February 20, 2026
Billie Eilish really stepped into it with her ill-advised Grammy comments. BTW, I stopped watching the Grammy’s so long ago I can’t remember when. I’m guessing Ms. Eilish does not hold a PhD in Political Science:
· “No one is illegal on stolen land”
· She urged people to “keep fighting and speaking up and protesting”
· She ended with an emphatic (and bleeped) “F*** ICE”
Well, her problem, among others, is that her home in LA sits on aboriginal Tongva tribal land and they’re now suggesting she may want to continue conversations with them? This is what you get when pencil brains decide to get involved in things in which their knowledge barely peaks above ignorance. They suddenly find themselves with people who do know what they’re talking about and apparently the Tongva tribe knows what it is talking about.
And there is a kind of scooped out, hollowed out, reasoning process going on. Is she saying that if the Tongva take her home (presumably making it “legal”) that it is then not OK to have illegal immigrants on the property? Hunh? Like, “Take my home and then you’re OK to deport all the illegals you find.” Hunh?
Now to be clear, I think we all agree that the taking of aboriginal lands in our history is not something to celebrate. I don’t know if it could have been avoided, given that conquest seems to be the way of the world, in all places and at all times. And that prior eons and centuries were exceedingly violent. And that the taking of those lands is a blot on our history.
We just visited Australia; they are wrestling with some heat about the treatment of their aboriginals given that those original settlers there came to Australia 65,000 years ago. Same issues of land steal and marginalization of the population. In New Zealand, same about the Māori people. In all three countries, , rapacious white European cultures came, saw and conquered. Thus, the reputation as colonizers, which is not inaccurate. But not unique either.
When we were on our world cruise, I “got into it” with a guide in South America. The entire history of South America can mostly be described as “what happened before and after the Europeans arrived.” That’s where people focus and of course, that gets you into European conquest, whether led by the Cross, led by greed, led by politics or all the above. The guide described all of it and how European conquest wreaked havoc on local populations. And it did.
But I asked this: What about the tribes the existing rulers conquered? Did those tribes steal the land from other tribes? That is, were the Europeans merely the last in a long line of land stealers and conquerors? What you never see reported:
The Inca Empire was built through extensive military conquest of other tribes and peoples. The Incas actively expanded from a small city-state into a massive empire by conquering their neighbors. The Incas used both military force and diplomatic strategies.
Playbook: Send spies to regions you wanted to control, gather intelligence on their political and military organization, then either conquer them by force or coerce them into submission. (We are channeling the Incas in our approach to IRAN and others…history rhymes). The Incas subjugated many powerful tribes, perhaps a dozen, and implemented policies to control, including forced resettlement throughout the empire to prevent rebellion.
When the Spanish arrived in 1532, many conquered tribes allied with the Spanish against the Incas, providing fighters, local knowledge and various forms of aid to help overthrow Inca rule. They saw an opportunity to regain their independence from Inca domination, though they couldn’t foresee they were simply trading one conqueror for another.
So, people talk about one conqueror (Europeans) but neglect to speak of the other (the Inca).
And here, many Native American tribes conquered and took territory from other tribes. This was widespread throughout North America long before European contact. Examples sourced from several historical websites including the Oklahoma Historical Society:
Originally part of the Shoshone people, the Comanches moved south onto the Great Plains. They attacked and displaced other tribes, notably the Apache, whom they drove from the southern Plains. By the 1760s, many Apache bands simply vanished from history due to Comanche conquest. The Comanche controlled a vast territory called Comancheria, spanning parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado.
The Lakota began in the Minnesota/Wisconsin region but were pushed westward by the Ojibwa and Cree tribes. Once they acquired horses around 1750, they became a dominant military force. Around 1776, the Lakotas displaced the Cheyennes and Kiowas, going after the Black Hills region’s abundant game, timber and water. They also displaced the Crow, Arikara, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Shoshone tribes westward from various territories. Very tough, the Lakota Sioux.
Cruel and violent warfare had been practiced against the Pawnee by the Lakota for centuries since the mid-1700s and through the 1840s. The 1873 Massacre Canyon incident, where over 1,500 Sioux warriors attacked a Pawnee hunting party and killed an estimated 70-156 people (mostly women and children), was among the bloodiest. Until I did this research, I never heard about this…you hear about Custer and Wounded Knee, which were contemporaneous. Bias sometimes expresses itself in the absence of reportage.
The Kiowa were originally in Montana near the Yellowstone River but in the early nineteenth century had been pushed south of the Platte to the Arkansas River by the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne. Not finished:
The Cheyenne defeated the Crow in 1820 in the engagement known as the Tongue River Massacre, taking control of the Powder River region. However, they were later pushed south by the Lakota Sioux. I’ve copied a detailed recounting of the massacre at the end of this piece, given that it approached a genocidal event.
Thus, the meme that Europeans went after peaceful, gentle aboriginal peoples has to be examined. North America actually had been a hotbed of tribal warfare, as it was in South America. So, the Cheyenne pushed out the Crow, and then the Cheyenne were pushed out by the Lakota Sioux who were then conquered by the United States, a campaign that included both Custer’s defeat and Wounded Knee.
So, if you want to pay reparations, whom do you pay? The last tribe or the first? Or allocate across all of them? If you want to give the land back, who gets it?
This is not to excuse the violence against the Sioux or American Indians by the United States (to be clear, none of us can condone it). It is not to suggest “they all did it so what the United States did was OK”, but rather, to remind ourselves this entire concept of conquest and blame and vilification is much more complicated than we are led to believe by those who can’t seem to let the colonial era move into the past, where it belongs.
I’m into my fourth volume of Durant’s History of Civilization. It features two basic themes. First, human beings have always tried to survive and then succeed. But second, that the trail of blood and war and conquest is the feature you remember most and it spans the entire human existence. Example:
After a three-year siege during the Third Punic War, Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus breached the city walls. Of approximately 500,000 inhabitants, only 50,000 survived the systematic violence which ensued. And those were sold into slavery. The city itself was razed; the ground was symbolically plowed with salt. That was 2500 years ago. And then of course, the Romans conquered seemingly everyone, and then the barbarians conquered the Romans and then the barbarians were torn apart by the…and so forth.
I think we need to come to a consensus. We can’t meaningfully right the wrongs of history. Those tribal lands, whether in the United States or New Zealand, are just not going to be given back. The Israelis aren’t going to give up their country. We can express sympathies for the tragedies (and I think most of us do feel them sincerely). But partisans can’t try to lay guilt on all of us, for things done by people 200 years ago. Heck, my people didn’t even arrive here until 100 years ago. And as Sicilians, my ancestors were conquered by everyone.
I prefer to put my energies, not into meaningless debate about placing blame, rather in making myself better and so, the world around me better. I can’t change history. But I can at least be determined that my own small life features goodwill to the people who are living today. And in that, we collectively write our own history, add it to the pile for future generations to either repeat, or hopefully, learn from.
Ms. Eilish isn’t going to hand over her home to the Tongva. Hypocrisy always lurks around Hollywood. Wasn’t it Leonardo DiCaprio who was found out taking his polluting private jet to conferences to get awards for climate change work? (Mostly, giving interviews). That stuff is everywhere.
I can only say that over the 60 or so years I’ve had political and social awareness, things are getting better. I’m sure it may be hard for some to believe that, in part because the progress is slow. And more, its jagged…two steps forward, three back, one forward, rest, then two forward. It’s slow. But it is real.
The Tongue River Massacre…genocidal?
(Wiki)
“The Tongue River Massacre was an attack by combined Cheyenne and Lakota forces on a camp of Crow people in 1820, and it was considered one of the most significant losses ever suffered by the Crow tribe.
The background involves long-standing intertribal rivalries. The immediate trigger was a Cheyenne raid in 1819 in which a Crow camp killed 30 Cheyenne Bowstring warriors while defending their horse herds. In retaliation, the entire Cheyenne tribe mobilized, carrying their sacred arrows (the Mahuts), joined by a Lakota camp, and they camped along the Powder River.
Crow warriors from a nearby Tongue River camp discovered them near dark and organized a war party to strike first — but the two forces crossed each other unnoticed in the night. The Crow lost the track entirely and never found the enemy camps.
The Cheyenne and Lakota then attacked the now-unprotected Crow camp at noon, finding only women, children, and old men remaining. They killed all the old men, captured the horse herds, took the women and children captive, and reduced the camp to rubble.
The long-term consequences were significant. The massacre permanently poisoned relations between the Cheyenne/Lakota and the Crow, preventing any future alliance — even decades later during Red Cloud’s War, when such an alliance might have been strategically valuable against the U.S. Army.
Crow chief Plenty Coups, recounting the event more than a century later, said the Crow had nearly been wiped out on that terrible day, and the site still showed evidence of the destruction when Cheyenne warrior George Bent visited it in 1865 — broken tipi poles and old stone weapons still visible in the grass.”
I would interject…the irony of history…it was the Lakota who were in turn massacred at Wounded Knee, 70 years later.
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
