Steven Newcomb: Setting sovereignty free from Christianity

In my view, we have spent too little time reflecting upon the full significance of our original free existence. Here’s an argument that Indian country is not using: “As a consequence of our original free existence we shall forever possess a fundamental right to live free of U.S. domination over our nations and peoples.”

The question is, when will we begin invoking our original free existence as a means of challenging the dominating underpinnings of U.S. federal Indian law and policy? Those underpinnings are premised on the Christian “Right of Discovery,” which is a conceptual system of Christian warfare against non-Christians which was woven into federal Indian law by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The actual phrase “right of discovery” appears only once in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh. “The right of discovery,” wrote Chief Justice John Marshall for a unanimous Supreme Court, “was confined to countries then unknown to Christian people.” Such countries unknown to Christians were inhabited by nations and peoples that had never been baptized. From a Christian viewpoint, the unbaptized existence of our ancestors was of political and legal significance.

Through a Christian lens, lands inhabited by unbaptized people were by definition empty because they were empty of Christians, and of Christian claims of “sovereignty” (domination). Christians defined unbaptized peoples as politically nullus (‘non-existent’) as far as “sovereignty” was concerned, and thus were deemed disqualified from being able to resist Christian claims of ascendancy. According to nineteenth century scholars Francis Lieber and Burke Aaron Hinsdale, the term nullus was applied to “a heathen, pagan, infidel, or unbaptized person.”