Discovery doctrine ended Indian sovereignty while preserving their possession rights.

Evidence

In the establishment of these relations [between European governments and the Native nations and peoples], the rights of the original inhabitants were in no instance entirely disregarded, but were necessarily to a considerable extent impaired [diminished]. They [the Indians] were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it [on that basis], and to use it according to their own discretion; but their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations [i.e. to a free and independent existence] were necessarily diminished [ended], and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave [an]exclusive title [of domination] to those who made it [the ‘discovery’]. — Doctrine of Discovery Project, The Marshall Trilogy, 57

Categorization

• BMF: Evokes Things Fall Apart: the colonial court ‘admits’ the clan’s land rights while extinguishing its sovereignty, and Okonkwo’s world collapses precisely because the power to dispose of the soil is denied.
• XREF: Connects to the Black Marxism material on how juridical racism and legal categorization did the structural work of dispossession without denying possession outright.