Colonizers define Indigenous title among themselves without Indigenous participation

Evidence

Upon reflection, it is noteworthy that the discussion of the “nature” of “Indian title” took place without the participation of representatives of the Illinois and Piankeshaw nations. Those nations were not attempting to win acceptance of their view of the “nature” of their “title” to the land; and who knows if they had taken any position in this regard whatsoever. The discussion of how to define “Indian title” was a discussion that the colonizers decided to have amongst themselves. — Doctrine of Discovery Project, The Marshall Trilogy, 9

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the defining legal categories of a people were settled in rooms that people was barred from — a general essay on jurisdiction as the deepest form of exclusion.
• XREF: Parallels the Indian Claims Commission’s ‘tribal attorney’ system, where Native claims were litigated in forums Natives could not design.
• BMF: Things Fall Apart — Achebe goes to great lengths to show Okonkwo’s own clan legal reasoning and its procedural workings before the District Commissioner reduces it to a paragraph; the defining of a people’s law by outsiders is the novel’s quiet centerpiece.