Johnson v. M'Intosh: The Christian right of colonization

[nosmokes]

I found this fascinating- that Justice Marshall had gone all the way back to a papal edict from before Columbus had even set sailfloored me.
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original-indiancountry

Johnson v. M'Intosh: The Christian right of colonization

by: Steven Newcomb / Indigenous Law Institute
My book, ''Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery'' (Fulcrum, 2008), unpacks many layers of meaning found in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M'Intosh. It poses an alternative view by identifying the doctrine of ''Christian'' discovery in U.S. law, and posits that a failure to account for the role that the Christian religion plays in Marshall's reasoning in the Johnson ruling is a failure to crack the cognitive (mental) code hidden or buried in that decision.

The ''great nations of Europe,'' Marshall said, had historically established ''a principle'' (a guiding generalization) that they acknowledged as ''the law'' by which the right of land ''acquisition'' (colonization) would be regulated among them, thereby avoiding bloody and costly wars over territory in North America. ''This principle,'' Marshall explained, ''was that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments.''

Nothing in the wording of the previous sentence even remotely suggests that the Christian religion had anything to do with the claim that ''discovery gave title'' to the European government said to have made a ''discovery'' in North America. However, Associate Justice Joseph Story, who was on the Supreme Court at the time of the Johnson ruling, published a book 10 years later in which he drew a specific connection between Christianity, the pope (the Vatican) and the ''principle'' of ''discovery'' adopted by the Supreme Court.

In his ''Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States'' (1833), Story identified a papal decree as the origin of the ''principle'' of ''discovery'' that his friend and mentor Chief Justice Marshall had written into the Johnson ruling. As Story stated:

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complete article here