Steven Newcomb. Photo from Finding the Missing Link
Everyone from European explorers to the U.S. Supreme Court have imposed religious metaphors on indigenous nations, influencing how they are treated in federal Indian law and policy, argues Steven Newcomb of the Indigenous Law Institute:
The idea of “Indian occupancy” is no more a natural physical feature of our nations than a front or a back is a natural feature of a tree. Ideas such as “Indians,” “occupancy,” “diminishment,” “ultimate dominion,” “civilized nations,” “uncivilized,” “savages,” “Christian people” and “heathens,” in the Johnson ruling, are examples of metaphors being used by the white men who were seated on the U.S. Supreme Court at that time. The concept of a “diminishment” of the original independence of our nations, for example, is a result of the white man’s metaphorical act, by which he mentally conceives of the independence of our nations as having been “diminished” or reduced. If anything, it is an act of “reduction” simply created by the minds of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court used various royal charters of England as the basis for its mental projection onto our nations of an Indian “title of occupancy” and a “diminishment” of our original independence. Those charters authorized “Christian people” to “discover” and “subjugate” (dominate) the islands, countries, region, and provinces of “heathens” and “infidels.” But there was also another powerful idea behind the U.S. Supreme Court mentally creating the idea that the independence of our nations had been “diminished” by “discovery.” This “something else” was what Chief Justice John Marshall called “ultimate dominion,” which he traced to the idea of an ultimate Christian right of “an ascendency.” Webster’s defines “ascendency” as “controlling or governing power: domination.” The background idea of a claimed Christian right of domination is what tacitly frames the idea of an Indian title of “occupancy.” Every time we see the United States ascribe an “Indian title of occupancy” to some Native nation or people, the idea of a claimed right of “Christian peoples” to the domination of non-Christian nations and their lands is always there in the background. An Indian title of “mere occupancy” and a metaphorical “diminishment” of the independence of Native nations (based on a claim that “Christian people” had “discovered” the lands of non-Christians) are not physical features of the existence of any original nation or people. They are metaphorically features of a world, or reality, of domination that the U.S. Supreme Court and the rest of the U.S. government meticulously invented and constructed through its mental activities. The U.S. Supreme Court constructed a dominating reality system for the control and containment of the original nations and peoples of the continent.Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: Imposing Metaphors on Original Nations: Part 1 (Indian Country Today 1/22)
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