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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The phrase “the doctrine of discovery” never appears in the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh ruling. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote instead of “the right of discovery,” which he traced to England’s 1496 commission to John Cabot. Steven T. Newcomb reads the Latin Letters Patent, which directed the Cabots to find lands of “Heathens and Infidels” and to subjugate, occupy, and possess them, and draws on Burke Aaron Hinsdale’s 1888 article on the subject.

Read the full post on Steven Newcomb’s Substack: https://stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/a-right-of-discovery

SUGGESTED CITATION

Steven T. Newcomb, "A Right of Discovery?," Doctrine of Discovery Project (2 October 2026), https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/link/a-right-of-discovery/.

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