"When we, as Indian people, grapple with the meaning of U.S. federal Indian law and policy, we are grappling with the nature of the “word-reality” that the officials of the United States constructed over many generations as a method of containment, limitation, and subordination for our nations and peoples. As a significant unit of meaning, even the English prefix “sub” is capable of shifting reality. Sub means “under,” “beneath,” or “below,” and “ord” refers to an “order” as in a world-order. One people may be presumed to have a sub-order existence or reality because they are presumed to exist under, beneath, or below some other people who are presumed to have an existence of dominance. (“dom” is the opposite of “sub”).

When we think back to the worlds of our ancestors as distinct peoples before the invasion of Europeans, we think back to a time when each and every one of our Indian nations possessed an original existence, independent of each other and the rest of the world for thousands of years. That original existence or reality was well noted by Chief Justice Marshall in the 1832 US Supreme Court decision (Worcester v. Georgia).

“America,” wrote Marshall, “separated from Europe by a wide ocean, was inhabited by a distinct people, divided into separate nations, independent of each other and of the rest of the world, having institutions of their own, and governing themselves by their own laws.” This is the baseline for every indigenous nation.

That original reality of Indian independence was something that many generations of U.S. government officials worked in a skillful manner to undermine through the reality-constructing power of words. Our ancestors fought back against those efforts to subordinate them as best they could, but in most cases they were not proficient enough in the English language to be able to fight against the oppressors in English on the semantic level of reality-construction."

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: The reality-constructing power of words (Indian Country Today 8/10)

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