"The Myth of the ‘Empty Land’: Settler Colonialism and Erasure"

  

The Myth of the ‘Empty Land’ is one of the most grotesque and calculated lies ever weaponized by the empire—a vicious fantasy that painted thriving Indigenous civilizations as barren wastelands, all to justify their annihilation. This wasn’t just propaganda; it was genocide’s opening act. Colonizers didn’t "discover" empty territories; they manufactured emptiness through slaughter, disease, and forced displacement, then gaslit the world into believing the land had been "waiting" for them. The legal fiction of terra nullius—Latin for "nobody’s land"—allowed British invaders to pretend Australia was a vacant desert, despite 65,000 years of Aboriginal stewardship. In America, the myth of the "Wild West" erased the fact that bison herds, cornfields, and complex trade networks had sustained millions before settlers arrived with rifles and smallpox blankets. And in Palestine, Zionist rhetoric of "a land without a people" sought to invisibilize entire villages, olive groves, and generations of Palestinian life before they were bulldozed for settlements. These weren’t accidents of history; they were deliberate acts of narrative warfare, where erasing the past was just as crucial as stealing the land. The myth persists because it’s easier to build on graves than to admit they exist.

Settler colonialism isn’t just invasion, it’s replacement, a slow-motion extermination project dressed up as "progress." Unlike the old-school empires that looted resources and left, settler colonies came to stay, bulldozing Indigenous societies to build their own on top. This isn’t just theft; it’s a war of attrition against memory itself, where the original people must vanish physically, culturally, or at least in the history books for the settlers to feel at home. Historian Patrick Wolfe nailed it when he said settler colonialism isn’t some bloody moment in the past; it’s a living system, an ongoing machine that grinds up Indigenous existence to fuel its expansion. Look at America: treaties were broken, children were stolen into boarding schools, and sacred lands were turned into national parks all to craft the myth that settlers "won" fair and square. Canada’s residential schools weren’t "mistakes"; they were policy, designed to "kill the Indian in the child." Palestine’s Nakba wasn’t "collateral damage"; it was the necessary clearing of the land for European refugees. Even today, when museums display Indigenous artifacts as "relics" or governments deny genocides, the message is clear: you are extinct, so we belong here. The horror isn’t just in the violence, but in the paperwork—the laws, the maps, the school curriculums all working to make replacement look inevitable. Settler colonialism doesn’t end; it just finds new ways to disappear people.

Land dispossession isn’t just theft, it’s the deliberate unraveling of entire worlds, a campaign of organized forgetting where every broken treaty and bulldozed village serves a single purpose: to make the land appear as if it was always meant for the colonizer. From the Trail of Tears to Palestine’s ongoing Nakba, forced removals weren’t tragic accidents; they were calculated acts of ethnic cleansing, dressed up as law. Treaties weren’t contracts they were traps, scraps of paper meant to be shredded the moment they became inconvenient. The U.S. government signed over 500 treaties with Native nations and violated every single one, turning ancestral homelands into real estate for railroads, mines, and suburbs. Australia’s terra nullius doctrine didn’t just deny Indigenous ownership it denied their humanity, declaring a continent of thriving cultures "empty" so settlers could fence it off like livestock. And when resistance flared, the response was always the same: massacres, mass deportations, and legalized land grabs disguised as "progress."

But stealing land wasn’t enough; settlers had to steal memory, too. Cultural genocide was the backup plan: if Indigenous people couldn’t be killed fast enough, their cultures would be smothered in cold blood. Canada’s residential schools where priests and politicians systematically tortured children to "civilize" them weren’t schools at all; they were death camps for language and tradition. Sacred sites were dynamited to make way for dams, or worse turned into tourist attractions, like the desecration of the Black Hills’ Paha Sapa, carved into Mount Rushmore as a monument to the thieves themselves. Governments banned ceremonies, outlawed languages, and rewrote history books to paint conquest as destiny.

And all of it was legal. The Doctrine of Discovery, a 15th-century papal decree that declared non-Christian lands "free real estate" for European kings still lurks in modern property law. Manifest Destiny wasn’t just propaganda; it was a death warrant, declaring Indigenous extinction "God’s will." Courts still cite these rotting doctrines to deny land claims, while museums hoard stolen bones and call it "science." The message was clear: if you can erase a people from their own story, you can make the world believe they never existed at all. The land wasn’t empty, it was made empty, corpse by corpse, law by law, lie by lie.

The ‘Empty Land’ myth is not some abstract lie; it’s a blood-soaked blueprint, repeated across continents with chilling precision, each time producing the same result: mass graves beneath fresh settlements. In Palestine, the Zionist slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" wasn’t just propaganda; it was a prelude to erasure. By the time European settlers arrived, Palestine was a thriving mosaic of villages, orchards, and ports yet colonial cartographers drew it as a barren wasteland, as if centuries of Palestinian life could be inked over. The Nakba of 1948 didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the violent realization of this myth, with over 700,000 Palestinians expelled at gunpoint so their homes could be repopulated overnight.

In North America, the myth took the form of the "vanishing Indian" a grotesque fantasy that Indigenous peoples were destined to fade away, clearing the path for "civilization." Settlers spun massacres like Wounded Knee as tragic but inevitable, while textbooks depicted Native nations as ghostly figures of the past, not living peoples resisting ongoing theft. The frontier wasn’t "won"; it was stolen, acre by acre, through broken treaties like the Dakota Access Pipeline betrayals, where "legal" land grabs continue today.

Australia’s terra nullius doctrine was perhaps the most brazen lie of all declaring a continent inhabited for 65,000 years "empty" so British convicts could claim it. The Stolen Generations, where Aboriginal children were ripped from their families to "assimilate," weren’t just cruelty they were population control, ensuring the next generation would forget their own land.

South Africa’s apartheid regime weaponized the same myth, herding Black communities into Bantustans; barren, artificial "homelands" while white settlers seized fertile land. Millions were displaced under the pretense that they "didn’t belong" in their own country.

Even Canada, which prides itself on polite multiculturalism, hides its founding violence behind myths of "peaceful settlement." The truth? Mass graves of Indigenous children are still being uncovered at residential school sites, while pipelines plow through unceded territories. The pattern is undeniable: settlers don’t just take land they rewrite reality, turning genocide into a footnote and resistance into a nuisance. The ‘Empty Land’ was never a fact; it was always a death warrant.

Indigenous resistance is the living, breathing counterpunch to the ‘Empty Land’ myth, a defiant roar that shatters colonial lies with unshakable truth. While empires built their myths on paper, Indigenous peoples carried their histories in oral traditions, passed down through generations like a fire that no storm could extinguish. These stories of creation, of struggle, of survival aren’t just folklore; they’re evidence, meticulously preserved in the face of state-sanctioned erasure. Colonial archives may have burned records and rewrote textbooks, but they couldn’t silence the voices whispering through time: We were always here.

The Land Back movement is where this resistance takes physical form not as a plea, but as a reclamation of stolen futures. At Standing Rock, water protectors stood against militarized police to defend sacred rivers from oil pipelines, proving that treaties weren’t relics but living promises. In Wet’suwet’en territory, Indigenous land defenders blocked construction crews with their bodies, showing the world that "unceded" doesn’t mean "uninhabited" it means never surrendered. These aren’t protests; they’re assertions of sovereignty, direct challenges to the myth that Indigenous peoples passively faded into history.

Decolonial scholarship has armed this resistance with intellectual artillery. Vine Deloria Jr.’s "Custer Died for Your Sins" didn’t just critique anthropology, it exposed it as grave robbery, showing how academia turned sacred objects into museum trophies. Edward Said’s "Orientalism" ripped the mask off Western scholarship, revealing how "experts" invented fantasies of empty lands to justify conquest. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s "Decolonizing Methodologies" handed Indigenous peoples the tools to dismantle colonial research, asking: Who owns history? Who gets to write it?

Even the dirt beneath our feet tells a different story than settlers want us to believe. Indigenous-led archaeology is unearthing proof of continuous habitation ancient cities, trade networks, agricultural systems that colonial narratives dismissed as "primitive." In the Amazon, terra preta soils reveal civilizations that shaped the land for millennia; in Australia, 65,000-year-old artifacts bulldoze the myth of terra nullius. Science, weaponized for so long to justify erasure, is now confirming what Indigenous peoples always knew: this land was never empty. It was made empty.

The fight isn’t just for land it’s for memory, for truth, for the right to exist in the past as well as the present. Every recovered language, every repatriated artifact, every blockade on stolen ground is a message to empire: you built your world on lies, and we are the proof. The ‘Empty Land’ myth is crumbling not because settlers finally "see the light," but because Indigenous peoples refuse to let the darkness win.

The myth of the ‘Empty Land’ isn’t confined to history books; it's alive and metastasizing today, fueling fresh waves of displacement under the banners of "development," "security," and "progress." In Israel-Palestine, the bulldozers never stopped. Since 1948, over 700,000 olive trees, sacred symbols of Palestinian rootedness, have been uprooted by settlers armed with court orders and M16s, while entire villages like Sheikh Jarrah are emptied at gunpoint to make way for luxury apartments. This isn’t "conflict"it’s slow-motion erasure, where every demolished home reinforces the lie that Palestine was "barren" before Zionism.

Half a world away, Mauna Kea stands as a sacred ancestor to Native Hawaiians and a cash cow for astronomers who see its summit as nothing but prime real estate for telescopes. When Kānaka Maoli elders chained themselves to lava rocks to block construction crews, they weren’t just protesting a telescope; they were rejecting the colonial gaze that turns sacred land into disposable commodity. Meanwhile, at Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline slithers through burial grounds and under rivers, proving that corporate profits still trump treaty rights in a country built on stolen land.

The Amazon rainforest dubbed the "lungs of the Earth" is being chainsawed into cattle ranches and soy fields, with Indigenous activists like Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips murdered for exposing illegal logging. In Africa, neo-colonial land grabs masquerade as "investment," with foreign corporations seizing ancestral farms to grow palm oil and chocolate for Western consumers, leaving locals to starve on the scraps of their own soil. This isn’t "business" it’s resource colonialism 2.0, where your morning coffee depends on someone else’s dispossession.

Even cities aren’t safe. Gentrification is urban settler colonialism, with Black and Brown communities priced out of their own neighborhoods as cafés and condos roll in like a new occupying army. From Brooklyn to Boyle Heights, the script is the same: art galleries follow evictions, and suddenly, a "revitalized" block has no room for the people who built it.

And when Indigenous land defenders stand in the way of this global land rush, they’re branded "terrorists" or "anti-progress." Berta Cáceres, murdered for opposing a Honduran dam. Oscar Eyraud Adams, shot dead for defending Kumiai water rights in Mexico. Over 1,700 environmental activists have been killed in the last decade, many Indigenous. This isn’t just violence it’s climate apartheid, where the same countries that fueled ecological collapse now send police to protect the oil drills and mines poisoning Indigenous land.

The ‘Empty Land’ myth was never about the past. It’s the operating system of today’s plunder, dressed in suits instead of conquistador armor. But from the frontlines of pipeline blockades to the courts fighting for land repatriation, Indigenous resistance is the living antithesis to this lie proof that the land was, is, and always will be occupied, defended, and alive.

The myth of the ‘Empty Land’ didn’t spread by accident, it was drilled into the collective psyche through a relentless propaganda machine masquerading as entertainment, education, and culture. Hollywood Westerns didn’t just tell stories; they rewrote genocide as heroism, turning scalp-hunting colonizers like John Wayne into American icons while reducing Native peoples to savage props or romanticized ghosts. Films like The Searchers and Dances With Wolves peddled the same poisonous lie: that Indigenous peoples were destined to vanish, making room for the "brave" settlers who "tamed" the wilderness. Even Disney’s Pocahontas; a sugar-coated cartoon, erased the real Pocahontas’s brutal kidnapping and forced assimilation, spinning her into a lovesick prop for white male fantasy. This wasn’t storytelling; it was cultural brainwashing, conditioning generations to see colonization as inevitable, even noble.

Schools doubled down on the erasure. Textbooks reduced millennia of Indigenous civilizations to a single chapter, framing Native Americans as footnotes in the "real" history of European conquest. The Trail of Tears became a "tragic detour" rather than a premeditated death march. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was taught as some divine birthright, not a genocidal land grab. Students memorized dates of colonial victories but never learned the names of the Indigenous nations that were burned off the map. This wasn’t education; it was intellectual colonization, ensuring kids would grow up believing the land was "discovered," not stolen.

Museum displays completed the illusion, turning vibrant cultures into relics behind glass cases artifacts labeled "prehistoric" or "primitive," as if their creators had conveniently disappeared to make room for "modernity." Sacred objects; pipes, masks, burial offerings were looted from graves and displayed as curiosities, while museums ignored living Indigenous artists and scholars. The message was clear: You belong in a display case, not in the present.

Today’s media continues the tradition, framing land rights struggles as "disputes" rather than resistance to ongoing theft. When Wet’suwet’en land defenders block pipelines, they’re painted as "radicals" disrupting the economy, not as people defending unceded territory. When Palestinians resist eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, Western headlines call it a "clash," not ethnic cleansing in slow motion. The bias is baked in: settler violence is "security"; Indigenous resistance is "unrest."

This isn’t just bias; it’s psychological warfare. By controlling the stories, the conquerors ensure each generation inherits the same lies: that empty land awaited them, that resistance is irrational, and that the past is settled. But from TikTok activists debunking colonial myths to Indigenous scholars rewriting textbooks, the truth is fighting back. The ‘Empty Land’ myth is rotting from the inside because you can’t gaslight people who never forgot the truth.

The myth of the ‘Empty Land’ is more than a historical lie it is the founding delusion of empire, a grotesque fairy tale that turns genocide into destiny and erasure into inevitability. From the Doctrine of Discovery to modern corporate land grabs, this myth has served as the psychological and legal scaffolding for centuries of theft, displacement, and cultural annihilation. Yet Indigenous resistance through land reclamation, decolonial scholarship, and the fierce revitalization of language and tradition proves that no lie can outlast the people it was meant to destroy. The truth is written in the unbroken threads of oral history, in the bones beneath bulldozed villages, and in the living defiance of those who refuse to vanish. Settler colonialism’s greatest fear is not legal challenges or protests, but memory itself, the kind that outlives textbooks, Hollywood lies, and state propaganda. The fight for justice is not just about returning land but restoring stolen futures, dismantling the systems that profit from disappearance. This is not a plea for inclusion; it is a reckoning. The ‘Empty Land’ was always a crime scene. Now, the evidence is speaking and the world must listen

WRITTEN BY SAFIA KHALID