The acclaimed singer and songwriter Billie Eilish recently caused a furor by declaring that “no one is illegal on stolen land” in her acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards, adding “Fuck ICE.” Many men furiously denounced Eilish, treating her as out of her depth. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank gave her the advice to “shut your mouth and just entertain.” Bill Maher essentially called her stupid, pointing out that Eilish “didn’t go to school” (she was homeschooled) and wondering whether she meant we should “go back to living in teepees.”
Steve Forbes, writing in his grandfather’s publication Forbes, was equally patronizing, saying it was “preposterous to conclude that regrettable past actions mean that today we should let millions of foreigners illegally enter the U.S.,” and suggesting the Tongva tribe, on whose ancestral land Eilish’s Los Angeles home sits, could evict her. The New York Post and GB News gleefully hopped on this angle, wondering when Eilish was going to give her house to the Tongva, or to anyone who wanted to squat there. The Washington Post ran a column by law professors Richard Epstein and Max Raskin, arguing Eilish was ignorant of U.S. property law, under whose principles the land is not, in fact, considered stolen.
Interestingly, the Tongva tribe themselves responded to Eilish’s comments not with a demand for her to turn over her house, but an expression of appreciation for her drawing attention to the injustices upon which Los Angeles was founded. “We do value the instance when public figures provide visibility to the true history of this country," the tribe said, although they asked that future statements name them specifically. The tribe’s reaction exposes the poor reasoning of those who said Eilish’s beliefs would require to evacuate her home. Acknowledging that an injustice was done does not inherently commit us to a particular maximalist means of redressing that injustice. The tribe isn’t asking her to turn over her home. They’re asking for an acknowledgment of what happened.
Epstein and Raskin’s op-ed makes a downright childish argument, ironic considering that Eilish is the one accused of being an intellectual lightweight. They argue that “Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land,” and then cite Anglo-American legal principles, noting that “statutes of limitation and doctrines such as adverse possession clearly provide that you must sue by a certain date or your title is gone, no matter how maliciously acquired.” Therefore, even if we concede that Native American tribes were forcibly dispossessed, the land is not stolen, because enough time has passed. Of course, that doesn’t prove that it was not stolen, only that there is no legal obligation to give it back at this point.