Episode 10: Pulp Legal Fiction: The Bizarre Case Of Tee-hit-ton v. US

PULP LEGAL FICTION: THE BIZARRE CASE OF TEE HIT TON V. US Today we do a 70 year retrospective on the 1955 Supreme Court decision, Tee Hit Ton v. United States , which reaffirmed the 1823 US claim of a right of domination announced in Johnson v. McIntosh . But Tee Hit Ton also did something else: It laundered the Johnson decision for 20^th^ century sensibilities by deleting the word "Christian" from the "doctrine of Christian discovery". That redaction made it possible for later judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2005 to avoid the religious basis of the claim of a right of domination. In fact, the rhetorical clean up increased the use of Johnson v. McIntosh as a legal precedent in federal anti Indian law. We compare Tee Hit Ton with the decision one year earlier in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the segregation doctrine of "separate but equal". We explain how these two cases, apparently completely divergent in their outcomes, were actually on the same trajectory. In Brown , the court overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine because it obstructed the "Cold War" quest of the United States to dominate international politics. In Tee Hit Ton , maintaining but hiding the doctrine of Christian discovery the claim of ownership of the "North American" landmass, with its many sites of strategically important industrial resources (like the timber taken from Tlingit land) supported a core U.S. geopolitical interest. Taken together, Brown and Tee Hit Ton were parts of a mission to dominate the world literally. Transcript Download an AI Generated Transcript of this conversation Resources: Tee Hit Ton v. US /