On the morning of November 20th, 1969, 89 Native Americans departed from their relocated home of San Francisco to Alcatraz Island. Before what would become a nineteen-month takeover ignited the Red Power Movement. Upon arrival, they re-claimed the island by “right of discovery” in the name of all American Indians. Satirically referencing the legal and religious justification for colonial conquest of the so-called New World, their use of the language of discovery is neither accidental nor unique; it demonstrates the concept’s central role in the making of the modern world.
Yet the core trope of discovery in early modern imperialism has been underexamined, with little to no evaluation of the construction of the Native subject for the service of imperial thought and government. As Timothy Vasko’s Making All the World America: Native Information and the Doctrine of Discovery unearths, European Christian discovery of the Western Hemisphere and its original inhabitants played a significant role in the Doctrine’s development, generating concern for the rights and duties that followed discovery as well as the nature, meaning, and consequences of the history of knowledge.
Vasko presents a genealogy tracing the complex, contradictory roles that Indigenous peoples and intellectuals have played in Christian European claims of discovery between 1492 and 1690. While attentive to the work of theorists of empire and liberalism like Onur Ince who insist upon shifting focus from the identities of the colonized to the actions of the colonizers to illuminate the ideas, practices, and institutions that perpetuated European Christian imperialism, Vasko insists that the latter depends on the former: justifications of imperial rule and colonial settlement by Ramón Pané, Peter Martyr, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Thomas More, Richard Hakluyt, and John Locke, to name a few, relied upon their use of what he calls native information as a metric to make and mark the limit of colonial government.
Essential to the consolidation of modern colonial power, native information underlies the legal and moral claims of discovery in Atlantic imperial thought and the subsequent colonial societies empires claiming discovery established. Core to Vasko’s reconstruction of native information lies in its dual function of elimination and production of the Native as a subject and object of knowledge that the Doctrine relied on to legitimate European-Christian dominance. Presenting a vast archive of discursive artifacts and conditions that generated these processes of production, Vasko details how reliance on native information contained claims shared by imperial intellectuals across his study: the epistemic value of direct, first-hand accounts and Native testimonies of knowledge, and the insistence that Native peoples across Mexico and the Andes, in the Caribbean, and along the North American Atlantic coastline demonstrate the capacity for natural reason. Together, these proved efficacious for developing relations with Native authorities, introducing modes of socialization, education, and conversion, and constructing more stable forms of colonial government.
Each chapter guides readers through the political thought and practice of Spanish and English architects of discovery, highlighting contributions, and sometimes challenges, to native information. Throughout, Vasko documents how theological hermeneutics and post-theological thought that emerged in late Renaissance and early Enlightenment discovery discourses were renegotiated through native information in three distinct forms. First, Scholastic theories of pagan natural reason were translated into a logic of colonial domination steeped in the twin goals of resource extraction and conversion. Second, native information aided new understandings of the relationship between natural and human law by identifying Native peoples as evidence of Providentially ordained natural order and as a means to restore harmony in relations between European Christians, Natives, and nature itself. Lastly, native information’s impact on theories of pagan natural reason and nature played a crucial role in the transmission of southern European humanism’s ideals to English political theologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Shoring up racial domination through religious delineation, theories of statecraft that developed through discovery preserved the status of European Christian empires as spiritually and intellectually superior to other peoples in the New World. This “secular but still fundamentally Christian theological metaphysic that determined understandings of self and other” (22) animating native information has fundamentally shaped the political grammars of modern thought, constricting interpretive engagement with Indigenous political action and speech in discovery discourse and beyond.
Vasko’s engagement with Martyr, Las Casas, More, and Locke is bound to attract the attention of theorists of empire and political theology. This will certainly be the case for his chapter on the contradictive, paradoxical role native information plays in Locke’s justification for dispossession, account of property, and theory of consensual contract in his Second Treatise and his work governing the Carolina colony.
I now turn to Vasko’s analysis of the relationship between native information and Indigenous intellectuals who served fundamental roles in the advancement of the Doctrine and its criticism, specifically his epilogue’s presentation of Black and Pequot Baptist minister William Apess’s critique of the Doctrine in the nineteenth century. In doing so, I seek to draw attention to the theoretical contributions native information offers for the study of Indigenous political thought as well as the potential possibilities and limits native information presents for scholars of settler colonialism and Indigenous criticism.
Apess’s presence in Making All the World America is overshadowed by Vasko’s attentive analysis of two late sixteenth-century Indigenous intellectuals who emerge as a direct consequence of native information’s role in colonial government: Garcilaso de la Vega (“El Inca”) in Peru and Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in New Spain. Chapter three, “Pagan Republics of Universal Renown,” carefully reconstructs de la Vega’s and Ixtlilxochitl’s theories of good government, virtue, and statecraft which, Vasko contends, were born from Native and European Christian forms of knowledge that generated native information. By using their Native identities to claim the rightful belonging and contributions of Nahua and Inca forms of life and thought in the broader framework of universal history, de la Vega’s and Ixtlilxochitl’s respective works both challenged and contributed to theories deployed to legitimize imperial rule and colonial governance.
Apess’s presence in the epilogue seems critical for understanding interpretive and epistemic concerns that Vasko’s theory of native information raises when confronted with the study of Indigenous political thought and, more explicitly, Indigenous critiques of empire. Apess’s “critique of the ‘doctrine’ underpinning colonial institutions, Christianity, and national identity consists in his account of the extreme, unrelenting violence of colonial settlement and territorial dispossession that were the ends of such grotesque acts” as well as his description of native information’s circumscription of Native thought and life (242).
Apess wrestles with how the Doctrine of Discovery effects the spiritual and political character of the republic. Diagnosing the contradictions and hypocrisies that fortify the obstacles surrounding the new republic’s founding principles and promises of liberty and equality, he demonstrates how native information supplements the Doctrine’s hypocrisies and, more specifically, prevents Native participation in the republic as full humans. This is made particularly salient in Vasko’s analysis of Eulogy for King Philip (1836) and its presentation of the complex, contradictory relationship between Christian theology and colonial violence that both cast and condition the status of “son of the forest” and the status of “poor Indian” that whites graft onto the Native subject. Rather than turning away from the ideals of justice, equality, and freedom espoused by the nation, Apess reaffirms his belief in the promise of a republic founded on these principles by recasting them against the “pretended pious,” demanding his audience recognize his Native kin for their humanity that universal precepts of Christian and Enlightenment thought supposedly guarantee.
In highlighting Apess’s use of nature and tropes of Native naturalism, Vasko draws attention to how interpretations of Eulogy and Apess’s other works obfuscate how native information shapes his critique of American settler empire and his normative vision of a society that respects the full humanity of Natives and embraces them as free and equal members of the republic. Regardless of one’s evaluation of Apess’s use of nature and the tropes of Native naturalism, Vasko contends that his thought is stunted by the hold the Doctrine and its reliance on native information has over the universal precepts of Christian and Enlightenment thought that Apess embraces. Vasko concludes, “Apess cannot himself seem to make a moral claim on those universals without recourse to the particularizations of race and religion that…have allotted him and his ancestors a specific, subordinate position in a hierarchy of humanity” (244). Further, “[N]ative information has assigned a specific role for Native people to interminably reiterate the importance of those [universal] principles. This may be because, ironically, these principles are not sustainably endogenous (one dares to say ‘Indigenous’) to canons of European-Christian thought themselves. It is also, however, because Native people have long understood the role they have been conscripted to play in the making of the modern world” (245).
I look forward to the conversations concerning the study of Indigenous intellectuals in modern political thought that Making All the World America and its analysis of Apess’s thought through native information will generate. I hope it will encourage readers to reconsider their reductive treatment of Indigenous intellectuals according to their ancestry, and to reconsider characterizing intellectuals like Apess as simply accommodationists.
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Discovery feeds the grammars, ideas, and dilemmas of modernity. Consequentially, the product of discovery — the Native subject of imperial expansion — and its political, legal, and philosophical implications linger beyond the genealogy of native information that Vasko develops. He is certainly aware of the absences within his text, particularly the relationship between discovery and the transatlantic slave trade as well as the discrepancies between moral reckoning’s role in the colonial enslavement of Native American peoples and colonial enslavement of Africans.
It would be somewhat foolish to ask Vasko to comment on the decision to exclude the significant role enslaved and free Black peoples played in colonial contexts in his dense study of the early modern period. But these entangled histories will inevitably prompt interest in native information’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade and its attendant material, economic, and social conditions. What would it mean to engage, for example, Chief Justice Roger Taney’s explicit contrast of Blacks with Native Americans in his Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision through the lens of native information? More generally, how can native information enhance analyses of comparative taxonomies of racial classification that were leveraged to legitimize violent exclusion, expropriation, and exploitation?
Returning to Vasko’s assertion that Native peoples have long understood the role they play in making the modern world, I want to conclude by reflecting on how native information may affect political theory’s treatment of Indigenous intellectuals. Throughout, Vasko reflects on the figure of the Native and their dual role as a subject of imperial government: they are both the site of its exercise and the limits of its legitimacy. Yet as immanent critique of empire, Indigenous critique is often dismissed, ignored, or defanged as Vasko’s evaluation of interpretations of Ixtlilxochitl, de la Vega, and Apess that fixate on their ancestry, Native “authenticity,” or use of nature and tropes of Native naturalism demonstrates.
I share Vasko’s concerns. Even in good faith, understanding the dilemmas that discovery and its reliance on native information presents for Indigenous intellectuals may reinscribe the Native’s morally saturated, naturalized subject position and their redemptive function for liberal democracies in crisis. That knowledge and experience of their conscripted purpose in making the modern world creates fruitful conditions for producing an immanent critique of empire inadvertently and, following Vasko, ironically mirrors the centrality of Indigenous peoples in the project of discovery.
Vasko reminds readers that claims to discovery were steeped in a need to recognize America and its original inhabitants because of the very challenges they presented to the epistemic foundations and the theological, legal, and political legitimacy of European Christian empires. By addressing these problems through the solicitation and production of native information, theorists fortified the claim to discovery through their purported recognition of Native rights, thought, and life. Embedded racial and religious differences served to document a lens through which European Christians could see themselves and affirm their own claims to truth, virtue, and authority in the New World as well as the excesses of imperial conduct and colonial violence. Native information, therefore, offered intellectual resources to those who sought to address moral crises precipitated by the discovery of America and the religious and political upheavals of early capitalist, post-Reformation Europe. For these authors, the Native figure granted European Christians an opportunity to examine their traditions, beliefs, and relations against a human society distinct from yet very similar to their own.
While this analysis preoccupies Vasko’s assessment of imperial approaches to and uses of Indigenous intellectuals like Ixtlilxochitl and de la Vega, contemporary examples reflect similar treatment. Take, for example, American lawyer, scholar, and architect of the modern field of federal Indian law Felix S. Cohen. Commenting on bureaucracy, law, and the erosion of Indigenous rights in the United States in 1953, Cohen reflected, “Like the Miner’s Canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere and our treatment of the Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith.”
Scholars of settler colonialism including Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd, Delaware Joanne Barker, and Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million have long shown how the Native functions as an empty cipher to project one’s dreams, anxieties, and fears. Cohen’s metaphor, to be fair, demands more attention than allotted in this essay. Yet his positioning of Natives as the premier minority to evaluate the state of American democratic faith deposits an overwhelming moral authority into the figure as a tool to measure, correct, and redeem American democracy, and it therefore entrenches a dynamic contained in the dense archive of early modern discovery and its deployment of native information Making All the World America reveals. My preoccupation with moral redemption in colonial contexts does not diminish the significance of what the book accomplishes. What is left unsaid scaffolds a promising agenda for Vasko’s future works and contributions to the study of early modern imperialism.
