Steven Newcomb: Keeping Indian people down through language

Chief Justice John Marshall used the language technique of reduction when he wrote of American Indians in Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh: “Their [the Indians] rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave title to those who made it [the discovery].” (emphasis added) My definition of “diminish” is, “to reduce or make less than a starting point of fullness.” Something that has been reduced from an original or starting point of volume or extent can be said to have been “diminished.” To be considered fully-free, for example, and then be deemed by foreigners to be less-than-free as the result of an imposed language system of dominance, is to be considered to have been “diminished” by what the foreigners have “deemed” or “judged” in their language to be true.

Did Marshall have had a machine called a diminishment-ometer to physically measure the extent of the supposed “diminishment” of Indian nation independence? Of course not. I mention the possibility of a physical measurement to create a heightened awareness of the fact that Marshall was using what I like to call “the poetics of oppression” in his drafting of the Johnson ruling. It was not necessary for him to reference some scientific report based on a physical measurement of the supposed “diminishment” of Indian nation independence. All Marshall had to do on behalf of the Supreme Court was use language to metaphorically construct a “reality” of Indian nation independence having been “necessarily diminished.”

Marshall’s opinion in Johnson operates to this day on a metaphorical or figurative level. It works to constitute and create ‘a sense of reality’ that the independence of Indian nations was “diminished.” We as “Indians” live with that ‘sense of reality’ on a daily basis. And we have not yet figured out how to strategically challenge it and Marshall’s use of poetics against us.