PROFESSOR SNYDER POSTULATES : AMERICA BACK TO NATIVE AMERICANS
APR 28TH SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex - the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST 2018 A.D.E.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
APR 28TH SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex - the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST 2018 A.D.E.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
1. US government should cede territory back to Native Americans : Timothy Snyder : Historically, immigrants were given special rights to take Native land. If Trump says we are no longer a nation of immigrants, that has consequences.
2. Does the federal government mean to cede the territory of the United States back to the Native Americans? The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has altered its mission statement, removing the characterization of America as a “nation of immigrants” in order to emphasize the new goal of “securing the homeland”. Some critics made the point that most citizens are immigrants or their descendants, while others noted that most Americans believed that immigration should remain stable or increase.
Yet the problem with the change in language lies deeper. According to our own legal tradition, Americans claim sovereignty over the territory of the US as immigrants, precisely because the territories in question were someone else’s homeland: the Native Americans’.
Since our country exists, we don’t ask ourselves how or why. The legal foundation of the federal claim to dominion over territory is something called the Doctrine of Discovery, a notion that goes back five centuries. As European explorers sought new maritime passages and found new lands, popes granted European powers the authority to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue” the people they found.
3. Portugal, Spain, France and England claimed territory by planting a flag, a symbolic action known as “discovery”. It made no difference whether the land in question was inhabited or not, since only Christians had conferred upon themselves the right to “discover” in this sense. By the logic of the papal bulls, and that of later charters to English explorers made by the English king or queen, indigenous peoples had no rights to land or to legal recognition of any kind. Only immigrants did.
The young American republic preserved this European doctrine. The US supreme court formalized the Doctrine of Discovery in three famous cases of 1823, 1831 and 1832. Chief Justice John Marshall took for granted the obvious fact that America was the homeland of the Native Americans, “the rightful occupants of the soil”. By the logic of “discovery”, Native Americans had no rights because America was their homeland: “Their power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.”
4. In American law, to have a homeland established no sovereignty over territory; only immigration created such authority. According to Marshall, English charters and claims had established an “absolute and complete” title to the land of North America, which then “passed to the United States” in 1776. The judicial magic of creating sovereignty and property is performed on behalf of immigrants and only on behalf of immigrants. From the perspective of modern human rights, or even of simple logic, there is much to criticize in the Doctrine of Discovery and in these rulings. In light of the first amendment of the constitution, separating church and state, papal bulls seem untenable as a source of American jurisprudence. When Marshall writes that “conquest gives a title that the courts of the conqueror cannot deny”, it is easy to wonder whether anything more is being claimed in his rulings than that might makes right. Native American scholars have made all of these points, and aboriginal activists here and around the world have asked the pope to repeal the original bulls.
5. However flawed it may be, the Doctrine of Discovery is the law of the land, affirmed regularly by our highest court. In the 21st century, in New York v Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the supreme court cited Marshall’s rulings and relied upon the Doctrine of Discovery as the basis of the federal government’s dominion over land once controlled by Native Americans – which is to say, the entirety of the United States of America.
The American claim to American land is that Native Americans had a homeland but no dominion over it, since sovereignty automatically shifted to immigrants. If the federal government no longer defines the America as a “nation of immigrants”, it abandons, by its own logic, the claim to sovereignty over the land. If US policy is now, instead, to protect a “homeland”, that would mean restoring the rights of the Native Americans to the entirety of the US.
6. To be sure, a mission statement does not itself make law. But it expresses an attitude that is quite common in the Trump administration and indeed in both houses of Congress, one that denies the premise of the Doctrine of Discovery, disables the rulings of the supreme court, and reopens the question of the sovereignty of the US over territory. Marshall admitted that territorial control by immigration, the “pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited territory into conquest” might appear “extravagant”. Yet the Doctrine of Discovery prevails, he asserts, so long as the “principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained”.
7. If the federal government claims that the US is a nation of natives rather than immigrants, that test is no longer met. If the federal government no longer asserts the principle on which its own sovereignty is based, no longer sustains the Doctrine of Discovery. Following Marshall’s reasoning, Native Americans would then have, in his words, a “legal and just claim to retain possession” of what is now the United States of America.
We have a responsibility to know and face our history, the indefensible as well as the praiseworthy. To deny our past as immigrants is to deny ourselves the chance of understanding who we are, for better and for worse. It is also, following the very logic and law of America, to abandon our claim to the dominion over territory, and to restore the land to those who first called it home.
We have a responsibility to know and face our history, the indefensible as well as the praiseworthy. To deny our past as immigrants is to deny ourselves the chance of understanding who we are, for better and for worse. It is also, following the very logic and law of America, to abandon our claim to the dominion over territory, and to restore the land to those who first called it home.
The government agency in charge of granting citizenship to prospective Americans has removed a passage from its mission statement that describes the United States as a nation of immigrants.The move by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency was first revealed via an email shared with the Intercept, confirmed by the Guardian Thursday.
Whereas the mission statement had previously read:
USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”
It will now read:
US Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.
USCIS was created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, under the Department of Homeland Security. It processes about 6m applications a year.
In the email, later sent to the Guardian by the agency, USCIS director L Francis Cissna said: “This simple, straightforward statement clearly defines the agency’s role in our country’s lawful immigration system and the commitment we have to the American people.”
The director also noted the removal of the term “customers”, arguing that US citizens are the agency’s customers, not those applying for citizenship.
“All applicants and petitioners should, of course, always be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, but we can’t forget that we serve the American people,” he wrote.
However, virtually the entire agency budget – between 95% and 99%, according to publicly available budget documents – is funded through user fees paid by the applicants and petitioners.
“With this mission statement we move away from the transactional language of customer and product. Citizenship, residency and the other benefits of our immigration system are granted only after a rigorous evaluation, not merely by the payment of a fee, or submission of an application,” agency officials said.
They added that the new mission statement was effective immediately and was not ordered by Donald Trump or White House officials.
APR 28TH SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex - the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST 2018 A.D.E.