Steven T. Newcomb

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is the co-founder and director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and author of _Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery _(Fulcrum, 2008). He co-produced the documentary movie “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code” (2015), which is based on Pagans and his four decades of research.

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In this essay for The Domination Chronicles, Steven T. Newcomb revisits Walter Echo-Hawk’s In the Light of Justice (2013) and its foreword by James Anaya. Anaya traces the human rights problems Indigenous peoples face to “patterns of domination set in motion by colonization,” yet neither he nor Echo-Hawk names U.S. federal Indian law and policy as a present-day system of domination. Newcomb argues that the book’s turn to atonement, reparations, and “reconciliation” asks Native nations to acquiesce to that system rather than challenge it. He notes that the book’s index has no entry for “domination,” that Echo-Hawk passes over Chief Justice Marshall’s word “ascendency” in Johnson v. McIntosh, and that the call to restore “a balance” between dominionism and Indigenous worldviews assumes a balance that never existed. Newcomb insists that the claimed right of domination, including the plenary power doctrine, must be named accurately and challenged unceasingly.

Read the full post on Steven Newcomb’s Substack: https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/a-look-back-at-walter-echo-hawks

SUGGESTED CITATION

Steven T. Newcomb, "A Look Back at Walter Echo-Hawk’s, In the Light of Justice (2013)," Doctrine of Discovery Project (2 November 2026), https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/link/a-look-back-at-walter-echo-hawks-in-the-light-of-justice/.

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