ministries

CONAM Podcast on Doctrine of Discovery

Dear Friends and Colleagues
NYA•WEÑHA SKÄ•NOÑH: Thank you for being well.

We are excited to announce Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery, a podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the Indigenous Values Initiative and the American Indian Law Alliance. It is funded in part by the Syracuse University Engaged Humanities and Henry Luce Foundation. We are thankful for all our partners in our newest educational venture. Please share widely. (Click picture below to access podcast.)

We launch this Podcast with Columbus’ arrival to the “New World.” This event issued forth the “Age of Discovery.” Although we were taught Columbus was in search of spices, he was actually sailing under 15^th century Papal edicts known as the Doctrines of Christian Discovery [DOCD], decreeing that explorers were “…to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ…to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,…[and] convert them to his use and profit…”

Following the fall of Constantinople, these Papal Bulls were issued to legitimate Portugal’s exploits in extracting gold in West Africa and capturing slaves. By 1492, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade began with Columbus’ first crossing. The DOCD established the spiritual justification to bring the world under total dominion of the Church. The patriarchal hierarchy was constituted under an Almighty Supreme God at the helm—thus giving the Church full access to the world’s resources, by having dominion over Indigenous Peoples, their lands, and destruction of their cultures.

These Christian decrees soon became the legal principle used during the Protestant Reformation, by giving credence to any Protestant claim to Indigenous lands in the Americas. By 1823, the DOCD was codified into US property law by the Supreme Court in Johnson v M’Intosh. As recently as 2005, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg upheld the DOCD in her written majority opinion against the Oneida in; City of Sherrill v Oneida Nation.

Following 15^th century Christian imperialism, through to the19^th century formulation of US law, we are able to identify today, how the DOCD continues to be utilized all over the world by multi-national corporations. Corporations who continue to justify resource extraction through the seizure and destruction of Indigenous lands, and who perpetrate cultural genocide through the 15^th century fiction of “terra nullius”— empty land, and under the guise of economic development.

The goal of this podcast is to help identify these systems of domination that have been sustained by greed and power, through the subjugation of human beings and the natural world.