Editors' Commentary

This issue is about history. Perspectives about the early years of U.S. history are ubiquitous in historical literature and often clouded with distortions, half-truths, and biased non-Indian perspectives. This issue contains the views of both natives and non-natives about notions of discovery and empire building on the North American continent asthose activities relate and connect with American Indian nations andthe Corps of Discovery, the official name of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

It is probably as important now as it has ever been to examine how history portrays American beginnings and how it may be possible for academia to establish new ways of studying history with the idea that individual authors and local discourse can enlarge the range of interpretive history. Although there is no systematic methodology implied here, there are implications that new research questions must be raised, and colonialism remains a key contextual framework for understanding the unfolding of Indian-white relations.

Lewis and Clark and the devastating aftermath of their exploration cannot be separated from the history of colonialism. Although founded in the fervor of a revolution against England, one of the harsher colonial powers to enter the Americas, and its alleged tyranny, the United States incorporated the fundamental elements of the English colonial model into its discourses, laws, and policies. Historians have gone to great lengths to separate the United States from the history of colonialism, but the contributors to this issue tend to agree on one point, namely, federal Indian policy is essentially colonial policy.

Colonialism is a social, political, and economic system that seeks to obtain the lands and resources of others by conquest and purchase. It endeavors to subjugate indigenous peoples under the authority of the colonizer, which rests on the creation and sustainability of fictive claims of superior and preemptive rights over the indigenous inhabitants of the coveted lands. The exertion of power—legal, militaristic, or otherwise—underlies and supports the colonizers' aims. Indians had no voice or say in colonial discourse, and the development of colonial policies and meetings convened by European monarchies and legislative bodies to debate the rights of the colonized and the colonizer occurred in secluded settings away from indigenous peoples.

One of the first expressions of the discourse of colonialism found in early U.S. political thought is the doctrine of discovery. This theory, originating during the 1300s to legitimate the taking of Muslim property by Christian crusaders, was the foundation of European rights in and claims to the Americas. Basically, it is the assertion that discovery of the lands of "heathens," "infidels," and "pagans" gives title of the land. Europeans interpreted the discovery doctrine to mean that Indians continued to own the soil, but discovery impaired their rights to transfer their holdings to any other European nation. To the English, these stereotypes served as expedient rationales for the development of land acquisition and assimilation policies. Perhaps more than any other factor, it was the power of Indians to resist encroachments that constrained, or at least slowed, the forces of imperialism.

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court incorporated the doctrine of discovery into U.S. law in 1823 (Johnson v. McIntosh), policy makers and political philosophers accepted the legality of that infamous doctrine, however flimsy its foundation. In the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, the United States accepted the transference of millions of acres of land lying between the new nation and the Mississippi River, land previously claimed by the French and then claimed by England after winning the French and Indian War. In 1803, the United States purchased France's doctrine of discovery claim for Louisiana, which Spain had relinquished to France in 1801. The primary problem with the deed game is that none of the players solicited Indian opinions about the legality of such transactions. Indians never consented to the notion that some foreign deity had endowed newcomers with an inalienable right to claim and ultimately inhabit lands they had possessed, in many...