Greenland, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Federal Indian Law

When President Trump dismissed Denmark’s claim to Greenland by saying that having “a boat land there 500 years ago” doesn’t mean they own the land, he was trying to puncture an old-style imperial rationale.  The line functions rhetorically because most modern listeners instinctively prefer legitimacy grounded in living people, governance, and consent - not in a centuries-old arrival story.

But in U.S. federal Indian law, that “boat landed here” logic is not merely a relic. It is foundational.

The United States’ basic land-title framework regarding Indigenous nations traces to the Supreme Court’s 1823 decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh. Chief Justice Marshall described a European-derived principle that “discovery” gave the discovering sovereign an exclusive right to “appropriate” lands occupied by Indigenous peoples, leaving Indigenous nations with a recognized “right of occupancy” and vesting in the United States (or the states, as successor sovereigns) the “exclusive power to extinguish that right.”  In other words: the legal system converted an act of European assertion into superior title, and then treated Indigenous property interests as structurally subordinate—enduring, but defeasible.

So the boomerang is obvious. If it is unserious to claim Greenland because of a distant landing - if arrival alone does not generate legitimate sovereignty - then the moral confidence behind Discovery looks thin everywhere. That is the uncomfortable part: Trump’s critique, when consistently applied, is a critique of one of the central justificatory moves in the American land regime.

This is not merely an ethical debate. It has doctrinal consequences that still shape outcomes. The Discovery framework is not merely “bad history” preserved in old books; it has been used to define what counts as compensable property, what counts as “recognized” title, and which remedies are available when the United States takes Indigenous lands or resources.

In Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States (1955), the Court held that “permissive Indian occupancy may be extinguished by Congress in its own discretion without compensation,” citing Johnson and treating unrecognized occupancy as non-compensable under the Fifth Amendment.  That is Discovery’s logic, operationalized: ultimate title sits with the sovereign; Indigenous occupancy can be legally vulnerable unless and until the sovereign chooses to recognize it in a form the courts will treat as “ownership.”

This is why the Greenland rhetoric matters for federal Indian law, even if it changes nothing in court tomorrow. It dramatizes, in plain language, a contradiction that scholars and Indigenous advocates have been naming for generations: American law has often treated European assertion as legally generative while treating Indigenous presence and governance as legally reducible. The argument is not merely “hypocrisy.” It is that the legal order was built with a hierarchy embedded into its foundations, and it continues to produce predictable limits on Indigenous remedies in the name of stability, finality, and settled expectations.

Now add a second, revealing development: the Catholic Church has publicly disowned the Discovery rationale in moral and theological terms. In 2023, the Vatican issued a joint statement explicitly repudiating “what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’” and stating that it “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church.” The statement also acknowledges that certain papal documents were later “manipulated for political purposes” to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples.

It’s important to be precise here. The Church did not “overturn” U.S. law, and it did not rewrite history by magically nullifying the colonial record. What it did do - unambiguously - is deny that Discovery is legitimate as Catholic teaching and repudiate the concepts used to deny Indigenous rights.  That makes the present moment unusually stark: Discovery can be “defunct” in one realm (as a claimed moral warrant) while still enacted in another (as legal architecture through binding precedent).

That split-screen reality matters because it clarifies what is at stake. If a major institution can say, in effect, “this doctrine is not ours; it was used and abused to strip Indigenous peoples of dignity and rights,” then the question becomes harder to avoid: why should courts continue to treat Discovery as the quiet premise underneath property rules and remedy limits? Johnson and Tee-Hit-Ton are not obscure footnotes; they are load-bearing beams.

Greenland's modern status rests on contemporary political relationships, governance arrangements, and Greenlandic self-determination, not on medieval voyages. That is precisely why the “boat landed here” framing is rhetorically powerful: it highlights the gap between how we now talk about legitimate authority and how our foundational land doctrines were rationalized. When we reject the idea that ancient arrival confers ownership in the Arctic, we implicitly endorse a legitimacy standard closer to consent and lived political reality. That is the standard Discovery historically displaced.

None of this is legal advice, and none of it implies that a soundbite will topple entrenched doctrine. Courts change slowly, usually under sustained political pressure, doctrinal critique, and legislative action. But that is exactly why these moments matter. They translate an abstract, technical framework - Discovery - into a sentence that ordinary people can immediately recognize as inadequate. And once a legitimacy story is exposed as inadequate, the “just the way things are” aura begins to crack.

If “a boat landed here” is not enough, then federal Indian law should at least be honest about what Discovery is: not a neutral principle, but a historically contingent choice that entrenched a hierarchy. And if it were a choice, it can be revisited, through scholarship, through politics, through legislation, and eventually through doctrine, until the law’s account of legitimacy better resembles the moral instincts we suddenly find so obvious when the conversation turns to Greenland.