Mapping property

Abstract

To say that the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. M’intosh (1823) fundamentally altered the history of America is to understate the case’s importance in establishing and enforcing the principles that now govern this nation at the intersections of land, knowledge, and race. That case, in which the Court unequivocally supported settler colonialism by holding that title to land passed through the United States federal government, was superior to that passed through the Piankeshaw Indians, articulated the property interests that arise from the Doctrine of Discovery and aboriginal title respectively. The Court reasoned that European settler colonizers, because they created the nation’s architectures of sovereignty and rules of ownership through the Constitution and property law, were legally and intellectually superior to the inhabitants of the Americas, who had only a “right of occupancy” in their lands. The Doctrine of Discovery, originally set forth in the 1493 Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” naturalized settler colonial taking as a foundational principle of colonization in the Americas and marked land and knowledge claims that did not originate from Euro-American property law as secondary to those that did. Yet its impact was not limited to the Americas. Settler colonies all over the world embraced the Doctrine of Discovery and its corollaries as vehicles for expanding national boundaries