Indigenous legal scholar Robert Miller begins his chapter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny with:

The United States and most of the non-European world were colonized under an international legal principle known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which was used to justify European claims over the indigenous peoples and their territories. The doctrine provides that ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ Euro-Americans automatically acquired property rights over the lands of Native peoples and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants just by showing up. This legal principle was shaped by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority over other races and religions of the world. When Euro-Americans planted their flags and religious symbols in lands they claimed to have discovered, they were undertaking well-recognized legal procedures and rituals of discovery that were designed to establish their claim to the lands and peoples.

The straight-forward language of the Doctrine of Discovery might tempt readers to accept it uncritically as an obscure legal artifact of the past. But in fact, much more is at stake here. The concept of Euro-Christian supremacy over religious, political, and property rights derives from a series of 15th-century Papal declarations and has authority only insomuch as one grants the Vatican the authority to make such universal laws. There is no actual reason the European claims of supremacy, be they religious, racial, or social should be seen as anything more than a dangerous manifestation of chauvinism.  

What should strike us as even stranger is that this doctrine, formulated by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the relationship between Christian polities and non-Christian nations, should be presumed to apply to Protestant states after the Reformation.  

It was clear from the brutal sectarian wars fought between Catholics and Protestants across Europe for over a century that even the definition of the Christianity was not something upon which there was universal agreement. However, regardless of how they felt about the hierarchies of Christian denomination, European nations all held the equally prejudicial belief that they were the primary representatives of civilization.  

We might ask: did the absence of certain socio-political hierarchies or the lack of specific technologies mean that a society lived in a state of savagery? Students should be encouraged to critically consider and discuss these notions because they are still handed down from one generation to another. How did salient cultural differences in the realms of religion and technology help to legitimize the enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous societies around the globe that fell under European hegemony?  

By examining the formation of the legal structures that supported and continue to uphold white supremacy, like the Doctrine of Discovery, it should become clear to students how arbitrary the legacy of “legally-sanctioned” colonialism is.  

It is also important to note that the Doctrine of Discovery was used by many imperialist-minded realms and nation states, many of whom the Doctrine never directly intended to legitimize, to legally condone the conquest of indigenous lands around the world.

Spain and Portugal, in their rivalry for overseas possessions, were addressed in the Papal bulls issued by Nicholas V and Alexander VI, claiming each nation’s rights to particular lands in the Americas. One might be surprised to learn that, though English Christians were still under the authority of Rome when Henry VII sent John Cabot to explore the North American coast, the English did not cite the Doctrine in that venture. However, regardless of the outcome of Protestant Reformation and the movement away from the Vatican, the Doctrine of Discovery was referenced in United States jurisprudence in the early 19th century. This set a foundation of legal precedence in the United States, which remains with us to this day. For example, as recently as 2005 in the City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the Supreme Court ruled against the Oneida’s attempt to regain their traditional lands based on a number of factors, including the Doctrine of Discovery—cited in a footnote in the court’s written decision, authored surprisingly by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  

Works cited

Miller, Robert J. "The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians." Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians, 2015.