QUORA: 'Why aren't Native Americans taking back their country, The United States of America?'

QUORA *: Why aren't Native Americans taking back their country, The United States of America?

I posted this answer:

It’s not “their” country. A continent can’t belong to a race, and neither can a nation. That is a collectivist—racist, in this case—concept. Prior to the United States of America, early European settlers (and others) had as much right to migrate to the New World as did the ancestors of Native Americans.*

Whatever conflicts or injustices occurred through the centuries, the tribal nationalism no longer exists. The Enlightenment ideas of reason and individualism that culminated in the Founding of the United States of America ended that racial nationalism. The Founders established a nation that doesn’t belong to any race; a nation that legally upholds every individual’s rights to life, liberty, earned property, and the personal pursuit of happiness regardless of race, gender, or ancestral origin. That makes America, in its Founding principles, the truly moral and enlightened nation. A nation that doesn’t recognize the sanctity and freedom of every individual life regardless of skin color is not a legitimate society or government, and should be either reformed or swept into the “dustbin” of history. True, America didn’t live up to its principles in many ways at the start. But with the Declaration of Independence at their backs, hard-fighting reformers eventually allowed all people--blacks, women, Native Americans, gays--to win their rightful political equality under law.

After millennia in which conquest, subjugation, and plunder fueled by collectivism was ubiquitous throughout the world, it was finally declared that each individual life is sovereign and self-governed, not owned by any tribe. Why would anyone want to roll back that progress? Should some gang labeled “Native Americans” attempt to “take back their country,” it would be the modern equivalent of the barbarians that overran the Roman Empire. The premise of the question is philosophically aligned with the master-race policies of Hitler’s Germany or Imperial Japan, the modern white supremacist alt-Right, or any other racial supremacist movement in history. A red supremacist is no better than a white supremacist.

People of Native American descent have no more right to call the United States of America “their country” as any other American citizen. America is an individualist nation built by free people. I would like to think that most Native Americans recognize the moral superiority of the American system, whose foundational value of inalienable individual rights enables peaceful coexistence among people of all races but allows no single race to declare the nation “theirs.” Stop living in the dismal tribal past. Celebrate America. It’s what we all have in common.

*[NOTE: I’ll use the term “Native American” here for clarity. But I don’t like the term to define any particular group. Every one of us born in the U.S. is equally a native American, regardless of when one’s distant ancestors migrated to North America. To say otherwise is racist.]

Related Reading:

Is America Based on a "Land Grab From the Native American People?"

The Enemies of Christopher Columbus: Answers to Critical Questions About the Spread of Western Civilization—Thomas A. Bowden

Was America 'made possible by stealing Indian land and the labor of slaves?'

The Dakota Access Pipeline Controversy, American Indians, and American History

The American Dream

* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.]