Settlers invoked Indian property rights only when convenient to their land claims

Evidence

On one side were settlers who, doubtless more out of convenience than conviction, asserted the rights of the Indians from whom they had derived the titles which they claimed. … The other side in the case argued that the fullest possible title to the lands had, on the contrary, vested in the government of the United States as the successor to the British Crown, and the Crown in turn had acquired this title on discovery. … In an extended declamation, one of obscene eloquence, Marshall accepted that argument. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 226

Categorization

• CANDY: The irony that white settlers argued for Indian land rights purely to legitimize their own fraudulently acquired titles is a compact, striking anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Natives were rightful occupants but lacked power to sell their land. — Supreme Court of the United States (Marshall Court, 1823), Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh,…, 169; The Constitution protected only individual property, not Indigenous common land — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 71