For some 40 years now, Indian people have been attending law schools, getting their law degrees, passing bar exams, and entering the non-Indian legal profession. Federal Indian law attorneys are practitioners of a non-Indian law system that was historically designed by the United States to control and contain Indian nations, and to seize the vast majority of Indian lands, waters and traditional territories.

Attorneys who specialize in federal Indian law have learned a particular way of thinking and writing about U.S. legal decisions pertaining to Indian issues. However, almost all these attorneys seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the beginning premise of federal Indian law.

That premise is this: Because the ancestors of the non-Indian society were “Christian people,” and our indigenous ancestors were not, the non-Indian society of the United States has presumed itself to have an unquestionable right to exert an ultimate control over indigenous nations and to expropriate our traditional territories and waters for the profit, growth, and economic viability of the society of the United States.

The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of the federal Indian law attorneys, even those who are Indian, have been unwilling to explicitly condemn the presumed supremacy of “Christian people” as the basis for the initial premise of U.S. federal Indian law: Because our Native ancestors were labeled “heathens and infidels” when Christian monarchies invasively arrived to this hemisphere, the United States is supposedly entitled to exert plenary power (ultimate sovereign control) over our respective Indian nations and over our traditional territories.

There was no ambiguity on the part of the United States government attorneys when, in 1954, in the case Tee Hit Ton, they argued that according to the international law shared in common by “Christian nations” the lands of “heathens and infidels” were deemed to be open to acquisition by Christian nations. This is a religiously premised argument. It is also racist, to be sure, but it is an argument made by the United States government on the basis of the Christian religion.

The majority in Tee Hit Ton concurred with this argument in the court’s decision written by Justice Stanley Reed. It was Reed who, in a dissenting opinion in an earlier case, had said that the theory put forth in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh was that “discovery by Christian nations, gave them sovereignty over and title to the lands discovered.”

Yet, given this irrefutable formation, why is it that hardly any attorneys working in the area of federal Indian law seem willing to challenge the fallacious Christian religious premise that was first articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh, a case that Lindsay Robertson in his book “Conquest by Law” has documented was fraudulent to begin with? (The attorneys for the land companies in the Johnson v. M’Intosh case hired the attorneys for William M’Intosh).

As a case in point, the Doctrine of Christian Discovery was not raised in the San Francisco Peaks case. How is it that although indigenous nations have had a sacred spiritual relationship with the peaks for thousands of years, and spiritual knowledge keepers and ceremonial leaders still maintain that relationship to this day, yet all those thousands of years are negated in favor of the commercial interests of a non-Indian ski resort?

The answer is this: Indigenous spiritual and ceremonial knowledge and practice in relation to a specific sacred place is negated by the fact that the Christian mission of subdue and dominion has been interwoven into U.S. law and policy and used against the earth-centered spiritual traditions of indigenous nations and peoples. On the covert basis of the doctrine of terra nullus promulgated by the Catholic Church, thousands of years of spiritual and ceremonial evolution are being rendered null and void by the courts of the United States, such as in the case of San Francisco Peaks.

In this case, the term nullus refers to “heathens, pagans, infidels, or unbaptized people.” When a land (terra) is inhabited by non-Christians (those who have never been baptized – and who are therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the pope and of the Roman Church – the entire way of life and, indeed, the people themselves are conceptualized as being null and void, and incapable of standing against the Christian monarch’s presumed authority.

The uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of federal Indian law attorneys are either uninformed about this history, or else disinclined to bring up the religiously racist foundation of federal anti-Indian law and policy.

Speaking truth to power must begin with truthful and accurate information about the nature of the “legal” arena within which the debate over American Indian human rights and the protection of sacred places has been taking place and will continue to take place. Indian nations now have the opportunity to come together in common cause against the doctrines of Christian supremacy and terra nullus.

Let us hope that the attorneys working in the field of federal Indian law will explicitly repudiate and work to end the use of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and supremacy against Indian nations, just as Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in their time worked to end segregation in the United States.

Steven Newcomb, Shawnee and Lenape, is co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” (Fulcrum, 2009).