Episode 8: WORDS & MEANINGS

WORDS & MEANINGS OUR CONVERSATIONS Today, Steve Newcomb and Peter d'Errico talk about their conversations: What motivates them? What guides us? Toward what end do we converse? From what vantage point? With what perspectives? And in particular, how and why do we focus on "domination"? Steve opens the discussion by recounting his own journey from an early encounter with Johnson v. McIntosh and the doctrine of "Christian discovery". He explains how his reading of many authors and treatises brought him to understand the Johnson decision as "a claim of a right of domination" a claim he refused to accept as having any legitimacy. Steve talks about how he gradually reached a "comfort zone" a willingness to speak forthrightly about "domination" despite the unpleasant significance of that word. Moreover, he developed a "domination translator" to reveal how "domination" is encapsulated in (and hidden by) other words used more commonly in ordinary conversation: e.g., "state", "empire", "sovereignty", and "civilization". These are synonyms, euphemisms, for "domination"; and they appear frequently in texts that on the surface do not deal with "domination". They are often linked to terms that seem to have pleasant significations, such as "Christian", "welfare", "divine", and "progress". The "domination translator" exposes the ambiguities of these word combinations, allowing us to trace the history of domination systems and show their present operation. We explore how terms of domination are prevalent in ordinary daily language. For example, "landlord" is used without acknowledging that it expresses a structure of claimed power over land and people a "lordship" relation in society with a deep political/economic history and significance. This is but one example of how domination is hidden in ordinary conversation. In this way, domination is normalized in everyday consciousness. Domination consciousness was "normal" in what we call "the view from the ship" the colonizers' view of reality. The "explorers", "adventurers", and "colonizers" carried "royal grants" authorizing" them to "take possession" of lands they discover, in the name of their "sovereign", with the proviso that the lands were not "in the possession of" another "Christian monarch". The colonizing invaders lived and thought and acted within a multi faceted world of domination that they understood as "reality". John Marshall penned Johnson v. McIntosh within this "reality". He stood aside from that "reality" enough to say that it was an "extravagant... pretension" that "may be opposed to natural right"; but he stood firmly in the domination system and declared that it "certainly cannot be rejected by courts of justice." The Johnson claim of "a right of domination" remains in the 21^st^ century at the foundation of US property law, which is simultaneously federal anti Indian law. Our conversation examines how names help normalize domination. For example, "Indians" has long been deprecated in US English as a name for the original peoples of the continent. However, "federal Indian law" makes it exceedingly tricky to drop the name. Alternatives like "American Indian" and "Native American" are oxymoronic, since the original peoples predate "America". Even the apparently satisfactory word "Indigenous" is problematized by the United Nations definition as being dominated peoples. We use the phrase "original peoples" to emphasize that our analytical perspective stands outside naming conventions that normalize a "claim of a right of domination". We close today's conversation by acknowledging that some (many?) of those who follow our work experience "disillusionment" when we criticize familiar tropes. A significant example is the so called "trust doctrine" rooted in John Marshall's Cherokee Nation v. Georgia opinion. The notion that the US has a "trust responsibility" for "tribes" is the most common argument heard in courtrooms and repeated by "pro Native" commentators... Despite the fact that (1) Cherokee Nation invented the doctrine to diminish the national status of the Cherokee, and (2) that the US Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that the "federal Indian law trust" is not a true trust, but an instrument by which the US "pursue[s] its own policy goals". Steve says the "domination translator" throws some of our listeners for a loop. Peter recounts his answer to students who expressed "disillusionment" after learning about the domination inherent in US law: He responded, "Wonderful! Losing illusions is the first step to understanding." Transcript Download an AI Generated Transcript of this conversation Resources : Dee Brown writings: /