Discovery doctrine

What the cluck-cluck we gonna do? Organize a chicken coup.

If people want to do a bit of research, just Google the Doctrine of Discovery 500 years ago.

Europeans were given permission by the church to go in and take over lands and that set a precedent for colonization of places in a very, very bad way for Indigenous people around the world.

And so here in our own homelands here, 1764 and the Niagara Treaty, that was really a time where the wampum belt, the two-eyed seeing, the indigenous way of knowing the land and its relation, and then the colonists, the settlers with their way of being, it was not gonna be a blended soup pot.

There's a lot more than that.

We're talking about the encounter today between Indigenous peoples and Europeans and where the doctrine of discovery came from, kind of the early colonial content.

So I want you to come and see this painting with us of the 1500s.

You might not be able to capture the era with one key phrase or something like that, but I think you'll see this era, which for so many Protestants is so critical, through different eyes.

That's not what made them say, this is our land.

That was just more proof.

It's the collection of different views from the top, the different papal bulls that create what's called the constellation that's called the Doctrine of Discovery.

The Doctrine of Discovery wasn't like a special doctrine.

Like that is the-

The Doctrine of Discovery, right?

... founding claim, the Doctrine of Discovery.

Uh, and even today in the, in the, in the rotunda of the Capitol, right, um, I, I'm still struck by this, that there's eight big paintings around the rotunda of the Capitol Building.

Um, four of them are essentially Christian nationalist paintings.

And I think-

Yeah

... a lot of the, the Doctrine of Discovery was probably, you could speak more, more authoritatively on this, but it seems to me to have been bolstered and cemented by our capitalist system and sla-

I am a mother, a geographer, an educator, and a writer.

I work with an organization called Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples, and I also volunteer with the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, Arizona Faith Network's Cherishing Creation Collaborative.

All right, so before we jump into this conversation, I just want to frame for folks what we're talking about and why we're having this conversation.

What led us to be sitting here today? So

But additionally, assigning certain sections where one of us would be kind of like the first dedicated thinker on this topic.

For example, you know, I did a deep dive into the Jay Treaty and Sarah was like thinking about the Doctrine of Discovery.

I actually think that if we did that in a way that was together in conversation, that it would have taken much longer.

But we already kind of had this relationship of trust where we were able to hand that off.

They are not.

They involve all of us.

In fact, tracing those links through my own family history and really understanding more about the Doctrine of Discovery and the Royal Proclamation and how these international laws made it possible for immigrants to come to these lands.

That I had known that, but I hadn't encountered it in quite this way.

And Ignatius of Loyola was a former soldier.

And so he kind of took that word mission and brought that into the church and very much came about the time of colonialism and the Papal Bull for the Doctrine of Discovery, where the Pope explicitly gives empires the permission to go convert Christians in quote-unquote heathen lands and to even enslave them if needed.

This is official Vatican Church history right here, right? And it's shaped the policies of settler colonial empires like the U.S.

and Canada even today and even Australia.

So settlers justified their colonization of indigenous land by deeming themselves entitled to it by some divine right, and obliged to tailor it to their own needs and political systems, indigenous populations be damned.

Now, manifest destiny and the, the kind of doctrine of manifest destiny is very much in the same trajectory as the 1493 papal bull called Inter Caetera, the so-called Doctrine of Discovery issued by Pope Alexander VI, which really was central to the Spanish conquest and colonization of the so-called New World.

It deemed any place basically on the map that was not already Catholic could be seized, could be taken over by Spain in an effort to Christianize the native population to spread the word of God.

And so manifest destiny in the American sense is another step in that direction.

The 13th Amendment Exception.

The Doctrine of Discovery.

The Violence Against Women Act.

Three laws that were built in the name of justice and produced more of what they were supposed to prevent.