As noted there are two theories. One is land belongs to "a people" based on the "right of discovery" and the other is land belongs to those people who occupy it by "right of conquest".
The US clearly has the right to the US by "right of conquest", but if we use the right of discovery, it becomes more difficult.
So, who are the original natives?
"Genetic studies suggest that the first people to arrive in the Americas descend from an ancestral group of Ancient North Siberians and East Asians that mingled around 20,000 to 23,000 years ago. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge sometime between then and 15,500 years ago, said David Meltzer, an archaeologist and professor of prehistory in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and author of the book "First Peoples in a New World, 2nd Edition" (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
But some archaeological sites hint that people may have reached the Americas far earlier than that.
For instance, there are fossilized human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico that may date to 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. That would mean humans arrived in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which occurred between about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of what is now Alaska, Canada and the northern U.S.
Other, more equivocal data suggest the first people arrived in the Western Hemisphere by 25,000 or even 31,500, years ago. If these dates can be confirmed, they would paint a much more complex picture of how and when humans reached the Americas."
What is clear is that for the most part, Native American tribes claiming land in North America were not the first to discover the land, but rather the last to conquer it before Europeans arrived.
Hence, their claims are the same as Americans, right of conquest. Under that theory, the last one to conquer has the principal claim.
However, if someone could show they are directed related to the original people who discovered land in the new world, they would have a "claim" based on the "right of discovery", whether they could assert their claim even in an international court would need to be seen, but the issue is somewhat mute, because most Native Americans reject the theory that the "original" humans to occupy the Americas were immigrants from Asia. At least, that is what I have been told by several Native Americans I know.
