The United States was built on the theft of Indigenous land and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans. The European doctrine of discovery declared that Christian nations had the right to claim lands already home to millions of people, and the US Supreme Court wrote it into American law in 1823. From the first colonies onward, settlement advanced through war, massacre, and broken treaties. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 drove the Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations from their homelands at gunpoint, and thousands died on the Trail of Tears. By the end of the nineteenth century, roughly 1.5 billion acres had been taken from Native nations.

The same expansion carried the United States beyond its borders. In the war of 1846 to 1848, it seized nearly half of Mexico's territory. In 1893, US businessmen and Marines overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1898, Washington took Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, crushing the Filipino independence struggle in a brutal war. The logic of settler colonialism at home became the logic of empire abroad, extended through the military bases, coups, and wars of the century that followed.

Indigenous peoples have never stopped resisting. Their resistance runs from the occupation of Alcatraz and the American Indian Movement's stand at Wounded Knee in 1973 to the water protectors at Standing Rock and the movement for Land Back. The Lakota have refused payment for the Black Hills, which the Supreme Court acknowledged in 1980 were illegally taken, because the land itself is not for sale. To say the United States is an empire built on stolen land is not a slogan about the past. It is a demand for justice, for the return of land, and for the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, and it must be at the heart of any movement for liberation.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*