Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery

A book review by: Jessica Lee

In a well-argued book, Shawnee/Lenape scholar and author Steven T. Newcomb outlines how the doctrine of Christian discovery and dominion was used by European monarchs and colonists, and eventually the U.S. courts, to justify the taking of Native American land, through both physical and psychological warfare, and to refuse to grant complete Indian sovereignty today.

Pagans in the Promised Land shines an informative light into understanding the conscious — and unconscious — founding principles of “the United States of America” empire.

Explaining American colonial history through cognitive theory, Newcomb reminds us that all laws and borders are a manifestation of one’s imagination, that what we deem to be literally or objectivelytrue is really only metaphorically true from a specific perspective. For example, that Europeans “discovered” North America is only metaphorically true from the European perspective at the time, not from the perspective of the millions of Native peoples who had been living on the continent for thousands of years.

The thrust of his book involves a careful analysis of the infamous 1832 U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which the high court ruled that Native Americans did not have ownership rights to their ancestral lands (only a title of “occupancy” on U.S.-owned land) and thus could not sell parcels to private citizens. The court opinion detailed this rationale in its “Discovery Doctrine,” the principle that claims the U.S. government had fairly acquired land from the European Christian colonial immigrants who had previously “discovered” and made claim to the land (“dominion”) based on their belief that God wanted “barbarous nations” to be overthrown and to become subservient to the “Cross and Crown.”

There's more here: http://www.indypendent.org/2008/04/25/discoverer-delusions-a-review-of-pagans-in-the-promised-land/