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Reviews
NATIVE AMERICA, DISCOVERED AND CONQUERED: THOMAS JEFFERSON, LEWIS AND CLARK, AND MANIFEST DESTINY
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by Robert J. Miller
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| Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, 2006. Notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $49.95 cloth. |
| Robert J. Miller describes how United States policy makers deftly used a precept of international law — the doctrine of discovery — to subjugate Native Americans and seize their land. According to Miller's definition, the doctrine of discovery held that "when European, Christian nations discovered new lands, the discovering country automatically gained sovereign and property rights in the lands of non-Christian, non-European peoples" (p. 8). This is a very narrow summary of a much broader definition, composed of ten distinct elements that Miller employs in this work. |
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The doctrine of discovery originated when the medieval Catholic Church sought to justify the dispossession of non-Christians. Western European powers then used the principle, as it was developed and revised by church lawyers and legal philosophers, to determine priority among competing territorial claims. One signally important principle of the doctrine held that the discovering "Christian" nation assumed sovereignty over newly found territory and acquired an exclusive "right of preemption" to purchase from Native residents the right of possession — the only title acknowledged to indigenous peoples by imperialist legal scholars. |
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After the American Revolutionary War, the nascent United States claimed it was the successor to Great Britain's discovery rights; and early national leaders, particularly George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, grounded their plans of national expansion in the doctrine. Congress, by means of the Trade and Intercourse Acts, and the U. S. Supreme Court, in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), institutionalized discovery into American law. Miller maintains that the Supreme Court developed three "fundamental" principles in federal Indian law during the past two centuries: that the sovereignty of tribal nations is not complete and was circumscribed by their first contact with a European imperial power; that Congress now possesses plenary power over Indian relations; and that the federal government holds a fiduciary relationship over the tribes and consequently holds their lands in trust. All of these maxims were grounded in ethnocentrism, Miller argues, and "flowed naturally from the Doctrine of Discovery" (p. 163). |
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This history has been examined thoroughly by previous scholars; what Miller adds to the discussion is a thorough study of Jefferson's infatuation with the principle and a determination to link doctrine of discovery to the emergence of the American belief in Manifest Destiny. According to Miller, Jefferson was extremely well-versed in the law of nations, was "thinking of a continental American empire early on," and "used the Doctrine of Discovery ... to assist in this national expansion" (p. 59). Miller maintains that Jefferson's primary motivation for the Lewis and Clark Expedition was to perfect the discovery title to the Pacific Northwest, which the United States claimed it had acquired with Robert Gray's 1792 sighting of the Columbia River. Miller convincingly demonstrates that Lewis and Clark were clearly prepared to carry out their president's wishes by closely following the rituals customary to exerting a discovery claim. |
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Although the phrase "Manifest Destiny" did not appear in public until 1845, Miller contends that the ideas it represented had long been present in American political discourse and "grew naturally out of the principles and legal elements of the Doctrine of Discovery, Thomas Jefferson's ambitions, and the path-breaking work of the Lewis and Clark expedition" (p. 115). The sensed divine mission to spread the nation's ideals and authority over the continent was particularly prominent in the rhetoric of expansionists who wanted to seize control of the Oregon Territory. Readers who fret that the Pacific Northwest is marginalized by American historians will find this section of the work particularly pleasing, for Miller makes a compelling argument that the region was central to the development of the character, economy, and history of the United States. |
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Miller's thoroughly researched and determined argument is significant for at least three other reasons. First, he points out that the doctrine of discovery was not only the foundation of American territorial and political hegemony over our nation's indigenous peoples, but that it is a living, breathing principle that courses through contemporary American Indian law and political calculations. Second, the book complements an important and expanding historiography on the ideology and cant of Euro-American conquest. Finally, Miller does not simply lament the tragedies wrought by the doctrine of discovery; he offers the United States an honorable way out of the legal miasma produced by two centuries of adherence to the doctrine. In his conclusion, Miller urges the United States to abandon its reliance on discovery and recommit itself to the principle of self-determination. He calls for the congregation of a pan-tribal blue-ribbon commission to find ways to "reduce the Discovery burden on Indians and their governments" and return United States–Indian relations to the early republic days when the federal and tribal governments "negotiated and traded their rights and interests in a political and diplomatic setting." Purging the nation of discovery, Miller concludes, would "give tribal governments a real decision-making role and a real voice in how the United States treats them" (p. 176–77). |
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| Tim Alan Garrison
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| Portland State University |
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