From Discovery to Cobell: Critical Race Theory and the Construction of the American Indian

• In Event: 520 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Toward a Sociological Critical Race Theory

Abstract

Laws and social policies have been critical constructs in developing, maintaining and recreating systems of domination and cultural suppression for indigenous peoples also collectively (racially) called Native American, and in legal discourse often referred to as Indian Nations or tribes. These laws and policies are clearly, and often explicitly, drawn from the Doctrine of Discovery with its start from the 1493 Papal Bull and subsequent Spanish conquest laws (Prince’s Rights to Conquest), and the differential citizenship English laws of the 17th century, that became a main underpinning for United States constitutional law, throughout the nineteenth century, and then very complicated laws and treatments of the twentieth century where Native Americans were accorded citizenship even as intense legal wrangling arose over status of Indian Nations or tribes. No treatment better illustrates the discriminatory, unjust settlement of policies than the Cobell case in the early twenty-first century, connected to the Discovery Doctrine, through four centuries of conquest and domination

Author

• James V. Fenelon, California State University, San Bernardino