anson2995, surely you don’t mean that Alaska and the Louisiana purchase were made from the local tribe.
I will accept your take on it as being authoritative then. Your background was not immediately apparent from your username. (Maybe you should consider changing it to !MrDibble 
)
No, don’t do that. I seriously am not an authority, and I don’t think you were wrong in your comment, I just wanted to say that* I wasn’t*, either, and why I thought that.
Now that’s funny!
Ok, then, yours is at least based on more direct personal knowledge of the subject than my own.
It can just be difficult to evaluate how to refer to an ethnic group when members of the group differ among themselves in the terms they prefer or use (as in latino/hispanic/chicano, and Inuit/Eskimo). I worked on an exhibition once where one of the reviewers wanted us to refer to Pygmies as “short-statured hunter-gatherers.”
Peter Morris mentioned the reclaimed lands of the Netherlands, which have probably been held by the Netherfolk since the reclaiming. One of the United Arab Emirates (Bahrain?) has constructed new islands, and they have not changed hands since they were built.
I suppose some volcanic islands have grown in eruptions, and the new land would be unstolen in most cases.
Does it count if you move in after the original inhabitants died out or moved away due to something you didn’t do (such as climate change or a natural disaster)? What if your group didn’t directly cause the other group to die out, but did something that ended up causing them to die out (the epidemics that European colonists of North America inadvertently and unknowingly spread to the Indians would be an example of this)? If the latter doesn’t count as stealing land, there are probably some examples of unstolen land in the US.
Heh! PC gone crazy. I find it’s often the most educated (but least culturally-imersed) Bushmen who prefer “San”. They’re also the ones who are most influenced by Western notions of P.C. etc. I sometimes think the UN’s First Peoples working group was the worst thing to happen to the Khoisan peoples…
…well, other than smallpox, and that patch in the 1800s when there was a bounty on their heads (just the heads), but you get the point.
See post #3.
No, of course not. I guess I was trying to draw a distinction between these circumstances and what I thought the OP was describing, which was taking land from the locals by force. In retrospect, even that distinction is a subtle one, and perhaps not really germane to this conversation.
My comment about Palestine not having stood unconquered from 70 CE to 1948 still stands, though.
There is more truth to that quip then you may have suspected: after a group of Pitcairn men were convicted in 2004 on a number of rape and child abuse charges, an appeal was lodged with the Privy Council in London on the basis that the conviction was unfair, given that Pitcairn had been settled by by the Bounty mutineers, had never formally recognised British law, and that the defendants had no way of being aware of the law’s provisions. It seemed a plausible defence to me, but the Privy Council, not about to rule that they had no jurisdiction in the matter, tossed out the appeal.Link and link.
Actually, the Louisiana Purchase probably wasn’t legal even ignoring the issue of original native ownership. When France bought the territory from Spain one of the terms of the sale was that France would not resell the land to any other nation. The provision was obviously ignored when France sold Louisiana to the United States and Spain was in no position to protest at the time. If the British had won a decisive victory in the War of 1812 they could have made a strong legal case for overturning both the American and French purchases and returning the land back to Spain.
I hear Tabasco is a pretty unique state.
Well, y’see, the Indian needed food,
he needed skins for a roof.
But he only took what they needed,baby.
Billions of buffalo were the proof.
Yeah,its all right.
But then came the white man.
[sub]Muzak is mind-control![/sub]