Cruz and Europa v. Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources

charged with this right of possession, and to the exclusive power of acquiring that right."[162] It has been said that the history of America, from its discovery to the present day, proves the universal recognition of this principle.[163] The Johnson doctrine was a compromise. It protected Indian rights and their native lands without having to invalidate conveyances made by the government to many U.S. citizens.[164] Johnson was reiterated in the case of Worcester v. Georgia.[165] In this case, the State of Georgia enacted a law requiring all white persons residing within the Cherokee nation to obtain a license or permit from the Governor of Georgia; and any violation of the law was deemed a high misdemeanor. The plaintiffs, who were white missionaries, did not obtain said license and were thus charged with a violation of the Act. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the Act as unconstitutional for interfering with the treaties established between the United States and the Cherokee nation as well as the Acts of Congress regulating intercourse with them. It characterized the relationship between the United States government and the Indians as: "The Indian nations were, from their situation, necessarily dependent on some foreign potentate for the supply of their essential wants, and for their protection from lawless and injurious intrusions into their country. That power was naturally termed their protector. They had been arranged under the protection of Great Britain; but the extinguishment of the British power in their neighborhood, and the establishment of that of the United States in its place, led naturally to the declaration, on the part of the Cherokees, that they were under the protection of the United States, and of no other power. They assumed the relation with the United States which had before subsisted with Great Britain. This relation was that of a nation claiming and receiving the protection of one more powerful, not that of individuals abandoning their national character, and submitting as subjects to the laws of a master."[166] It was the policy of the U.S. government to treat the Indians as nations with distinct territorial boundaries and recognize their right of occupancy over all the lands within their domains. Thus: "From the commencement of our government Congress has passed acts to regulate trade and intercourse with the Indians; which treat them as nations, respect their rights, and manifest a firm purpose to afford that protection which treaties stipulate. All these acts, and especially that of 1802, which is still in force, manifestly consider the several Indian nations as distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive, and having a right to all the lands within those boundaries, which is not only acknowledged, but guaranteed by the United States. x x x. "The Indian nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil from time immemorial, with the single exception of that imposed by irresistible power, which excluded them from intercourse with any other European potentate than the first discoverer of the coast of the particular region claimed: and this was a restriction which those European potentates imposed on themselves, as well as on the Indians. The very term "nation," so generally applied to them, means "a people distinct from others." x x x.[167]