Opinion

Steven Newcomb: Challenging the roots of federal Indian policies

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

"Neither the United States as a whole, nor any individual state of the United States, has a right to unilaterally impose an inferior political status upon us as Indigenous peoples, without our free and informed consent. I am challenging an argument commonly made during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and later centuries, that some “Christian people,” “Christian state,” or “Christian power” was entitled to assume a right of domination over our free and independent ancestors and over our traditional territories. To this day that argument undergirds the claim by the United States that it has an ultimate dominating authority, or “plenary power,” over our nations, and our lands, territories, and resources, and that we are, at most “domestic dependent nations.”

What is called U.S. federal Indian law and policy is nothing other than a carefully constructed and carefully guarded institution of American domination over our Indigenous Nations that has been successfully passed from one generation of Americans to the next.

How do we know this? Because of the words found in Vatican documents and in the overall Christian European history that gave birth to U.S. federal Indian law and policy. The evidence is found in words such as “conquer” “conquest,” “conqueror,” “empire,” “sovereignty,” “the sovereign,” “their Highnesses,” “lordship,” “overlordship,” “overriding,” “dominion,” “the crown,” “ultimate title,” and “ultimate dominion,” “domestic,” “dependent.” Each and every one of these terms is but a different expression and manifestation of domination."

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: On Federal Indian Domination (Indian Country Today 7/19)