Steven Newcomb: Indian policy is unmistakenly linked to religion

The federal Indian law and policy system of the United States is unmistakably tied to a Judeo-Christian religio-political worldview which is well-expressed as the Chosen People and the Promised Land theory. As Walter Russell Mead stated in his 2008 article “The Deep Roots of American Zionism” in “Foreign Affairs,” “Americans found the idea that they were God’s Israel so attractive partly because it helped justify their displacement of the Native Americans.” And, in his now classic essay “Civil Religion in America,” Robert N. Bellah stated: “The theme of the American Israel was used, almost from the beginning, as a justification for the shameful treatment of the Indians so characteristic of our history.”

What other federal Indian law scholars have left out of their discussions of the doctrine of discovery, or doctrine of Christian discovery, is the fact that the Judeo-Christian worldview, traced in particular to the Genesis story of the Chosen People and the Promised Land, serves as the religious backdrop and conceptual basis of U.S. federal Indian law and policy. It is on the basis of that biblical source of ideas that the United States claims to be “the Sovereign” with “ascendency” (a right of domination) over originally free and still rightfully free Indian nations. That Old Testament relgio-political worldview is the background source of the United States’ claim that the U.S. federal government has an unquestionable and unchallengeable right of “plenary power” over Indian nations and a power of “dominium” (“ultimate dominion”) over the territories over Indian nations.

It is because of this religious, indeed, Old Testament, basis of U.S. federal Indian law, that it was necessary for the United States to pass the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, despite the fact that freedom of religion for everyone else was already enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. The Old Testament basis of U.S. federal Indian law is the reason why the territories and sacred places of our Original Nations have never been protected from exploitation, desecration, and destruction.