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Lone wolf v hitchcock2/9/2024 In March 2023, the Vatican tried to wriggle out of accountability for colonization’s devastating and ongoing effects on Native communities. Fifteenth-century papal bulls directed Christian monarchs to “invade, conquer, fight, subjugate” lands owned by non-Christians and reduce the inhabitants to “perpetual servitude.” The bulls described colonization as a transaction: salvation for those Christians who contributed money or combat skills and excommunication for those found taking anything “except expenses and salaries.” The bulls also described map coordinates establishing which nations owned what discovered, or “hitherto undiscovered,” land. Marshall had carved out an exception to property law, proclaiming that Natives, as inferior people, had “diminutive rights”: They might inhabit land but did not own it. D’Errico quotes him conceding that the claims of one opinion were “pretensions” that existed “nowhere else.” This was not ordinary law, but the suspension of law, d’Errico says. He pointed to Christianity as the rationale for dominion and - after religious conversion of “heathen” Natives - the compensation for their losses. A devout Christian, he ignored the Constitution’s imperative to separate church and state. The opinions’ primary author was Chief Justice John Marshall. State of Georgia-that Native peoples did not, in fact, own their land but were mere “occupants” if Christians had “discovered” it that Native nations were “wards” of the United States and that the United States had “ultimate dominion” over all Native land and peoples. In the early 1800s, the court declared in three opinions- Johnson v. The Supreme Court has long provided legal cover for those who wish to wrest land and resources from Indigenous peoples. A graduate of Yale Law School, he co-founded the legal studies department at UMass-Amherst and taught there for 30 years. He continues to this day to litigate Indigenous cases, including on behalf of Native prisoners’ freedom of religion, Mashpee Wampanoag fishing rights and Western Shoshone land rights. Meanwhile, non-Native companies and individuals throughout Indian country were profiting off Native land to the tune of billions of dollars as they grazed animals, planted crops, felled timber, dug up minerals, extracted oil and gas and more.ĭ’Errico’s writing is informed by his experiences starting in the late 1960s as an attorney for the primarily Navajo clients of the nonprofit legal service, Diné be’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’ diit’ahii, which was located on the Navajo Nation at the time. Government Is Helping Corporations Plunder Native Land” for In These Times in 2016, the article was about a Navajo family that was struggling to shut down an oil pipeline that had been crossing its land for decades. Our first president’s maxim is still true today. law to Indigenous people has had an unflinching goal: theft. Throughout the chaos, the application of U.S. Similarly, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution and a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen, hails the book as “important and enlightening for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.” Kent McNeil, a professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, calls d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law “a frontal attack on the whole field of American law pertaining to Indigenous peoples.” He lauds it as a “must-read” for those wanting to understand what motivates any claims that the dispossession of Indigenous people has been legally sound. ![]() court decisions, laws, executive orders and agency regulations that have piled up over the years in a disorderly and improvised fashion. ![]() Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called “a vast hodge-podge” and covers all areas of Indigenous life and activity with a massive array of U.S. Instead, according to d’Errico, it’s what mid- 20 th-century U.S. This landgrab is accomplished in part because what’s typically called federal Indian law is hardly a systematic set of statutes. By destroying Native individuals and communities, it has helped the rich and powerful scoop up vast lands and resources. “When we enter a realm called ‘federal Indian law’ … we are entering a semantic world created by the United States to control Native peoples and claim their lands,” writes d’Errico, an attorney and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.ĭespite its confusion and contradictions, federal Indian law - in d’Errico’s terms, “anti-Indian law” - has long had an unchanging purpose. In Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, Peter d’Errico exposes the capriciousness and hostility with which the United States uses the law to apply - or deny - justice to the original peoples of this land.
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