Thanks for this. My worries and my assessment travel along similar lines. If you will indulge my mentioning my own work, one example of ongoing American dehumanization centers on our law, policy, and conduct towards the peoples of the Native Nations as the arguments that led to the Trail of Tears in the 1830s are still the foundation of grotesque oppression and exploitation to this day.
“All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.” So claimed Georgia Senator John Forsyth in 1830. To this advocacy of what became the Trail of Tears, Rhode Island Senator Asher Robbins replied: “does our civilization give us a title to his right? A right which he inherits equally with us, from the gift of nature and of nature’s God. The Indian is a man, and has all the rights of man. The same God who made us made him, and endowed him with the same rights; for ‘of one blood hath he made all the men who dwell upon the earth.’”
Faced with a choice between these two positions, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in early 1831, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote a majority opinion (there was a powerful dissent) in which Marshall knowingly and dishonestly refused to challenge the position of the majority of the Congress—Forsyth’s position—as a violation of constitutional law. Refusing to recognize the Cherokee Nation’s rights under its treaties—rights that according to the Constitution are part of the supreme law of the land—Marshall boldly lied: “If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”
That is how the genocide of the 1830s—as well as subsequent genocides and land thefts—were allowed to proceed. That is how they were made “legal” by the Supreme Court in spite of the fact that, according to Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution, the Cherokee Nation—even if it were somehow, as Marshall falsely claimed, “domestic” and “dependent”—still had a right to bring an action under the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction in “all cases” arising under a treaty in which a state of the Union is a party to the case.
We cannot change a past in which President Andrew Jackson was specifically warned by his secretary of war, Lewis Cass, in September of 1831, that without adequate preparations “great sufferings must be encountered upon the journey, and many will doubtless perish.” Within a matter of months one in five members of the Choctaw Nation were dead. And the killing, for that is what it was, went on for many years as nation after nation was driven west and away from their ancestral lands. But we can and must repudiate and overturn the body of “law” that allowed these crimes and that oppresses and exploits the peoples of the Native Nations to this day by building on this and other poisonous precedents—especially the false claim of a “right” to dominate the Native Nations and their lands and to unilaterally ignore or override treaty obligations to them on the basis of a “plenary power” or “ultimate dominion” that simply does not exist in either the individual states or the United States according to constitutional law (properly construed).
Arguments over Genocide—now available in paperback—is a history of the fight against Cherokee Removal in the nineteenth century. It also addresses some of the ways the arguments of the advocates and appeasers of that genocide continue to determine American law, policy, and conduct to this day. It is about the ways knowledge of the arguments of the opponents of that genocide, and of the framers of the Constitution, might be revived to transform American relationships with the peoples of the Native Nations and perhaps to transform the American people as well.
We as a people have at least some sense of our historic wrongdoing towards the Native Nations—a sense that spans most of our political spectrum and combines with a tangible feeling of sympathy for the cause of bringing an end to the systematic injustice with which the United States has treated these peoples. What might we become as a people if we were to truly care for the larger whole that embraces all life beginning by caring for justice for the Native Nations by listening to them as to what they most want.
The arguments advanced by men guilty of horrific evil—the arguments advanced by the advocates of genocide and their appeasers—triumphed in the 1830s and have never since lost the ascendency. These historic arguments for genocide—or for a “sovereignty” over others that carries a “right” to commit genocide—support present-day assertions of U.S. domination in the structure of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law.” The arguments of the opponents of the genocide of the 1830s, meanwhile, have largely been forgotten, at least among non-Native people. These arguments center on the proposition that Native Nations are independent foreign states, as the Cherokee Nation told the Supreme Court in 1831, “not owing allegiance to the United States, nor to any state of this union, nor to any other prince, potentate, or state, other than their own.” This is a truth that the advocates of genocide and their appeasers—then and now—have united in denying.
As George Manuel, chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (known today as the Assembly of First Nations), has written: “Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”
it will take you to the publisher’s webpage where you can read some blurbs and, if so inclined, purchase the book, with 40% off the hardback price, and 20% off the paperback, simply by using that link (you can click the small arrow next to “binding” to access the paperback).
👏this was so thought provoking thank-you
Dear David,
Thanks for this. My worries and my assessment travel along similar lines. If you will indulge my mentioning my own work, one example of ongoing American dehumanization centers on our law, policy, and conduct towards the peoples of the Native Nations as the arguments that led to the Trail of Tears in the 1830s are still the foundation of grotesque oppression and exploitation to this day.
“All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.” So claimed Georgia Senator John Forsyth in 1830. To this advocacy of what became the Trail of Tears, Rhode Island Senator Asher Robbins replied: “does our civilization give us a title to his right? A right which he inherits equally with us, from the gift of nature and of nature’s God. The Indian is a man, and has all the rights of man. The same God who made us made him, and endowed him with the same rights; for ‘of one blood hath he made all the men who dwell upon the earth.’”
Faced with a choice between these two positions, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in early 1831, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall wrote a majority opinion (there was a powerful dissent) in which Marshall knowingly and dishonestly refused to challenge the position of the majority of the Congress—Forsyth’s position—as a violation of constitutional law. Refusing to recognize the Cherokee Nation’s rights under its treaties—rights that according to the Constitution are part of the supreme law of the land—Marshall boldly lied: “If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”
That is how the genocide of the 1830s—as well as subsequent genocides and land thefts—were allowed to proceed. That is how they were made “legal” by the Supreme Court in spite of the fact that, according to Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution, the Cherokee Nation—even if it were somehow, as Marshall falsely claimed, “domestic” and “dependent”—still had a right to bring an action under the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction in “all cases” arising under a treaty in which a state of the Union is a party to the case.
We cannot change a past in which President Andrew Jackson was specifically warned by his secretary of war, Lewis Cass, in September of 1831, that without adequate preparations “great sufferings must be encountered upon the journey, and many will doubtless perish.” Within a matter of months one in five members of the Choctaw Nation were dead. And the killing, for that is what it was, went on for many years as nation after nation was driven west and away from their ancestral lands. But we can and must repudiate and overturn the body of “law” that allowed these crimes and that oppresses and exploits the peoples of the Native Nations to this day by building on this and other poisonous precedents—especially the false claim of a “right” to dominate the Native Nations and their lands and to unilaterally ignore or override treaty obligations to them on the basis of a “plenary power” or “ultimate dominion” that simply does not exist in either the individual states or the United States according to constitutional law (properly construed).
Arguments over Genocide—now available in paperback—is a history of the fight against Cherokee Removal in the nineteenth century. It also addresses some of the ways the arguments of the advocates and appeasers of that genocide continue to determine American law, policy, and conduct to this day. It is about the ways knowledge of the arguments of the opponents of that genocide, and of the framers of the Constitution, might be revived to transform American relationships with the peoples of the Native Nations and perhaps to transform the American people as well.
We as a people have at least some sense of our historic wrongdoing towards the Native Nations—a sense that spans most of our political spectrum and combines with a tangible feeling of sympathy for the cause of bringing an end to the systematic injustice with which the United States has treated these peoples. What might we become as a people if we were to truly care for the larger whole that embraces all life beginning by caring for justice for the Native Nations by listening to them as to what they most want.
The arguments advanced by men guilty of horrific evil—the arguments advanced by the advocates of genocide and their appeasers—triumphed in the 1830s and have never since lost the ascendency. These historic arguments for genocide—or for a “sovereignty” over others that carries a “right” to commit genocide—support present-day assertions of U.S. domination in the structure of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law.” The arguments of the opponents of the genocide of the 1830s, meanwhile, have largely been forgotten, at least among non-Native people. These arguments center on the proposition that Native Nations are independent foreign states, as the Cherokee Nation told the Supreme Court in 1831, “not owing allegiance to the United States, nor to any state of this union, nor to any other prince, potentate, or state, other than their own.” This is a truth that the advocates of genocide and their appeasers—then and now—have united in denying.
As George Manuel, chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (known today as the Assembly of First Nations), has written: “Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”
If you click here:
https://ethicspress.com/products/arguments-over-genocide/?GENOCIDE
it will take you to the publisher’s webpage where you can read some blurbs and, if so inclined, purchase the book, with 40% off the hardback price, and 20% off the paperback, simply by using that link (you can click the small arrow next to “binding” to access the paperback).
There is also a free essay available here:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/03/reimagining-nationalism-and-democracy-with-the-view-from-the-shore/
All the Best,
Steve Schwartzberg
Thank you, Steve. I look forward to reading the book!