Native women at the U.S. Supreme Court. Photo by Indianz.Com / Available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
If you're looking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court to explain her disastrous decision in Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, you won't find it in her new book, My Own Words. Steven Newcomb (Shawnee / Lenape) of the Indigenous Law Institute revisits the 2005 case:
When Justice Ginsburg invoked the doctrine of discovery in her City of Sherrill ruling, she was not basing her ruling on “human dignity.” She was citing to a racist and religiously bigoted doctrine that dominates our nations and dehumanizes our peoples on the basis of the Bible and Christianity. Evidence of this form of reasoning is found in the wording and arguments contained in a legal brief that the U.S. Justice Department submitted in 1954 to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States. That U.S. legal brief argued that the Tee-Hit-Ton Indians should not receive monetary compensation for a taking of their timber because “the Christian nations of Europe acquired jurisdiction over the lands of heathens and infidels.” 1954 was the same year the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which Justice Ginsburg says has done so much to advance “respect” and “human dignity.” Yet, importantly, not one word of her book addresses the disrespectful and dehumanizing arguments that the U.S. Justice Department put forward that very same year against our Original Native Nations on the basis of the Bible and Christianity. Although Justice Ginsburg’s speech in South Africa was about the U.S. justice system supposedly working to end racial discrimination in the United States with its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, I do not consider our Original Nations to be part of a “racial minority.” Our nations long predate the United States of America. Our nations are pre-American. We are the pre-invasion nations. We are the pre-American nations and peoples on the Turtle Island continent.Read More:
Steven Newcomb: On Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Book, 'My Own Words' (Indian Country Today 11/3) U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Sherrill v. Oneida Nation:
Syllabus | Opinion [Ginsburg] | Concurrence [Souter] | Dissent [Stevens]
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