How true is Billie Eilish's ‘No one is illegal on stolen land' statement from historical pov?

The 68th annual Grammy Awards resurfaced a historical debate in American history. 

While the night was full of surprises, the statement of Billie Eilish made during her acceptance speech for the Song of the Year award sparked a historical debate.

While criticising ICE, she stated: “f*** ICE. No one is illegal on stolen land.”

Although Billie’s sentiment was clearly to sympathise with the victims of ICE in Minneapolis, her statement of “stolen land” started a debate on social media.

The question of whether the United States is built on “stolen land” is a profound and polarizing historical debate that has been reignited in modern political discourse.

The argument is essentially based on the violent removal of Native Americans and the constitutionality of the western expansion of the country.

In the eyes of the Indigenous community, the simplest word stolen is used in reference to a known history of systematic eradication, broken accords, and warfare.

Beginning with the early colonization and growing in strength through 19th-century policies such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears, Native nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. 

The forced relocation of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 to 15,000 Indigenous people due to disease, exposure, and starvation.

Researchers observe that Indigenous people lost more than 98 percent of their lands with treaties signed under duress or under some form of deception, and only approximately 2 percent of the reservations are still there today.

Another, frequently-mentioned conquest perspective argues that the world of the time was characterized by land transfer by any means of warfare and changing of power relations.

Some historians have echoed this opinion, saying that European powers and the subsequent U.S. entered into a continent that already had inter-tribal warfare and territorial issues, and participated in conquest instead of the robbery of a united and peaceful society.

A key area of fault is the legality of treaties. As the government of the U.S. existed under a legal structure consisting of making treaties, most of the treaties were obtained either by coercion or fraud, and later violated by the federal government; thus, they did not hold significant weight among most Native tribes and historians.

Finally, the American framing of the U.S. as a nation based on stolen land is largely conditioned by focusing on the ethical and coercive aspects of the U.S. expansion or the legal and martial law of conquest achieved today.

Although the mass relocation and cultural eradication of Native American cultures is an undisputed historical reality, the explanation of this past is one of the most characteristic arguments of the nationhood.