Some years ago, I purchased Latin for Americans (B. L. Ullman, Charles Henderson, and Norman E. Henry, New York: the MacMillan Co., 1962) at a used bookstore. It’s a high school textbook that was published at a time when some pre-college students were still being expected to learn Latin. The opening section, “Our Roman Heritage,” tells us that the authors were expecting the students to think of themselves as having a heritage that traces back to Rome and the Roman Empire. “This, then, is the mighty and ancient tradition of which you are a part,” they wrote.
Suppose there was an American Indian student in the Latin class back then. Would it not have been strange to expect the Native student to think of herself as having a heritage that traces back to Rome and the Roman Empire?
The textbook authors also say in “Our Roman Heritage”: “Nothing could be more incorrect than the idea that Latin is dead…On the contrary, in one form or another Latin is very much alive today and in large measure what has given the Romans immortality.” Because Latin lives on in the English language, knowledge of Latin is important for gaining a deeper recognition of the colonizing patterns of English and English words.
The authors further say that 2,500 years ago the political and military power of Rome “dominated most of the rest of the civilized world.” They point out that the Romance languages of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Romania “are living descendants of the Latin spoken by the Romans who conquered and colonized these lands.”
In the above paragraph, we find three key words “dominated,” “conquered,” and “colonized.” On reflection, “conquered and colonized” are synonyms for “dominated.” For this reason, the above sentence is accurately re-expressed as follows: Those languages “are living descendents of Latin spoken by the Romans who dominated these lands.” This re-expression matches perfectly the idea quoted above that Rome “dominated most of the rest of the civilized world.”
Another word for “the civilized world” is “civilization.” A little noticed definition of “civilization” matches the aforementioned idea that Rome and Romans “dominated.” That definition of “civilization” is, “the forcing of a particular culture on a population to whom it is foreign.”
Foreigners forcing their culture and language upon another people results in a foreign domination of the people upon whom that culture and language is imposed. The authors of Latin for Americans reference this kind of domination in history when they write: “Rome was at the same time urbs et obis—city and world, and Latin came to be used everywhere, largely replacing the native tongues.” Roman domination caused this trend of “largely replacing the native tongues.”
All this leads to a point of critical importance for our Nations and Peoples when using the English language to decolonize our minds: domination is a synonym for civilization, and vice versa. Dominated is a synonym for civilized, and vice versa. Dominating is a synonym for “civilizing,” and vice versa. Uncivilized savages means un-dominated savages; “wild” savages means those still living free of or free from domination.
The Latin for Americans textbook says that “[m]ore than sixty per cent of English words are derived or taken from Latin.” Those English words trace back to Rome and the Roman Empire’s ever-expanding domination (“civilization”). They are words in English that were first developed with a Roman perspective, and we need to take that into consideration.
Take, for example, the word “conquer.” When the Roman Empire is said to have “conquered” a given place, this means that it is said to have attained a “military victory” or “triumph” over that place, from the viewpoint of the Roman Empire. A victory or triumph is something “celebrated” or “celebratory” from the viewpoint of those who consider themselves to be the victors, or winners. It is this point of view that has led to the saying, “history is written by the victors.”
So, what about the viewpoint of those over whom Romans consider themselves to have attained a celebrated win? Why would Nations and Peoples that have ended up on the receiving end of Roman domination call it “a victory?” If those being dominated call the domination imposed on them a “victory” or “conquest,” this suggests that they view themselves as an enemy over whom a “victory” or “conquest” has been achieved. Strangely, they are thereby framing the Romans’ successful domination over them not only as their “defeat,” but something to be “celebrated,”
We as the Original Nations and Peoples of Great Turtle Island need to learn from the above patterns. We need to refuse to allow the celebratory and victorious words conquest and conquered to be applied to our Nations. We need to replace “conquered” and “the conquest” with “dominated” and “the domination.” By doing so, we are thereby acknowledging that our Nations are not defeated for we are still questioning and challenging wrongful, unacceptable, and ongoing patterns of domination imposed on us. We need to take the position that we shall forever possess the right to live free of imposed patterns of domination asserted against and over our originally free Nations and Peoples.
The word “domination” does not contain a celebratory view of a dominating imposition. Use of the word domination is strategic and tactical. It shows that we are challenging rather than accepting domination. Nor does it ascribe a “win” to the invaders who have imposed the form of domination they euphemistically call “civilization” on our originally free Nations and Peoples.
Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court studied five years of Latin in just four years. We may therefore assume that he is well aware of the domination orientation of the Latin-premised word “subjection” used against our Nations by both the majority and by the dissenting members of the Court in the May 2014 decision Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community.
The word subjection means to place under, or to classify under domination, but subjection also traces to the Latin servitus, “slavery, slaves, property.” And property has been defined as “the first establishment of socially approved physical domination over some part of the natural world,” which is sometimes called “occupancy” or “possession.” (Jesse Dukeminier and James E. Krier, Property, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981, p. 2). A domination-premised claim of U.S. possession is behind the United States government’s use of “our Indian tribes,” or “U.S. Indian tribes.”
So here’s a question: What is our political and decolonizing counter-argument to the Latin language basis of the Court’s statement that our nations exist in “subjection” to the American domination, which is sometimes called “protection and authority” and sometimes called the “plenary power” of the United States? What is our political counter-argument especially given that the U.S.’s claim of a right of “subjection” (servitus) is premised on the Christian “right of discovery” and right of “ultimate dominion” (domination) otherwise known in the Latin language as dominorum Christianorum and dominationes.
Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, 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, 2008). He has been studying U.S. federal Indian law and international law since the early 1980s.