Pagans in the Promised Land by Steven Newcomb

Author:Steven Newcomb [Newcomb, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2014-06-26T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Converting Christian Discovery

into Heathen Conquest

In the Johnson ruling, Chief Justice Marshall said that the “different nations of Europe” had not “entirely” disregarded the rights of the Native nations, because the nations of Europe had “respected the natives as occupants.”1 The word entirely suggests, of course, that the European nations had mostly disregarded the rights of the Indians, just not entirely so. As we shall see, in the Court’s view Indian rights were to be disregarded to the extent necessary to ensure that the Indian nations were incapable of contradicting the United States’ claim to an “ultimate dominion” over and an “absolute title” to the lands of the continent.2

Because Marshall answered the central issue before the Court in the Johnson ruling by deciding that Indians only had a “title of occupancy,” this has led most scholars to conclude that Marshall’s Indian title of occupancy is the main significance of the Johnson ruling.3 But interpreting the concept of an Indian title of occupancy within the context of the royal charters of England, as Marshall did,4 reveals that the more important significance of the Johnson ruling is Marshall’s mention of “ultimate dominion.”5 The chief justice said that those royal charters illustrated how “Christian people” had asserted, on the basis of “discovery,” “a right to take possession” of the indigenous lands of the continent, “notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were heathens.”6 In other words, Marshall saw the royal charters as evidence that the Christian European monarchs who sent colonizers to this continent were in possession of a governmental authority (“dominion”) to grant or convey the lands of “heathens.” Based on their assertion of “ultimate dominion,” the Christian monarchs could begin granting the land and colonizing the continent without first receiving permission from the indigenous nations and peoples who were already living on and in possession of the land. As Marshall put the matter, the “different nations of Europe claimed and exercised as a consequence of this assertion of ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil, while yet in possession of the natives.”7 Marshall said that such charter-grants of the soil had “been understood by all [Christian Europeans], to convey a title to the [Christian European] grantees, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy.”8

One way of interpreting the Johnson ruling is that after a land grant had been made by a Christian European monarch, on the basis of a presumption of ultimate Christian dominion and an imperial right of occupatio,9 the Native peoples would then be conceptualized, from a Christian viewpoint, as still being in possession of but only “temporarily occupying” lands that the Christian “discoverers” now purported to own.10 As clearly documented in chapter 4—particularly Henry Sumner Maine’s point about the Indians being “compared almost universally to the Canaanites of the Old Testament”—the cognitive background of Marshall’s account in Johnson is the Chosen People–Promised Land cognitive model: the Christian monarch or nation purported to own the “discovered” land by virtue of a mandate by “God,” given to them as “chosen people,” to locate, possess, and occupy “promised” heathen lands.

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