Stevens, Scott Manning. "Reading the Doctrine of Discovery." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/reading-the-doctrine-of-discovery. [Date accessed].
Reading the Doctrine of Discovery
Reading suggestions for a deeper dive into the centuries of jurisprudence for stealing Native lands set by an obscure early modern religious decree.
Cavedon, Matthew P. From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands: Alexander VI in Spanish Imperialism. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
Miller, Robert J. Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny,” Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Patricia Seed. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Further learning
Recommended
The false conflation of indigeneity and race
It is imperative that, while teaching about indigeneity in our classrooms, we dissect how the term came to be and how it is often conflated with race. Using texts by Richard Hakluyt and Sir Thomas Browne help to demonstrate the conflation to students.
