The Doctrine of Domination and Robert Jones’s Essay in Time Magazine

As an Indigenous scholar, I have dedicated my adult life to investigating the conceptual roots of the United States. In 1993, New York University published my first law review article, “The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Plenary Power.”

Thirty years later, in an August 2023 Time magazine article titled “The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think,” Robert P. Jones skillfully publicizes his book “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.”

Given that by his own admission Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars—starting with Vine Deloria, Jr.—have been researching, writing, and talking about this subject for some fifty years, one wonders in what sense the information can still be considered “hidden.” From a marketing standpoint, though, I suppose it’s important to build up a sense of intrigue.

Perhaps Professor Jones prefers to frame the information in this manner because he was unaware of the information until fairly recently, and never bothered to communicate with those of us who, as Native and non-Native scholars, have been developing a formidable and comprehensive body of research regarding the Doctrine of Discovery and Domination since the 1970s and early 1980s.

I become skeptical when I see the mainstream media (e.g., “Time” magazine) widely publicizing what appears to be a “cutting edge” historical critique of the “conservative right-wing” of American society, with phrases such “white Christian nationalism.” When we see this happening, it makes a great deal of sense to slow down and ask ourselves, “What’s going on?”

“What’s the underlying political agenda which has nothing at all to do with Indigenous nations and peoples?”

How interesting that a professor who self-identifies as “white” (and “We white Christians”) has taken the liberty of unilaterally framing decades of efforts by Indigenous scholars to excavate the deeper patterns within the Latin and English versions of fifteenth-century papal decrees, and the semantic subtleties of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, which are premised on the claim of a right of Christian domination, and then presumptuously use that information for his own partisan political purposes within the mainstream American society.

Professor Jones doesn’t seem to realize that he seems trapped within a metaphorical framework of race, which uses the color spectrum in a manner that is well designed to divide and dominate people. Why? Because his approach lacks nuance and a possible path toward healing: e.g., Republicans v. Democrats, Whites v. All Other “Colors.”

Given the findings in my 2008 book Pagan in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery,” why does Jones ask the rhetorical question “Is America a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians?”

Why not use the findings in my book, and thereby give credit where credit is due, to make an unvarnished factual statement: “Since the founding of the United States, the American people have framed themselves as a Chosen People destined to take possession of the continent as a Promised Land,” modeled after the Old Testament narrative in the Bible.

For him to pose the above question (“Is America a divinely ordained promised land . . . ”) suggests that this information about the United States is still a mystery, and the conceptual “roots” that we clearly revealed long ago are still “hidden.” In this sense, Professor Jones has engaged in a scholarly erasure of the findings of those of us who have preceded him.

In at least one instance, his use of analogy seems wildly inapt: To say, for example, that the image of “insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021” is analogous to Hernando de Soto” using “Christian symbols to claim Indigenous lands for Spain” strikes me as patently ridiculous.

Is Jones seriously asking us to mentally envision the Capitol Building of the American Empire, an empire premised on the Old Testament Image of the Chosen People and the Promised Land, as being even slightly analogous to the lands of the original nations at the mouth of the Mississippi River?

The Chosen People/Promised Land narrative, the papal documents of the fifteenth century, and the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh ruling provide us with a disturbing insight: The United States was founded upon a claim of a right of domination over all of our original nations and peoples, and it maintains that claim to this day.

Given that this is the case, we need to reframe the argument  that Professor Jones makes: “. . . we can no longer disingenuously pretend that democracy and the Doctrine of Domination are, or ever were compatible.”

American “democracy” was and is fully compatible with the Doctrine of Domination. In fact, that doctrine occupies a special place at the root of all federal claims of power over “public lands”, all claims of “trusteeship” over Indigenous lands, and all property law.

In addition to my book, Peter d’Errico has provided a thorough excavation of the American system of legalized domination, in Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Praeger 2022).

Democracy has nothing that cannot be reconciled to a claim of a right of domination over other peoples and their lands. American democracy allows the masses to vote for the administrators of the system of domination, and then say as the Who song goes, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

This point is well-documented in Steve Schwartzberg’s Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal (Ethics Press 2023), which shows how claims and counterclaims of a right of domination over Indigenous peoples played out and ultimately won out in the democratic system of the US Congress.

If Jones were not trying to ride the latest wave of left-right partisanship, he might have done a better and more honest job of recounting the history of American stances toward our original nations and peoples.

That key point has the potential to be a unifying truth for those “Americans” who identify as “Republican” or “Democrat,” or “White,” or “Christian,” or some other “Color, Creed, or Religion.” Perhaps all of us, even those of us who come from the Original Nations and Peoples of this Turtle Island continent, can find common ground by opposing the claim of a right of domination being used against us.

Perhaps we can use that common position as a starting point to figure out how to live together, and learn how to develop the discipline to communicate respectfully, and work through our differences, in a manner that is beneficial to one another and all living things.