The United States was built on the conquest of Indigenous land and the destruction of the peoples who held it.
Long before European colonization, the continent was home to many different nations and societies with their own governments, economies, cultures and ways of using and caring for the land. These societies were not all alike, and their systems of landholding differed. But the capitalist system that developed through European colonization brought a new drive to turn land itself into private property and a source of profit. For the colonizers, Indigenous control of the land stood in the way, and that made the struggle over land fundamental from the beginning.
The U.S. wanted the land itself
European colonial powers seized territory throughout the Americas through war, forced removal, broken agreements and the destruction of Indigenous societies, and the U.S. continued and expanded this process after independence. Unlike colonial systems concerned mainly with extracting taxes or labor from a conquered population, much of U.S. expansion sought the land itself. Indigenous peoples were driven from territories wanted for farms, plantations, railroads, mines, towns and capitalist expansion.
This is why the history of Indigenous oppression cannot be understood simply as racial prejudice. Racism justified conquest, but the conquest had a material foundation: the seizure of land and resources and the destruction of Indigenous control over them.
Marx called this process original expropriation — the violent separation of people from the land and other means of production, creating capitalist property on one side and a class with nothing to sell but its labor power on the other. On this continent it wore a specific face: the U.S. government, settlers, railroads, speculators and banks worked together to take Indigenous land, cut it into deeds and open it for profit. Land seized from Indigenous peoples became private property — it could be bought and sold, mortgaged, mined, farmed for profit and granted to railroad and other corporations. Capital accumulated through dispossession.
The conquest was genocidal
The conquest was genocidal. Indigenous populations were devastated by disease brought from Europe, but disease alone does not explain what happened. Colonial governments and later the U.S. state carried out wars, massacres, forced removals and policies that destroyed food supplies and drove entire peoples from their homelands. The purpose was repeatedly to break Indigenous resistance and open territory for settlement and capitalist development.
The forced removal of Indigenous nations from the southeastern U.S. in the 1830s is one well-known example; thousands died during removals that became known collectively, through the Cherokee experience, as the Trail of Tears. As U.S. expansion moved westward, the same pattern continued: military campaigns forced nations onto reservations, and settlers, mining companies, railroads and land speculators followed. The destruction of the buffalo herds attacked the material basis of life for many Plains peoples as effectively as military conquest.
Genocide does not mean only mass killing. It also includes attempts to destroy peoples as peoples — breaking their relationship to the land, suppressing their languages and cultures, separating children from their communities and destroying their political and social institutions.
Allotment broke up collective land
Once Indigenous peoples had been confined to reservations, the attack on their land did not stop. The U.S. government increasingly tried to break up collectively held Indigenous lands and replace them with individual private property. The 1887 Dawes Act divided reservation land into individual allotments, and land declared “surplus” was then opened to non-Indigenous settlement.
This was presented as a program to “civilize” Indigenous people by turning them into individual farmers and property owners. In reality, it transferred millions of acres out of Indigenous hands. The policy shows how closely colonialism and capitalist property relations were connected: collective possession of land was treated as backward, private property as progress. But what was called progress meant destroying Indigenous control over the land so that it could enter the capitalist market.
The schools aimed to destroy peoples
The attack extended far beyond land. For generations, Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their languages, practice their cultures or maintain their traditional identities. Children suffered forced labor, physical and sexual abuse, hunger and disease. Many died and never returned home.
These schools were not separate from the broader process of conquest. Once military resistance had been suppressed, the state tried to accomplish through forced assimilation what warfare had not: the destruction of Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples. The aim was not simply to change individual beliefs — it was to break the bonds connecting people to their nations, cultures, communities and land.
Indigenous peoples are nations
Indigenous peoples in the U.S. cannot be understood only as a racial group. They belong to peoples and nations whose existence predates the United States. Many entered treaties with the U.S. government, and those treaties themselves demonstrate that the U.S. dealt with Indigenous peoples as political nations possessing territory and rights. The U.S. repeatedly violated those agreements.
This is why questions of Indigenous oppression involve national oppression and self-determination, not simply individual equality. Formal equality before the law cannot by itself settle questions of stolen land, treaty rights, political sovereignty, water rights or control over natural resources. A people dispossessed of its territory does not regain what was taken simply because individual members receive equal legal rights.
Capitalism still presses on Indigenous land
The struggle over Indigenous land is not only a chapter in the distant past. Mining, oil and gas development, pipelines, dams, military installations and other projects continue to threaten Indigenous lands and water. Corporations seek valuable resources, governments claim authority to approve their extraction, and Indigenous nations and communities are repeatedly forced to defend rights that treaties and previous struggles were supposed to guarantee. The form changes, but an old conflict remains: who will decide what happens to the land?
The struggle at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline showed this clearly. What appeared to corporations as a route for moving oil crossed land and water bound up with treaty rights, Indigenous sovereignty and the survival of communities. Such struggles also show why the environmental question and the question of Indigenous liberation are closely connected: capital treats land, water and minerals according to their value for accumulation, and Indigenous struggles often confront this directly, because capitalist expansion continues to press against territories and resources that Indigenous peoples are fighting to protect.
Resistance never ended
Indigenous peoples were never simply passive victims of conquest. They resisted from the beginning. They fought colonial armies, defended their territories, maintained languages and cultures despite efforts to destroy them, preserved political institutions and repeatedly forced governments to recognize rights the state had tried to erase. Resistance has taken many forms: armed struggle, treaty struggles, land occupations, labor struggles, legal battles, cultural revival and mass movements. Indigenous survival itself is a defeat for policies intended to make Indigenous peoples disappear.
These struggles have also affected the broader class struggle. When Indigenous peoples resist corporations seeking land, minerals, oil or water, they confront some of the most powerful sections of capital. Workers have every reason to support those struggles.
National oppression is what divides the working class
Marxists fight for the unity of the working class. But unity cannot be built by asking oppressed peoples to set aside their own national rights. Workers belonging to an oppressor nation have a special responsibility to oppose the oppression carried out in their name. For workers in the U.S., that means supporting Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights and self-determination and opposing the continued seizure and exploitation of Indigenous land.
This does not divide the working class. National oppression is what divides it. Solidarity with oppressed nations helps create the trust necessary for real working-class unity.
Socialism must confront the land question
Socialism cannot simply take over the existing property relations of the United States and call them social ownership. Much of that property rests on land originally taken from Indigenous peoples, so a socialist transformation has to confront the national and land questions created by conquest. That means respecting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, honoring treaty rights and addressing demands for the restoration of land and control over resources. The precise forms will be determined through struggle and by Indigenous peoples themselves, but the essential principle is clear: socialism cannot reproduce colonial domination under a different economic name.
Capitalism turned enormous areas of land into private property and commodities while breaking the peoples who stood in the way. A socialist society must move in the opposite direction — toward collective decision-making, restoration of the rights of oppressed peoples and a relationship with the land based on human need rather than private accumulation. The struggle for Indigenous liberation is therefore not separate from the struggle against capitalism; it is part of the struggle to overturn the social relations created through conquest, expropriation and class rule.
Additional reading
Capital, Volume I, Chapter 31: “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” — by Karl Marx (1867). Marx identifies colonial conquest, the seizure of land, slavery and the plunder of the Americas as central processes in the original expropriation that helped create capitalism.
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto — by Vine Deloria Jr. (1969). A classic Indigenous critique of U.S. colonial policy, assimilation and the treatment of Indigenous nations.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States — by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014). Traces the development of the United States through conquest, land seizure, war and Indigenous resistance rather than treating Indigenous history as a side story to U.S. history.
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance — by Nick Estes (2019). Connects the Standing Rock struggle to the much longer history of Indigenous resistance to conquest, dispossession and capitalist development.
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth — by The Red Nation (2021). Connects Indigenous liberation, land, capitalism and ecological struggle and argues for Indigenous sovereignty as part of a wider transformation of society.