Discovering Indigenous Lands

Discovering Indigenous Lands
Author: Robert J. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-08-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199579814

North America, New Zealand and Australia were colonised by England under an international legal principle that is known today as the doctrine of discovery. This book analyses how this doctrine was used to gain control over the indigenous peoples, and how this control continues to this day.

Native America, Discovered and Conquered

Native America, Discovered and Conquered
Author: Robert J. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2006-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0313071845

Manifest Destiny, as a term for westward expansion, was not used until the 1840s. Its predecessor was the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal tradition by which Europeans and Americans laid legal claim to the land of the indigenous people that they discovered. In the United States, the British colonists who had recently become Americans were competing with the English, French, and Spanish for control of lands west of the Mississippi. Who would be the discoverers of the Indians and their lands, the United States or the European countries? We know the answer, of course, but in this book, Miller explains for the first time exactly how the United States achieved victory, not only on the ground, but also in the developing legal thought of the day. The American effort began with Thomas Jefferson's authorization of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which set out in 1803 to lay claim to the West. Lewis and Clark had several charges, among them the discovery of a Northwest Passage—a land route across the continent—in order to establish an American fur trade with China. In addition, the Corps of Northwestern Discovery, as the expedition was called, cataloged new plant and animal life, and performed detailed ethnographic research on the Indians they encountered. This fascinating book lays out how that ethnographic research became the legal basis for Indian removal practices implemented decades later, explaining how the Doctrine of Discovery became part of American law, as it still is today.

Conquest by Law

Conquest by Law
Author: Lindsay G. Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2005-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199881995

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world. At the heart of the decision for Johnson v. M'Intosh was a "discovery doctrine" that gave rights of ownership to the European sovereigns who "discovered" the land and converted the indigenous owners into tenants. Though its meaning and intention has been fiercely disputed, more than 175 years later, this doctrine remains the law of the land. In 1991, while investigating the discovery doctrine's historical origins Lindsay Robertson made a startling find; in the basement of a Pennsylvania furniture-maker, he discovered a trunk with the complete corporate records of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, the plaintiffs in Johnson v. M'Intosh. Conquest by Law provides, for the first time, the complete and troubling account of the European "discovery" of the Americas. This is a gripping tale of political collusion, detailing how a spurious claim gave rise to a doctrine--intended to be of limited application--which itself gave rise to a massive displacement of persons and the creation of a law that governs indigenous people and their lands to this day.

Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights under International Law

Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights under International Law
Author: Jérémie Gilbert
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007-03-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9047431308

This book addresses the right of indigenous peoples to live, own and use their traditional territories. A profound relationship with land and territories characterizes indigenous groups, but indigenous peoples have been and are repeatedly deprived of their lands. This book analyzes whether the international legal regime provides indigenous peoples with the collective right to live on their traditional territories. Through its meticulous and wide-ranging examination of the interaction between international law and indigenous peoples’ land rights, the work explores several burning issues such as collective rights, self-determination, autonomy, property rights, and restitution of land. In assessing the human rights approach to land rights the book delves into the notion of past violations and the role of human rights law in providing for remedies, reparation and restitution. It also argues that there is a new phase in the relationship between States and indigenous peoples in the making of territorial agreements. Based on its analysis of indigenous peoples’ land rights under international law, this book proposes an original theory as regards the legal status of indigenous peoples. It explores how indigenous peoples have been the victims of the rules governing title to territory since the inception of international law, and how under the current human rights regime, indigenous peoples have now gained the status of actors of international law. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

Reconciling Sovereignties

Reconciling Sovereignties
Author: Felix Hoehn
Publisher: Native Law Centre University of Saskatchewan
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Indians of North America
ISBN: 9780888805775

"Reconciling pre-existing Aboriginal sovereignty with de facto Crown sovereignty will not threaten the territory of Canada, nor will it result in a legal vacuum. Rather, it will facilitate the self-determination of Aboriginal peoples within Canada and strengthen Canada's claim to territorial integrity in the eyes of international law.

All Our Relations

All Our Relations
Author: Winona LaDuke
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608466612

How Native American history can guide us today: “Presents strong voices of old, old cultures bravely trying to make sense of an Earth in chaos.” —Whole Earth Written by a former Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was once listed among “America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty” by Time magazine, this thoughtful, in-depth account of Native struggles against environmental and cultural degradation features chapters on the Seminoles, the Anishinaabeg, the Innu, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Mohawks, among others. Filled with inspiring testimonies of struggles for survival, each page of this volume speaks forcefully for self-determination and community. “Moving and often beautiful prose.” —Ralph Nader “Thoroughly researched and convincingly written.” —Choice

Pagans in the Promised Land

Pagans in the Promised Land
Author: Steven T. Newcomb
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2008
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781555916428

"An analysis of how religious bias shaped U.S. federal Indian law."--

Discovering Indigenous Lands

Discovering Indigenous Lands
Author: Robert J. Miller
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1396
Release: 2012-01-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191627631

This book presents new material and shines fresh light on the under-explored historical and legal evidence about the use of the doctrine of discovery in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. North America, New Zealand and Australia were colonised by England under an international legal principle that is known today as the doctrine of discovery. When Europeans set out to explore and exploit new lands in the fifteenth through to the twentieth centuries, they justified their sovereign and property claims over these territories and the indigenous peoples with the discovery doctrine. This legal principle was justified by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority over the other cultures, religions, and races of the world. The doctrine provided that newly-arrived Europeans automatically acquired property rights in the lands of indigenous peoples and gained political and commercial rights over the inhabitants. The English colonial governments and colonists in North America, New Zealand and Australia all utilised this doctrine, and still use it today to assert legal rights to indigenous lands and to assert control over indigenous peoples. Written by indigenous legal academics - an American Indian from the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, a New Zealand Maori (Ngati Rawkawa and Ngai Te Rangi), an Indigenous Australian, and a Cree (Neheyiwak) in the country now known as Canada, Discovering Indigenous Lands provides a unique insight into the insidious historical and contemporary application of the doctrine of discovery.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807013145

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.