(1/6) As Trump vows to bring back Columbus Day, here is a reminder of why this is not just rhetoric. The 15th-century legal doctrine Columbus used to colonize and slaughter the Indigenous peoples he encountered is still the law in the U.S. today.
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(2/6) The “Doctrine of Discovery” 1st appeared in 1455 as a papal bull giving Portugal permission to invade and colonize West Africa. After Columbus’s infamous voyage, a similar papal bull was extended to Spain in 1493.
(3/6) The Pope declared that any land, treasure & people belonging to non-Christian nations were free for the taking. Europeans used this international law, grounded in the racist presumption of European superiority, to colonize most of the earth.
(4/6) The Doctrine of Discovery was codified into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in 1823. That year, in Johnson v McIntosh, the Court ruled that Indigenous nations did not own their land, but were “occupants” or tenants–making the United States their landlord.
(5/6) After the Revolutionary War, the theory went, the U.S. inherited the land from the British–land that the British had owned by right of “discovery”. The Doctrine of Discovery was cited by a U.S. Appeals Court as recently as 2014.
(6/6) In 2005, SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians, wrote that “…the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.”
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