The Caucasity of Colonizers

Written by Sikowis Nobiss

“I'm a fan of Denmark, but you know, the fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn't mean that they own the land.” {Another Savage Trump Quote}

The current president of the United States has no moral standing to lecture anyone about land ownership—especially not after the centuries of genocide, displacement, and theft committed against Indigenous Peoples across this continent. When the president recently claimed that Denmark’s historical claim to Greenland is invalid because “a boat landed there 500 years ago,” he ignored the fact that the very nation he presides over was built on the same logic: that first contact, conquest, and colonial assertion somehow grant permanent dominion over land and people.

This is the same logic that justified the Doctrine of Discovery—the 15th-century papal decree that European powers used to claim sovereignty over lands inhabited by Indigenous nations. It’s the same logic that fueled the Trail of Tears, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the forced removal of hundreds of tribes from their ancestral homelands. It’s the same logic that allowed the U.S. government to declare Native children “wards of the state” and place them in boarding schools designed to not to just erase their cultures and identities, but to genocide them.

Greenland is home to the Kalaallit, Tunumiit, and Inughuit, who make up nearly 90% of the population and who have lived there for time immemorial, long before any European ship arrived. Their sovereignty, self-determination, and right to govern their own land are not negotiable, which is why Denmark needs to give land and power back. However, to suggest that Denmark’s colonial claim is illegitimate while ignoring the U.S.’s own violent colonial legacy is not just hypocritical, it’s dangerous. It reveals a worldview that sees land as property to be seized, not as a living relationship between people and place. It not only reveals a society who’s only real culture is built on land theft, genocide and enslavement–but one where people will lie, ignore, whitewash and even defend their hypocrisy for the sake of their incessant greed for land, privilege and dominion over everything.

If the president truly believes that historical claims to land are invalid, then he must also acknowledge that the United States has no legitimate claim to the land it occupies today. The same logic he applies to Greenland must be applied to Turtle Island, this land colonizers call North America. The only path forward is to honor Indigenous sovereignty, return stolen lands, and support self-determination, not to re-attempt colonial conquests in the 21st century.

The world is watching. And Indigenous Peoples everywhere are reminding the world: we are still here. We have always been here. And they cannot attempt to erase us again by the same colonial logic that built their callous, vicious and delusional empires on our beautiful and sacred homelands.

This isn’t just about words, it’s about action and when we organize, we can force “our” leaders to reckon with the truth, which is–no one owns land by right of conquest. Land is not owned, it is stewarded. Indigenous Peoples have held, protected, and nurtured land since time immemorial, not as property, but as a relative. All living things, human and non-human, are bound to the land in reciprocal relationship. This is another truth that christian-colonial-capitalism tried to erase and one that we must restore throughout the world.