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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Significant aspects of this research were published in the New York University Review of Law & Social Change (Vol. 20, Number 2, 1993), “The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law.”

In United States law, early documents of “discovery” and conquest, issued by a number of fifteenth century popes, form the basis of denial of the rights of Indian nations and peoples. As a result, the United States continues to deny that Indians have complete rights of sovereignty and territorial integrity, simply because Indians were not Christians at the time of Christendom’s arrival to the Western Hemisphere. By dehumanizing Indian people, and by considering their territories as being, with “respect to Christians,” “inhabited only by brute animals,” the Christian world created a system of colonization that has not yet ended.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Steven T. Newcomb, "Pagans in the Promised Land: a Primer on Religious Freedom," Doctrine of Discovery Project (2 September 2021), https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/link/religious-freedom/.

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