The Illusion of Empty Lands
The context they conveniently omitted: DOUBLE STANDARD ANALYSIS: Fabricated Emptiness CASE A: Trump's Greenland Remark (2019) Donald Trump's characterization of Greenland as a 'large piece of ice' was presented in the media as a peculiar diplomatic misstep. The Deutsche Welle article (2024) notes, 'The US president's curt description of Greenland recalls a pattern in which colonial authorities
have sometimes classified land as 'not used' or 'uninhabited,' overlooking Indigenous land relations and stewardship.' This coverage frames it as a historical echo, a 'pattern' observed by academics, rather than a direct, active continuation of a specific imperial strategy. CASE B: Indigenous Dispossession in the Americas and Australia (16th-19th Centuries) Compare this to historical narratives
surrounding European colonization. The doctrine of terra nullius —Latin for 'nobody's land'—was explicitly invoked by colonial powers to justify the seizure of territories inhabited by Indigenous peoples. For example, British colonial law applied terra nullius to Australia in 1788, effectively declaring the continent 'empty' despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples, whom the British refused to recognize as having legal land rights (Burchill, 2008). Similarly, in North America, concepts like 'wasteland' or 'frontier' were used to diminish Indigenous presence and create legal pretexts for land cessions and forced removals. The 1830 Indian Removal Act in the United States, for instance, propelled the forced migration of Cherokee,