Some people like to make up shit about themselves. In grammar school, there was a kid to used to tell us that he had the Mach 5 in his garage and that Gigantor was stored in his attic (supposedly the roof of his house slid open so G could get out). If they aren't called out for it early on, the lies get bigger, and after a time they can't go back out the way they came - so they expand and embellish until it becomes a pseudo-reality. I'd be interested in knowing if she engaged in this kind of stuff as a kid.
I have a hard time getting all twisted up about the business of "stolen land". There is significant evidence in studies that there are no truly "indigenous" people in the US anyway - that everyone's presence here is a result of migrations that can go back 30,000 years - from Eurasia (via the Bering Land Bridge) or South America on the west coast and the Nordic countries on the east. I also don't place a lot of stock in the theory that people spontaneously leapt into existence from hot springs (that's probably as likely as the Gigantor story). At the time America was colonized/settled, territory or land was acquired by, well, taking it. Sometimes you had to fight to maintain what you already had because there was no means of proving that it belonged to you. This was common among Indian tribes as well - somebody showed up, said "I'm taking this" and the battle was joined. There were no land deeds, no mortgage bankers and no Century 21 offices in the center of town. No lawyers, either - cough, cough. That is not an excuse or mean that it was right - that's just the way it was. We can't view yesterday's transgressions through the prism of today's standards.