A Comment on Timothy Bowers Vasko, Making All the World America: Native Information and the Doctrine of Discovery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)

Abstract

Peter d'Errico comments on Timothy Bowers Vasko's Making All the World America: Native Information and the Doctrine of Discovery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), as a companion to Steven T. Newcomb's review of the same book. Working from the publisher's description, d'Errico questions the book's claim to offer a "provocative new account" given the large existing literature on the doctrine (surveyed through WorldCat, Google Ngram, and Westlaw), and argues that legal materials must be read with the precision of equations rather than as stories, illustrating the point with the plenary-power clause of Worcester v. Georgia. He rejects Vasko's thesis that the doctrine depended on the recognition of Indigenous rights and sovereignty, citing Inter Caetera (1493), Johnson v. McIntosh, and Joseph Story's Commentaries; reads the book's language of "incorporation," "leveraged" Native knowledge, and "Indigenous intellectuals" as apologetics for empire; and recalls John Locke's colonial offices and his doctrine of waste land as warnings against treating Locke as a sympathetic theorist of Indigenous peoples.