The First Peoples

The land that would become the United States was not empty when Europeans arrived. It had been home to human beings for at least 15,000 years, and possibly much longer. Archaeological evidence suggests the first peoples migrated from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age, spreading gradually southward and eastward across the continent over thousands of years. By the time European explorers arrived in the late 1400s, North America was home to millions of people living in hundreds of distinct nations, speaking hundreds of different languages, and organized into a vast range of political, social, and economic systems.

These were not simple or primitive societies. Across the continent, indigenous peoples had developed sophisticated agriculture, extensive trade networks, complex governance systems, monumental architecture, astronomy, medicine, and rich artistic and spiritual traditions. The Mississippian city of Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, had a population of perhaps 20,000 people at its peak around 1100 CE, larger than London at the same time. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the Northeast had developed a sophisticated system of representative governance centuries before Europeans arrived.

Major Indigenous Civilizations and Peoples

European Exploration and Early Contact

European contact with the Americas began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, sailing under Spanish sponsorship, landed in the Caribbean. What followed was a period of catastrophic change for indigenous peoples across the hemisphere. European diseases, to which indigenous populations had no immunity, swept through the continent in waves, killing between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population in some regions within a century of first contact. This demographic collapse, often called the Great Dying, reshaped the land that European colonizers would subsequently describe as empty and available.

What Gave England the "Right" to Colonize?

The legal basis for European colonization rested on the Doctrine of Discovery, a principle rooted in a series of 15th-century papal bulls that declared lands inhabited by non-Christians could be claimed by Christian monarchs who "discovered" them. English monarchs issued royal charters to companies or individuals granting them the right to explore, settle, and govern territories claimed in the Crown's name.

These charters were legal documents under English law, but they made no reference to the consent of the people already living on the land. The legal framework simply did not recognize indigenous sovereignty as equivalent to European sovereignty, a position that shaped colonial law, American law, and Supreme Court decisions well into the 19th century and beyond.

The Supreme Court addressed this directly in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), when Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery gave European nations, and then the United States as their successor, the right to extinguish indigenous title to land. This decision remains binding precedent. In 2005, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited it approvingly. In 2023, the Supreme Court reaffirmed it in Haaland v. Brackeen. The legal framework under which colonization occurred continues to shape federal Indian law today.