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Preface Seeing between Worlds This book tells the story of Christian discovery, the legal doctrine underpin- ning U.S. dispossession and domination of Indigenous peoples—it says that the United States owns all Native lands. The doctrine haunts U.S. law to this day in what is known as “federal Indian law.” In fact, federal Indian law is a matrix for domination, which is why I call it “federal anti-Indian law.” Logically and historically, federal anti-Indian law carries a significance far beyond the relations between the United States and Native peoples. Indeed, challenging Christian discovery and the U.S. claim to own Native lands and to have “plenary power” over Native peoples produces a metaphysical crisis for America. As one scholar said, “If the federal government . . . exercises unrestrained power over Indian nations, then . . . we have a different kind of government than we think we have.”1 Before we dive into all this, I want to tell you how I got here. My Yakama colleague and friend, JoDe Goudy, asked me what in my life laid the foundation for my deeply personal response to Indigenous peoples underlying this book. He said that I should explain that up front. I think the answer to JoDe’s question begins with my childhood. When I was just over a year old, my father, impatient to escape his World War II draft-protected job as a petroleum engineer in West Virginia and do some- thing more directly in the war, joined the U.S. Navy. The war would end before he finished training but at the time he departed, my mother was preg- nant with a second child, and they decided that I should go to Massachusetts to live among my father’s extended family—my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The train trip there with my aunt Angela is beyond conscious mem- ory, but I sense that I saw between worlds. That sense grew as I learned about my Italian heritage (my father was born in Italy) and the pain of