This is not about wrapping anything in words. It's about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.

You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That's just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.

You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.

No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn't the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn't. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.

Ah, the classic we're all just squatters on a rock defense. This is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb and hoping no one notices you're trying to justify a very specific and recent theft by invoking a vague, ahistorical free-for-all. Let's unpack your masterclass in bad faith.

First, the statement nobody has any claim to any land is a philosophical thought experiment for freshman ethics seminars, not a serious framework for modern justice. If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn't be paying a mortgage or respecting property lines. You'd be trying to plant a flag in your neighbor's backyard. But you don't. You only trot out this radical nihilism when it's time to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty, because applying it universally would immediately collapse the society you benefit from.

Then we get to the core of the argument, the whole they did it too school of history. Sure, conflict and displacement happened between pre colonial societies. To then equate that with the organized, state-sanctioned project of genocide, land theft, and cultural eradication enacted by European empires is so laughably dishonest it borders on parody. It's like saying a bar fight and the Normandy invasion are the same because both involve violence. The scale, intent, and lasting structural power are so fundamentally different that only someone desperate to avoid accountability would conflate them.

Your hypothetical about one tribe taking over if left alone is pure fantasy, a just-so story you've invented to make colonialism seem inevitable. It's not history. It's fan fiction for the apologist. You're judging real people who suffered a documented catastrophe against your imaginary scenario of what might have happened, and then using your own fiction to wash your hands of the real consequences. This is the ultimate colonial mindset, projecting your own violent assumptions onto other cultures to make their dispossession seem like a natural event rather than a deliberate crime.

The punchline, of course, is that this entire line of reasoning only ever flows one way. It's only ever used to undermine Indigenous claims. You never apply this nobody has a claim logic to the current title holder, the corporation, or the state. Their deed, derived directly from that original theft, is somehow treated as sacred. So your whole philosophy is a sham. The goal isn't to debate land claims. It's to freeze the current distribution of power, which you benefit from, by pretending all claims are equally invalid except, conveniently, the one that gives you your house. It's a shell game of morality where you get to keep the prize and call everyone else a hypocrite for wanting it back. 🤡