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Reviewed by:
  • Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery
  • Leola Tsinnajinnie
Steven T. Newcomb. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008. 224 pp. Paper, $19.95.

The title Steven T. Newcomb gives to his book brought to my mind playful memories of attending a Catholic Indian boarding school with friends who represented Native nations from throughout the Southwest. The school was located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and consisted of a predominantly Pueblo student population. During various times throughout the school year our Pueblo brothers and sisters would go to their home communities to participate in ceremonial life. This left the school sparsely occupied by those few of us who were not from the pueblos. In observation of these recurring events, my non-Pueblo friends and I renamed ourselves the Pagans, having learned the term from reading the Old Testament in theology class. While we knew the true meaning of the term, we re-created it to amuse ourselves and to poke fun at our curriculum.

I gather the same sense of the Indigenous will to play into the imagination of a powerful institution. In this book Newcomb takes on the significant task of actually attempting a deconstruction of the imagination of the United States Supreme Court and its federal Indian law. Specifically, Newcomb decodes the Doctrine of Discovery as it was implemented in Johnson v. M'Intosh. He thus renames this doctrine the Doctrine of Christian Discovery in recognition of the roots of the Old Testament, Christianity, and Christendom on which Justice Marshall truly based his ruling.

Since my days of writing highlight and reflection papers in theology class, I have long thought about the connection between the Old Testament and the invasion of Indigenous lands by Christian settlers. I was pleased to see an entire book devoted to the relationship Indigenous peoples of the United States have with the original pagans in the promised land. My enthusiasm was briefly stilted, as I soon realized Newcomb would be using cognitive theory in his critique of federal Indian law. Incorporating this type of theory into Indigenous studies was a new territory for me. However, Newcomb points out that [End Page 568]

federal Indian law can be studied as an ongoing process of mental or conceptual activity and socialized human behavior. In part, it can therefore be analyzed and studied in terms of conceptual metaphors, image-schemas, and other cognitive operations. (1)

Chapter 1 carefully provides a basic introduction into how concepts in cognitive theory can be applied to the early formation of federal Indian law. In so doing Newcomb effectively sells the reasoning behind utilizing the theory as his tool for this decolonization project.

Essentially, the metaphors Newcomb provides make excellent sense, and they provide a clear juxtaposition to Indigenous thought. For example, Newcomb identifies the source-path-goal image-schema and the life is a purposeful (westward) journey conceptualization that Americans have/had in viewing settlement of Indigenous land. Indigenous peoples were viewed as simply barriers to fulfillment of this journey. Through linear thinking, Indigenous people were viewed as backward, while Americans viewed themselves as having progressed forward in achieving what they considered to be civilization. Hence, it was easy for Americans to overlook the depth, complexity, and value of Indigenous life. I definitely appreciate this example as well as the many others Newcomb offered throughout the book. He provides an abundance of quotations from court case rulings in Indian law. The conceptual metaphors do much to explain the cognitive reasoning behind these cases, European invasion, and American Manifest Destiny.

The thought processes of rule-making Americans and their ancestors become more and more evident throughout the book as Newcomb decodes case after case. All the while he returns to deciphering Marshall's implementation of the Doctrine of Discovery as the Johnson v. M'Intosh ruling continues to serve as the basis of federal Indian law. However, as much as Newcomb advances his arguments in debunking this basis, the absence of the discussion of racism becomes more and more apparent. I worry that in all the effort to apply cognitive theory to American Indian history, the...

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