Justice for the Native Nations
First Steps on a Path to Genuine Self-Government for All
The injustice with which the United States has treated the Native peoples of this continent is so severe—involving so many repeated land thefts and genocides and so much ongoing oppression and exploitation, including so many ongoing treaty violations—that it may seem utopian to speak of justice.
Faced with this history, it is reasonable to ask:
Can we, as a people, truly change course?
And, if so, where would we even begin?
In a series of speeches and essays available on my website, in a recently published book, and in a forthcoming free article, I have sought to answer these questions at length and to insist that the first steps are far clearer—and far better grounded constitutionally—than many assume.(1)
These steps begin with a simple but transformative intellectual and cultural shift followed by hard social and political work:
We must first decide to move away from frameworks of domination and toward what many Native traditions describe as right relations. We must then actually move away from our broken democracy to genuine self-government.
Unless we begin with respect and love for the beloved community formed by “all our relations”—all living beings—we can expect to make the same old mistakes in new forms and to see continued political deterioration as what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls the “house of modernity” continues to collapse around us.(2)
In an hour long speech this past February (video and transcript) titled: “We the People between Immanence and Transcendence”—I called for building from the peaceful interactions of respectful consciousnesses rather than from the decisions of (allegedly) virtuous consciences. In other words, I called for replacing “virtue” with “attunement to right relations” as the cornerstone of even the most idealistic vision of our politics and for seeking to maintain alignment with the balance, harmony, and abundance that Earth provides in place of our previous attempts to build from our own “will.”(3)
We must learn, perhaps for the first time, the balance between the transcendent calling us to remember that every being shines with divine possibilities and the immanent reminding us that the divine already lives within every grain of soil, every trembling heart. We have failed to understand this—we have failed to understand the unity of immanence and transcendence, the unity of divinity—and so inserted ourselves into a role that is not ours to play in a seemingly biblically-inspired—but actually utterly twisted and illegitimate—position of domination; a position of domination that can only be sustained on the basis of illusion, idolatry, and violence.
The United States must abandon its longstanding—and unconstitutional—claim to a right to dominate the peoples of the Native Nations and to take their lands.
It must instead:
Recognize these nations as lawful equals
Honor treaties as binding commitments
Restore sufficient land bases for genuine self-government
These are not acts of charity. They are obligations grounded in the Constitution itself.
If taken seriously, such steps would not only begin to repair historic injustices—they would also open the possibility of renewal for American democracy and perhaps even a path to living in genuine self-government for all.
I want to be especially clear here: the resurgence of Native peoples, once our domination ceases and land bases sufficient for genuine self-government are restored to them, must unfold on their own terms. They are not instruments for our renewal. They are sovereign bearers of their own traditions and trajectories. If their example teaches the world something about alignment with Earth and natural law—as I fully expect that it will—this will be because they live life freely, not because others seek to rely upon or appropriate their ways. It will be because they prove that deep recovery and healing are possible even after unimaginably horrific injuries.
Nor, I want to stress, would recognizing and respecting the national rights of these peoples in our constitutional law (properly construed) provide any basis for stealing anything more from them, such as the citizenship that we have promised their nationals. If any of them do not wish to accept this citizenship, that is their right, but we have no basis for denying it to them if they wish to receive it: we have given them our word and, especially in treaties, our word must be our bond if we are to have any chance of even beginning to live in truth and honesty.
The guarantee of American citizenship in no way alters our obligations to these peoples as nations. Including, ultimately, our obligation to live in accordance with the international laws and usages that have been part of life on this continent for millennia. Far from having a right to subject these peoples to our laws, we are bound to respect the natural laws of this land, including maintaining a love for our grandmother Earth that is compatible with a respectful relationship with land and that avoids a brutal and abusive “ownership.”
The philosophical clarification of virtue drawn by David Benjamin Blower—virtue understood as some combination of the Greek terms arête and askesis is helpful. Virtue was, in fact, of central importance to the figure most responsible for the democratic revolutionary jurisprudence undergirding the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson—as is evident in his law lectures and in the understanding of democracy that we inherit from Wilson and his allies.(4)
To my way of thinking, any “universalism” that fails to center Indigenous ontologies and experiences—whether that “universalism” is secular or religious, whether rooted in ancient or in modern outlooks—is so inadequate as to be false. If we ask how the Native peoples could maintain what Wilson recognized as their “free and independent existence”—including their very impressive lack of a managerial class or anything like it—part of the answer seems to me their rejection of the emphasis on the decisions of virtuous consciences that was so important to Wilson and his allies in favor of an emphasis instead on the peaceful interaction of respectful consciousnesses that were each responsible to seek to maintain alignment with the balance, harmony, and abundance that our grandmother Earth provides.(5)
I’m running for the United States Senate because I think that genuine self-government flows from love, belonging, and respect for the sacredness of all life. We are far from that now. But we have been far from that since before our country was founded. We—the American people—need to retrace our steps, understand where we have been most seriously mistaken, and seek to get it right this next time.
When I say that caring for others comes first, I mean to suggest that the “America First” crowd has it exactly backwards. When you put brutality and greed out into the world, what eventually comes back to you is not pretty. You may acquire a lot of money with brutality and greed; money with which to try to purchase and consume things to cover the aching holes in your soul. But, if so, all you are really doing is numbing the pain of what you know at some level is your own wrongdoing. Once one has gone down such a path, one has to open oneself to grief at the suffering one has inflicted on others if one wants to change the way one is in the world—if one wants to regain and realign one’s heart and mind and free oneself from the numbness of selfishness and the lack of awareness of what the Vietnamese Buddhist Thích Nhất Hạnh calls our interbeing.
My friend Steve Russell (Cherokee) once wrote that there is an almost bottomless well of collective guilt that “keeps the modern beneficiaries of genocide from finishing the job,” and then later added: “We know the colonists could not now go home if they were so disposed. Our lot is intertwined with the colonists as black South Africans are with the British and the Dutch. They have nowhere to go. While they have not historically been the best of neighbors, they are still our neighbors and we must do our best to civilize them.”(6)
What would such a process of being “civilized” look like? How would a renewed effort to emulate genuine self-government have to function differently the next time around if it were to succeed?
For one thing, it would have to actually get us out from under the ideological foundations of the “modern world.” This would involve a return to natural law not merely as it was understood by the best of its western practitioners such as the sixteenth century Dominican jurist Bartolomé de Las Casas and the eighteenth century constitutional architect James Wilson, but as it has been understood by the elders of the Native Nations for millennia.
The ideological foundations of the “modern world” were laid in the fifteenth century, in a series of papal bulls that sanctioned conquest, enslavement, and domination in the name of God and Christendom. Sanctioning Portugal’s grotesque enslaving misconduct, Pope Nicholas V somehow gave authority to Portugal’s King Alfonso V to “search out,” and “subdue” all “Saracens,” “pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” and to reduce their persons to “perpetual slavery.”(7)
Later in that century, sanctioning Spain’s brutality in the New World, there was even the claim that this was being done to benefit those being assaulted: “in order that barbarous nations may be overthrown and brought to the faith.”(8)
These documents did not merely justify discrete acts of violence. They articulated a framework in which entire peoples could be subordinated, their lands seized, and their ways of life destroyed under claims of civilizational, religious, or national superiority.
This framework was challenged early and courageously when Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the Spanish conquests as “evil,” “essentially anti-Christian,” and “unlawful.”(9) Over time, Las Casas came to oppose slavery itself and to call for the return of stolen lands. Yet his challenge was ultimately contained. Even where reform was attempted, it did not reach the depth required to overturn the underlying assumptions that sanctified imperial greed and domination.
Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, Las Casas’ great rival, gave voice to those assumptions with chilling clarity. He described the peoples of the New World as inferior and defended conquest as both just and beneficial. In this way, domination was moralized: “Shall we doubt that those peoples, so uncivilized, so barbarous, so wicked, contaminated with so many evils and wicked religious practices, have been justly subjugated by an excellent, pious, and most just King, such as was Ferdinand and the Emperor Charles is now, and by a most civilized nation that is outstanding in every kind of virtue?”(10)
Over time, explicitly religious justifications gave way, in part, to secular ones. The language of Christendom was supplemented—and often replaced—by the language of civilization, race, and eventually nationalism.(11) By the late eighteenth century, a powerful new mechanism for legitimating domination had emerged. As the Abbé Sieyès declared on the eve of the French Revolution: “The nation is prior to everything; it is the source of everything. Its will is always legal. It is the law itself.”(12)
With this move, the sanctification of imperial greed and domination was relocated. No longer grounded explicitly in divine command, it could now be justified in the name of the nation. If the nation’s will was the source of law, then actions taken in its name—however violent—could be rendered legitimate. We see this ideological mechanism at work in the world around us in Putin’s justifications for Russia’s genocidal assault on Ukraine and in Netanyahu’s justifications for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.(13)
Lest we Americans think of ourselves as morally superior, much the same mechanism is at the heart of the “Christian Nationalism” with which our current aggression in the world is advocated and which has been used to try to justify our genocidal policies towards the peoples of the Native Nations for centuries. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1830, on behalf of what would become the Trail of Tears, Georgia Senator John Forsyth gave a most succinct formulation to this idolatrous variant of Christianity: “All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.”(14)
This was part of a striking betrayal—in which the majority of the United States Supreme Court (contrary to mythology) wholeheartedly participated—a striking betrayal of the jurisprudential position that James Wilson had articulated when he told the continental congress in July 1776 that “We have no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony,” adding, as if to put the sharpest possible point on it: “Grants made three thousand miles to the eastward, have no validity with the Indians.”(15)
The past five centuries have witnessed repeated efforts to reform the foundations of our present “world order.” The Enlightenment, liberal democracy, modern capitalism, and even social democracy have all presented themselves as improvements upon earlier forms of brutality. And in certain respects, they were, at least for some and at least for a time. Yet these reformist efforts remained partial and inadequate at best. They did not dislodge the deeper assumption that human societies are fundamentally organized around competition, control, and the right to dominate land and peoples—especially those deemed “other.”
The English and later American belief in our “exceptionalism” was not entirely without foundation, but its strength and significance has been greatly exaggerated because its advocates have remained within the ideological framework that undergirds modernity. They have sought to distance themselves and their country from the precedents of brutal Spanish and Portuguese misconduct, while maintaining the same central legal presumption of a “right” to exercise domination, and a recognition—at best—of only something of the rights of the Native peoples.
When Walter Raleigh sent a fleet of ships to the New World in 1584, although he did not sail himself, the historian Jill Lepore reports that he provided his expedition with “a copy of Las Casas’s ‘book of Spanish crueltyes with fayr pictures,’ to be used to convince the Natives that the English, unlike the Spanish, were men of mercy and love, liberty and charity.”(16)
Marred from the beginning by tolerance of, and even active support for, slavery, as well as by patriarchal supremacism, and a dominationist attitude towards “nature,” the American experiment was still betrayed by John Marshall and most of his fellow Supreme Court justices sanctioning land thefts and genocides—while pretending not to—beginning in the 1820s and 1830s.
As I have shown both in my book, and in my forthcoming free article, the framers of the Constitution intended treaties with the Native Nations to be respected as “the supreme law of the land,” considered these nations as sovereigns with a treaty-guaranteed right to their dominion, and would have been horrified at the dishonesty with which a unanimous Supreme Court turned this treaty-guaranteed dominion into a mere “right of occupancy” in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, before implicitly sanctioning genocide in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, in 1831, with a spurious claim that the Native Nations were “completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States,” and then doubling down on that betrayal in Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, with its concluding insistence that the United States—unlike the state of Georgia—had a right to enter Native Nations without their consent in accordance with “acts of Congress.”(17)
The Supreme Court has often been wrong about constitutional law. That fact should be more widely known. The Supreme Court may serve as something of a bulwark against the contemporary advocates of fascism in this country at the critical juncture in which we find ourselves, but it has also historically been an enabler of Christian Nationalism and that court is in desperate need of being radically reformed or replaced in accordance with constitutional law and the revolutionary democratic jurisprudence that undergirds it.
Rejecting that jurisprudence, the Supreme Court wrongly sanctioned slavery before the Civil War and wrongly sanctioned Jim Crow for decades afterwards. The Supreme Court wrongfully denied women equal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment in Bradwell v. Illinois, in 1873, and for more than a generation openly attacked the rights of trade unions to organize, siding repeatedly with the capitalist class against the working class—showing a favoritism for large business corporations that continues to this day and reached a new level of recent despicableness in the court’s mistaken decision in Citizens United, in 2010—a decision that has done much to corrupt our democracy by helping corporations and the super rich buy politicians and billionaires spend more than four dollars on Republicans for every dollar spent on Democrats.(18)
While the Supreme Court has been a frequent source of disappointment, the presidency, lately, has been even worse. A narrow majority of the American electorate hired Donald Trump to be a wrecking ball in order to smash what many of them view as “the liberal establishment.” And Trump and his allies have been extraordinarily destructive, seeking to tear up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in the frenzy of their fear and hatred of immigrants, and their fear and hatred of trans people, and their fear and hatred of “the left”—fear and hatred for fellow human beings and fellow Americans like you and I. Where does this fear and hatred come from and what does it serve?
I want to suggest to you that this fear and hatred comes from the idolatrous variant of Christianity known as “Christian Nationalism,” an idolatry that worships the nation’s ego—and especially violence used on its behalf—rather than God. This is an idolatry that serves a corrupt oligarchy of greedy and brutal billionaires by distracting attention from their crimes and misdeeds. This is an idolatry that views criticism of America’s wrongs and failures as what Trump calls “left-wing arsonism.”(19) This is an idolatry that is incapable of seeing the love that we feel for this country and for all of the peoples who live on this land because our love is love for America’s true self and not its ego, our love is love for what Langston Hughes called the America that “never was America to me, And yet… will be.”(20)
“We the People,” at least according to the origin story that I tell as an historian, emerged under the influence, direct and indirect, of perceiving something of the political life of the genuinely self-governing peoples of Turtle Island (this continent)—something of what my friend Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) calls the original free and independent existence of these peoples—and of perceiving something of the threat that the British empire might violate the British Constitution and come to treat the American people as Britain had come to treat the people of Ireland.(21) Their American concepts of what it meant to be “free”—their most emancipatory aspirations—were a hybrid of the desires born of these perceptions.
These revolutionary-era American desires for “freedom,” in turn, gave birth to our contemporary notions of “the republican tradition” and of “democracy and human rights.” These, in turn—precious as they are in contrast with contemporary corruption and open authoritarianism—can nevertheless be considered as part of a failed attempt to enter into millennia of Native culture and history; a failed attempt at genuine self-government.
It is time for us to begin anew. And, this time, to get it right!
Thank you.
Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation. Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies were they to be wisely raised. We are grateful to David Harmony for reminding us of the gulf between even our best vision of genuine self-government here and what Steve Newcomb and Tiokasin Ghosthorse call “the view from the shore.”
(1) On the legal, intellectual, and moral bankruptcy of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law,” see Steven J. Schwartzberg, Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal (Bradford: Ethics International Press, 2023); Peter P. d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2022); Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008); Thurman Lee Hester, Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2001). Maggie Blackhawk has recently provided a trenchant critique of the way the United States holds hundreds of governments in subordination, but without criticizing this conduct—and the body of “law” that sustains it—as repugnant to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, the clear language of the text, and the meaning it held for its “original” readers. Maggie Blackhawk, “The Constitution of American Colonialism,” Harvard Law Review vol. 137, no. 1 (November 2023): pp. 1-152.
(2) Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (New York: Penguin Random House, 2021).
(3) I am indebted to my friend Tiokasin Ghosthorse for my awareness of the importance of this distinction between consciences and consciousnesses.
(4) James Wilson was the preeminent theorist of American democracy and his central role in the origins of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1789 should be more widely appreciated. See Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007); William Ewald, “James Wilson and the American Founding,” The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2019), pp. 1-21; John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (June 2014), pp. 1063-1103; Randy E. Barnett, ed., The Life and Career of Justice James Wilson (Washington, DC: Georgetown Center for the Constitution, 2019); Akhil Reed Amar, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 206-12.
(5) James Wilson, An Account of the Proceedings of the Illinois and Ouabash Land Companies in Pursuance of their Land Purchases made of the Independent Natives, July 5th, 1773 and 18th, October, 1775 (Philadelphia: William Young, 1796), p. 27. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735054850270/viewer#page/1/mode/2up (accessed 8 April 2026).
(6) Steve Russell, Sequoyah Rising: Problems in Post-Colonial Tribal Governance (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), pp. 48, 148.
(7) See, for example, the Bull, Romans Pontifex, 8 January 1455, in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institute, 1917), especially p. 23.
(8) See, for example, the Bull, Inter Caetera, 3 May 1493, in Davenport, ed., European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States, especially pp. 61-62.
(9) Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians tr. Stafford Poole, C.M. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 355.
(10) Quoted in Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), p. 134.
(11) See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
(12) Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, The Essential Political Writings edited, with an introduction by Oliver W. Lembcke & Florian Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 89. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/54649/9789004273993.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 23 September 2025)
(13) When I was quoted in Haaretz in April of 2024 describing Israeli misconduct as genocide and apartheid, my stance was rather unusual among the Jews they interviewed. As the links below suggest, such views have become much less uncommon both among Jews and within the wider world. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, “Gaza’s Annihilation Can Never Be Forgiven: Revisiting On Repentance and Repair,” 15 September 2025, https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/gazarepentance/ (accessed 14 November 2025); “If the Soul of the Jewish People is to be Redeemed - Rabbi Sharon Brous | Rosh Hashanah 1 / 9.23.25” https://youtu.be/t0kx36cSYi0 (accessed 14 November 2025); Rabbi Ariana Katz, “What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786: notes on endurance,” 1 Tishri 5786, 23 September 2025), https://www.hinenubaltimore.org/blog/rham5786sermon (accessed 14 November 2025).
(14) 15 April 1830, United States Senate, 21st Congress, 1st Session, Register of Debates, p. 333.
(15) James Wilson, Notes of Debate, 26 July 1776, Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. 6, 1774-1789, p. 1078.
(16) Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 28.
(17) Johnson v. McIntosh 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543, 574-77 (1823) . Cherokee Nation v. Georgia U.S. 30 (5 Pet.) 1, 17 (1831). Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515, 561-62 (1832)
(18) “The claim that under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which declares that no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, the statute law of Illinois, or the common law prevailing in that state, can no longer be set up as a barrier against the right of females to pursue any lawful employment for a livelihood (the practice of law included), assumes that it is one of the privileges and immunities of women as citizens to engage in any and every profession, occupation, or employment in civil life … The Constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.”Bradwell v. The State of Illinois, 83 U.S. 16 Wall. 130, 140 (1872). https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/us/billionaires-federal-election-campaign-contributions.html (accessed 8 April 2026).
(19) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/columbus-day-2025/ (accessed 22 January 2026). See also https://steven3c6.substack.com/p/the-true-evil-of-the-columbus-myth (accessed 22 January 2026).
(20) Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again (accessed 22 January 2026).
(21) William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought on Europe, 1500-1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986); David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). James Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, 1774,” in Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), pp. 3-31; https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hall-collected-works-of-james-wilson-vol-1#lf4140_head_013 (accessed 21 November 2025). See Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). In addition, see the one-hour documentary film that Newcomb co-produced, “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dominationcode.
