Steven Newcomb: High court still relying on Christian doctrine

When Cristobal Colón made landfall on a sandy beach in the Caribbean, he planted the royal standards (flags) of Castile and Aragon and performed a ceremonial act of “discovery and possession.” The “standards” he planted in the soil were physical flags, but those flags also symbolized Christendom’s ideas and standards of judgment which Colón and other invaders intended to impose on the newly “discovered” land, and on the free and independent non-Christian nations and peoples already existing here.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court extended Christendom’s idea of “standards” in the case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York when it wrote: “[We] hold that ‘standards of federal Indian law and federal equity practice’ preclude the Tribe [the Oneida Indian Nation] from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” A traditional council fire was the background frame of reference for the Court’s phrase “rekindling embers of sovereignty,” and “a dying fire” is the frame of reference for the term “embers.” The Court’s use of the word “embers” and its allusion to the idea of a “dying fire,” calls to mind a fire “going out” or being “extinguished.” Similar imagery is at play when an “aboriginal title” of Indian “occupancy” is said to have been “extinguished.” The two senses of “extinguishment” are related because once aboriginal title was said to be “extinguished,” it generally followed that the council fire of the Original Nation was no longer to be found on that land because the people had been removed from their traditional territory.

The Supreme Court’s use of the words “rekindling” and “embers” evokes an idealized mental image of an Original Nation’s Council Fire. It implies a backstory that, by implication, has the Supreme Court writing the obituary of the Oneida Nation, and, by extension, for every one of our Original Nations.