The veneration of a jurist who used the racist legal fiction of the Discovery Doctrine to describe *all* American Indians is appalling. Her thinking was that we’re still too incompetent to manage our own lands, and we need the US to do it for us, like wildlife...
No religion should determine law, whether it’s abortion or Indigenous rights. Yet, RBG upheld a fifteenth century papal bull that said Indians barely possess faculties that distinguish them from animals.
Colonialism is authoritarian by nature. In the US, the highest jurists are appointed, not elected, by a president who is also not directly elected by the people, in system premises on Indigenous elimination. We should be challenging these systems not normalizing them.
As recently as 2005, RBG cited the 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh decision, which cited the Discovery Doctrine, in the Oneida decision. She felt that SCOTUS had to stop “the Tribe from rekindling the embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-…
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