“KNOWLEDGE” AND “BELIEF” UNDERLYING GOVERNMENT DOMINATION OF ORIGINAL PEOPLES

Some Musings on Knowledge and the Domination Code Framework

Greetings Everyone, and my apologies for taking so long to post another essay. Happy Gregorian Calendar New Year according to which it is now 2025. Here’s my first essay for this calendar year.

Black Elk Peak, Oceti Sakowin Territory (photo by Steven Newcomb)

The reality of our everyday lives is created and maintained by means of an unceasing flow of language, such as metaphors and interpretations which constitute what is termed “knowledge.” An example would be the constant refrain, “We live in a democracy.” Hundreds of millions of people who live in the United States, and others living in other parts of the planet have been conditioned to accept this statement as a truism. And whether the statement is accurate or not is beside the point. Everyone knows that this is a widely held, taken for granted belief.

The constant “flow” of language and the knowledge we experience from moment to moment holds our sense of reality together. When we experience the mental world that we inhabit with others, we interactively rely upon and perpetuate certain fundamental assumptions. Those assumptions are seldom called into question.

And when the members of a given society do question and challenge that society’s fundamental assumptions, the result can be mental dissonance and the sense that “reality” is being disrupted, or “coming apart at the seams,” which is stressful.

Because the most basic societal assumptions are taken for granted as being not only true but unquestionable by massive numbers of people, what serves as a kind of conceptual bedrock for mainstream society is what is assumed to be true without proof. No proof is needed because it is assumed that evidence of the assertion’s truthfulness was worked out by “the experts” long ago.

As a result of whatever evidence was worked out in previous generations, if any, it is widely assumed that a given assertion is “still true.” But what happens when it is no longer true and we don’t yet know it? What if we haven’t kept up with new information, or more accurate information, which demonstrates that a previously and seemingly unimpeachable assertion no longer “holds water”?

In other words, what if an assertion that was taken-for-granted as being true is now understood by those who dare to question such matters to be false? Do all the millions of people who have considered that information to be “true” now immediately understand their error and begin to adjust their thinking accordingly?

These days, because of the overwhelming amount of information readily available, some of which is accurate and some not, massive amounts of societal knowledge are now being seen as unreliable for a variety of reasons. Our knowledge base constantly needs to be revised by taking into account new information and new findings. And this is why those whose job it is to shape and control public opinion by means of propaganda are having such a difficult time keeping up. In desperation they are responding with ineffective phrases such as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.”

Usually, what they are opposed to is information not approved by the government-corporate, public-private, people-shapers. My response is we would be well-advised to assess the “information” we come across by looking for patterns of domination.

A word to the wise: It makes sense for us to regard our knowledge and any “conclusions” we might want to form as to being merely tentative. It’s what we believe we can reliably say we “know” at this moment. But what we say we “know” will certainly need to be modified as additional information becomes available. We ought to welcome this.

So, how do we “know” what we claim to “know”? And how do we verify whether what we believe to be true is in fact true? We are constantly being bombarded with massive amounts of information, much of it contradictory and the powers that be and the corporate media outlets expect us to treat the information that comes through “official channels” as being “true.” We are expected to ignore the fact that it’s coming from an unreliable and untrustworthy source, such as a system of domination termed “the government,” with its corporate sponsors and partners.

Black Elk Peak (Photo by Steven Newcomb)

How to Apply the Domination Framework Analysis to Identify Usually Unnoticed Patterns of Domination in So-called “Federal Indian Law”.

The 2005 version of the Felix Cohen Handbook of Federal Indian Law contains excerpts from the 1982 version of Cohen’s Handbook, which was put together by a “Board of Authors and Editors.” The Board included the following wording as Cohen’s initial “explanation of the ultimate foundation for the HANDBOOK.” “What has made this work possible,” wrote Cohen, “in the final analysis, is a set of beliefs that form the intellectual equipment of a generation.” He then lists four of those beliefs (some synonyms for domination are identified by placing “domination” in brackets):

“a belief that our treatment [domination] of the Indian in the past is not something of which a democracy can be proud”

“a belief that that the protection of minority rights and the substitution of reason and agreement for force and dictation [domination] represent a contribution to civilization”

“a belief that confusion and ignorance in fields of law are allies of despotism [domination]”

“a belief that it is the duty of the Government to aid oppressed [dominated] groups in the understanding of their legal rights, in Indian fields as elsewhere”

Anyone who has not learned to use my domination code framework will read these beliefs and not notice the domination inherent in the “Government” relation to “American Indians”. Once we become cognizant of this, however, it becomes possible to point out that the existence of Native peoples as “oppressed groups” is a direct consequence of them being abused by the system of domination called “government.” The body of ideas and arguments called “federal Indian law” is a mental outcome of that system of domination.

It is difficult for me to imagine anyone without the assistance of my domination code translator being able to reveal the domination inherent in the beliefs above; for example, translating the fourth belief in the following manner: “a belief that it is the duty of the Domination to aid dominated groups in the understanding of their legal rights in the U.S.’s system of domination.” Yet this is accurate. Cohen does not say it is the duty of “Government” to “aid oppressed groups” in their effort to free themselves from the system of domination. Its duty is evidently limited to assisting them in “understanding of their legal rights” under and subject to that form of domination called “the federal government.”

Accordingly, Cohen’s handbook would be more accurately titled, Handbook of the Federal Indian Law of Domination, which is why the title of Peter d’Errico’s 2022 wonderfully insightful book Federal Anti-Indian Law is so apt. However, as the Board of Editors of the Cohen Handbook state in the Foreword to the 2005 edition, “Felix Cohen’s [original 1941] Handbook brought focus and coherence to this confusing welter of sources and, in effect, created the field of federal Indian law.”

What a brilliant strategy: take some of the best and brightest minds in Indian Country and condition them to accept as normal the anti-Indian ideas and arguments of domination the U.S. government has cleverly devised to use against Native nations and peoples, and teach them to “master” the use of those ideas and arguments as U.S. “federal Indian law attorneys” and thus as sworn officers of the U.S. court system. It’s all designed to pull the knot tighter, not cut it.

It's been eighty-four years since Cohen first published his Handbook. As Vine Deloria, Jr. pointed out long ago, it is treated in the field as a kind of rigid catechism that does not suffer heretics. Unfortunately, after more than eight decades, this rigid system of “knowledge” and “belief” has now become a well-traveled road to a form of mental assimilation which seems to foreclose the possibility of any direct challenge to the premise of a U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination against our originally free nations and peoples. Our own efforts to launch such a challenge over a period of several of those decades continues.