Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights

Blake A. Watson. Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2012. isbn: 978-0-8061-4244-9. 494 pp.

In Buying America from the Indians, law professor and former attorney Blake Watson conducts an extensive investigation into the historical context surrounding the Supreme Court case that established early federal policy on Native land rights. In Johnson and Grahams Lesee v. McIntosh (1823) Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples did not own their lands based on the infamous doctrine of discovery. While the case has been denounced as "conquest by judicial fiat" and "an extraconstitutional fiction," it remains the oft-cited legal precedent upon which many Indigenous land claims are settled to this day. Watson seamlessly integrates primary source material into the flow of the narrative, privileging readers to the original language alongside his own thorough commentary. Watsons mode of historicism portrays history as an ongoing process and demonstrates how decisive events emerge from a variety of actors fighting for divergent interests amid shifting alliances, opinions, and fortunes. Watson proves that prior to the Johnson v. McIntosh decision, land policy in the Americas was a highly contentious debate that was by no means settled.

The work is divided into an excessive eighteen chapters, which causes discontinuity and unnecessary repetition. At times the narrative devolves into a miasma of cluttered details that do not contribute to understanding the legal dilemma. While the extent of the historical research is impressive, it is unclear whether this volume is intended as an academic argument or a reference work. Written from a scholarly perspective that emphasizes the European settler-colonial context, the authors attention to Native concerns may fall short of the expectations of those immersed in Native studies.

Watson rightly proposes to emphasize the role of the Native tribes as actors in the struggle by asking why they decided to sell their land in 1775 and again in 1805, by examining how legal arguments affected their communities and by giving attention to what tribal chiefs had to say about the issue. Despite recognizing the Illinois and Piankeshaw leaders as decision-making...