Pop singer Billie Eilish’s declaration that “No one is illegal on stolen land” at this year’s Grammy Awards ruffled the Make America Great Again crowd. Many grumbled about how Eilish, who lives in a 14 million dollar mansion in Los Angeles, didn’t seem ready to give up her estate despite its being “stolen”. I was intrigued, however, by the comments by a spokesperson for the Gabrieleno Tongva tribe:
“As the First People of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land. Eilish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property. We do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country … It is our hope that in future discussions, the tribe can explicitly be referenced to ensure the public understands that the greater Los Angeles basin remains Gabrieleno Tongva territory”.
Also at the Grammys this year, Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny declared:
“Before I say thanks to God, I gotta say, ICE out. We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans”.
Bad Bunny’s remark that we are not savages, animals or aliens, might refer collectively to the Hispanic peoples of the Americas. But you could also interpret this remark as implying that the Hispanic population inside the United States border belong there regardless of their immigration status. Either interpretation can also be applied to Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime show performance, earlier this week, where he marched at the head of a parade carrying the flags of every country in the American continents and holding a ball emblazoned with “Together We Are America”.
The most charitable reading here might be that he was asserting that “America” applies to the entirety of the Western hemisphere, not merely to the USA. On the other hand, independent journalist Alex Berenson was surely not the only person to view this staging as directly challenging the very concept of border controls:
“The imagery here could not be less subtle, down to the fact that football is the most explicitly warlike of all team sports, with the goal to cross territory and reach the other team’s ‘end zone’. We are marching over the border, whether you like it or not, so you’d better figure out how to accommodate us”.
Now we get to the weird philosophical aspect of what would otherwise be just celebrity gossip. The MAGA movement is widely condemned by its political opponents for being, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others resolutely phrase it, “neo-nationalist”. This is preemptively bad, of course, because “nationalism” these days is almost exclusively associated with certain horrendous political movements in twentieth century Europe. The National Socialist slogan Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) has come to expressly render any attempt to link a people to a specific portion of land as both racist and fascist, and no doubt many other nasty epithets as well.
Yet what are we to understand by Eilish’s “stolen land” remarks other than that there exists a relationship between the bloodlines of the Gabrieleno Tongva tribe and the lands of the Los Angeles basin? For that matter, when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rebuffed Trump’s endless trolling of the European Union by stoutly declaring “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders” (so: not to the Danes), is this not also establishing a relationship between the bloodlines of the tribes of Greenland and the island upon which they live?
What we to understand by Eilish’s “stolen land” remarks other than that there exists a relationship between the bloodlines of the Gabrieleno Tongva tribe and the lands of the Los Angeles basin?
If neo-nationalism of the MAGA kind is illegitimate because it invokes the dreaded concept of Blood and Soil, why is it acceptable to invoke tribal connections between ancestral bloodlines and land?
One potential explanation has the additional merit of also explaining why nobody took the Gabrieleno Tongva remarks as seditious or treasonous: the military power of these tribes lies in the past, whereas the political, economic, and military power of the United States stands near an effective apex. These kinds of Tribal Blood and Soil relationships can then be treated as anti-imperialistic, and therefore morally mandatory—consider the prevalence of Land Acknowledgements at events in Canada and parts of the United States. Yet there’s something patronizing about all these attempts to denounce and resist a certain kind of imperial-adjacent political power by asserting the prior legitimacy of non-nations above and against the nation states that displaced them. Advocates of this ethical framework can generously acknowledge Tribal Blood and Soil, because they have absolutely no intention of giving back any of this land, nor indeed of acceding to any rival attempts at governance, especially to any kind of insular national mythos like that of MAGA.
There is something patronizing about all these attempts to denounce a certain kind of imperial-adjacent political power by asserting the prior legitimacy of non-nations above and against the nation states that displaced them.
Once it comes into focus, you can see this dynamic playing out in dozens of ways in all sorts of places around our planet. MAGA folks seem to insist on glossing all this elevation of victims as Marxist-adjacent, which, to be fair, is how it will seem if you haven’t engaged with Foucault or his successors. Yet Marx expressly pushed for the liberation of the working class, and in the US this would be MAGA, at least to a fair approximation.
We face political conflict between the folkloric images of flag-lovers and the equally mythic transnational mass society of the human. In the United States, neo-nationalism violently clashes with the thin veneer of Tribal Blood and Soil that excuses so many people from thinking about how the problems of the US imperial machine did not begin with Trump, and certainly will not end when he leaves office.
