The Doctrine of Christian Discovery…The US hasn’t revoked an 1823 court decision which held that Native Americans couldn’t sell their land because, being savages, they could hold no title to land. The driving force behind the invasions of Iraq, “our oil under their sand”, grows out of the same racist subsoil. Dark-skinned peoples have no rights, not even the right to life, which can be snuffed out by “shock and awe” attacks or by “bugsplat” (drone) operations directed by the president in person.The US has conducted a murderous rampage since 1945 through various continents, partly through proxies, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere. There’s been hardly a dictatorship it hasn’t backed. It’s been by a distance the world’s biggest supporter and exporter of terrorism, fostering ‘Muslim’ extremists in Afghanistan and Syria to mention just the tip of an iceberg. Successive US governments whether they call themselves Republican or Democrat (read Big-Endians & Little-Endians), have loudly proclaimed their dedication to human rights and condemned, sometimes rightly, the actions of official enemies. But all of them, in pursuit of global power, have crushed the rights and the lives of human beings in parts of the planet not sanctified by the title “American”….just as Christian Spain while plundering silver from Potosí, now in Bolivia, said to have been enough over three centuries to build a silver bridge all the way to Madrid, discarded the lives of millions of indigenous people – “savages” – along the way. Now the “savages”, mostly Muslims, are called “terrorists” who believe in an “inherently violent” religion. A strange view when you look at the fact that the numbers killed in wars by Muslims in the twentieth century are disappearingly small when compared to those killed by Christians. Or that the number of Muslims who died as a result of righteous American “interventions” in Iraq alone since the 1982 invasion is close to 2 million. But facts don’t matter if your underlying assumptions are steeped in racism.
“In essence, the opinion outlined several troubling concepts that became the root of the discovery doctrine in much of federal Indian law (and property law in general). Among them, it would give full ownership of Indian lands to the United States with tribes only possessing the right of occupancy, completely ignoring the scores of treaties that had already been made with Indians by Europeans and Americans.. An extreme interpretation of this implies that the United States is not obligated to respect native land rights at all. The opinion also problematically relied on the concept of cultural, religious, and racial superiority of Europeans and deployed the language of Indian “savagery” as a means of justification for what Marshall would admit was the “extravagant pretension” of conquest. This in effect, scholars have argued, institutionalized racism in the legal structure that governs Native Americans….”
…from “What Is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” by Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Native American History Expert:
http://nativeamericanhistory.about.com/od/Law/a/What-Is-The-Doctrine-Of-Christian-Discovery.htm
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate