Discovery doctrine reduced Native peoples from actors to subjects acted upon

Evidence

It is this sovereign assertion which, more than anything else, distinguishes occidental title and makes manifest the racial basis of the doctrine of discovery. Bluntly, the discoverers were the kind of people who had sovereignty and title, and the discovered were the kind of people who had neither. Not only did the discoverers acquire “absolute” and “exclusive” title to the land, not only did discovery thence give them “the exclusive right… to appropriate the lands occupied by the Indians,” they also “asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves” (p. 574). Unlike Vitoria’s involving natural law which recognized something like sovereignty vested in them, the Indians were now utterly subordinate to a sovereign power and were “excluded… from intercourse with any European potentate than the first discoverer” (p. 573). The doctrine of discovery becomes one in which the discovered are no longer actors but merely acted upon. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interests in how legal doctrines naturalize racial hierarchy — echoes themes in Milgrom’s work on how institutions encode power relations. — connects to: American settlement was a history of dispossessing native peoples — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 273