Indigenous Rights Movements
The Legal Trick That Stole a Continent — and How Indigenous Peoples Are Dismantling It
A 15th-century papal decree, designed to justify the seizure of land from non-Christians, is still shaping court rulings over Indigenous land rights today.
The Idea
The Doctrine of Discovery sounds like a relic. It isn't. Originating in a series of papal bulls issued in the 1400s — most notably Pope Nicholas V's Romanus Pontifex in 1455 — it declared that Christian European monarchs had the legal right to claim 'discovered' lands occupied by non-Christians. The doctrine was absorbed into colonial law, then into the legal frameworks of settler states like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where it quietly underwrote centuries of dispossession. What makes Indigenous rights movements so historically significant is that they haven't simply argued for political recognition or compensation. The more ambitious strand of activism has targeted the foundational legal architecture itself. The demand is not just for a seat at the table — it's for acknowledgment that the table was built on stolen ground. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, a symbolic but genuinely remarkable moment. Yet repudiation doesn't automatically rewrite law. The doctrine still surfaces in court cases. Indigenous rights activists and legal scholars are doing the painstaking work of challenging it jurisdiction by jurisdiction, treaty by treaty — a project that requires holding together grassroots community organising, international law, and long historical memory simultaneously. That combination — the local and the planetary, the ancient and the urgently contemporary — is what distinguishes this movement from almost any other.
In the World
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court handed down Johnson v. M'Intosh — a ruling that essentially declared Indigenous peoples could not hold full legal title to their own land under American law because they had merely 'occupied' it, not 'discovered' it. Chief Justice John Marshall cited the Doctrine of Discovery directly. The case has never been fully overturned. Fast forward to 2005, and the same doctrine appeared in a ruling against the Oneida Indian Nation in New York state. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, invoked Johnson v. M'Intosh as settled precedent. The Onondaga Nation, watching this unfold, took a different path entirely: rather than working within US courts, they filed a case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, framing their land rights as an international human rights issue. They called it a 'land rights action,' deliberately not a 'land claim' — because you don't 'claim' what was never legally yours to lose. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the Māori Land Court has been operating since 1865 — originally designed to facilitate the transfer of Māori land into European hands, it has been progressively reoriented by Māori activists and lawyers into a tool for protection and recovery. The story of how a colonial institution gets turned against colonial ends is one of the quiet masterclasses of Indigenous rights history.
Why It Matters
Most of us encounter Indigenous rights as a news story — a pipeline protest, a land acknowledgment at the start of a meeting, a vote on treaty rights. These can feel local, specific, perhaps distant from our own lives. What the deeper history reveals is that these struggles are actually a stress test for the entire concept of legitimate governance. If the legal foundations of land ownership in settler states rest on a doctrine that has now been repudiated as morally indefensible, then the question of how societies reconcile that — without either dismissing history or collapsing into paralysis — is one of the defining political challenges of this century. It isn't only about Indigenous peoples. It's about what we mean when we say a legal system is just. Paying attention to these movements also sharpens how you read other political conflicts. Whenever states and peoples argue about sovereignty, territory, or recognition, the same structural questions are present: Who gets to decide what counts as legitimate ownership? Who wrote those rules, and when?
A Question to Ponder
If the legal framework that underpins land ownership in a country is shown to have been built on a morally indefensible foundation, what would genuine repair actually look like — and who gets to decide?
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