The 2024 Democratic Party Platform opens with a “land acknowledgment,” stating that the United States of America was established on territory stolen from the Native American tribes. “We honor the communities native to this continent, and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands,” the document states, adding that the Democratic Nation Committee “pay[s] our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history who have protected our lands, waters, and animals.”
The platform, which the Democrats will vote to endorse alongside presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Chicago, Illinois, over the coming days, further acknowledges that the Chicago area, specifically, comprises “the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.”
The Democrats also “acknowledge the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten.”
The “traditional homelands” of the American Indians changed hands between the native tribes over generations of warfare long before the arrival of the first European settlers. Much of the Great Sioux Nation, which warred with the United States through the 19th century, was established on territory the Sioux had stolen from the Crow tribe, for instance.
The first English colony in North America was established in 1585 on Roanoke Island, modern-day North Carolina, on land where the regional ruler, Powhatan, had exterminated the local tribe. He did so in deference to a prophecy that he would be overthrown by a nation arising from the area and massacred the English colonists after their ships sailed away for the same reason. This set the stage for the Anglo-Powhatan Wars when more Englishmen arrived to establish the Jamestown colony.
