Conflict of Ethics: Indigenous Americans and Settler Colonists

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop and present a novel approach to the conflict of ethics on the foundation of legal theory, particularly the legal rules governing conflict of laws. The focus is on the conflict of ethics impacting Indigenous Americans in the context of Occidental settler colonialism in the Americas. This paper contains three major contributions. First, the interplay between Indigenous American concepts categorized as ethics in the Occident and Occidental ethics in a settler colonial context was assessed. Second, Occidental concepts in Roman Law and Saint Thomas Aquinas’ natural law was used to determine the precedence of Indigenous American equivalents to ethics vis-à-vis Occidental ethics in the Americas. Third, rules-based solutions synthetized from conflict of laws in international law were applied to conflict of ethics in the settler colonial context in the Americas.