Democrat Platform Says America Was Built on Stolen Land

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The DNC 2016 party platform began by claiming that “Democrats meet in Philadelphia with the same basic belief that animated the Continental Congress when they gathered here 240 years ago.” Four years later, out went the Continental Congress and all of America.

The 2020 DNC platform began with a politically fashionable ‘land acknowledgement’ asserting that America was an illegitimate entity operating on stolen land “built on Indigenous homelands.”

The 2024 platform likewise begins with a ‘land acknowledgement’ claiming that Chicago properly belongs to 13 different Indian tribes. Once again, the DNC asserts that they “recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands.” That is to say America should not exist.

If the Democrats truly believe it, why not turn over Chicago to the Indian tribes?

Land acknowledgements were initiated by an Australian Marxist terrorist supporter at a counterculture festival in the 1970s. Its goal was to establish that Australians were foreigners and had to follow aboriginal laws and culture. 50 years later the practice, grounded in ‘decolonization’ has been widely adopted by American leftists and their ruling party.

Land acknowledgements are a form of historical revisionism, like the 1619 Project and destroying Columbus statues, that are paving the way for delegitimizing America.

The DNC transplanting them to Chicago demonstrates a whole new level of historical and scientific illiteracy. The Indians are not “native to this continent” unless the party’s new scientific consensus, which already believes that men can become women, also believes in separate human origins for different races (a racist 19th century belief once held by Democrats.)

Nor have they been here “since time immemorial”, but were Asian populations who crossed the Bering Strait in early human history. (The theory is unpopular with many Indian tribes.)

The DNC platform claims that Chicago was really the property of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, along with the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten Indians. But what actually happened to those tribes?

The Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Fox, Kickapoo and many of the others on the list allied with the British in the War of 1812. During the war, they carried out brutal atrocities such as the Potawatomi massacre of women and children during the evacuation from Fort Dearborn. (The massacre has become politically incorrect and monuments to the victims have been removed.)

The DNC land acknowledgement boasts that it made the Prairie Band of Potawatomi the “first federally recognized Tribal Nation in Illinois in 175 years.”

The Democrat platform claims that Chicago was the “traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.”

That would have been news to them.

The Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi moved around quite a bit. They were forced westward by Iroquois expansionism. Some of the tribes to whom the DNC wants to assign Chicago were actually living in what is today Canada. There was no eternal Indian homeland in Chicago (named after a foul smelling plant) just a place different tribes passed through in between wars with each other and through alliances and wars with different Europeans. Like the War of 1812.

The United States and Great Britain ended the war with the Treaty of Ghent. Article Nine of the treaty mandated that the United States also conclude all hostilities with Indian tribes and “restore to such Tribes or Nations respectively all the possessions, rights, and privileges” so long as they “agree to desist from all hostilities against the United States of America.”

Some tribes chose to end hostilities, others moved with the British to Canada, and still others continued to engage in attacks. The tribes and smaller groups made and broke alliances with the British, the French and the Americans based on their perceived interests. They were not a fundamentally different “native people” with nobler, peaceful and more spiritual values. That is white liberal noble savage nonsense. They were colonists, warriors and hunters, like the Europeans, but without the same level of civilizational development or technology.

The DNC’s land acknowledgment fails to address any of this thorny history or answer the question of whether the Democrats, whose original party foolishly started the War of 1812 while being unprepared to fight it, would have been better off losing the war and the country.

Would Kamala prefer a world in which the British not only burned the White House but retained possession of it because that is what her party’s idiotic ‘land acknowledgment’ amounts to.

Instead the DNC reduces the Indians to magical “indigenous” people who “have been here since time immemorial” and “protected our lands, waters, and animals.”

The Indian tribes did not protect land and animals, they used them as hunting grounds.

Whatever human population existed in the Americas (which likely little resembled the modern conception of Indian tribes) probably led to the extinction of the megafauna, such as the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. They in turn were probably exterminated by the Indians, much as the more indigenous Hawaiians were enslaved and killed by the Polynesian colonists.

The Indians had more trouble hunting herd animals to extinction than they did apex predators, but that was because they lacked the technology to wipe out entire species. And those who did, like the Mayans and the Mound Builders (who built pyramids in Illinois and had more right to a DNC land acknowledgement) lacked the technology to survive overhunting a food species.

The myth of Indians valuing and preserving wildlife only to have Americans swoop in and destroy species like the bison or the passenger pigeon is more white liberal noble savage nonsense. While some tribes sensibly took steps to limit the impact of their hunting, others gleefully killed as many animals as they could. Indian creation myths left them with little grasp of the possibility of species extinction and refused to accept it when it was explained to them.

Perhaps the DNC could tell us how hunting bison by driving them off cliffs in huge numbers entailed protecting animals. Or killing entire herds of bison just for their tongues.

Given horses, rifles and a market demand for bison, beaver and other animals, the Indian tribes engaged in large scale killing of animals whose existence they took for granted.

The death of the bison and the passenger pigeon were more due to the Indians than Americans.

But the DNC is not interested in turning over Chicago to the Indians. No more than it is interested in real history and real Indians. Much as black people are to the 1619 Project, the Indians are to land acknowledgements as only a means to delegitimize America.

The DNC’s continuing use of land acknowledgements is more than an accident.

While the 2016 Democrat platform at least tipped the hat to the Founding Fathers, the 2024 platform makes a point of rejecting their work and the entire notion of America.

In a paragraph proposing slavery reparations and a study of “the continuing impacts of slavery” (which ended over 150 years ago), the DNC 2024 platform sarcastically jabs at the Declaration of Independence by endorsing ‘equity’ and contends that “we have a long way to go to realize the full promise of America, but we are committed as a party to continuing the work to build a nation where all people are not only created equal, but treated equally throughout their lives.” There is understandably no mention of the “inalienable rights” that come next since the purpose of equity is to eliminate individual rights and make the state absolute in all things.

The only mentions of the “constitution” in the DNC 2024 platform involve either attacking former President Trump or falsely claiming that there is some constitutional right to killing infants in the womb. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, once seen as the founders of the party, are absent, the only Jackson in the document is Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Democrats claim that they want to “ensure the promise of America for everyone, including black, Latino, and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Americans”, but what is that promise and where was it made? The DNC platform does not know or care.

America, in the DNC view, is an unfulfilled “promise” of equality that their party intends to fulfill through equity. What it is not is exceptional. Its history is of no interest. It is a bunch of racists living on stolen Indian land. And the mission of the Democrats is to put an end to America through a totalitarian state for which the DNC platform is only a partial blueprint.

Daniel Greenfield is a columnist, an investigative journalist and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.