For a few years now, hearing people say that land was "stolen" from indigenous americans during colonisation has never quite sat right with me semantically. I do not believe this word is accurate, and I propose we use phrases like "american land was enclosed" instead.
The appeal of the word "stolen" is clear, it's a concept which rightly communicates the severity and injustice of the act of enclosure. However I do not believe it accurately describes the process of european apropriation of american land (and land from other colonised nomadic peoples throughout the world). Indiginous american people did not concieve of that land as belonging to anyone. They were then denied access to that land and forcably dissplaced and exterminated. To steal something it must first have belonged to someone, but this land belonged to no one (and therefore, to everyone). The enclosure movement is a fascinating bit of history which I recomend reading about but in summary, it was the process by which, in medieval and ramping up in early capitalist england, common land was forcibly appropriated by the ruling class, denying commoners free access to this land. In modern terms we might say this is similar to the process of privitisation. Taking something which was previously communal and dividing it up in ownership among few members of the ruling class. This is a more accurate parallell to what took place in areas where nomadic peoples were subject to colonisation.
When we say land was "stolen", we are buying into the idea that land ownership is the natural state of things, and saying that the problem is simply that the wrong people now own the land. This is in my view buying into harmful ideas. Land ownership, and nationhood, borders, are not concepts with direct equivelants in many indiginous cultures prior to european arrival. The problem is that people think they can own land in the first place. Saying the land was enclosed more accurately communicates the fact that the central issue was the transferance of a common, "non-owned" thing into a state of ownership.