Legal doctrine rationalized land theft rather than hiding it.

Evidence

White Americans’ racism toward Tribal Nations was very much out in the open. But for me, the most remarkable part of this history is that white Americans actually believed the country rightfully belonged to them. When you have unfettered power to strip people of their own land, you have no reason to lie about what you are doing. Tribal Nations were judged for how they used the land, and because they used it differently, it was argued they had forfeited the right to keep it. The chief justice correctly acknowledged that Tribal Nations would not go down without a fight, so the Supreme Court stepped in to make it legal to take whatever land the government wasn’t able to take through war. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 150

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘When you have unfettered power… you have no reason to lie’ is a crisp, quotable inversion of the usual assumption that wrongdoing hides itself.
• XREF: connects to: A buried legal definition let officials seize land without paying first. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 774