Episode 15, “STOLEN LAND”: The Danger and Limitation of Performative Speech, begins with the Grammys uproar after Billie Eilish said, “no one is illegal on stolen land,” and the fast backlash that followed. Peter P. d’Errico and Steven Newcomb argue that much of the public fight is performative speech: words that signal virtue or expertise while blocking real inquiry. They dig into the deeper structure beneath the sound and fury—how U.S. concepts of “property,” “theft,” and “title” grow out of a claimed right of domination. The conversation turns to Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) and the “extravagant pretension” that Christian “discovery” created superior legal rights over Indigenous lands. Steven traces “government” and “dominion” through Latin roots linked to domination, showing how legal language can hide coercion. The episode challenges listeners to move past gestures and confront the framework itself.

Russell Diabo and our hosts examine Canada’s “reconciliation” agenda, exposing domination, fiscal dependency, and ongoing struggles for Indigenous self-government.

A concise exploration of key terms that reveal how words like civilization, sovereignty, and empire encode patterns of domination and power in law and history.

Newcomb and d’Errico examine the Federal Indian Boarding School Report, its apology, assimilation policies, dispossession, and ongoing domination today.

Domination Chronicles opens the new year with a wide-ranging conversation that sets the direction for months ahead. We explore free existence and domination through close attention to words, meanings, and entangled histories. Drawing on legal documents, technology debates, and long-standing narratives of sympathy and apology, the podcast invites careful reading and sustained reflection. Future episodes will include guest voices and focused discussions of cases, texts, and emerging tools—always with the aim of understanding life beyond inherited frames.

In this episode of Domination Chronicles, our hosts Steven T. Newcomb and Peter d'Errico commemorate seventy years of Tee-Hit-Ton v. United States. Our hosts reflect on seventy years of Tee-hit-ton to expose how U.S. law has been used to legitimize domination—both domestically and globally. They trace how the 1955 decision reaffirmed the 1823 ruling in Johnson v. McIntosh, which asserted a U.S. “right of domination” over Indigenous lands through the doctrine of Christian discovery. By quietly deleting the word “Christian,” the Court in Tee-Hit-Ton sanitized this religious foundation for a modern legal audience, making it easier for later courts—including a 2005 opinion by Ruth Bader Ginsburg—to rely on Johnson without confronting its theological roots.

Newcomb and d'Errico then place Tee-Hit-Ton alongside Brown v. Board of Education (1954). At first glance, Brown, which repudiated “separate but equal,” appears to move against racial domination. But we explore how both cases, in different ways, served U.S. Cold War ambitions and a broader project of global control—over people, land, and resources such as the timber taken from Tlingit territory.

Drawing on cases, commentary, and human rights documents, this episode reveals how legal “progress” and legal repression can advance the same imperial trajectory.

Our springboard is the 2020 Supreme Court decision, McGirt v. Oklahoma, that upheld US criminal law jurisdiction over “major crimes” in “Indian country” (via the 1885 Major Crimes Act, an act based on the claim of a right of domination by the US over the Original Nations).

We focus on the way the US claim of “a right of domination” under federal anti-Indian law is both visible and invisible in the majority opinion (authored by Justice Gorsuch).

The Domination Chronicles explores how everyday language hides systems of power. In this episode, Steven T. Newcomb and Peter d’Errico unpack the words we use—state, sovereignty, civilization, landlord—and show how they mask a “claim of a right of domination” embedded in U.S. law and Western thought. Drawing on decades of research, they trace how naming, translation, and legal rhetoric normalize domination while obscuring original free existence. Their dialogue invites listeners to pause, look again at familiar terms, and consider what it means to step outside the worldview that produced them.