The New Polis, in conjunction with other Whitestone Publications, is currently at work on a larger project for the year 2021 that involves the publication of articles, online seminars and conferences, and more expansive as well as deep-reaching conversations concerning indigeneity and the “de-colonizing” of prevailing forms of intellectual discourse and cognitive frameworks. The foundational issue in this project is the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” that has served as the basis of Western legal doctrine for centuries, especially as it pertains to access to and use of land, the nature of property, popular sovereignty, and the political rights and expectations of so-called “first nations” or indigenous peoples. The project will also explore what “discovery” has come to mean within the epistemic realm of inquiry. The following video by Prof. Roger Green, General Editor of The New Polis, is intended as a conceptual orientation and reference tool concerning the Doctrine of Discovery as the project unfolds in the coming months. – Editors
Transcript:
Hello, my name is Roger Green and I’m the general editor for The New Polis (the newpolis.com), and we are beginning a phase on our weblog where we will be reaching out to contributors on issues related to the Doctrine of Discovery. So, in this short video I want to just bring some general attention to the concept — which you will see if you’re a regular reader of our website or following our critical conversations — you will see emergent discourse related to this topic, and so this video is just a a quick introduction for people who are unfamiliar with the concept of the Doctrine of Discovery, or the Doctrine of Christian Domination, as Steven T. Newcomb — a great Doctrine of Discovery scholar — has been terming the subject.
So, I’m going to go through some powerpoint slides here just to to keep us on track in the very basic sense that when we’re talking about the Doctrine of Discovery, we’re talking about the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which is a set of formal legal and aesthetic procedures that begin in the mid 15th century, or the 1400s, with some papal bulls, especially, that get going after Christopher Columbus finds his way into the Caribbean and the bull enters into the treaty of Tordesillas, which comes quickly after that. But the concepts in those bulls of donation show up in some earlier papal bulls that I will get into here. So let me just share my uh screen with you. And we’re going to go to my powerpoint, and I’m going to select slideshow here…and play from the start.
So, some background here on the Doctrine of Discovery, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, or Domination — and these are technical terms, ‘discovery’ and ‘domination’. Just like the word ‘discovery’ is used in patenting processes for scientific discoveries, this is a process of converting things into property, and in very many cases land into property. And [with] ‘domination’, which we have in a in a general political sense, I think we have some pejorative or negative connotations that show up with the term ‘domination’, but going back into Roman concepts of law and the Dominate, it is a particular kind of of legal term as well. And so when we think of a term like christendom the d-o-m at the end of christendom is part of the dominate um and so we want to be aware of these very long and intergenerational continuities for legal concepts that then have made their way into popular culture and into ways that we might think about things that we don’t, or frame narratives of history that we may not even think very much about.
And so the process of this project is to unpack and find this kind of apparatus that shows up intergenerationally, and that is still cited today in recent court cases in the United States, especially with relationship to Indigenous Peoples or American Indians. So, attention to the Doctrine of Discovery shows up in the mid 20th century, as we’ll see with Vine Deloria, Jr., who was a Standing Rock Sioux, great scholar of law and American Indian traditions. But if we look kind of basically to the ways that conventional narratives are showing up in our lives, especially those of us who grew up in the United States, we could look at this statement that shows up partly in Jace Weaver’s wonderful book, The Red Atlantic, American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World from 1000 to 1927.
Obviously, it’s an echoing of The Black Atlantic, right? which is another famous book. Weaver says, “Although the historical fact is that European contact with American Indians or amerindians began around 1000 C.E. with vikings, most Americans will wrongly point to Columbus,” and this merely points to the power of a eurochristian narrative of Discovery and its legal fiction to legitimate rule. The transatlantic slave trade would grow to feed an economic greed that the founders of the United States could not resolve at the time of the American Revolution, right? Like, we know that slavery was a problem that there were people for and against it, that it was falling out of favor in Europe, for sure, but the found…the so-called founding fathers could not resolve the issue and later it kind of exploded in their face in the Civil War, right?
So, when we’re thinking about the Doctrine of Discovery it [also] gets integrated into U.S. law, and this is what makes it really important, cause we’re not just talking about papal bulls from the 1400s. What happens is, in the early 19th century those papal bulls get fused into United States law, and they make all sorts of dogmatic claims to christianity and to christian civilization that sort of get embedded into U.S. law, even though overtly we might think of the UnitedStates as valuing a separation between church and state.
At the same time that we have an overt valuing of that type of idea, we have christian civilization being embedded in and fused into U.S. law as a founding principle for the justification of the existence of the United States. Now, this shows up in Fletcher v. Peck (1810), but the big case here is Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823, which very much founds much of what we would call U.S. property law, and it also initiates [much of] what will become federal Indian law.
And so the later cases that are happening, just as Indian removal is happening in the early 1830s — Cherokee v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) — they are part of this process. They build out of Johnson v. M’Intosh, as well, and it is not … we’re not just talking about early American history here. We want to look at the ways that the Doctrine of Discovery as it exists in Johnson v. M’Intosh has been used within the past 15 years, both in Supreme Court cases — with the City of Sherrill v. Oneida (2005), which was written by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The decision was…which cites the Doctrine of Discovery and these Christian concepts, right? as being foundational…so the point is not [only historical], it is that this persists in law today, even if we might find it to be archaic conceptually. And we might think of ourselves as existing in a quote “secular world,” but nevertheless, the citation of that integration of christian concepts into American law continues to be used legally in decisions relating to land and American Indian peoples.
There’s a really good article that i’ve cited here dropped by Joseph J. Heath, which draws our attention to very recent court cases. If you wanna, you can pause and and get that title there. So, as I said, Vine Deloria, Jr. is the one who first really kind of drew some some attention to this idea of the christian doctrine of discovery. And so we owe, we’re always indebted to Vine Deloria for this. And so I pulled this quotation from an article called “Conquest Masquerading as Law,” and Vine Deloria says this,
Federal Indian law actually begins with a sleight-of-hand decision that proclaimed that the United States had special standing with respect to ownership of the land on which the Indigenous People lived. This nefarious concept was called the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Originating early in the European invasion of the Western hemisphere, this doctrine, as articulated by the Pope in the famous Bull Inter Caetera, by which he gave to Spain all lands hitherto discovered or to be discovered in the world. It was, as it turned out, the greatest real estate transaction in history. (96)
Of course, he’s referring to papal bulls of donation, Dum diversas in 1452, and the language in these bulls starts to repeat itself, over and over again. So in Romanus pontifex (1455), and those early bulls, even the first Inter Caetera (1456), they’re really designating things related to the emergent African slave trade and wars against the Ottoman empire and justifying going and taking slaves from West Africa and dividing up the kind of territory by which Portuguese and Spanish ships might have the rights to go into certain areas. And so, we see that showing up in…later on…after the the bull of discovery, the second Inter Caetera under Alexander IV in 1493 — this is the bull that comes out after Columbus has returned from the Caribbean, and then we get the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which again reenacts some of the earlier stuff and moves the concept over to what is what we now call South America. And so, you can see Brazil showing up [as] this Portuguese country on the east and Chile or Argentina on the west side, right? this is all part of that, these the kinds of divisions that showed up in the bulls of donation.
If we go here, just to look at some of the language itself, here, which repeats over and over again, Romanus Pontifex from 1454.
. . . We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso [of Portugal] — to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit –– by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.
So, this kind of language gets, you know, gets picked up and applied to different um European christian princes or kings and kingdoms in various different bulls. But the stuff that’s in bold here is what I want to draw particular attention to, because it shows up over and over again.
What we’re seeing is ritual conversions of land into property and then the justification for converting infidels into christian subjects. So, with clear intent, Columbus baptized the island through a eurochristian ritual, penetrating the land with a sword as he erased the Lucayan name, Guanahani, and replaced it with San Salvador. This act was in direct accordance with a papal bull from 1455 named Romanus Pontifex, which had to do with Portugal’s emergent slave trade off the coast of West Africa.
Basically what’s happening is the baptism of land and the renaming. Romanus Pontifex drew on a long euro christian history included in Dum Diversas, where [or] which granted Portugal’s claims to West African slavery in exchange for support against Ottoman Turks. But technically, once Columbus baptized the island, its inhabitants became “subjects” of the Spanish crown. It did not make the inhabitants christian, but we also know that the six captured Amerindians that Columbus took back to Spain on that first voyage were immediately themselves baptized and given new names.
Knowing that part of his own income depended on tradable goods, but finding little gold, Columbus took prisoners and wrote to the crown what good slaves the amerindians would make. So, he’s trying to figure out a way to keep getting money, and of course, actually, Queen Isabella was like, No, why is he doing this? If they’re not…they’re now my subjects.” So he can’t put subjects into slavery. That would be like putting another Spanish subject or “citizen” (later, that’s kind of a later term or concept) into slavery.
And so, out of that sort of tension we get this emergent questioning and dialogue about, like, you know, just how “human” are the Indigenous Peoples in theAmericas. Because, if they can be less than “human,” then they can justify some sort of slavery. And so, this is an ongoing debate that happens throughout the 1500s thatI won’t go into deeply here.
Of course, there’s a longer history of just wars and just theory going back to Saint Augustine. And so Robert J Miller and Jacinta Ruru, et al. have…they say this,
Scholars have traced the Doctrine as far back as the fifth century AD when, they argue, the Roman Catholic Church and various popes began establishing the idea of a worldwide papal jurisdiction that placed responsibility on the Church to work for a universal Christian commonwealth. This papal responsibility, and especially the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands in 1096-1271, led to the idea of justified holy wars by Christians to enforce the Church’s vision of truth onto all peoples. (9)
In this early modern period, the concept of ‘religion’ is different than in the ancient world, and it’s emergent and informative of of how we might think of religion more recently. But it’s important to notice that the concept of ‘religion’ is going through a change during this time period. So, as Jeremy Schott says in his book, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity — the book is mostly about the ancient world, but he has this to say,
The identification of the indigenous peoples of the Americas as “new gentiles” authorized the militant, often violent, extirpation, of traditional religions as “idolatry.” Certain colonialists, such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda went so far as to deny that natives possessed the capacity for natural religion at all; as such, they were subhuman and could be exploited as slaves. At the same time, however, others located the native cultures along a spectrum of “civilization.”(166)
And this is what we get, especially with the Franciscans, who are coming in, and they have that kind of spectrum-based view of “humanity,” but this is all sort of happening at the time through mixed agendas of expropriation and extirpation. Not even when Franciscans, for example, want to see Indigenous People as “human” or on that spectrum, they still must “become” christianized and they’re earlier quote “religious” ideas needed to be extirpated. So, we’re still talking about what we would call, in the 20th century, genocidal policies, even if one might seem more humane than than others.
Skipping forward, there’s a lot of work to be done in the early modern period, and up through Johnson v. M’Intosh, but this is just an intro discussion. Johnson v. M’Intosh…if i’m going to go through a number of quotations from it here…the court case’s, the decision, is written by Justice John Marshall, who was a long-standing Supreme Court Justice, very responsible for making the Supreme Court a powerful institution in the early United States. And he has this to say,
The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence. But as they were all in pursuit of nearly the same object, it was necessary, in order to avoid conflicting settlements and consequent war with each other, to establish a principle which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted should be regulated as between themselves. This principle was that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.
So, this is where Justice Marshall is bringing ‘discovery’ and the Doctrine of Christian Discovery into U.S. law. It is a case, that is, a case about land and whether or not Indians could sell land to colonists. And it’s actually a case it’s called a “faux case” that is brought into the courts, where basically both litigants have the same agenda that they just want a legal decision [for], but they both stand to benefit from it. So, actually, like, Native Americans are not actually even involved in the case about whether or not Native Americans can sell land here. It’s actually um two white colonialists who are working together, and no matter what the decision is, they’re going to benefit from it. So, more from the this landmark decision, in 1823 Justice Marshall writes,
No one of the powers of Europe gave its full assent to this principle more unequivocally than England. The documents upon this subject are ample and complete. So early as the year 1496, her monarch granted a commission to the Cabots to discover countries then unknown to Christian people and to take possession of them in the name of the King of England. Two years afterwards, Cabot proceeded on this voyage and discovered the continent of North America, along which he sailed as far south as Virginia. To this discovery the English trace their title.
In this first effort made by the English government to acquire territory on this continent we perceive a complete recognition of the principle which has been mentioned. The right of discovery given by this commission is confined to countries “then unknown to all Christian people,” and of these countries Cabot was empowered to take possession in the name of the King of England. Thus asserting a right to take possession notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens, and at the same time admitting the prior title of any Christian people who may have made a previous discovery.
So, what’s important here is that some people might think, “well, you know, what about New England? and what about the Protestant Reformation?” What he’s saying here is that England fully embraced the these papal bulls And the emergent international law by which they said that the rights of discovery were to be attained by christian princes or subjects of christian princes who would all be able to claim the territory not inhabited by christians for christianity itself. So, the emergence of the Anglican Church at this point in history still embraces the catholic papal bull ideas and, excuse me, though, or I misspoke earlier about Elizabeth. It was actually the the king [Henry VII] of England in 1496, but by the time Queen Elizabeth comes along in the later later 1500s, we still see England basing its claims to discovery on these papal bulls.
When we get James I and he gives the charter to New England, it’s still based on this kind of stuff as well. So despite the the turmoil of religious wars in Europe at the time, they still seem to be embracing these concepts in terms of international law. Again,
The same principle continued to be recognized. The charter granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578 authorizes him to discover and take possession of such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands as were not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people. This charter was afterwards renewed to Sir Walter Raleigh in nearly the same terms.
By the charter of 1606, under which the first permanent English settlement on this continent was made, James I granted to Sir Thomas Gates and others those territories in America lying on the seacoast between the 34th and 45th degrees of north latitude and which either belonged to that monarch or were not then possessed by any other Christian prince or people. The grantees were divided into two companies at their own request. The first or southern colony was directed to settle between the 34th and 41st degrees of north latitude, and the second or northern colony between the 38th and 45th degrees.
And we know later on this becomes “Virginia,” and then we get the New England colonies that become Boston and and the Puritans and all that. So, again, he [Justice Marshall] says,
While the different nations of Europe respected the right of the natives as occupants, they asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves, and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil while yet in possession of the natives. These grants have been understood by all to convey a title to the grantees, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy.
The history of America from its discovery to the present day proves, we think, the universal recognition of these principles.
Which of course, by 21st century standards, we know that, like, that probably very much the American Indians might not subscribe to this kind of “universal recognition,” but it was about who was being perceived at the time as fully “human,” and fully “human” meant being fully part of European and eurochristian civilization.
Again, he says…Justice Marshall says,
It has never been doubted that either the United States or the several states had a clear title to all the lands within the boundary lines described in the treaty, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy, and that the exclusive power to extinguish that right was vested in that government which might constitutionally exercise it.
So, that’s the Johnson v. M’Intosh case. That is the most important case, and what we will be considering in future discussions on The New Polis is, “what would it mean to overturn Johnson v. M’Intosh in the same way that Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the Jim Crow laws that are established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1890)?”
So, we do have a precedent for that kind of overturning of laws. Even though this goes back further, what would that mean? and what would that look like? That is an ongoing research question that we will be asking people to contribute on as we think through the persistence of the Doctrine of Domination or Doctrine of Christian Discovery.
Of course, unknowingly, Justice Marshall has kind of set himself up for some problems by the early 1830s, but I will not go into great detail over all of the cases here. On just a couple of important lines here from Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), this is again Justice John Marshall writing,
The Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and heretofore an unquestioned, right to the lands they occupy until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our Government. It may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may more correctly, perhaps, be denominated [and this is the famous line] domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases; meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage. Their relations to the United States resemble that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our Government for protection, rely upon its kindness and its power, appeal to it for relief to their wants, and address the President as their Great Father.
Along with the history of the doctrine and the legal apparatuses surrounding it, we get an aesthetic category that has been called the “metaphysics of Indian hating,” which is the chapter title of a chapter in The Confidence Man (1857) by Herman Melville, but it’s also the subtitle to a great book by Richard Drinnon called Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (1980). Then we want to have inquiries into legal cases then and now, as I said with the Joseph Heath article, right? It’s not just … we’re not just doing historical work here. The problem is that the concepts persist and persist to be cited even by otherwise so-called “progressive” Supreme Court Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
So, we want to look at the history then and now and the perception of a persistence, even when many groups like the United Methodist Church, for example, have explicitly disavowed the Doctrine of Discovery. And, as my friend and colleague and sometimes contributor — and mentor as well for me — Tink Tinker has said repeatedly, you know, it is one thing to acknowledge land or to acknowledge the injustice of the Doctrine of Discovery, or even to disavow one’s belief in it. But what is the action that comes with that? What does that mean in terms of giving land back to Native Peoples?
And so, that is where we land at the end of the implications here. And one of the questions that we will be asking in future discussions is, “What does land back look like? What does the tangible and equitable logical result of denouncing the christian doctrine of discovery or domination [entail]? What follows from that and how does that work?
Because it can’t just be an acknowledgement or recognition of the problem. It has to be a decolonizing of the legal process itself and the ways that the metaphysics of Indian hating and empire building have seeped into very common perceptions, especially among eurochristians or colonizers like myself, right? who talk this talk from what is traditionally Arapaho and Cheyenne land in Denver, Colorado, right? So, what does land back look like? What do equitable relationships look like?
And this is going to require a lot of ongoing scholarly study. It’s historical study, it’s legal study, it’s literary studies. It crosses all sorts of disciplines. It’s about ethics, it’s about justice, it’s about undoing the problems of racism, and it’s about economics, right? It’s about that whole marxian concept of the commodity or the land being converted into a commodity. But it must also be a conversation that is in dialogue with existing Native Peoples, or American Indian Peoples for where I am talking about now. But of course it is implicated throughout the world for Indigenous Peoples abroad, especially following the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
So, international law and international treaties come in to this kind of study as well. I don’t have, do not have, time to go into that today, but this has hopefully been an introduction into a really interesting concept worth unpacking worthy of study, worthy of contributions and much bigger than any kind of a conversation that I can have alone as a scholar. So I invite you, we The New Polis, invites contributors to keep thinking through issues related to this as we put together articles and contributions, critical discussions — and eventually we’re hoping for a conference in April of 2021 around these issues.
So, what we want to do is draw people’s attention right now to the basic concepts, and teaching people an awareness of the doctrine of discovery, so that when we arrive at that conference, we can get a lot of good intellectual work done without having to retread the consciousness-raising work that videos like this do. I will be providing along with this underneath the transcript a preliminary list of readings related to these issues, if people are interested and they want to start looking into things. Thank you very much for watching and we hope to hear from you in terms of contributions or participation in our upcoming critical conversations and conference thank you and have a good day.
Preliminary Readings, Media, Cases, etc.
Videos and Media:
Arnold, Philip P. and Sandy Bigtree. “Situating Mother Earth’s Pandemic The Doctrine of Discovery.” https://youtu.be/gwHsCcsjoWg
Lyons, Oren, et al. “Doctrine of Discovery.” https://youtu.be/V3gF7ULVrl4
Lyons, Oren. “God, Glory, Gold.” https://youtu.be/0GpIkrqOlHA
Newcomb, Steven. “Steve Newcomb – Doctrine of Discovery, the Domination Code.”
Tinker, Tink. “Reflections on the Doctrine of Discovery by Tink Tinker.” https://youtu.be/pJC8S8Hum2w
Wolfchild, Sheldon. Doctrine of Discovery, Unmasking the Domination Code. https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/the-doctrine-of-discovery-unmasking-the-domination-code/
Papal Bulls, etc.
Dum Diversas (1452)
Romanus Pontifex (1455)
Inter Caetera (1456), renewed in 1481
Alexander IV’s Inter Caetera (1493)
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
Charter of New England (1620)
Important U.S. Court Cases
Fletcher v. Peck (1810)
Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823)
Cherokee v. Georgia (1831)
Worcester v. Georgia (1832)
Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States (1955)
City of Sherrill v. Oneida (2005) Justice Ginsburg wrote the decision.
Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki (2nd Circuit 2005)
State of New York v. Shinnecock Indian Nation (2nd Circuit 2012) Upheld a 2003 decision.
White vs. University of California (9th District 2014).
Books and Articles:
Bratspies, Rebecca M. “The New Discovery Doctrine: Some Thoughts on Property Rights and Traditional Knowledge.” American Law Review 31, no. 2 (2007): 315-340.
“The Bull Romanus Pontifex.” doctrineofdiscovery.org, July 23, 2018. https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/the-bull-romanus-pontifex-nicholas-v/.
The Charter of New England: 1620. Yale Law School Avalon Project. Accessed November 28, 2019. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass01.asp Source: The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, Compiled and Edited Under the Act of Congress of June 30, 1906 by Francis Newton Thorpe Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909.
Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492-Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.
Churchill, Ward. Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002.
Deloria, Vine Jr. “An Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America.” In For This Land, 77-83.New York: Routledge, 1999.
Deloria, Vine Jr. “Conquest Masquerading as Law.” In Unlearning the Language of Conquest, edited by Donald Trent Jacobs, 94-107. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).
Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.
Freeland, Mark. Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language and the Logics of Decolonization. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020.
Friedberg, Ali. “Reconsidering the Doctrine of Discovery: Spanish Land Acquisition in Mexico (1521-1821).” Wisconsin International Law Journal 17, no. 1 (1999): 87-108.
Heath, Joseph J. “The Doctrine of Discovery: Its Fundamental Performance in United States Indian Law and the Need for Its Repudiation and Removal.” Albany Government Law Review 10 (2017): 112-156.
Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
Means, Russell. “For the World to Live ‘Europe’ Must Die.” archive.org, July 1980. Accessed November 30, 2019. https://archive.org/stream/ForAmericaToLiveEuropeMustDie/foramericatolive_read_djvu.txt.
Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery: The International Law of Colonialism.” Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture and Resistance 5 (2019): 35-42.
Miller, Robert J. Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008.
Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Newcomb, Steven T. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500 – c. 1800. Yale: New Haven, 1995.
“Requerimiento 1510.” National Humanities Center. Accessed February 23, 2020. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/requirement.pdf.
Rivera, Luis N. A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas. Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
Robertson, Lindsay. G. Conquest by Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Rose, Carol M. “Property and Expropriation: Themes and Variations in American Law.” Utah Law Review 1 (2000):1-38.
Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World: 1492-1640. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Tinker, George E. “Tink.” “John Locke on Property.” In Beyond the Pale: Doing Ethics from the Margins, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and Miguel De La Torre, 49-59. Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011.
United Methodist Church. “Resolution 3331. Doctrine of Discovery.” 2016. https://www.umcjustice.org/who-we-are/social-principles-and-resolutions/doctrine-of-discovery-3331
Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. Oxford: Oxfor University Press, 1990.