Billie Eilish can be forgiven for being thoughtless — as a pop star, it’s practically part of her job description.

But her anti-ICE declaration at the Grammys that “no one is illegal on stolen land” — met with rapturous applause — pungently expressed a point of view that has significant support on the left and in academia.

The sentiment is a distortion of the history of North America and, more than a shot at President Trump’s immigration policy, an attempt to delegitimize the American project at its root.

There is no doubt that we were, at our worst, brutal and duplicitous in our dealings with Native Americans, and that we were a land-hungry people.

The misapprehension of the simplistic “stolen land” narrative, though, is that, prior to Europeans showing up, peoples in North America had clearly delineated territory with a provenance stretching back into the mists of time. In fact, all was conflict and flux.

The context for contention between Europeans and Native Americans over land was set, tragically, by the spread of disease that catastrophically diminished native populations. In the early 19th century, according to Jeff Fynn-Paul in his book, Not Stolen, fewer than 100,000 Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi, while the population of the United States was 5 million and rapidly growing.

Early on, Europeans by and large accepted Native American land claims and thought purchase was the way to gain new land. The deals might strike us as lopsided — Manhattan for some trinkets — but the Native Americans had plentiful land on offer, while European trade goods were extremely valuable to them.

It was when the power disparity between the United States and the Native Americans grew more stark in the 19th century that we see the most infamous incidents of forcible dispossession.

But if we are guilty of “stealing land,” so is nearly everyone else in history, including Native Americans, who constantly fought and dispossessed one another.

The Iroquois, for instance, gained military superiority by acquiring firearms from the Dutch and English in the 17th century and proceeded to wipe out or displace the Huron, the Neutral Nation, and the Erie. They established what is called the Gunpowder Empire, with its locus in Eastern and Central New York.

For their part, the Comanche originated in the northern Rocky Mountains, then moved into the Great Plains. Their prowess as mounted warriors allowed them to displace the Apache and subordinate the Wichita and establish dominance in a vast region known as Comanchería.

And so on.

The historian Elliott West describes how the rise of horse culture amplified conflict.

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, seeking to snatch “horses, mules, and slaves.”

The Southwest, meanwhile, 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 exactly Dances with Wolves.

As it happens, American leadership created a post–World War II world where the integrity of sovereign territory and borders was reinforced. If it’s true, as Eilish said, that no one is illegal on stolen land, then basically no countries around the world — almost all of which were “stolen” at some point — can have borders.

Of course, Eilish shouldn’t be taken too seriously. It presumably matters to her that she lives on her plot of Los Angeles land, not that of her neighbor; that she lives in California and not, say, Nevada; and that she lives in the United States rather than Mexico.

None of these distinctions would be possible without the kind of borders that she and her compatriots profess to be so troubled by.

© 2026 by King Features Syndicate