Tea at Trianon: The Myth of Stolen Land and the Erasure of Indigenous Agency

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

The Myth of Stolen Land and the Erasure of Indigenous Agency

From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

By the time Spanish missionaries and soldiers established a sustained presence in California in the late 18th century, indigenous California had already been transformed by forces internal to the continent. Disease, resource pressure, and intertribal conflict had reduced populations and altered political structures. Spain claimed California as a colonial possession, governed it for just over half a century, and integrated it into a broader imperial system. When Mexico gained independence, it inherited Spanish sovereignty. California then passed from Mexico to the US in 1848 through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a treaty negotiated between two recognized states following a declared war, and ratified under the international law of the era.
One can condemn the war. Many did, even at the time. But condemnation does not erase the legal fact of transfer. Mexico ceded California in exchange for $15M and the assumption of $3.25M in debt. That is not theft in any coherent legal sense. It is state succession, a mechanism by which sovereignty has changed hands throughout recorded history.
At this point, critics often shift the argument. The land may have passed legally between colonial powers, they say, but it was never theirs to give. It belonged to the tribes. This objection deserves careful treatment, because it raises the hardest questions.
The US government itself recognized these questions. In the early 1850s, federal negotiators entered into treaties with California tribes, treaties that involved the cession of land in exchange for reservations, goods, livestock, and federal recognition. These agreements were not symbolic gestures. They were attempts, however flawed, to regularize sovereignty through consent rather than extermination. Some treaties were shamefully mishandled, delayed, or ignored by Congress. That failure remains a stain. But the existence of the treaties matters. It shows that tribal leaders were not treated merely as obstacles to be cleared, but as parties capable of bargaining, choosing, and surviving.
To insist that these agreements were meaningless because tribes were too weak to consent is to deny indigenous agency altogether. It implies that native leaders were incapable of understanding tradeoffs, incapable of acting strategically, and incapable of making binding decisions for their people. That view is not morally enlightened. It is condescending.
The moral record of the US in California is mixed, and often dark. Violence, displacement, and broken promises occurred. None of that is in dispute. But moral wrongdoing does not automatically negate sovereignty. If it did, nearly every nation on earth would be illegitimate. Borders everywhere are the product of conquest, negotiation, succession, and compromise. To single out California as uniquely stolen is to apply a standard that no historical society could meet. (Read more.)