might be best to avoid digging up more mass graves to settle the question.
