A crowd at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 2016. Photo by Indianz.Com / Available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Can the original nations get a fair shake in the courts when federal Indian law is rooted in religious concepts of domination? Steven Newcomb (Shawnee / Lenape) of the Indigenous Law Institute explores the origins of a system that views indigenous as heathens and infidels:
In 1954, at the opening of the era of Termination, the U.S. Justice Department delivered its legal brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, and later delivered oral arguments to the Court on that basis. The issue before the Court was whether the Tee-Hit-Ton Indians in Alaska were entitled to monetary compensation for a taking of their timber by the U.S. Interior Department. The Justice Department introduced the context for its argument with the following: “The discovering nations acquired absolute title to the lands of this continent subject only to the Indian right of occupancy.-Prior to the great era of discovery beginning in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the Christian nations of Europe acquired jurisdiction over newly discovered lands by virtue of grants from the Popes, who claimed the power to grant to Christian monarchs the right to acquire territory in the possession of heathens and infidels.” The Justice Department looked back to the 14th century to provide an example. “For example,” wrote the U.S. attorneys, “in 1344, [Pope] Clement VI had granted the Canary Islands to Louis of Spain upon his promise to lead the islanders to the worship of Christ, and, following the discovery of the New World by Columbus, [Pope] Alexander VI in 1493 and 1495 issued bulls granting to Spain all lands not under Christian rule. . .”Read More:
Steven Newcomb: Christian Dominionism at the Root of U.S. Federal Indian Law (Indian Country Today 10/22)
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