Systematic Land Theft

In Systematic Land Theft, each chapter captures how land has been lost in Black and Indigenous communities. Hishaw, uses her family’s experience of land loss as a case study, throughout the book to affirm how bias policies dispossess Blacks and Tribal groups of their land. The reality is Whites presently own over 95% of the farmland in the United States, due to the misappropriation of tribal lands and the exploitation of enslaved African labor. As Europeans strategically immigrated and implemented English common law into U.S. governance, property ownership was created. The physical division of tribal land resulted in statehood, thus replacing indigenous beliefs of communal living. Adopting European religious beliefs and customs in the U.S., influenced the Five Civilized Tribes’ ownership of enslaved Africans. U.S. property laws were implemented to equip settlers with tribal land and afford Europeans’ protection, while disenfranchising non-Whites.