In this groundbreaking new history, Caroline Dodds Pennock recovers the long-marginalised stories of the Indigenous …
The erasure and exclusion of Indigenous peoples is a fundamental part of national narratives across the world. The ‘Doctrine of Discovery’, a legal fiction that granted Europeans and their descendants the right to ‘discovered’ territories, has its roots in the fifteenth-century papal bulls that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, making Indigenous peoples ‘politically non-existent’. This doctrine has a powerful legacy in United States law, and patriotic myths are often framed around the ‘absence’ of Native Americans: discovery, the wilderness, the untamed frontier, the ‘opening’ of the West – these are compelling fantasies that deliberately erase Indigenous presence and set the scene for the settlement of empty lands by industrious ‘pioneers’. The violent displacement of Native peoples from their lands is obscured, and even their presence is blurred so that they become merely a distorted caricature in the origin story of the nation.