The difficulty of accurately analyzing the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh is well demonstrated in an article published by Robert T. Coulter (co-authored with Steven M. Tullberg) in 1984 in the book The Aggressions of Civilization. In their article, “Indian Land Rights,” the two scholars say that the Supreme Court’s analysis of Johnson v. M’Intosh found that “the right of discovery…did not limit the legal powers or rights of Indian nations in their homelands.”

Although it would have been great if this characterization had been correct, this is a curious conclusion, especially given what the Supreme Court actually said. Unfortunately, in the Johnson ruling the Supreme Court said that the Indians’ “…rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nation, were necessarily diminished…by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave title to those who made it.” If the word “diminished” means anything, it means “to limit” by decreasing or reducing something in size, content, or extent.