An Appeal to the American People—Overturning “Federal Indian Law”
Steven J. Schwartzberg urges Americans to overturn Federal Indian Law by confronting the colonial assumptions that still shape U.S. jurisprudence now.
Canonical: https://jcrt.org/archives/25.1/schwartzberg/
Abstract
Steven J. Schwartzberg urges Americans to overturn Federal Indian Law by confronting the colonial assumptions that still shape U.S. jurisprudence now.
The famous "Marshall trilogy"—Johnson v. Mclntosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia—is repugnant to the written Constitution of the United States as well as to the international laws and usages that have been a part of life on Turtle Island (this continent) since millennia before the first eurochristians invaded and which still constitute the true unwritten constitution of this land and the deepest legitimate source of "the law." Rooted in that licentious hybrid of fifteenth century religious jurisprudence and ethnonationalism known as the doctrine of Christian discovery, the "Marshall trilogy" established a legal framework that has systematically denied to the peoples of the Native Nations their constitutional rights. In particular, it has denied them their right to have the obligations of the United States under their treaties adhered to as the "supreme law of the land" and also their right to enforce these legal obligations in the Supreme Court under its original jurisdiction in any case arising under a treaty in which a state is a party to the case. Without the legal structure established by the "Marshall trilogy," including the "right" of the United States to enter Native Nations without their prior permission that was fabricated in Worcester so as not to interfere with the Trail of Tears, the land thefts and genocides of the 1830s, as well as those that followed in the so-called "Indian Wars," could never have taken place. Nor could such subsequent horrors as the boarding "schools" and the exploitations and oppressions and treaty violations that continue to this day. The "trust" in any treaty relationship is the trust on both sides that the treaty will be adhered to. This is precisely what the "trust relationship" denies whenever the United States wishes to deny it on the basis of a claim that the Native Nations are, in the words of Cherokee Nation, "completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States." This is a claim-like the analogous "states' rights" claim that these nations are subordinate to the individual states-that is repugnant to constitutional law (properly construed).
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