Tag: Columbus Day

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Native Americans and Land Rights

In a blog post a few weeks ago, I discussed the Amazon rainforest fires in terms of how the Brazilian government was doing away with or disregarding rights for the natives of that land.

That post got me thinking about Native American rights, and particularly Native American land rights. The result of that thinking was this blog post, purposefully published on Columbus Day.[1]

That thinking also led me to a United States Supreme Court case from nearly 200 years ago, back to when John Marshall was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In this case, which is known as Johnson v. M’Intosh, the court had a case before them where they had to determine whose land rights were superior: those of plaintiffs whose land claims came from Native Americans or those of defendants whose land claims came from a United States land grant.[2] The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the defendants’ claims to the lands were superior. Furthermore, Chief Justice Marshall, who wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision, put into legal writing what is called the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a doctrine which said that European “discoverers” of land inhabited by non-Europeans have rights to the land.[3] This doctrine has existed for centuries, going back to Pope Nicholas V’s papal bull Romanus Pontifex,[4] but Chief Justice Marshall’s decision made this doctrine a part of the legal fabric of this country.

The consequences of this doctrine have been significant. Since European discoverers had rights to the land, not Native Americans who already had the land, it has allowed for the pushing of Native Americans off their former lands and for the killing of Native Americans in the process. And, when this doctrine hasn’t killed Native Americans, it has at the very least disenfranchised many of them.

To make matters worse, the Doctrine of Discovery remains a major part of the American legal system. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the very Doctrine of Discovery that has caused so much harm when she wrote a majority opinion for a Supreme Court decision in 2005.[5] And, to my knowledge, there has been nothing to undo that Doctrine of Discovery being part of America’s legal framework.

This is not to say that there is no hope in terms of acknowledging the wrongs of the doctrine, let alone doing anything about it. Many prominent entities, ranging from the United Nations in its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[6] to the World Council of Churches (a fellowship of churches that includes the United Methodist Church, Episcopal churches from several regions, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, to name a few),[7] have repudiated this doctrine either explicitly or implicitly (as the UN did so without specifically mentioning the words “Doctrine of Discovery”). If these efforts show anything, it’s that more people are realizing the damage of this doctrine, and that maybe such a realization will eventually make its way to the American legal system. And hopefully more people and groups will come to this realization, because acknowledging the damage of the Doctrine of Discovery is one step, albeit a significant step, towards addressing the historical lack of land rights for Native Americans.

[1] For more on my feelings about Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day in general (which, as my readers can tell, are not positive feelings), I encourage you to read my post about the person and the holiday that I wrote two years ago: https://blindinjusticeblog.com/2017/10/10/why-i-blogged-today-even-though-columbus-day-was-yesterday/

[2] Lexis-Nexis probably does a much better job of describing the case than I could, so I encourage all to read the Lexis-Nexis summary of Johnson v. M’Intosh: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-johnson-v-m-intosh

[3] Chief Justice Marshall goes into this doctrine when writing about the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh.

[4] http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html

[5] I am a fan of Ruth Bader Ginsburg overall, but, as sad as it is for me to say this, she invoked the Doctrine of Discovery when she wrote the majority opinion of City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-855.ZO.html

[6] Page 3 of this declaration affirms “further that all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.” https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf

[7] https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/statement-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples

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Native American Barriers to Voting

As per usual, while I take many holiday weeks off, I am not taking Columbus Day off. If you’re wondering why, just read this post from the week of Columbus Day last year.

However, from this year on, I’m not just going to post on the week of Columbus Day, but also to post on one or more issues related to indigenous people (since, you know, that was the group most hurt by Columbus and others coming).

At this point, you’re probably asking this: “What are you going to post this year, Brendan?”

This year, given the upcoming midterm election, I think it’s important to write a post about an injustice many of us are not aware of: the fact that many Native Americans face barriers to voting.

It may be surprising to hear that many Native Americans face barriers to voting, especially considering the fact that Native Americans technically have the right to vote. However, just because a group of people has the right to vote doesn’t mean that they are given the resources to vote easily.

Take, for example, the barriers to voting that many Native Americans face in elections. The quantity of barriers is staggering: long distances to voting places, less time for early voting than other groups, restrictive voter-identification regulations, a lack of accommodations for tribal languages at polling places, and many more. The Native American Voting Rights Coalition listed further voting barriers faced by Native Americans in several states, such as registration problems caused by non-traditional addresses, a lack of voter-registration drives in Native American communities, and a lack of Internet access (which makes online voter registration impossible in practice even if it exists in theory). There are even more barriers that Native Americans face to voting, but these are just a few.

If your head is spinning at this point from the massive list of voting restrictions that Native Americans face, don’t feel badly—honestly, I felt that way, too, while drafting this post. If anything, be glad that you’re recognizing the extent of voting restrictions against Native Americans in 2018.

However, we must go further, as individuals, than simply recognizing how the system is stacked against Native Americans, as far as voting is concerned. Instead, we must consider what, if anything, our candidates say about voting rights for all individuals, including Native Americans. While I will not be one to endorse candidates on this blog, what I will say is that anyone who does not support the further enfranchisement of all individuals at the voting booth, including the enfranchisement of Native Americans, does not deserve anyone’s vote.

Update as of October 16, 2018: For the first time ever, I needed to update a blog post soon after writing one. That is because yet another barrier has been added for some Native Americans. Namely, for people in North Dakota, you must have an ID with a current street address in order to vote. P.O. boxes are not acceptable. This disproportionately affects Native Americans, as many Native American reservations lack physical street addresses (plus many homeless Native Americans use P.O. boxes, not physical street addresses). Therefore, North Dakota has created, and the Supreme Court has refused to do anything about, yet another barrier to voting that Native Americans in that state will face. I want to give a “thank you” to Scottie at Scotties Toy Box for bringing my attention to this issue, and to National Public Radio’s article on the topic and many others for reporting on this.

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Why I Blogged Today, Even Though Columbus Day was Yesterday

Anyone who has followed my blog over the last several months would’ve noticed that I don’t blog on weeks of federal holidays. It was a practice I started with Independence Day and Labor Day, and I will continue this habit with Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day in the next few weeks.

But this practice will not extend to Columbus Day. Not this year, and probably not ever.

The reason is that, quite honestly, this blog is supposed to expose injustices instead of celebrate them. As a result, I felt that not posting for the week of Columbus Day would be a de facto celebration of Columbus and a number of injustices related to him and the way he is celebrated.

I am not going to go into all of the injustices related to Columbus, but here are a few:

  1. When Columbus got involved in “America” (which wasn’t actually America but places in the Caribbean like Haiti), he and his people enslaved many, treated many people brutally, and saw many people die as a result of mistreatment from him and those who helped him. It’s fair to say that people in the West Indies weren’t exactly flourishing while he was the governor there.
  2. Columbus and his entourage claimed the land for themselves, even though other people were on the territory many years before they “discovered” it. This sort of claiming of land is not worth celebrating.
  3. The way Columbus treated indigenous people in America started a pattern of how Europeans often brutally treated indigenous people in the New World. In other words, this pattern of mass enslavement and brutality against indigenous people continued for many years after Columbus died. Basically, Columbus was a trendsetter in all the wrong ways. This is also nothing to be celebrated.
  4. Brutality aside, he was not the first person to discover America, because that was actually done many centuries before Columbus went on his voyage. For that matter, he was not even the first European to discover America, as there is strong evidence of a Viking presence in Newfoundland. Actually, Columbus never even landed in mainland North America, in spite of the continuously popular myth of his “discovering” America. So Columbus Day is a holiday that is built on all sorts of false premises about what he “discovered.” As a result, even the way he is celebrated is, in a way, unjust.

I am not a scholar on Christopher Columbus, so people can probably find even more reasons, on both sides of this argument, about why he should or should not be celebrated. But these are a few of the big reasons why I will not celebrate him by having an “off week” on this blog.

Instead, I hope to use the week of Columbus Day in future years to do as I’ve always tried to do here: discuss injustices which many of us may be blind to or blindly commit.