Thread by @rebeccanagle

Happy #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth. Everyday this month I am sharing a history lesson. #WeAreStillHere #NativeIn2019

This week's theme is US Federal Indian policy and we are starting at the very, very, VERY beginning with the DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY.

While the international Indigenous community has been calling for the denouncement of the Doctrine of Discovery for decades, most ppl don’t know what it is. It first appeared in 1455 as a papal bull (a decree from the pope) giving Portugal permission to colonize West Africa.

After Columbus’s infamous voyage in 1492, a similar papal bull was extended to Spain's right to colonize the Americas.

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery asserted simply that Christian Nations became the rightful owner of any land they found occupied by non-Christian people.

Europeans used this international law, grounded in the racist idea of their superiority, to colonize most of the earth. What followed was the enslavement of 12.5 million African people and the systematic genocide of 90 mil Indigenous people (90% of the population of the Americas)

The Doctrine of Discovery was codified into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in 1823. In Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice Marshall wrote that “discovery gave title to the government” and that “the Indigenous inhabitants were then left with only a ‘right of occupancy...

which... could be terminated at will by the federal government.” In other words, because of this papal bull, the US was the landlord and Native people were the tenants. On our own land.

The Doctrine of Discovery is STILL the basis of US Federal NDN policy TODAY.

As recently as 2005, Justice Ginsberg — a liberal icon of the left — cited the Doctrine of Discovery in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians, stating that the Oneida Indian Nation could not exert sovereignty over land within their 1794 treaty territory.

In the first footnote of her decision Ginsberg cites the Doctrine of Discovery stating “…the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.”

This thread was adapted from an article I wrote for @thinkprogress. You can read the whole thing here: thinkprogress.org/the-15th-centu…

To learn more, check out this documentary: doctrineofdiscovery.org/the-doctrine-o…