The Hidden Roots Of White Supremacy

How do you track a single thread that ties conquest-era theology to modern law, racial violence, and today’s fights over memory and repair? This book argues that the Doctrine of Discovery—born in fifteenth-century papal bulls and European imperial practice—provides the deep grammar of American dispossession. It shows how this doctrine moved from church decrees to courtroom doctrine, from royal charters to U.S. policy, and then hardened into the civic habits that normalized Indigenous land theft, the plantation economy, and white supremacy’s violence against Black and Native communities. The book’s second claim is just as urgent: truth-telling, memorialization, and reparative action can unwind some of that inheritance, but only if you pair moral clarity with legal and material change.

The through-line you need

Start not in 1619 or 1776, but in 1493. Papal bulls like Inter Caetera and Dum Diversas authorized Christian crowns to claim non-Christian lands and hold non-Christians in “perpetual slavery.” That logic became the legal scaffolding for centuries. You see it domesticated in Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1823 opinion in Johnson v. M’Intosh, which said “discovery” gave sovereigns title and left Native nations only a diminished “right of occupancy.” From there flow federal Indian law, treaty-busting, removal policies, and the reallocation of land and wealth to white settlers.

The book follows this thread across geographies. In Mississippi, Choctaw dispossession cleared the ground—literally—for a cotton economy powered by enslaved African labor; Emmett Till’s 1955 murder surfaces as a downstream consequence of that order. In the Upper Midwest, broken annuity promises and rigged trade created starvation that helped spark the 1862 Dakota War; the state answered with military tribunals, the largest mass execution in U.S. history at Mankato, and deportations to Crow Creek and Santee. In Oklahoma, the Dawes Act, Boomer agitation, and staged land runs translated communal homelands into private parcels for whites, while oil wealth in Osage County triggered a guardianship regime and a murderous “Reign of Terror.” Tulsa’s 1921 massacre then shows how civic, legal, and even religious institutions collaborated to erase accountability and memory.

Why starting at 1493 changes your map

Begin with 1493 and you see religion and law fused from the start. Hernando de Soto’s crucifix-planting (celebrated in William H. Powell’s U.S. Capitol painting) wasn’t just piety; it was a juridical performance of the Requerimiento—a public script announcing that conquest had divine and legal sanction. When Americans later insist this is a Christian nation, they often draw unknowingly on the same mythic current that turned dominion into a moral good. That’s why fights over school curricula, anti-CRT laws, and who deserves land and sovereignty feel existential: they contest the country’s original moral script. (Note: Scholars like Robert J. Miller detail how discovery doctrines migrated into U.S. and Commonwealth jurisprudence; the book builds on that legal history and connects it to civic life.)

Tangled, not parallel, histories

You’re encouraged to drop the tidy Black–white binary. Indigenous dispossession and African chattel slavery are distinct but entangled systems. In Mississippi, the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (Choctaw Removal) made room for plantations whose profits depended on enslaved labor; Reconstruction’s promise gave way to Black Codes, lynchings, peonage, and convict leasing. That same legal-rhetorical machine—grounded in discovery logic, racial hierarchy, and a civilizing mission—legitimated both the theft of land and the extraction of labor. Emmett Till’s lynching, Duluth’s 1920 murders, and Tulsa’s 1921 massacre all sit inside that longer ecology of sanctioned racial violence.

From silence to memorial repair

The book also gives you a civic playbook. Where local leaders chose silence—Duluth hiding its lynchings, Tulsa framing massacre as a “riot”—denial metastasized. Where communities faced truth, public identity shifted. Tallahatchie County’s Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) paired apology and education with courthouse restoration to catalyze economic renewal and interracial dialogue. Duluth’s Clayton-Jackson-McGhie Memorial emerged from grassroots research and ritual, then became a living civic institution that anchors vigils and policy conversations (the posthumous pardon of Max Mason in 2020 is one fruit). These cases show you how memory work, done honestly and locally, can pry open space for structural change.

What repair demands

Repair needs three pillars: truth, material redress, and structural reform. LandBack examples—the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo; Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot; acres to the Onondaga—prove restoration is possible. Church bodies have begun to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery (Episcopal Church, World Council of Churches; Jesuit reparations efforts), but apologies without assets or legal change risk symbolism. In Tulsa, centennial truth-telling built museums and visibility, yet formal reparations lag; survivors like Viola Ford Fletcher still petition for justice. Your takeaway is pragmatic: build durable institutions, name the legal architecture that did the harm, and fund the remedies at a scale matching the theft. (Compare David Treuer’s proposal to return national parks to tribal stewardship as a system-level idea.)

Key Idea

This book’s core argument is simple but sweeping: doctrines born of conquest still structure our laws and moral imagination; to choose democracy over domination, you must pair honest memory with legal and material repair.

If you’re an educator, official, or faith leader, the path forward is clear: teach the full history from 1493 on; connect local harms to national doctrines; and invest in returns—of land, wealth, and power—to those whom the law once declared “discoverable.”

The book asks you to treat the Doctrine of Discovery as a living operating system, not a relic. Papal bulls like Dum Diversas (1452) and Inter Caetera (1493) did not just bless voyages; they created a juridical logic that converted “discovery” into title and non-Christian peoples into obstacles to be subdued. That rationale traveled from Iberian crowns to Anglo-American courts and still appears in U.S. jurisprudence today.

From bulls to black-letter law

You see the translation in early cases. In Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the Supreme Court characterized Indian title as “mere occupancy.” Chief Justice John Marshall’s Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) made the doctrine explicit: discovery gave European sovereigns radical title; Native nations held only a right of occupancy that the sovereign could extinguish. A year later, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) reframed tribes as “domestic dependent nations,” establishing a guardian–ward relation that justified federal control. Modern echoes surface in City of Sherrill v. Oneida (2005), where the Court denied tribal tax immunity on repurchased land, citing “disruptive” effects on settled expectations—an argument with discovery DNA.

The ritual and language mattered on the ground. The Spanish Requerimiento demanded Indigenous submission in Spanish or Latin, then declared war justified when people “refused” it. Hernando de Soto’s cross-planting was a public rite of possession, later romanticized in national art. These performative acts became legal performances—paper trails and ceremonies courts would recognize.

Policy instruments that carried the code

Federal policy operationalized the doctrine: the Bureau of Indian Affairs was housed in the War Department; removal and allotment substituted “civilization” talk for conquest. The Dawes Act (1887) dissolved communal title into individual parcels, declared “surplus” lands open to white settlers, and conditioned citizenship on assimilation. The Curtis Act (1898) dismantled tribal courts in Indian Territory, pre-wiring Oklahoma for statehood on white terms. Each move assumed non-white polities lacked legitimate sovereignty.

Recent cases remind you that old code still runs. McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) confirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation persists because Congress never clearly disestablished it—a rebuke to a century of state practice that presumed Indigenous sovereignty was a historical footnote. Yet even celebrated wins like McGirt occur in a legal landscape defined by discovery-era presumptions about who owns, governs, and names land.

Cultural afterlives and Christian nationalism

The book links legal doctrine to culture: the myth of a divinely favored Christian nation primes citizens to view land claims by tribes as special pleading, not treaty rights. That myth also fuels contemporary battles over curriculum (“anti-CRT” laws), place names, and monuments. Tulsa’s Bishop Ed D. Mouzon embodied this dynamic in 1921, preaching that racial equality defied divine order while Greenwood still smoldered—proof that pulpits can launder violence into moral narrative. (Parenthetical note: while Pope Paul III’s Sublimis Deus attempted an early theological corrective, its influence failed to uproot the institutional power of discovery-era bulls.)

Key Idea

If you don’t name discovery doctrine as the source code, you will treat symptoms—removals, allotment, guardianship, “riots”—without touching the kernel that made them legally and morally thinkable.

So when you weigh reforms—treaty enforcement, land return, or jurisdictional recognition—measure them against this architecture. Are you still assuming Native occupancy is provisional? Are you still privileging “settled expectations” over original treaties? Until those defaults change, repair remains partial.

The book insists you read Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement as distinct wounds produced by one machinery. Mississippi is the case study that makes the argument tangible: Choctaw removal treaties like Doak’s Stand (1820) and Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830) cleared millions of acres. Those same acres became plantation wealth, carved by enslaved Africans who drained swamps, felled forests, and harvested cotton that enriched white planters and northern mills.

Mississippi as a proving ground

When the Choctaw and other nations were forced west (Trail of Tears), a racial-capitalist order moved in. Postwar Mississippi codified that order: Black Codes of 1865 curtailed mobility and labor rights; the 1890 constitution entrenched disfranchisement; convict leasing and peonage extended slavery by other names. Lynching enforced the color line with terror—the Delta saw disproportionate lynchings between 1888 and 1901. These systems weren’t incidental; they made stolen land profitable by securing a captive labor force.

Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching in Money sits downstream of this architecture. Sheriff Clarence Strider’s manipulation of evidence, the all-white jury in Sumner, and the brazen acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (who then confessed to Look magazine) reveal a legal culture trained to protect white sovereignty over land, labor, and female honor. Moses Wright’s courageous finger-point in court could not overcome an institution calibrated by a century of doctrine and custom.

Shared logic, different modalities

You should keep the modalities distinct. Indigenous peoples faced removal, treaty nullification, and cultural erasure; Black Americans endured chattel status, natal alienation, and a post-emancipation regime of economic bondage and terror. Yet both systems used law to ratify violence and used Christianized rhetoric to cast domination as civilization. The “civilizing mission” that underwrote allotment also animated missionary schools and segregationist pulpits.

The book shows how local repair must hold both histories at once. In Tallahatchie County, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) restored the 1955 courthouse as a site of conscience, erected markers (including one repeatedly vandalized at Graball Landing), and issued a public statement of regret (a negotiated term after resistance to the word “apology”). It also connects Till’s murder to earlier Choctaw dispossession, teaching students and visitors that the plantation order did not emerge on empty land.

Why this framing matters to you

If you silo harms, you risk repairing one wound with materials quarried from another. Economic development around civil rights tourism must ask: who benefits locally, and do descendants of the dispossessed share governance and gains? Curriculum reform should trace lines from 1493 to 1955 to now, not just spotlight singular atrocities. (Note: This “linked-systems” lens resonates with scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Nick Estes, who map racial capitalism across Indigenous and Black histories.)

Key Idea

Treat land theft and labor theft as parts of one extraction engine; only then can you design reparations—material, legal, and narrative—that don’t leave the underlying machinery intact.

In practice, that means pairing memorials with land access programs, scholarships with voting and labor protections, and public rituals with policy that returns decision-making power to those long excluded from the courthouse and the county ledger.

Minnesota’s story forces you to hold two scenes in one frame: the 1862 Dakota War and the 1920 Duluth lynchings. Together they expose how quickly law can mask dispossession and how easily a northern city can mirror southern terror—then forget it.

Dakota treaties to mass execution

In 1851, Dakota leaders signed the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, ceding 24 million acres for annuities and a riverine homeland. Congressional edits, corrupt agents (Alexander Ramsey), and traders’ claims siphoned funds before they reached Dakota families. By the winter of 1861–62, people starved; women scavenged mule dung for undigested oats. After Andrew Myrick sneered “let them eat grass,” violence erupted at Acton and the Lower Sioux Agency. U.S. forces under Henry Sibley responded with drumhead tribunals that condemned 303 men to death. President Lincoln pared the list but still approved the hanging of 38 at Mankato on December 26, 1862—the largest mass execution in U.S. history—followed by treaty revocation and deportations to Crow Creek and Santee where hundreds died.

Here, law is not absent; it is hyper-present. Treaties, military courts, congressional acts—the formal machinery reshaped a nation’s life in months. This is discovery doctrine in domestic practice: when settler imperatives collide with Indigenous survival, law proves a ready instrument of eviction.

Duluth 1920: a northern lynching

Half a century later, Duluth revealed that racial terror is not regional. After Irene Tusken and Jimmy Sullivan claimed a circus assault, a mob stormed the jail. Police were ordered not to shoot; judges were shouted down; firefighters turned hoses on officers trying to hold the line. Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were lynched at a downtown lamppost as ten thousand watched; postcards of the scene circulated. Only minor rioting convictions followed. One Black man, Max Mason, was convicted of rape on thin evidence, paroled after four years, and banished from the state—a reversal that reveals the legal double standard at work.

Then came a civic hush. Records were hidden or “lost.” Schoolbooks ignored the murders. The silence lasted into the 1990s until researchers like Michael Fedo and activists like Heidi Bakk-Hansen, Henry Banks, and Cathy Ostos worked with clergy and community leaders to recover names, graves, and facts. The Clayton-Jackson-McGhie Memorial, unveiled in 2003, now anchors annual vigils and racial justice gatherings; in 2020, Max Mason received a posthumous pardon, thanks in part to attorneys like Jerry Blackwell and persistent organizing.

Lessons for democratic muscle

Minnesota teaches you two lessons. First, speed: it takes years to negotiate a treaty and weeks to nullify it when settlers want land or vengeance. Second, memory work must be institutionally rooted. The Duluth memorial didn’t appear by accident; it took coalitions across NAACP chapters, churches, journalists, and city officials. It also needed rituals, names, and a physical plaza to resist erasure. (Compare the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery for a national-scale analog.)

Key Idea

Law is a tool that cuts both ways: it can expedite dispossession through “due process,” and it can, when pushed by citizens, carve durable spaces for truth and atonement.

If you lead locally, copy Duluth’s sequencing: research the harm, say the names, build a public place, craft a ritual calendar, and pursue formal remedies (pardons, curriculum, investments) that give memory policy weight.

Oklahoma condenses a century of policy maneuvers—from land runs to allotment to statehood—and then adds an oil-fueled parable of predation in Osage County. Read it as a choreography of dispossession where reform rhetoric, legal engineering, and spectacle deliver a white-majority state on lands promised “forever” to Native nations.

Legal choreography of state-making

Indian Territory, home to the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw, was supposed to be secure. Post–Civil War politics and railroad ambitions changed the script. Boomers like David Payne invaded the so-called “Unassigned Lands,” hymning a “Promised Land” while trespassing. Congress converted trespass into law with the April 22, 1889 land run, when 50,000 settlers sprinted at a bugle to stake claims. The Dawes Act (1887) then privatized communal lands into 160-acre allotments, declared “surplus” available to whites, and empowered the Dawes and Jerome Commissions to dissolve tribal governance in practice. The Curtis Act (1898) killed tribal courts; the Oklahoma Enabling Act (1906) merged Indian and Oklahoma Territories, burying the 1905 Sequoyah statehood bid that might have preserved Indigenous autonomy.

This was not naked violence but “intelligently selfish” reform talk doing the work of conquest. Allotment promised civilization through property; the reality was tax foreclosures, fraudulent rolls, and land companies buying distressed parcels—the slow siphon that transformed Indigenous commons into settler holdings.

Osage headrights and the Reign of Terror

The Osage negotiated shrewdly within this hostile system. Chief James Bigheart and attorney John Palmer won a crucial provision: surface allotments but communal mineral rights paid as “headrights” to 2,229 original allottees and their heirs. When oil boomed (auctions under the “Million Dollar Elm” in Pawhuska, with magnates like Harry Sinclair and Frank Phillips bidding), Osage citizens became among the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

That wealth triggered state guardianship. Federal trusteeship and racist incompetency rules said full-blood Osage could not manage money; local judges appointed white guardians who controlled disbursements. Predation followed the law’s invitation: coerced marriages, poisonings, staged “suicides,” complicit doctors, and coroners who wrote alcohol as cause of death while headrights floated to white inheritors. Between roughly 1918 and 1931, a web of murders—the Reign of Terror—turned a protective mechanism into a target map.

Tulsa 1921: annihilating Black prosperity

Just south, Tulsa’s Greenwood—“Black Wall Street”—met a similar jealousy. After Dick Rowland was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the Tulsa Tribune inflamed a white mob. When armed Black veterans defended Rowland at the courthouse, whites pivoted to Greenwood, burning 35-plus blocks, detaining thousands, and likely killing hundreds. Bishop Ed D. Mouzon’s sermon blaming “radical Negroes” helped fix a white-innocence narrative. For decades, the city called it a “riot,” not a massacre; public memory erased aerial attacks, arson, and official complicity.

Later commissions (1997–2001) documented deaths and municipal culpability and recommended reparations; centennial efforts built Greenwood Rising and drew presidential acknowledgment (Joe Biden, 2021). Yet cash reparations remain largely unrealized; survivors like Viola Ford Fletcher, Lessie Benningfield Randle, and the late Hughes Van Ellis continue the fight, represented by attorneys such as Damario Solomon-Simmons.

Key Idea

Oklahoma demonstrates how law can first pulverize Indigenous polities, then police Black prosperity, all while narrating the result as progress—and how modern truth-telling without restitution leaves the architecture intact.

If you’re crafting repair, learn from the Osage: protective design (headrights) can be subverted unless power over assets remains with the people themselves. And in Tulsa, pair memorial infrastructure with enforceable restitution mechanisms, not just donor-funded museums.

Religious institutions play starring roles in this book—as ideologues of conquest and as late-coming agents of repentance. You see pulpits sanctify white rule, then later hear liturgies of apology that waver between honesty and evasion. The question for you is simple: when churches say “sorry,” do they also surrender assets and authority?

When theology underwrites domination

From the bulls that authored discovery logic to American pulpits defending slavery and segregation, Christian language repeatedly provided moral cover. Bishop Ed D. Mouzon’s 1921 sermon in Tulsa labeled Black equality a theological impossibility, echoing centuries of Christianized hierarchy. Mission schools and boarding schools for Indigenous children advanced assimilationist policies that aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man,” inflicting cultural genocide under the sign of salvation.

These aren’t outliers; they are institutional patterns. The Southern Baptist Convention long defended slavery; many mainline bodies blessed colonial missions entwined with imperial projects. That institutional weight helps explain why legal rulings could so easily map conquest to Christian duty.

What repentance looks like (and where it falls short)

There are promising moves. The Episcopal Church repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009; the World Council of Churches followed (2012). Jesuit leaders pledged $100 million to atone for slaveholding, working with descendant communities. Pope Francis’s 2022 pilgrimage to Canada brought a visceral apology for harms committed in residential schools, and the Vatican later issued a statement repudiating discovery-era doctrines.

Yet the language often hedges. Vatican statements sometimes distinguish “the Church” from “many Christians,” blurring institutional culpability. Many apologies arrive untethered from land returns, endowments, or governance shifts that would place descendants and Indigenous nations in decision-making seats. The book presses you to ask whether contrition changes control. (Compare Georgetown’s engagement with GU272 descendants as an example of partial but contested power-sharing.)

Local models that integrate truth and utility

At the local level, Tallahatchie County’s ETMC—while not a church project—models a repentance posture that institutions could emulate: tell the truth publicly (a statement of regret on the courthouse lawn), invest in education (the Emmett Till Interpretive Center), and tie memory to material benefit (historic preservation driving economic revitalization). In Duluth, clergy stood with activists to build the Clayton-Jackson-McGhie Memorial, lending moral authority and convening power.

Key Idea

Apology without asset transfer is liturgy without conversion; repentance that matters returns land, funds descendants, and shares power in perpetuity.

If you’re inside a denomination or school, your checklist is concrete: name the doctrine (Discovery), inventory and publish institutional gains from dispossession, set aside irrevocable funds governed by affected communities, and explore LandBack or long-term ground leases that restore stewardship and revenue.

The book closes with a roadmap: truth-telling, material repair, and structural change. It argues you can’t skip any stage. Without truth, repair misfires or calcifies into tokenism. Without material and legal shifts, truth-telling becomes museum work that leaves living inequities untouched.

Pillar 1: Truth infrastructures

Build institutions that keep memory from eroding. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner and the Clayton-Jackson-McGhie Memorial in Duluth are not just plaques; they are programmatic hubs—hosting youth dialogues, vigils, and public education. Commissions matter too: the Tulsa Race Riot Commission (1997–2001) re-labeled a “riot” as massacre, estimated 100–300 Black deaths, and documented city complicity. Curricular changes and place-name restorations embed truth in daily life.

Pillar 2: Material repair

Pair stories with assets. Reparations can include direct payments to survivors and descendants (as in Tulsa’s recommendations), endowed scholarships, debt relief, business grants in Greenwood, or county-level revenue sharing tied to civil-rights tourism in the Delta. For Indigenous nations, LandBack is central: Blue Lake returned to Taos Pueblo; Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot; acreage to the Onondaga Nation; grassroots projects like Real Rent Duwamish channel monthly support to landholders excluded from treaty recognition. (Note: David Treuer’s call to return national parks to tribal stewardship is a scale-appropriate idea matching federal-scale dispossession.)

Pillar 3: Structural reform

Dismantle the code that keeps reasserting itself. That means honoring treaties (as McGirt v. Oklahoma insists), reforming guardianship and trusteeship regimes that infantilize Native citizens, protecting voting and labor rights to block neo–Black Codes, and rolling back laws that gag honest history (anti-CRT statutes). Churches and universities should cede decision-making seats to affected communities and consider long-term ground leases or fee-to-trust transfers that restore jurisdiction and revenue streams.

Barriers and how to move through them

Expect headwinds: political backlash, cultural denial, court precedents like Sherrill that prize “settled expectations,” and the persistent pull of Christian nationalism. The book’s counsel is pragmatic: tie moral argument to practical coalitions. In Tallahatchie County, Jerome Little linked apology to economic revitalization through preservation. In Duluth, activists yoked memorial building to municipal leadership and police endorsement (Chief Mike Tusken defended the memorial as civic truth). In Tulsa, survivors’ testimony reached Congress and the White House, keeping pressure on city and state budgets.

Key Idea

Repair is a network, not a payout: build truthful memory, return wealth and land, and rewire the law so conquest doctrines stop deciding who belongs and who benefits.

Your actionable to-do: map harms and beneficiaries locally; convene cross-sector partners (tribal leaders, descendants, churches, city officials); design a reparations portfolio that includes at least one land return, one endowed fund governed by descendants, one policy reform, and one permanent memorial. Then publish annual metrics so truth and repair become a public habit, not a one-off ceremony.