Natural law let Vitoria simultaneously justify and void Indian sovereignty

Evidence

Vitoria also managed, however, to arrive at a contrary conclusion by relying on that same natural law. This infinitely amenable law also provided that the rights of the Indian peoples had to adjust to the expansive rights of all other people, including the Spanish, to travel, trade, “sojourn” and, in the cause of Christianity, to proselytize. There was also something of a right to enforce natural law. These rights could not be aggressively asserted unless they were resisted by the Indians. When so resisted, however, they could be asserted to the full extent of conquest and dispossession. And so they were. This process was greatly facilitated by Vitoria’s deeming the Indians to be inherently recalcitrant. Although included initially within its universal embrace, Vitoria also found the Indian to be outside the range of natural law. The details of their utter deviance was even then quite standard, ranging from the instantly egregious, such as cannibalism and sexual perversion, to more picayune affronts to European taboos of diet and dress - nudity, consuming food raw, eating reptiles, and so on. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 223

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A single legal framework could be ‘infinitely amenable’ — first granting Indians full natural-law title, then voiding it through the very same law by classifying their resistance and ‘deviance’ as placing them outside it. This is a dense mechanism for how universalist legal vocabularies produced racialized exclusion.
• XREF: Echoes vault material on how universalist liberal/rights discourse simultaneously includes and excludes racialized subjects; parallels racial formation’s ‘inclusion inside, exclusion outside’ double move.
• ADDENDUM: Could strengthen the sacrifice essay’s logic of how civilizations justify dispossession of those deemed outside moral community — here via natural law rather than ritual.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 223