Original Free Nations

Riverfront Trail Extension Opens, Linking Downtown to the Valley

2026-07-02T00:00:00Z

Twenty-two years after the first mile of riverfront trail was paved, the loop is finally closed. City and county officials cut the ribbon Wednesday morning on the 3.4-mile southern extension, and roughly 300 cyclists immediately set off to ride the full 22-mile circuit for the first time.

The extension threads the trail through the valley’s restored floodplain forest, crosses the river twice on new pedestrian bridges, and connects four neighborhoods that previously had no off-street route downtown.

Two decades, three mayors, one lawsuit

The project outlasted three mayoral administrations, a rail-corridor lawsuit that froze construction for four years, and a funding gap that was finally closed with a mix of federal transportation grants and a county green-bond issue approved by voters in 2023.

County executive Priya Raman called the opening “proof that boring persistence is a civic virtue.” The final price tag came to $19.6 million, about $4 million over the 2019 estimate — most of it attributable to the bridge redesigns required after the 2024 flood study.

What riders will find

Two new pedestrian bridges with fishing overlooks
A trailhead at Dorwin Avenue with parking, restrooms and a repair station
Native wildflower plantings along 1.8 miles of restored bank
Mile markers tied into the county’s 911 location system

Parks officials expect heavy use this holiday weekend and are asking riders to treat the new boardwalk sections as single-file zones. A full trail map is available at every trailhead kiosk, and the county says a printable version will be posted to its site next week.

Eastside United Wins First State Soccer Title in Overtime Thriller

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

Ninety-seven minutes into the state final, with penalty kicks looming and half the east side holding its breath in the stands, junior midfielder Fatima Diallo took one touch at the top of the box and buried the golden goal. Eastside United 2, Bethlehem 1 — and the first state championship in the program’s history.

The team returned home Sunday to a fire-truck escort down Salina Street and an impromptu crowd outside the school that athletic director Ray Tomasello estimated at 2,000 people.

Built over a decade

Eastside’s run is the product of a youth program that barely existed ten years ago. The district launched free after-school soccer in 2016 with donated equipment and two volunteer coaches; today the pipeline runs from second grade through varsity, and eleven of the championship roster’s eighteen players came up through it.

“These kids grew up playing together on a field with no lines painted on it,” head coach Simone Achebe said. “Tonight they played like they could see lines nobody else could.”

Diallo, who also broke the program’s single-season scoring record, said the moment had not sunk in. “I’ve watched state finals on my phone since I was eight,” she said. “I kept waiting for the video to end.”

A city-sponsored celebration is planned for Saturday at the Eastside rec center, with the trophy on display and a youth clinic run by the varsity players.

City Council Approves $312M Budget with Road Repair Surge

2026-06-12T00:00:00Z

The Common Council approved a $312 million budget Thursday night on a 7–2 vote, holding the property tax rate flat for a third consecutive year while doubling the city’s paving budget to $14 million — the largest single-year road investment in city history.

Mayor Ellis Nakamura, who proposed the plan in April, called it “a maintenance budget in the best sense — we are finally maintaining things.” The paving surge targets 63 lane-miles, with a published street list due from the Department of Public Works by July 1.

Where the money goes

The budget’s biggest line items break down as follows:

$14 million for street paving and sidewalk repair, up from $7.1 million
$6.2 million to fully staff two long-vacant fire companies on the south side
$3.5 million for the lead-pipe replacement match required by the state
$1.8 million in new funding for the library system’s Sunday hours pilot

Councilors Pat Whelan and Dora Estevez cast the two no votes, both citing the budget’s reliance on $9 million in one-time reserves. “We are paving roads with money we can only spend once,” Whelan said during the floor debate.

A harder year ahead

The city’s final tranche of federal recovery aid expires in December, and early projections show a $17 million gap for next year. Budget director Sonia Reyes told councilors her office will present gap-closing options in the fall, including a review of the city’s 41 tax-exempt payment agreements.

The new fiscal year begins July 1.

Summer Arts Festival Returns to Clinton Square with 90 Artists

2026-06-06T00:00:00Z

The Summer Arts Festival came home this weekend. After two years at the fairgrounds — a move organizers made during the Clinton Square renovation — the juried show returned downtown Friday with 90 artists, its largest field ever, and a new night market that kept the square busy well past dark.

Festival director Amara Osei said downtown foot traffic changed the event’s whole character. “At the fairgrounds people drove in, walked the rows and left,” she said. “Here, half our visitors didn’t know we existed until they walked through us on the way to dinner.”

What’s new this year

A night market on Friday and Saturday, running until 11 p.m. with 20 additional vendors
Live printmaking and glass-blowing demonstrations on the hour
A youth wing showing work from four city high schools
Free bike valet at the Erie Boulevard entrance

Best in Show went to fiber artist Renata Kim for a wall-sized tapestry mapping the city’s creeks, most of which now run underground in culverts. The piece was purchased Saturday by the county arts council for its permanent collection.

Organizers estimate weekend attendance at 38,000, ahead of the festival’s pre-renovation record. Next year’s dates are already set for the first weekend of June.

Planning Board Advances Westside Rezone for 240 Homes

2026-05-26T00:00:00Z

The city planning board voted 5–2 Monday night to advance a rezoning request that would clear the way for 240 homes on the long-vacant Westside industrial parcel, sending the proposal to the Common Council for a final vote expected in late June.

The plan from Gateway Development calls for a mix of townhouses and four-story apartment buildings, with 30 percent of units reserved for households earning below 80 percent of the area median income. It would be the largest residential project on the west side in more than two decades.

Three hours of testimony

More than 40 residents signed up to speak. Supporters — including two neighborhood churches and the county housing coalition — pointed to a rental vacancy rate below 2 percent. Opponents raised traffic on Grand Avenue and questioned whether the developer’s tax agreement gives too much away.

“We are not against housing. We are against being the last people asked about it,” said Gwen Aldous, who has lived two blocks from the site for 31 years.

Board chair Emmett Cho said the conditions attached to the approval — a second traffic study, a construction-noise curfew and a community benefits agreement to be finalized before closing — directly answered the concerns raised in April’s session.

The Common Council’s neighborhood-development committee takes up the rezone June 16. If approved by the full council, site work could begin as early as this fall.

Salt City Bakehouse to Open Second Location on the North Side

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

Salt City Bakehouse, the small-batch bakery that turned a converted garage into a weekend destination, announced Tuesday it will open a second location this fall in the former Lombardi’s storefront on Butternut Street.

Owner Dana Kowalski said the North Side space will triple the bakery’s production capacity and add 14 jobs, including four full-time baker positions. The company closed on the building last month with financing from a regional community-development loan fund.

Betting on Butternut Street

The move adds to a stretch of new investment along Butternut, where a bookstore, a Salvadoran restaurant and a bike-repair cooperative have opened in the past two years. Neighborhood association president Luis Herrera called the bakery “exactly the kind of anchor the corridor has been waiting for.”

Kowalski said the decision came down to three things:

A commercial kitchen already fitted for food production
Foot traffic from the adjacent farmers market pavilion
Rent roughly half of what downtown landlords quoted

The original location will stay open, shifting to a retail-only counter while the ovens move north. A hiring fair is planned for late August, and Kowalski expects the new doors to open before the holidays.

Home Opener Sells Out as Mets Begin Season with 7–2 Win

2026-04-30T00:00:00Z

The tarp came off at 4 p.m., the gates opened at 5:30, and by first pitch there was not a seat to be had. The home team opened its Triple-A season Thursday night with a 7–2 win over Rochester in front of 11,071 fans — the first sellout home opener since 2019.

The game turned in the sixth. Trailing 2–1, the home side sent nine batters to the plate and scored five runs on four hits, a walk and a Rochester throwing error that brought the loudest cheer of the night.

New faces, new food

The offseason brought changes beyond the roster. The ballpark’s left-field concourse has been rebuilt with a widened family section, and the concession lineup now includes three local vendors selected by fan vote over the winter.

“We wanted opening night to feel like the whole city showed up to the same backyard cookout,” general manager Terri Okafor said. “Judging by the salt potato line, I think we got there.”

Season attendance projections are up 12 percent over last year, driven partly by a new downtown shuttle running on game nights. The team plays a six-game homestand before heading to Buffalo at the end of next week.

Volunteers Pull Three Tons of Debris from Onondaga Lake Shoreline

2026-04-14T00:00:00Z

By 8 a.m. Saturday the parking lots along the western shore were full, and by noon the dumpsters were too. Organizers with the Lakefront Alliance say this year’s spring cleanup drew more than 400 volunteers — nearly double last year’s turnout — who collected an estimated three tons of debris across four miles of shoreline.

“Every year we think we’ve finally gotten ahead of it, and every year the lake proves us wrong,” said Marisol Greene, the Alliance’s volunteer coordinator. “But the trend line is real. Ten years ago we were pulling out twice this much from half the distance.”

What they found

The haul included the usual suspects and a few surprises:

Roughly 1,900 pounds of scrap metal, including two shopping carts and a bicycle frame
More than 60 bags of plastic bottles and food packaging
A refrigerator, avocado green, that county staff dated to the mid-1970s
Four tires, one still mounted on a rim

County parks officials say the refrigerator will be displayed at the visitor center this summer as part of an exhibit on the lake’s recovery.

A long recovery, still going

Onondaga Lake was once ranked among the most polluted lakes in the country. Decades of industrial dumping and municipal sewage overflows left the lakebed contaminated and the fishery collapsed. A federally supervised cleanup, largely completed in the last decade, has brought back bass tournaments, bald eagles and — slowly — public trust.

The Alliance’s next event, a native-plantings day at the inner harbor, is scheduled for the second weekend of May. Registration is free and open to all ages.

Ojai Valley Film Screening

2025-05-03T00:00:00Z

Join us for a screening of The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code in Ojai, Wednesday May 21, at 6:00PM.

The cost is $20 and will help support the filmmakers travels to Rome for high level meetings and research.

RSVP Now

Free Online Film Screening Of The Doctrine of Discovery Unmasking the Domination Code

2024-01-25T00:00:00Z

Featured Epic Events & Life-Changing Courses with Shawna Bluestar and Steven T. Newcomb.
Wisdom for the New Paradigm Series

Film Screening

The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code

Q & A with Shawna Bluestar & Steven Newcomb
Join us Saturday Jan 27th
@ 10 am PST, 6 pm GMT

Learn Hidden History behind current events!

Free event *Donations are appreciated*

RSVP Today! Invite friends

An Original Nations’ Examination of “Freedom,” “Human” and “Human Rights”

2023-08-14T00:00:00Z

Some Reflections for the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, Illinois, August 14-18, 2023

by Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape)
Indigenous Law Institute and Original Nations Advocates^[1]

“Force is not truth, nor justice, but [force] is indispensable for the propagation of civilization”^[2]

Our Global Predicament and the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions

This essay reveals why, from an Original Nations’ Perspective, the term “human,” in the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian sense, as traced to the Vatican papal bulls of the fifteenth century, means “living under domination,” which in turn changes our understanding of the term “freedom.” We will explain why the international framework of human rights is not designed to liberate Peoples from the claim of a right of domination.

Peoples who were labeled and categorized as “barbarous,” “infidel,” “heathen,” “pagan,” and “savage” by the ancient political powers of Western Christendom, are still being labeled and categorized in that manner by the present-day successors of those political powers. It’s a tradition held together by means of, for example, active Supreme Court precedents that have those labels and categories embedded in them.^[3] Those labels and categories are rooted in the past and ongoing in the present.

Domination has been defined as “living under the arbitrary will of another, [or] having to conform one’s actions to a will external to one’s own.”^[4] This essay will explain that the claim of a right of domination is a hidden dimension of the terms “barbarous” and “human.” We have identified this covert dimension by studying fifteenth century Vatican papal bulls that labeled our non-christian Peoples “barbarous” and called for the oppression (“deprimantur,” in Latin) of our Original Nations and Peoples.

In our view, the claim of a right of domination, and the behaviors that follow from that claim, are the main cause of the global problems we all face. This is why opposition to that claim is a potentially unifying theme for homo sapiens. Accordingly, we are prompted to ask: “To what extent is the theme of the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions, ‘A Call to Conscience: Defending Freedom and Human Rights’ focused on the fundamental and global issue of domination?” One possible answer is: “While it’s true that the Parliament’s theme is not focused on the term domination, the potential for such a focus is hidden in the background and deeper meaning of the terms ‘freedom,’ ‘human,’ and ‘human rights’ when examined from an Original Nations’ Perspective.”

An Original Nations’ Perspective

Our way of framing the context for this 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions is to think of it in terms of the contrast between our initial free existence as the Original Nations and Peoples of this continent, and the claim of a right of domination that centuries ago was brought by ship across the ocean from Western Christendom and imposed on Peoples and places that Christendom labeled as “barbarous” —an imposition which continues today. From this contrast, two points of view emerge: The first vantage point imagines our ancestors’ view-from-the-shore, seeing an invading ship moving toward them. The second vantage point is a view-from-the-ship, with the voyaging colonizers looking at our free and independent Native ancestors standing on shore.

The Domination Translator

At times I will be using a specific technique I’ve developed, which I call “the domination translator.” It’s quite simple. After a synonym for domination, such as the word “conquest”, I add the word “domination” in brackets. For example, “conquest [domination].” Or I may place “dominator” or “dominating” in brackets. I use this technique because none of us were ever taught to make a mental association between certain English and Latin words and domination. Using this technique helps the brain learn to make the connection.

The System of Domination

For tens of thousands of years, our Original Nation ancestors lived truly free here on this Turtle Island continent (“North America” ) with our own unique languages, values, and Sacred Responsibilities to care for our homelands. Our Ancestors used their free existence to evolve for us, their future generations, systems of Spiritual Understanding, Knowledge, and Wisdom. They were able to maintain a deep relationship with and an abiding appreciation for all Life, especially the Waters of Life, without which nothing can live. Our songs and ceremonies, our stories, our agricultural practices are all directed toward the accentuation and furtherance of Life.

However, centuries of unrestrained domination, which Christian Europeans call a “human” existence, have culminated in the waters of Mother Earth and our own bloodstreams being poisoned by carcinogenic and neurologically destructive toxic chemicals. The effect of this toxicity on the mind also needs to be taken into account. All this has happened as a result of a “human” economics of unbridled militarism, corporate gluttony, and greed.

The ecosystems of the planet have been horrifically impacted, while poverty and abuse have proliferated everywhere. The suffering caused by poverty and degradation is contrasted with a massive accumulation of wealth and power by the masters of the domination system. The wealthy and the powerful create the appearance of “green,” “healthy,” and “democratic” solutions, which are measures that merely reinforce the existing patterns of militarism, colonization, authoritarianism, and suppression.

During the past five centuries, the vast majority of the original old growth forests on this Turtle Island continent (“North America” ), which our ancestors nurtured, have been cut down, along with much of the rainforests to the South. Massive numbers of species have been wiped out. Genocide—the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, an entire nation or people—was committed against the Buffalo Nation, and against our Original Nations throughout this Western Hemisphere.

The “human” and “Christian” system of domination called “civilization,” which has been so destructive to our Original Nations and Peoples is also well-illustrated by the U.S. government detonating nuclear weapons in the homeland of the Western Shoshone Nation, thereby sending radioactivity, spewing out onto the Western Shoshone, the land, the air, and the water, and reaching some 46 states, Mexico, and Canada.^[5] There was no regard by the scientific and military planners for the long-term and devastating consequences of the radiation. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the instability caused by competing domination systems vying for supremacy, has brought the planet closer than ever to the real prospect of a nuclear catastrophe.^[6] Innumerable destructive effects of the claim of a right of domination can be recounted.

The 1893 Congress of Religions

This Ticket to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition displayed a Native American chief. Actual American Indians were “displayed to fairgoers as objects of anthropological inquiry.” PHOTO:TOM HOFFMAN

2023 marks one hundred thirty years since the convening of the Congress of Religions, which was a gathering of interfaith leaders in Chicago, during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. It was intended to celebrate 400 years since Columbus’s first voyage to “discover and conquer” [dominate] distant non-Christian lands in 1492. It is recorded that more than four thousand people attended the opening ceremony. Representatives from different faiths marched into the Hall of Columbus on September 11, 1893.

A replica of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was cast for the Exposition. It was named the Columbian (for Columbus) Liberty Bell and stood seven feet high and weighed 13,000 pounds. It was engraved with wording from the Bible and hung up in the Court of Honor. During the grand opening of the Congress of Religions, the bell was rung 10 times to honor “Liberty of Thought” and ten world religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianisim.

The Original Nations and Peoples of this Turtle Island continent were not honored during the Columbian Exposition or the Congress of Religions, unless the image of an “Indian” chief wearing a warbonnet, which was printed on one of the Exposition entrance tickets, strikes you as an honoring.^[7] Some Native people were displayed at the Exposition as an anthropological exhibit.^[8] The U.S. government and various Christian denominations labeled our ancestors as “barbarous,” “pagans,” “heathens,” “infidels,” and “savages,” whose lands, languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions needed to be wrested away from them, so that they could receive the “blessings” and “progress” of a “human” Christian European “civilization” [domination].^[9]

To achieve this “beneficent” objective, the children of our Original Nations and Peoples were taken away from their families and loved ones and subjected to horrific abuse in so-called “boarding schools” and “residential schools.”^[10] They were taught the patterns of domination by, for example, being forcibly christianized and violently subjected for doing the most natural thing imaginable, speaking their own Original Nation language.^[11] The death toll was high. At Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California, for instance, there are some 70 unmarked graves. There were more than 300 such “schools” in the United States, and several hundred in Canada as well. The children who died were alone without the comfort of any family member or loved ones.

The 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee

Mass grave of Original Free Peoples at Wounded Knee, SD, murdered on 29 December 1890.

The 1893 Congress of Religions in Chicago was held at the end of the nineteenth century phase of the bloody era of U.S. Manifest Destiny, and just three years after “human and Christian civilization,” represented by some 500 US Army soldiers, and supported by a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns and other firearms, slaughtered hundreds of Lakota women, children, elderly, and men at the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890. Some twenty of those soldiers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, “the highest military decoration presented by the United States government to a member of its armed forces.”^[12] Recipients “must have distinguished themselves at the risk of their own life above and beyond the call of duty in action against an enemy of the United States.”^[13]

Dewey Beard, the grandfather of my Oglala Lakota friend and mentor Birgil Kills Straight, was a Wounded Knee Survivor. He recounted that the commanding U.S. officer gave his soldiers the order to fire upon the innocent people. When I told Oglala Lakota Medicine Man Richard Two Dogs this story a couple of years ago, he told me that his grandmother had also survived the massacre. His grandmother told him she saw the commanding U.S. officer give the order to commence firing immediately after a Catholic priest finished delivering the last rites, which is a Catholic ceremony that a priest may conduct for those awaiting execution. There is no indication the priest tried to use his influence to talk the commanding officer out of slaughtering Chief Bigfoot and his Miniconjou people.

A century after Wounded Knee, from 1986 to 1990, Birgil Kills Straight (Oglala Lakota), Alex White Plume (Oglala Lakota), and Eugenio White Hawk (Oglala Lakota), and many other people of the Oceti Sakowin (“Great Sioux Nation” ) organized an annual horseback ride some 300 miles long, through winter conditions periodically engulfed in blizzards. The Ride retraced the footsteps of Chief Bigfoot and his people to Wounded Knee. They did so as a ceremonial way of renewing the traditional Wiping of the Tears of the people and honoring the memory of the hundreds who were murdered by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, while at the same time revitalizing the ceremonial life of the Oceti Sakowin.

Birgil and I Attended the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions

In 1993, Birgil and I traveled to Chicago to attend the first Parliament of the World’s Religions to be convened since the Congress of Religions was held in 1893. 1893 marked four centuries since Pope Alexander VI had issued a series of papal documents in 1493. The documents called for the propagation of the Christian empire and for the establishment of Christian domination wherever it did not yet exist.

Birgil and I were presenters on a panel titled “Voices of the Dispossessed.” We brought the issue of the Vatican papal bulls to the world stage by publicizing the patterns of oppression and subjugation found in the Vatican documents. We explained the link between the so-called doctrine of discovery, the Vatican documents, and the ideas and arguments that comprise U.S. federal-indian-law, which is an anti-Indian area of “law.” 1993 was also the year that we wrote an open letter to then Pope John Paul II,^[14] calling on him to formally revoke the Inter Caetera papal bull of May 4, 1493. We did this as a way of publicizing the connection between U.S. federal-indian-law and the Vatican documents of the fifteenth century.

How Are We Able to Defend Our “Freedom” When We Are Living Under and Subject to the U.S. Claim of a Right of Domination?

As we reflect upon the above information, we—the Indigenous Law Institute and Original Nations Advocates—reaffirm our call upon Pope Francis and the Vatican (the Holy See) to formally revoke the Inter Caetera papal bull and other such fifteenth century Vatican documents. We call upon the U.S. Supreme Court to discontinue using the patterns of domination found in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling of 1823^[15] against our nations and peoples.

We are challenging the destructive conceptual patterns found in those papal documents and in U.S. case law, and the patterns of domination which continue to afflict our Indigenous Nations and Peoples, and the planet. We are also sharing insights obtained from decades of research into the terminology and patterning of the Domination Code.^[16]

This year’s theme of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, “A Call to Conscience: Defending Freedom and Human Rights,” raises some questions:

Given that our Original Nations and Peoples have lived for more than two centuries under the U.S. government’s claim of a right of “Christian domination,” and given that the U.S. government is still asserting that claim, why would we say we are defending “freedom” under and subject to the U.S. claim of a right of domination?
What human rights framework is this year’s Parliament theme referencing?
Is there a specific provision of human rights that will give us the leverage we need to free ourselves from the U.S. claim of a right of Christian domination, or is the United States going to be able to maintain its claim forever?

When someone claims to be defending “freedom,” there is an unconscious assumption that we all share the same understanding of the word freedom: “being free.” But what kind of “freedom” are we talking about, relative to our Original Nations and Peoples, given that foreigners from across the ocean came here, labeled our ancestors “barbarous” and worked to deprive us of our original free existence by means of their invasive system of domination called “human civilization,” “democracy,” and “civil society” ?

Our nations and peoples have ended up with a type of “human freedom” under and subject to the control of the United States (and “Canada” ), and of other countries in other areas. This type of “freedom” does not include our original free existence because the invaders consider us to be the descendants of “barbarous” ancestors and thus rightfully subject to the ideas and arguments produced by their mental world of domination, ideas such as “conquest,” “ultimate dominion,” and the “plenary power” of Congress. To be “human” in this context is to live “free” under the arbitrary restrictions of a mentally imposed framework of domination.

The Vatican’s March 30th Statement About the Doctrine of Discovery and Human Rights Failed to Address the Claim of a Right of Domination^[17]

After we helped generate several decades of publicity about the Catholic Church’s fifteenth century papal bulls, Pope Francis traveled to “Canada” in late July of 2022 as part of the Church’s work of evangelization.^[18] Because the graves of Native children had been found on the grounds of former church-run and government-run “residential” “schools,” the pope also expressed contrition for the deaths of Native children at hundreds of those institutions (indoctrination centers).^[19] His visit was called “penitential.”^[20]

During the pope’s 2022 visit to Canada, some Indigenous peoples’ representatives held up banners challenging the “doctrine of discovery.”^[21] Then, during his return flight to Rome, the pope told a Mohawk reporter that the horrific treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian government was “genocide.”^[22] The pontiff failed, however, to draw attention to the connection between what he was calling genocide and the system of domination which his predecessors set into motion on the planet by means of papal documents of the Holy See. Strangely, the pope also indicated to the reporter that he had no knowledge of the “doctrine of discovery.”

Then, suddenly, on March 30th 2023, the Vatican issued a statement on the doctrine of discovery. The statement claims that “The ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teachings of the Catholic Church.” It says that the Holy See “repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous [sic] peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’.” For years we’ve been discussing “the doctrine of domination” with a number of Vatican officials, including with Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Sweden, in an effort to make them aware of the theology of domination found in the papal bulls, patterns that continue to have real world destructive consequences today.

30 March 2023 Vatican Statement on the doctrine of discovery

Despite our efforts, the March 30th document never once mentions the word “domination.” The Vatican statement completely ignores that issue, even though the statement says it has been written as a response to discussions among Indigenous peoples’ representatives. This seems strange since we are among the Indigenous peoples’ advocates who have been discussing the “doctrine of discovery” with Vatican officials.

The Vatican officials did quote the titles of three of the papal documents, but they did not quote one word from the text of those papal bulls, such as the language from Dum Diversas of 1452. Pope Nicholas V provided an excellent example of the patterns of domination in that document when he called upon King Alfonso V of Portugal to travel to the Western coast of Africa, and “to invade, search out. capture, vanquish, and subdue, all Saracens, and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and take away all their possessions and property.”^[23] The March 30th statement conveniently ignores such evidence, which we have been publicizing for decades.

The Vatican’s March 30th statement also ignores the intention, which is explicitly mentioned in two papal bull documents dated May 3rd and September 26th of 1493, to establish Christian domination wherever it did not yet exist. The Vatican’s statement does not explain that the system of domination the Holy See helped unleash on the planet is what makes people call out for “human rights.” The claim of a right of domination is what results in the problems that the international “human rights” framework is supposedly designed to resolve. However, the international human rights framework never acknowledges that domination is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “human.”

The Vatican is Responsible for Our Nations and Peoples Having Been Forced to Transition from Living Free to Living a “Human” Existence Under Christian Domination

The history of the colonization of California provides important evidence that the word “human” means “living under domination.” In 1930, for instance, the California Supreme Court issued a decision in the case City of San Diego v. Cuyamaca Water Company (209 Cal. Mar. 1930, p. 125). The court said that when the Spaniards arrived at Alta (“Upper” ) California, with the intention of establishing a Spanish Catholic mission system, the “Indian population” was, from the Spaniards’ viewpoint, living in “a state of barbarism.”

Interestingly, the term “barbarism” matches Pope Alexander VI’s expressed desire in the 1493 papal bulls to “reduce” the “barbarous nations” to the “Catholic faith and Christian religion.”^[24] A system of Christian domination could not be established in any non-Christian place until the original Native peoples were deprived of their free existence and/or removed from the land.

In the Spanish language, the Catholic missions, such as those established in Alta (Upper) California in 1769, were called reducciones (“reductions” in English). This process of reduction is designed to cause a transition from one capacity, quality, or quantity to a “diminished” or smaller capacity, quality, or quantity. A reduction can also be thought of in terms of moving or pushing something downward from a starting height to a lower level, which is the metaphorical image of a motion that causes Free Nations and Peoples to be forced down and under a system of oppression.

The imagery of reduction was utilized by Chief Justice John Marshall in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). Marshall said of the “Indians”: “Their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished by the original fundamental principle that, discovery gave title to those who made it [the discovery].”^[25] (emphasis added) Notice how Marshall is claiming that the colonizers are original and fundamental to this continent. In fact, they are neither, which is why we emphasize that we are the Original Nations and Peoples who were already living on this and other continents when the invaders arrived on their ships.

The Mission of the Mission System

Two Spanish Catholic colonizers, Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra, and Spanish military officer Gaspar de Portola founded the San Diego Mission in the Kumeyaay Nation Territory in 1769, to begin building “missions” to the north. They intended for the Indians in Alta California to be “reduced” downward from the “height,” so to speak, of their original free and independent existence, which the invaders called “barbarous,” to a resulting unfree existence called “human” under and subject to the supposed Spanish Catholic’s claim of a “right” of domination.

Together, Spanish military officer Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra founded the San Diego Mission.

In a 1995 essay,^[26] Gary Caldwell says “it was Serra’s task to implement the reducci__ó__n (reduction) type of mission.” Caldwell then quotes Lenape scholar Jack Forbes, as saying that a reduction mission “was not erected in an already existing pueblo with sufficient population to support a church, but was utilized as a device for gathering together (congregating) natives who were dispersed in small villages,’ and for ‘reducing’ them from the ‘free,’ ‘undisciplined’ way of life to that of a disciplined subject of Spain.”^[27]

Gary Caldwell lucidly explains how the Spanish Crown had enlisted the Franciscans to assist the Spanish military project to protect Alta California from possible Russian claims to that same area:

The Russians were coming, expanding southward out of the Gulf of Alaska with their Aleut hunters in search of the prized sea otter. The strategic plan to meet this threat was crafted by the vainglorious and unstable José de Galvez and approved by [King] Carlos III. It called for an expedition northward which would secure by occupation this remote province of Spain’s unguarded northwestern frontier. To that end Father Serra and his Franciscans were enlisted in direct support of this military move on the international chess board. Saint Francis [of Assisi] had been turned on his head. And so it had been from the initial organization of the expedition under [Gaspar de] Portolá in Baja California. It was obvious the Franciscans were going to play much more than a religious role when it came to the native inhabitants of Alta California.^[28]

Caldwell notes Charles Chapman’s cynical comment about “the priests heading north.” For the Franciscan priests, if the individual Indian’s “soul were to be saved and his intelligence quickened . . . his body should first be enslaved [domination].”^[29] To this, we accurately add, they should first be enslaved [dominated] as part of the process of being made “human” living under Christendom’s claim of a right of domination.

Is it Possible to Defend a Freedom You’ve Been Deprived of?

Let us now examine more specifically how the invading Spanish Catholic colonizers forced the Native Peoples into a reality of domination called “human.” Because of the Spanish Catholic invasion, Native Nations and Peoples were working to “defend their freedom,” meaning their original free existence, from the Catholic Church’s and the Spanish crown’s claim of a right of domination. The framework for this was created by the Spanish monarchy’s assumed right of domination (“dominium” ) over the Native Nations and their lands.^[30] This was applied to any newly identified non-Christian place on the basis of the papal bulls of domination. After the Original Nations and Peoples had been deprived of their free existence, and forced to live a “human” existence under domination, how much of their original freedom was remaining for them to defend?

To begin creating a framework of domination in a newly located non-Christian area, a ceremony was conducted which symbolically claimed to “convert” the lands of the “barbarous nations” into “Spanish crown land.”^[31] Additionally, the Native peoples were made to undergo Christian baptism and receive the imposition of a Christian name. The Christian name was a metaphorical carrier (metonymy) of the Christian European system of domination called “a human existence,” and “Spanish civilization.”^[32]

Next, the “barbarous” Indians were forced to help build a brutal and deadly “chain” of mission structures that was used for containing and controlling them, and for securing control of the land for the Spanish crown. I use the word “deadly” based on historian David Stannard’s assessment in American Holocaust (1992)^[33] that “the missions were furnaces of death that sustained their Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge numbers who were being killed once they got there.”^[34] He continues:

This was a pattern that held throughout California and on out across the southwest. Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an astonishing 93 percent of the children born within its walls died before reaching the age of ten—and yet the mission’s total population did not drastically decline.

There were various ways in which the mission Indians died. The most common causes were the European introduced diseases—which spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters—and malnutrition. The personal living space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked at night into sex-segregated common rooms that contained a single open pit for a toilet.^[35]

And, as one example of the views of a Catholic Church official, what did Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles have to say about this historical record of suffering, disease, and death to force the Indians to transition into an existence under domination called “human.” Gomez claimed that Serra was “a pioneer of human rights and development in the Americas.”^[36] It would have been more accurate if he had said that Serra “was a pioneer of human [dominated] rights under domination” .

Referencing Gomez, in 2015 Catholic News Agency stated, “Not only did Bl. Junipero Serra offer an important model to follow for the eighteenth-century missionaries, but he also continues to pave the way for the new era of cultural encounter.”^[37] Archbishop Gomez, without a sense of irony, says the current generation “has much to learn from Padre Serra in the continental mission of the new evangelization.”^[38]

Being Whipped and Goaded into Worshipping the “God” of the “Humans”

For the Franciscan missionaries, the temporal (physical) and spiritual “conquest” [domination] of the Native peoples was a taken for granted objective. Eyewitness Thomas Jefferson Farnham explained that the Indians’ attendance at the mission church was mandatory.^[39] Once inside the church, the men and women were separated by a wide aisle. He described the threatening tactics used against the Native people in the mission church to make them comply with the dictates of a “human” existence under a joint church (priests)-state (soldiers) system of domination:

In this aisle are stationed men with whips and goads to enforce order and silence, and keep them [the Native people] in a kneeling posture. By this arrangement, the untamed and vicious [resistant ones] are generally made willing to comply with the forms of the service. In addition to these restraints, a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets occupies one end of the church, who may suppress by their more powerful weapons any strong demonstration against this comfortable mode of worshipping God.^[40]

Looking back on such examples of mission history, Archbishop Gomez claims “We cannot judge eighteenth century attitudes and behavior by 21st century standards.”^[41] “But the demands of Gospel love are the same in every age,” he continues.^[42] Gomez does not entertain the possibility that the horrific mission conditions of that time are correctly judged in our time consistent with the eighteenth-century views of the Native Peoples themselves who were being whipped, goaded, terrorized, and killed on a mass scale in the name of “Gospel love,” and “God’s plan of salvation,” and that form of domination euphemistically called “civilization.”

La Conquistadora (the Female Dominator)

Archbishop Gomez says of Serra, “His story reminds us of God’s plan of salvation, the Gospel was first preached in this country by Spanish missionaries from Mexico, under the sign of the Virgin Guadalupe, the bright star of America’s first evangelization.”^[43] “And let us ask Our Lady Guadalupe,” he adds, “to help us to continue her work of America’s first missionaries—in offering Jesus Christ to every man and woman and promoting justice and human dignity.” He does not admit that, in keeping with the goal of the “spiritual conquest” of the “Indians”, a Spanish name for the Virgin Mary was “La Conquistadora” (a female Conqueror, and thus Dominator).^[44]

Civilization as Domination

Various tactics were used as a means of forcing Original Nations and Peoples to transition from their traditional free way of life to a “civilized” and “human” way of life, subject to the Spaniards’ claim of a right of Christian domination. This matches a definition of the word “civilization” found in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1996), “the forcing of a cultural pattern on a population to which it is foreign.” (emphasis added) It also coincides with a statement made by Manuel Serrano y Sanz in his book Origenes de Dominacion Espanola en America, (“Origins of Spanish Domination in America” ) published in 1918.

“Force is not truth,” said Serrano y Sanz, “nor justice, but [force]is indispensable for the propagation of civilization . . .” His statement is aligned with the language of the papal bull of May 4, 1493, where Pope Alexander VI calls for the “propagation of the Christian empire,” “imperii Christiani propagationem.” In other words, the bloody, destructive, and deadly violence that was inflicted on “infidel” nations and peoples in “the Americas,” was indispensable for spreading violent Christian evangelism, and for planting (“propagating” ) that form of domination called “human,” “Christian,” and “civilization.”

Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970), points out that the explorations of “Western man” were focused on whatever “aspect of nature” “could be brought under human domination.” (p. 3) Two inventions that helped facilitate this process were the magnetic compass, to figure out where they were going, and gunpowder to assist them in using lethal force once they got there. Then, using synonyms for domination Mumford writes about “the equipment that made these conquests and exploitations and enslavements possible—the armor, the crossbows, muskets and cannon—these new technical facilities” which “gave the Europeans who commanded them, though vastly outnumbered, the power to overcome the aborigines: their [the Christian Europeans’] grim audacity and their utter ruthlessness were not only supported but magnified by their superior weapons.” “What is more,” he continues, “the easy successes this achieved re-enforced the new power complex [of human domination] that was coming into existence.” (p. 7)

“The State” of Domination

Once the Christian European dominators had deprived our ancestors of their free existence, the only possible “freedom” for our Original Nations and Peoples to experience was whatever degree of latitude they could achieve under and subject to the resulting “human” system of domination being forcibly imposed by the Spanish Catholic imperialist, or by the United States in its political context. If the Native Peoples had been told back then they were in need of “human rights” it would have been because of the torment, misery, and death they were experiencing as a result of being forced to live a “human” existence under the domination of the Catholic Church and “the State.” German sociologist Max Weber pointed out a century ago that “the State” is accurately defined as “a relation of men dominating men,…. If the state is to exist, the dominated [e.g., the Original Nations and Peoples] must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be.”^[45]

A “Human” Existence Lived Under Domination Creates the Need for “Human Rights”

If the positive connotation of the terms “human” and “civil society” is warranted, how is it that for centuries Indigenous (dominated) peoples have been deprived of their freedom, and subjected to slavery, torture, and forced labor as a means of driving them into a “human” and “civil” order?

And once the freedom of the Native peoples had been successfully destroyed as a result of them being subjected to the brutal dominion of a “civil” and “mission” existence, they were well on their way to becoming “human” under and subject to Christian European domination.

At that point how much of their pre-invasion pre-domination freedom was remaining for them to have defended by means of the idea “human rights,” if such a framework had been existing back then? Being compelled to live a “human” life under Christian European domination is what caused them to need “human rights” in the first place.

The Context of the United Nations

Founded in 1945, the United Nations (UN) defines “human rights” as “rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.”^[46] Human rights are said to include “the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more.”^[47] How interesting that the destructive acts perpetrated against the Native peoples to rob them of their freedom and make them “human”, are the actions said to be disallowed according to the international framework of “human rights.”

According to the UN, “International human rights law lays down the obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups.”^[48] We are also told that the “comprehensive body of human rights law” is “a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people [can] aspire.”^[49]

Given that “aspire” means “to desire a lofty object”, this implies that all people can desire to one day obtain the goal and protected code of human rights. But the UN also tells us that human rights are “inherent”, which means “innate” . It stands to reason that if these rights are innate within us, then there is no need for us to desire them because we already have them. This must mean that such “rights” are merely ideational (i.e., existing on the level of ideas) and that the mere aspirational idea of such rights provides us with no actual ability to end the patterns of domination that are causing our suffering and discontent.

The “Human Rights” Framework Provides Us with No Means of Liberating Our Nations and Peoples from the Claim of a Right of Domination

The language of the Vatican papal bulls, and the above depiction of the Spanish Catholic mission system in California, is but one way to powerfully illustrate how, over the course of centuries, a “human” and “civil” system of domination has been extended all over our planet, by the Catholic Church and the various “States of Christendom.” Today, people throughout the world are seeking relief from the pain, misery, and suffering they are experiencing as a result of being forced to live subject to a “human” system of domination called a “civil society” and “the State.” And the international framework of human rights, unfortunately, does not provide any means of being liberated from this predicament.

Innumerable abuses result from living a way of life under the claim of a right of domination. Yet, if we point this out, we are told dismissively, “well, that’s just human nature.” Those very abuses are what eventually resulted in the development of a framework of “human rights” that operates in a limited manner under “the rule” [domination] of “the State.” When the United Nations was founded in 1945, even though its membership was comprised of “States,” it could not be named “the United States” because the “United States of America” already had that name. This evidently caused the founders of the UN system to revert to the word “nations” when naming that international system.

In any case, the United Nations is an organization made up of States of domination. And the rules of that system have put everyone on notice that no one is permitted to challenge “the State’s” ultimate control within its claimed geopolitical boundaries. This is emphasized in the human rights document called The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). In the text below from Article 46 of the Declaration, we use the domination translator to emphasize concepts of domination found therein:

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State [of domination], people, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act contrary to the Charter of the United Nations [i.e., United States] or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity [domination] or political unity of sovereign [dominating] and independent States [of domination].^[50]

No one, in other words, is allowed to call into question the domination system termed “civil society,” “democracy,” and “the State.” Accordingly, the international framework of human rights regards every State of domination as a permanent and unquestionable given. We as Indigenous people and peoples are able to use international human rights to aspire to someday alleviate the suffering we experience as a result of the domination system, but from the perspective of the UN, no one is allowed to challenge the premise of the UN system, which is “the State’s” claim of a right of domination over everyone and everything within boundaries claimed geopolitically by a given State of domination.

Challenging the Claim of a Right of Domination

An existing global system of domination, which has been used to strip Indigenous Nations and Peoples of their original free existence, is the context for the Parliament’s phrase “defending freedom and human rights.” One potential course of action is for us to put forward the argument that there is no such thing as a right of domination. Making that argument, however, does not change the fact that the present day and ongoing system of ideas and arguments called U.S. federal-indian-law (a.k.a anti-Indian law) and policy has been constructed, and continues to operate, on the basis of the U.S. claim of a right of domination over our original Native Nations and Peoples. The Felix Cohen Handbook of federal-indian-law, for example, pointedly states: “Conquest [domination] renders the tribes subject to the legislative power [domination] of the United States.”^[51]

The question remains: How do we get free from the U.S. claim of a right of domination by getting U.S. government officials to stop claiming a right of domination over our original Native Nations and Peoples? And, given that the international “human rights” framework does not seem to include the leverage necessary to compel U.S. government officials to stop claiming a right of domination over our Original Nations and Peoples, how can that international framework be a means of liberating ourselves from that U.S. government’s invalid claim? Moreover, how can there be peace, harmony, and respect for one another and Mother Earth if the global domination system continues unabated?

Given that the “State” systems of the planet have been organized around the presumption that every “State” has a right of domination over “its” “citizens,” how are the people who are defined as “citizens” going to be able to respond when the algorithms of the internet, including the “transhuman” Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, have been encoded with an assumed right of domination over them? Will every means of escape have been permanently preempted?

Here are some additional questions: Will robots and AI systems end up with an unquestioned right to exert a right of domination over the “humans” who have built those systems? Will every human being on the planet one day be compelled, based on an AI theology, to live under and subject to an AI system of domination? Will an Era of robots and Artificial Intelligence render obsolete any discussion of a fundamental “human right” to live free from an AI system of domination?

Will the Chief Justice of an AI Tribunal, which is modeled after Chief Justice John Marshall and the U.S. Supreme Court, someday say of the humans: “Their rights to live free from an AI System have been necessarily diminished by the original fundamental principle that the discovery of AI gave a title of ultimate dominion to the Central AI System.” Are we hurtling toward an AI form of totalitarianism from which there will be no means of escape? Is the so-called “great reset” simply a “reset” and intensification of the global system of domination?

Conclusion

There is something that everyone who believes in a free existence should have been calling into question long before now, but without a View-from-the-Shore perspective, it was difficult to understand why we should be doing so. I’m talking about calling into question the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian category “human.” If you hear someone say, “You can’t treat me like that, I’m a human being,” the person making that comment assumes that being defined as “human” is a solution to the abuse they are suffering. But what if the category “human” contains an unnoticed hidden meaning, specifically, “living under domination.” And what if that hidden meaning reveals the actual cause of the vast majority of the abuse that people suffer everywhere on Mother Earth?

Our View-from-the-Shore perspective as Original Nations and Peoples provides us with an awareness of our pre-invasion free existence. This awareness enables us to see that being defined as “human” in a Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian” sense, means being born into an unfree existence, which means being made to live under and subject to a taken-for-granted system of domination. This predicament eventually results in the need and demand for “human” rights for those who are suffering from being compelled to live under the claim of a right of domination. If a people can be deceived into passionately demanding human rights under domination, without noticing they are doing so, they will end up mentally captured in a most insidious manner.

The result is an existential dilemma called the double bind. A double bind means, “you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Someone might say, “I am being dominated and treated horribly because I am not being regarded as human,” or, that person might say, “I am being dominated and treated horribly because I am being regarded as human living under and subject to the domination of a civil [domination] society.” You’re damned if you are defined as “human” and damned if you aren’t. The bind is there no matter where you turn.

Our View-from-the-Shore perspective has enabled us to gain these insights from our heightened awareness of our pre-invasion and pre-domination free existence as the Original Nations and Peoples of this continent. We need to keep gaining insights and sharing them with others, while continuously challenging the claim of a right of domination. We need to maintain our spiritual strength and our identity as rightfully free Original Nations and Peoples because the dominationists (aka, “globalists” ) are working 24/7/365, with their technological prowess, to forever end even the very possibility of conceiving of a way of life lived free from their imposed “Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian” system and, soon to be Artificial Intelligence, system of domination. Continuous new knowledge and ever-insightful consciousness is a central part of the liberating solutions we need to build together.

We have a sacred responsibility to place the long-term well-being of our children and future generations here on Mother Earth ahead of any technological dystopia. Now is the time for the people of good hearts and minds to come together and live out our spiritual values by accurately naming the domination system so we can end it. We need to publicize the claim of a right of domination, by pointing it out wherever it exists. We need to declare the claim of a right of domination to be invalid.

Protocol of Domination Vocabulary

We need thoughts, behaviors, and language of Reverence that will enable us to create the social and economic patterns by means of which we can thrive together in perpetuity as free beings, meaning free from domination. In the meantime, we need to learn how to listen skillfully, and develop the receptivity, patience, and discipline to establish and maintain strong relationships by communicating effectively so we can work together toward these positive outcomes.

Notes

This claim of a right of domination has been used against Indigenous nations and peoples, and, indeed, against peoples and ecosystems everywhere. Given our long-standing challenge to the patterns of domination that are found in the Vatican papal bulls and other documents, this 2023 Parliament provides an excellent opportunity to embrace and publicize a View-from-the-Shore insight about the Parliament’s theme. Here’s the insight: The present-day concepts of “freedom” and “human rights” have emerged from a historically Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian context. In that context, words such as “human,” “civil,” “dominion,” and even “freedom,” mean “living under the claim of a right of domination.” This is an accurate context for the idea of “human rights.”

Indigenous Law Institute. See also, https://originalfreenations.com ↩︎
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, The Origins of Spanish Domination in America, 1918. ↩︎
Ancient labels and categories that have been institutionalized in the symbols, architecture, and linguistic structures of empires and states remain active and ongoing in their present-day systems of meaning. ↩︎
From the Preface to Political Exclusion and Domination, in Nomos XLVI, ed., by Melissa S. Williams and Stephen Macedo, Yearbook for the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, New York: New York University Press, 2005. ↩︎
Nuclear fallout from Manhattan Project’s Trinity test reached 46 states, new study finds, Adam Schrader, United Press International, 20 July 2023 ↩︎
For a deep reflection on all this see, Trinity’s Shadow, Edward Curtin, Behind the Curtain, 29 July 2023 ↩︎
Your Ticket to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Atlas Obscura, 13 July 2015 ↩︎
Fair Representation? American Indians and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, David R.M. Beck, World History Connected, Vol. 13, Issue 3. October 2016 ↩︎
Johnson v. McIntosh 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), 573 “The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence [for the Christian Europeans].” ↩︎
Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Peoples, and the Canadian State (2018). ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
List of Medal of Honor recipients for the Wounded Knee Massacre, Military Wiki ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Letter to Pope John Paul II; See “Revoke the Inter Cetera Bull,” Valerie Taliman, Turtle Quarterly, Fall-Winter 1994, p. 7-8. ↩︎
21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823) at 574, “[T]hey asserted the ultimate dominion [domination] to be in themselves, and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil while yet in possession of the natives.” ↩︎
See Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery (2008), and the documentary movie “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” 2015. Evidence of the Global System of Domination is found in the text of the May 3rd papal bull titled Inter Caetera. It refers, for example, to “insulas” (islands) and “terras firmas” (firm lands), “remotis et incognitas” (remote and unknown), “que non essent sub actuali dominio temporali aliquorum dominorum Christianorum constitute.“ The Latin is referring to remote and unknown islands and firm lands [continents], “that have not been “established under the domination [“dominio” ] of any Christian dominators [“dominorum Christianorum].” ↩︎
Joint Statement on the “Doctrine of Discovery” 30 March 2023 ↩︎
Pope Francis in Canada, Walking Together, 24-29 July 2022 ↩︎
Canada: 751 unmarked graves found at residential school, BBC News, 24 June 2021 ↩︎
Pope’s Penitential Pilgrimage to Canada to reconcile and heal, Deborah Castellano Lubov, Vatican News, 20 July 2022 ↩︎
Why Pope Francis may be hesitant to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery, Mark Gollum, CBC News, 30 July 2022 ↩︎
Pope says genocide took place at Canada’s residential schools, Ka’nhehsí:io Deer, CBC News, 30 Jul 2023 ↩︎
The language from Dum diversas of 1452 is folded into the papal bull, Romanus Pontifex of 1455. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Johnson v. McIntosh at 574. ↩︎
Gary Caldwell, “St. Francis Turned on his Head: A Summary Assessment of Mission Impact on the Indian Population of Alta California, 1769-1834,” For the Indian Task Force, Advisory Council on California Indian Policy, Revised and Expanded, August 1995. (On file with Original Nations Advocates.) ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 1-2. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 4. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 4-5 ↩︎
See generally E. N. Van Kleffens, Hispanic Law until the end of the Middle Ages, Edinburgh, 1968. “Note on the continued validity after the fifteenth century of medieval Hispanic legislation…ii. the Fuero Juzgo and Las Siete Partidas in the Americas, Asia, and Africa,” pp. 261-277. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
See the explanation of metaphorical systems in Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land, 2008. ↩︎
David Stannaard, American Holocaust, 1992. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 137. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 137-138. ↩︎
America’s Next Saint, St. Junípero Serra, Archbishop Gomez ↩︎
Why Junipero Serra’s canonization is important for the new evangelization, CNA, 22 January 2015. ↩︎
America’s Next Saint_, op. cit._ ↩︎
Caldwell, p. 16, footnote 2. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
America’s Next Saint_, op. cit._ ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
The cover of Manuel Vanegas’s biography of Juan Maria Salvatierra uses the “La Conquistadora” to reference the Virgin Mary. ↩︎
politics as Vocation, Max Weber, originally from a 1918 speech at Munich University. ↩︎
Human Rights, United Nations – Peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Article 46, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, adopted 13 September 2007 ↩︎
Note 4, Tribal Sovereignty and the Supreme Court’s 1977-1978 Term, 1978 BYU L. Rev. 911 (1978). ↩︎

Conflicting Perspectives Regarding the Holy Mountain Called “San Francisco Peaks,” and Other Sacred and Significant Places of Original Nations and Traditional Healers

2023-08-11T00:00:00Z

Conflicting Perspectives Regarding the Holy Mountain Called “San Francisco Peaks,” and Other Sacred and Significant Places of Original Nations and Traditional Healers

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape)

Our original nation ancestors understood mountains and other geographical areas as living beings imbued with spiritual energy. Our spiritual people knew and still know how to spiritually attune and align themselves with that energy in a ceremonial manner, by means of our languages and ceremonial ways. This has always been the central purpose of our Spiritual Way of Life.

Prefatory Note: The Free Existence of Original Nations

Mentally picture the free and independent existence of all the Original Nations and Peoples on this continent, extending back to the beginning of time through their oral histories and oral traditions, before the Christian Europeans had invasively arrived. Throughout that timespan, our ancestors lived free from the words and mental world of Western Europe. Our ancestors lived entirely free from the clever Euro-American metaphors, ideas, and arguments now used on a daily basis by the United States government against our nations and peoples.

Our traditional healers and medicine people knew and still know why it is necessary to conduct ceremonies, especially in Sacred and Significant Places of concentrated spiritual energy. Even today our traditional spiritual people continue to carry on their ways, to fulfill the sacred responsibilities that our peoples have to care for our rightful place on Mother Earth.

However, invading and colonizing peoples from Western Europe eventually arrived to this continent more than five centuries ago. They showed no respect for the Life-Ways and free existence of the original nations and peoples because they had carried with them across the ocean, a mental world of domination. Based on the Bible, the invading nations of Christendom mentally claimed that their “God” had “given” them the lands where our Ancestors were living,^[1] and where our spiritual people carry out their authority and sacred responsibilities.

The invading peoples assumed that their “God” had given them the right to use their ideas and arguments as a means of depriving our nations and peoples of our original free existence. They assumed that their “God” had chosen them as a people with whom “He” would make a divine “covenant” or treaty.^[2] And on that basis they further assumed their “God” had “given them” the right to name and claim as their own,^[3] the lands and Sacred Places with which our original nations and peoples already had and still have a well-established spiritual relationship that has lasted millennia, to use Western time-frame language.

The difference between our original-free-existence perspective, and the claim-of-a-right-of-domination perspective of the dominating society, invariably produces conflict. That difference gives rise to competition between those who carry these two distinctive perspectives over questions of power and decision-making. Given the existence of these two opposing perspectives, both of which are competing to make final decisions regarding the use of a particular geographical area, the question becomes: which perspective will end up in the final decision-making position? Now apply this question to a dispute between the United States government and traditional ceremonial Native people regarding a Sacred and Significant Place of original nations — so-called San Francisco Peaks, a place for which our original nations have our own name in our own respective languages.

On Redundancy and the Domination Translator

A cardinal rule of writing is don’t repeat yourself. Clearly state what you have to say and move on. Once you’ve stated something, there’s no need to say it again. This essay intentionally violates this rule. To write about a system of domination it becomes necessary to use the word domination in what appears to be an obsessively repetitious manner. Additionally, we use what we call “The Domination Translator.” It’s a simple technique: place the word domination inside brackets after a synonym for domination. An example is: “property [domination].”

Some Clarification on Terminology

This essay is being written for the orientation of an English-speaking audience that lives in the mental world and thus the reality system of the dominating society of the United States. For this reason, we need to make some preliminary comments concerning the terminology used herein.

In the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh of 1823,^[4] Chief Justice Marshall (1755-1835) says of the “Indians” : “[T]heir rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished … by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave title to those who made it [the discovery].” ^[5] (emphasis added) This reasoning implies that the invading Christian Europeans are the ones who are “original” and “fundamental” to this continent. To correct this wrongful impression, we refer to the nations and peoples of this continent and this hemisphere as “original” nations and peoples, meaning the ones already living here on this continent before the invasion by Christendom.

The terms “Christian” and “Christian European” and “Christendom” are used in this essay because they match the historical record of Vatican papal documents, royal charters of Great Britain (England), and the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh. Those documents illustrate the claim, made in the name of Christianity, of a right of domination over non-Christian peoples and their lands, a claim which is now a feature of the body of anti-Indian ideas and arguments now called “federal-indian-law.” ^[6]

Most scholars of the subject do not write about the anti-Indian ideas of federal-indian-law as a system of “domination.” They also tend to change the word “Christian,” which appears in the earliest documents, to the word “European” which is not found in those documents. In our view, this change in particular prevents an accurate understanding of the historical record. Take, for example, a rather common way of explaining the “doctrine of discovery” :

The doctrine of discovery came into existence with the rapid expansion of European empires in the fifteenth century. Its basic tenet “that the European nation which first ‘discovered’ and settled lands previously unknown to Europeans thereby gained the exclusive right to acquire those lands from their occupants became part of the early body of international law dealing with aboriginal peoples.” ^[7] [emphasis added]

This is a secular non-religious explanation of what the ancient documents reveal to be a biblically premised and theological (religious) basis for the Claim of a Right of Christian Domination. Key terminology found in the documents of that period reveal why the terms “European” and “non-European” are not accurate. They do not appear in those documents. Pope Alexander VI, for example, issued several papal documents to the monarchs of Spain shortly after Columbus’s first voyage to the Bahamas and never uses the terms Europe and Europeans.

The first papal bull in the series is dated May 3, 1493.^[8] The pope’s scribes used the phrases “Christian lords” (“dominorum Christianorum” ), “Christian king or prince” (“Christiano principi” ), and “Christian people” or “Christendom” (“populi Christiani” ). Not surprisingly, popes of the Catholic Church distinguished between the Christian world and peoples that Christians called “heathen,” “pagan,” “infidel,” “savage,” and “barbarous.”

Three hundred and thirty-three years later, in 1823, the members of the United States Supreme Court, such as John Marshall and Joseph Story (1779-1845), looked back to those ancient documents of Christendom when deciding how to write a landmark decision in the case Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh.

It appears that most people of our current generation have failed to realize that Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the Johnson ruling, on behalf of a unanimous Court, by following Christendom’s ancient tradition of distinguishing between Christians and non-Christians. This is demonstrated by Marshall’s repeated use of the phrase “Christian people,” which he distinguished from “natives, who were heathens” . And it is demonstrated by Marshall’s documentation of the Christian claim of a right of domination over non-Christians, which is now a permanent feature of U.S. federal-indian-law, otherwise known as federal anti-Indian law.

The Biblical Framework and Context of Federal Anti-Indian Law

Marshall included the phrase “Christian people” in the Johnson ruling in specific imitation of that phrase being expressed in a number of royal charters of England, such as the John Cabot Charter of 1496, which King Henry VII issued in imitation of the Alexandrian papal bulls of 1493. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that “heathen” is a word "of Christian origin," ^[9] which means “heathen” is a linguistic carrier of the context of the Bible, the source of Christianity. It is a part that stands for the whole.

This leads to an important insight about the linguistic and intellectual tradition of the United States with regard to the Sacred and Significant Places of original nations and peoples, including San Francisco Peaks. The Christian (biblical) context of the body of ideas and arguments called “federal-indian-law” begins with a distinction between what the Supreme Court called the “ultimate dominion” (a right of domination) of “Christian people” and the mere “occupancy” of “heathens,” with no presumed property right of domination.

Because “heathen” is a word of Christian origin, and because the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling is still an active Supreme Court precedent, this means that the United States government is still using this distinction between Christian domination and “heathen occupancy” as the basis of its decision-making regarding the Sacred and Significant Places of our original nations and peoples. In other words, whether they know it or not, U.S. government officials are using a conceptual framework that is premised on language from the Bible. Whenever we see a Sacred and Significant Place being referred to as “federal property,” contrasted with an “aboriginal interest” of “occupancy,” which has been declared as “not a property right,” the distinction between Christian domination and non-Christians occupancy is actively being used.

U.S. government officials apply to the Sacred and Significant places of original nations, this categorical difference between a right of domination (“property” ) for Christian people," along with their descendants and successors, and a non-domination right of “occupancy” for non-Christian original nations. As we shall demonstrate below, the U.S. claim of a right of domination is the biblical and historical context for American Indian religious freedom cases having to do with the Sacred and Significant Places of the original nations and peoples of this continent.

Religious Freedom arguments made on behalf of Native spiritual practitioners have proven ineffective as a means of stopping the desecration and destruction of their Sacred Places. The reason should be clear: “Free Exercise of Religion” arguments are not able to effectively counter the presumption that the U.S. government has the sole and exclusive right of domination over places that are being deemed “federal property.”

As a result of our investigation of ancient documents from Western Christendom and the overall historical record, we know that the invading colonizers sailed their ships to this continent with a specific intention. It was their intention to identify the geographical location of lands which until then had remained unknown to the Christian world. The word “discovery” is a shorthand way of referring to this new form of geographical knowledge.

The Intention to Establish Domination Where It Did Not Already Exist

It was Christendom’s intention to identify non-Christian lands across the ocean so that a right of Christian domination (“dominio” and “dominium” ) could be claimed in relation to those newly located lands, and in relation to the original nations and peoples living there. A key example is wording found in the Prerogatives that the monarchs of Spain issued to Columbus: Columbus (Cristobal Colón, “Christ-bearing Colonizer” ) was authorized to “discover and conquer” and “discover and subdue” whatever lands he was able to locate across the ocean that had not been previously identified and dominated. The words “conquer” and “subdue” are two synonyms for domination.

Centuries later, as a result of its international treaties with different countries from Europe—such as, for example, England, France, and Spain—the U.S. government became the political successor to the Christian world’s claim of a right of domination that had been initially made by those monarchies of the Christian European world. By means of the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling, the United States have consistently claimed and continue to claim a right of Christian domination over the lands and territories of our original nations, including over our Sacred and Significant Places, such as “San Francisco Peaks,” on the basis of a biblical distinction between “Christian people” and “heathens.”

Mental Competition between the Traditional Ceremonial People of Original Nations and U.S. Government Officials who Use the United States’ Claim of a Right of Domination

Let us return now to the context for this discussion. Our Native ancestors stood on the belief of the Sacredness of All Life. Our ancestors had no knowledge of the language spoken by the invading colonizers, and, conversely, the invading colonizers had no knowledge and no idea of our worldview that all Creation is Sacred. It was not possible for them to comprehend what the foreigners were saying. Nor did our ancestors have the ability to read the documents of the foreigners, such as Vatican papal decrees or royal charters.

Even the everyday European person back in those days probably had no ability to get their hands on such documents, let alone accurately read and interpret their text. Those documents were highly specialized and handled at the very highest level of the Church and the State. They were drafted by an extremely small number of Christian European men, or scribes, who had been taught the unique set of skills needed for writing such documents, which were modeled after documents of the Roman Empire.^[10] Remarkably, we as the Native people of this generation now have the ability to read and learn what those ancient documents are able to teach us about persistent and chronic patterns of domination in today’s world.

Now, centuries after the invading colonizers first arrived here to this continent, there are those of us as Native people who have learned how to read a number of ancient documents that were created by Christian Europeans to the East across the Atlantic Ocean. We have learned to interpret those documents and other specialized writings that are part of the organic law tradition of the United States, with its linguistic and behavioral tradition of domination, an organic law tradition that is woven into the writings of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

Some of us have dedicated decades to acquiring the necessary skills to do such interpretive work.^[11] And this work has involved a certain amount of risk. For there was always the possibility that this intellectual activity would result in our minds becoming so absorbed, so to speak, into the dominating society’s consciousness that we would be left with only the ability to accept rather than reject the Christian European claim of a right of domination over our nations and peoples, and over our Sacred and Significant Places. Fortunately, this has not happened.

The Benefit of Traditional Ceremonies

Some of us who have been fortunate enough to participate in the liberating experience of ceremonial life, especially in our Sacred and Significant Places, have thereby gained a heightened appreciation of the original and spiritually grounded free existence of our nations and peoples. We have how now learned to think, speak, and write with a view-from-the-shore perspective, envisioning the invading ships sailing toward our ancestors on shore.

That view-from-the-shore perspective enables us to unequivocally oppose the claim of a right of domination over our nations and peoples, over our women and children, over our traditional territories, including our Sacred Places, and over Life itself. By contrast, U.S. government officials operate on the basis of a well-accepted but unstated assumption that the U.S. federal government has the right, consistent with the ancient language patterns and mentality of Christendom, to claim, on behalf of the United States, a right of domination over our original nations and peoples.

Identifying the Linguistic Patterns of Domination

A view-from-the-ship-of-state perspective results in the use of euphemistic vocabulary that draws attention away from the system of domination. We as Native people need to learn to identify the linguistic carriers of the domination system. An excellent example of that system is the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling State v. Foreman.^[12] In his ruling, Judge John Catron provides an excellent example of the kind of language that has been used by the United States officials in relation to our original nations and peoples and our Sacred and Significant Places:

We maintain, that the principle declared in the fifteenth century as the law of Christendom, that discovery gave title to assume sovereignty over and to govern the unconverted natives of Africa, Asia and North and South America, has been recognized as a part of the national law [the law of nations], for nearly four centuries, and that it is now so recognized by every Christian power, in its political department and its judicial . . . That, from Cape Horn to Hudson Bay, it [this principle] is acted upon as the only known rule of sovereign power, by which the native Indian is coerced [dominated]. . . Our claim [to a right of domination] is based on the right to coerce obedience. The claim may be denounced by the moralist. We answer, it is the law of the land. Without its assertion and vigorous execution, this continent never could have been inhabited by our ancestors. To abandon the principle now, is to assert that they were unjust usurpers; and that we, succeeding to their usurped authority and void claims to possess and govern the country, should in honesty abandon it, return to Europe, and let the subdued [dominated] parts again become a wilderness and hunting ground.^[13]

It is notable that Judge Catron was eventually appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Andrew Jackson. In other words, he reached the highest strata of the legal profession in the United States. In the above quote, he claims that “discovery” (new geographical knowledge) “gave” the discoverers a “title” to assume sovereignty [i.e., a “right of domination” ] over and to govern [dominate] the non-Christian [“unconverted” ] natives of Africa, Asia and North and South America" by coercing them into obedience to a system of domination.

This tells us that when the representatives of a Christian monarch reached a region where non-Christians were already living, and where Christian domination had never been previously established, the monarchs of Christendom had already agreed amongst themselves that the “discovering” monarch would have the right to claim a right of Christian domination (“title” and “sovereignty” ) over any area that had been identified for the very first time by a monarch of Christendom.

In keeping with the previously mentioned papal and royal documents, “discovery” meant sailing by ship across the ocean with the intention of identifying any geographical location where non-Christians were living, and to create a Christian system of domination where such a system had never been previously established. And this intention was fulfilled by coercing the original nations into obedience to the reign of the dominators. This reveals the linguistic and behavioral basis for the claim of a right of domination that the U.S. government is now claiming in relation to San Francisco Peaks and other Sacred and Significant Places of Original Nations, such as Oak Flat and the Black Hills, as well as over our sacred holdings such as Eagle Feathers.

Traditional Native People

Traditional Native people, especially Elders who are fluent in their own non-English language, despite the effort to kill our languages, have tended to avoid the specialized knowledge of the dominating society. They have focused instead on learning from their Elders the highly specialized knowledge, sacred language, and ceremonial ways, which the U.S. government has worked so diligently to destroy. There is a need for a collaboration between those traditional Native people who still wholeheartedly maintain and uphold the ceremonial practices of their people, and those Native scholars who have studied the documents, ideas, and arguments of the dominating society.

Strengthened by the knowledge we have accumulated, we as scholars need to advocate on behalf of our traditional ceremonial people, and on behalf of our fundamental birthright to live free from and to reject the claim of a right of domination from any source whatsoever, in honor of our original pre-invasion existence.

Let us now examine more specifically some of the ideas and arguments that have been used against our original nations and peoples with regard to our traditional territories and our Sacred and Significant places. In the next section we discuss the writings of Henry Wheaton (1785-1848) and Burke Aaron Hinsdale (1837-1900). Wheaton was a reporter for the U.S. Supreme Court, and Hinsdale was an eminent nineteenth century educator author who studied what he called “The Right of Discovery” that has been applied by the U.S. government to our Sacred and Significant places, such as the San Francisco Peaks.

Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law and the Doctrine of Infidel Nonexistence

Henry Wheaton was a U.S. lawyer, jurist, and diplomat. He was the third reporter of decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. He held that position when the Court issued the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh ruling. In 1836, thirteen years after the Johnson decision, Wheaton published his Elements of International Law^[14] in which he explained that, “The law of nations, or international law, as understood among civilized, Christian nations, may be defined as consisting of those rules of conduct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of the society existing among independent nations; with such definitions and modifications as may be established by general consent [of the civilized, Christian nations].” ^[15]

Given the importance of Wheaton’s Elements, and his explanation of what we call the right of Christian discovery and domination pursuant to the “law of nations,” we are including below several lengthy quotes from Chapter IV of Elements, titled “Rights of Property,” ^[16] while reminding the reader here in passing that “property” has been defined as, a right of “physical domination over some part of the natural world,” such as San Francisco Peaks:

The title [of domination] of almost all nations of Europe to the territory now possessed by them in that quarter of the world [the Western Hemisphere] was originally derived from conquest [domination] which has been subsequently confirmed by international compacts to which all the European states have successively become parties. Their claim to the possessions held by them in the New World discovered by Columbus and other adventurers, and to the territories which they have acquired on the continents of Africa and Asia, was originally derived from discovery [new knowledge] or conquest and colonization [domination], and has since been confirmed in the same manner by positive compact. Independent of these sources of title, the general consent of mankind has established the principle that long uninterrupted possession [of territory] by one nation excludes the claim of every other.^[17]

If the Christian nations of Europe had been required to apply to our nations this principle of long “uninterrupted possession of territory,” specifically, that our nations’ long uninterrupted possession of our territories excludes the claim of every invading nation, then our nations would have been able to invoke that principle to exclude the invasive claims made by the monarchs of Christendom to this continent. The Christian monarchs, however, had agreed among themselves that only Christian nations could invoke the principle of long uninterrupted possession of territory by colonizing powers. The Christian world refused to apply that principle to peoples they deemed to be “barbarous” “heathens,” and “infidels.”

B. A. Hinsdale

Burke Aaron Hinsdale, in his 1888 essay “Right of Discovery,” ^[18] writes," “To the mind of Christian Europe in the fifteenth century the distinction between Christian and Infidel was ineffaceable [irremovable].” In other words, within the mental world of Christendom, the hatred Christians had toward non-Christians was considered permanent. Hinsdale continues: “Mr. Wheaton states the case thus: ‘According to the European ideas of that age, the heathen nations of the other quarters of the globe were the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors.’” ^[19] This language exemplifies the claim of a right of domination.

Hinsdale puts an even finer point on the matter with a quote from H. H. Bancroft, to the effect that, what “seems never to have been questioned” during that era, “by either discoverer, adventurer, or ruler,” was the assumption that the Native peoples were “fit subjects for coercion, treachery, robbery, enslavement, and slaughter.” ^[20] Bancroft continues as follows: “However invalid might have been the argument of a housebreaker, that in the room he entered he discovered a purse of gold, and took it, Spaniards never thought of applying such logic to themselves in regard to the possessions of the natives in the new lands the Genoese [Columbus] had found.” ^[21]

Hinsdale explains the trick of the mind that European scholars performed during the so-called Age of Discovery. The seafaring powers of Christian Europe, says Hinsdale, “had not seized the possessions of their enemies by force, but had occupied what belonged to nobody.” ^[22] (emphasis added) “Nobody” is a category that serves to negate the original peoples by deeming (judging) them as not existing. It relegates non-Christians to a dimension, so to speak, of non-existence. Peoples deemed (judged) to not exist conceptually (even though they existed physically) could not compete with or block the Christian Europeans.

This suggests that the intellectuals of Western Europe created the pretension that our Native ancestors were nonexistent and thus not to be included in the allocation of rights of domination (“property” ), meaning “a right of domination rightfully obtained over some object,” such as the lands of the continent. Hinsdale notes that “the Roman law furnished a full legal justification for the appropriation of the New World by the Christian nations.” ^[23] “They had but to hold the savages their enemies and to treat them accordingly…. They chose another path,” a path that was “more in accordance with the theological temper of the times.” ^[24]

Proof of the Christian (Biblical) Basis for ‘the Right’ to Sail to and Identify Non-Christian Lands

“Perhaps the strongest proof of the correctness of the view advanced,” said Hindsdale, “is furnished by the commissions, charters, and patents granted to explorers by the Kings of England.” ^[25] He continues:

Henry VII, in 1496, commissioned John Cabot and his sons “to seek out and discover all Islands, regions, and provinces whatsoever that may belong to heathens and infidels” and “to subdue [dominate], occupy, and possess these territories as his vassals and lieutenants.” The charter granted to Sir Walter Raleigh by Queen Elizabeth, in 1584, gave him full liberty and license “to discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, as to him shall seem good,” etc. Afterwards the words “heathen” and “barbarian” were omitted from this class of documents, but the phrase “not possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by any Christian people” is found in charters of the next century, as in those of Virginia, 1606, and New England, 1620. The disappearance of the heathen qualification from the English charters after 1620 was due in part to the fact that the boundaries of claims had become more definite, but also in part because of the growing secularization of politics.

Such was the origin of the Right of Discovery, the criterion to which the nations that had divided the New World appealed in territorial controversies, and the ultimate ground of title [a right of domination] throughout the United States.^[26]

Here, Hinsdale has identified the view that as soon as a Christian power had identified a non-Christian area, over which no Christian monarch had previously claimed a right of domination, as if by magic, the Christian monarch was considered to have come into possession, so to speak, of a right of domination over that non-Christian area. Hinsdale also reveals another key point: As the generations pass, negative Christian religious terminology (e.g., “heathen,” “pagan” and “infidel” ) began to fall out of favor and the word “Christian” often ended up being replaced with the word “European.” When this happens, the specifically Christian, and, thus, biblical basis for the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination in relation to San Francisco Peaks and other Sacred and Significant Places becomes veiled and thus more difficult to identify.

Consistent with what we may aptly term The Doctrine of Infidel Nonexistence, some Christian European intellectuals decided that they would pretend that non-Christian peoples did not even exist when it came to “property” and “property rights.” This explains the basis upon which the U.S. government defines the terms “Indian title” and “aboriginal title” with regard to our Sacred and Significant Places, as “mere occupancy,” and “not a property right.” ^[27]

The original nations upon whom the categories “heathens,” “pagans,” and “infidels” were mentally imposed, have been excluded from Christendom’s allocation and distribution of rights of domination (“property” rights) in newly identified non-Christian geographical areas. This explanation sheds light on what Wheaton said about the relationship between the idea of “discovery” and the creation of “rights of property.” Hinsdale goes on to explain:

Practically, discovery, when consummated [by possession], was conquest, but theoretically, it was something very different. An enemy overcome in battle was nullus according to the Roman law, but another definition, and one more consonant with the temper of the times, was now adopted. This definition was supplied by the Roman [Catholic] Church.

The new definition of nullus was, a heathen, pagan, infidel, or unbaptized person. “Paganism, which meant being unbaptized,” says Dr. [Francis] Lieber, “deprived the individual of those rights which a true jural morality considers inherent in each human being.” The same writer [Lieber] also states that the Right of Discovery is founded “on the principle that what belongs to no one may be appropriated by the finder,” but this principle become effectual only when supplemented by the Church definition of nullus. That definition supplied the lacking premise in the demonstration. Grant that res nullius is the property of the finder; that an infidel is nullus [nonexistent]; that the American savage is an infidel [a nonexistent nobody], and the argument is complete. That the Church, one of whose great duties is to protect the weak and helpless, should have supplied one-half the logic that justified the spoliation and enslavement of the heathen, is one of the anomalies of history.^[28]

This points out a specific pattern of reasoning applied to the Sacred and Significant Places of our original nations such as San Francisco Peaks, a pattern which is premised upon a Doctrine of Infidel Negation with regard to Christian claimed rights of domination over the lands of “heathen” and “Infidel” nations and peoples.

More From Wheaton’s Elements of International Law

Wheaton says the following with regard to Christendom’s agreed upon principle, mentioned above, that long uninterrupted possession of territory by one invading (“civilized invaders” ) Christian European nation excludes the claim of every other:

Whether this general consent be considered as an implied contract or as positive law, all nations [of Christian Europe] are equally bound by it, since all are parties to it; since none can safely disregard it without impugning its own title to its possessions; and since it is founded upon mutual utility, and tends to promote the general welfare of mankind.^[29]

Clearly, Wheaton’s category “mankind” did not include the “heathen” and “infidel” nations of the globe. He makes this point even more clear as he continues with his explanation of Christian Rights of Property [Domination]:

The Spaniards and Portuguese took the lead among the nations of Europe in the splendid maritime discoveries in the East and the West, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to the European ideas of that age, the heathen nations of the other quarters of the globe were the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors [dominators], and as between the christian powers themselves, the Sovereign Pontiff was the supreme arbiter of conflicting claims. Hence the famous bull issued by Pope Alexander VI. [sic] in 1493, by which he granted to the crown of Castille and Arragon all lands discovered, and to be discovered, beyond a line drawn from pole to pole, one hundred leagues west from the Azores, or Western Islands, under which Spain has since claimed to exclude all other European nations from the possession and use, not only of the lands, but of the seas, in the New World west of that line. Independent of this papal grant, the right of prior discovery was the foundation upon which the different European nations, by whom conquests [dominations] and settlements were successively made on the American continent, rested their respective claims to appropriate [dominate] its territory to the exclusive use of each nation. Even Spain did not found her pretensions solely on the papal grant. Portugal asserted a title derived from discovery and conquest [domination] to a portion of South America, taking care to keep to the eastward of the line traced by the Pope by which the globe seemed to be divided between these two great monarchies.

On the other hand, Great Britain, France, and Holland, disregarded the pretended authority of the papal see, and pushed their discoveries, conquests, and settlements, both in the East and the West Indies, until conflicting with the paramount claims of Spain and Portugal, they produced bloody and destructive wars between the different maritime powers of Europe. But there was one thing in which they all agreed, that of almost entirely disregarding the right of the native inhabitants of these regions. Thus the bull of Pope Alexander VI. [sic] reserved from the grant to Spain, all lands which had been previously occupied by any other christian nation [Wheaton’s emphasis]: and the patent granted by Henry VII. [sic] of England to John Cabot and his sons authorized them “to seek out and discover all islands, regions, and provinces whatsoever that may belong to heathens and infidels,” and “to subdue, occupy, and possess these territories, as his [the king’s] vassals and lieutenants.” In the same manner the grant from Queen Elizabeth to Sir Humphrey Gilbert empowers him to “discover such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people, and to hold, occupy, and enjoy the same with all their commodities, jurisdictions, and royalties.” ^[30]

And how did Wheaton sum up this lengthy explanation of the theoretical framework that the nations of Christendom applied to the lands and lives of our original nations? In keeping with B. A. Hinsdale’s explanation of infidel non-existence (“nullus” ), with regard to the claim of a right of domination, or sub-level existence for non-Christian nations and peoples in comparison with Christian European powers, Wheaton further states:

It thus became a maxim of policy and of law that the right of the native Indian was subordinate to that [right of domination] of the first christian discoverer, whose paramount claim [of a right of domination] excluded that of every other civilized nation, and gradually extinguished that of the natives. In the various wars, treaties, and negotiations, to which the conflicting pretensions of the different states of Christendom to territory on the American continent have given rise, the primitive title of the Indian [to maintain a free and independent existence] has been entirely overlooked, or left to be disposed of by the states within whose limits they happened to fall by stipulations of the treaties between the different European powers. Their [the Indians’] title has thus been entirely extinguished by force of arms, or by voluntary compact, as the progress of cultivation [i.e., colonization] gradually compelled the savage tenet of the forest to yield to the superior [dominating] power and skill of his civilized invader.^[31]

Wheaton was playing a trick of the mind when he said the “Indians” “happened to fall” within “the limits” of “the states,” as a result of agreements (“stipulations” ) “between the different European powers.” After all, the original nations were living on the land long before the Christian nations of Europe ever arrived, and long before any lines of demarcation were mentally created by the colonizers.

How then could the original nations be said to “fall” “within” boundaries imaginatively created by the colonizing powers? One possible answer is that Wheaton used the word “fall” as a metaphorical device to make it seem as if Christian European boundaries were created before the Native peoples were ever existing on the land. By means of this imaginative technique, it was possible to leave the false impression that the original peoples arrived on the land after those imaginary Christian European boundaries were made and “fell” inside those boundaries.

However, there is another possible interpretation. A “fall” indicates a “descent” from a high level to a lower level, or “to fall in battle,” which usually indicates a soldier who has died. Once Christian European “boundaries” had been created on maps, the result was to depict vast areas of Native lands as being “under or subject to the domination of” the colonizing invaders. The corollary of this is, of course, a depiction of the Native peoples as being subject to the invaders. This explains how the Native peoples ended up being depicted as existing “within” those mentally created Christian European boundaries. This is the result of highly skilled and inventive metaphorical framing.

It’s Time to Identify the U.S. Government’s Claim of a Right of Domination

The fact that the U.S. federal government has been claiming a right of domination over the lands of original nations has been seldom spoken of or written about. The people who work on behalf of the United States have had no reason to identify such a claim because to do so would reflect negatively on the United States. Federal government officials use synonyms for domination such as “federal property.”

For their part, Native ceremonial people have not tended to focus on the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination over their Sacred and Ceremonial places. This is most likely because the attorneys and other advocates whom they have worked with have not explained why that specific wording is a powerful means of challenging the United States’ desecration of those places. People who have never been taught a particular wording, such as “the U.S. claim of a right of domination,” will not be able to use that style of wording because they have no knowledge of that. In any case, given the information provided in this essay, it is now possible to identify the claim of a right of domination that the U.S. government continues to use against our original nations.

Regarding the Sacred and Significant Places of our original nations, and the argument that Native peoples have the right to engage in a Free Exercise of Religion, it makes a great deal of sense to say the U.S. government has been claiming that it is entitled to a Free Exercise of Domination over any and all areas that have been designated as “federal property.” Based on what Story, Wheaton, and Hinsdale documented during the nineteenth century, the papal bulls of the fifteenth Century are the basis upon which the U.S. government currently claims a right of domination over San Francisco Peaks and other Sacred and Significant Places of Native nations.

Everyone educated in the United States has been taught to believe there is a separation between church and state in American society. It is surprising to discover that it is on the basis of the Bible, and the related concept of “property” [domination], that the U.S. government claims a Free Exercise of Domination over our original nations, and over our lands, including our Sacred and Significant Places.

The Biblical Connection

Are we able to identify a biblical connection to the claim that our traditional lands are “federal property?” William Blackstone, the eminent British jurist and commentator on English Common Law, explained that the “right of property,” in general, is defined as “that sole despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” ^[32] As we shall explain below, Blackstone pointed to Genesis 1:28 as the basis for that definition.

Once the federal government of the United States was able to use a biblical reasoning process to claim a right of domination over an area which is traditional to a particular original nation or people, the implication is that the United States government is the entity that has the “sole despotic dominion” (“property” ) over that entire area, “in total exclusion any Native nation or people, or traditional healers.” And this claim is being made by the United States despite the fact that an original nation or people has had an ongoing cultural and spiritual relationship with that area extending back to the beginning of time.

Next we need to point out Blackstone’s explanation of the basis of “property,” which he said is the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning of the world,” he says, “we are informed by Holy Writ [of the Bible], the All-bountiful Creator gave to man 'dominion over all the earth, and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” ^[33] “This,” says Blackstone, “is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things.” ^[34]

Judge Blackstone’s explanation of the relationship between the idea of “property” in English common law and the Old Testament of the Bible, means that whenever and wherever the U.S. government has unilaterally claimed that the Sacred and Significant Places of Native peoples is “federal property” [domination] belonging to the United States, it has been using Genesis 1:28 against Native nations. For the federal government to claim a right of “ultimate dominion” [domination] and “property” [domination] over the traditional lands of a Native nation, including a Sacred and Significant Place such as San Francisco Peaks, is to use what Blackstone termed “the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion [domination] over external things,” i.e., Genesis 1:28 in the Bible.

What this means is that the U.S. government has been tacitly using the Old Testament of the Bible to claim it has a right of domination (“property” ) over the Sacred and Significant Places of Native nations and peoples. The federal government has been using a Christian claim against those peoples it has labeled “heathens” and “infidels” as a basis for claiming an ultimate right of decision-making in relation to those Sacred Places. By that means, the traditional and ceremonial people of Native nations have thereby been excluded from their rightful position as the final decision-makers with regard to places such as San Francisco Peaks and the Black Hills of the Oceti Sakowin.

In order for U.S. government officials to escape the implications of this framework of analysis, they must explain on what non-biblical and constitutional basis they, on behalf of their government, are claiming a right of “property” and domination over Native nations and peoples. Or, alternatively, those officials would need to demonstrate that the U.S. government has not previously claimed, and is not now claiming, a right of domination over Native nations, over their traditional lands, and over their Sacred and Significant Places, such as San Francisco Peaks.

American Indian Religious Freedom Legal Cases and the U.S. Claim of Property Over the Traditional Lands of Our Original Nations

Political activism in Indian Country in the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in the U.S. Congress passing the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), as a joint resolution of Congress.^[35] To grasp the historical and mental context for Congress’s passage of the AIRFA legislation, which the Supreme Court stated in Lyng “has no teeth,” ^[36] we need to trace Christendom’s Christian-heathen distinction forward to nineteenth century U.S. Indian policy.

In 1883, during his annual report to Congress, Secretary of Interior Henry M. Teller explained why he believed a Code and Court of “Indian Offenses” was needed. Pay attention to his denigrating and demeaning language in the statement below about the traditional ceremonial practices of Native peoples:

If it is the purpose of the Government [Domination System] to civilize [dominate] the Indians, they must be compelled to desist from the [free and independent] savage and barbarous practices that are calculated to continue them in [a free way of life] savagery, no matter what exterior influences are brought to bear on them. Very many of the progressive [dominated] Indians have become fully alive to the pernicious influences of these [free] heathenish practices indulged in by their people, and have sought to abolish them; in such efforts they have been aided by their missionaries, teachers, and agents, but this has been found impossible even with the aid thus given. The Government [Domination System] furnishes the teachers, and the charitable people, contribute to the support of the missionaries, and much time, labor, and money is yearly expended for their elevation [reduction], and yet a few [free and independent minded] non-progressive, degraded Indians are allowed to exhibit before the young and susceptible children all the debauchery, diabolism, and savagery of the worst state of the Indian race. Every man familiar with Indian life will bear witness to the pernicious influence of these savage [ceremonial] rites and heathenish [non-Christian] customs.^[37]

The Code and Court of Indian Offenses resulted in Native ceremonial leaders and traditional healers being jailed for performing ceremonies and for engaging in traditional spiritual practices. Non-Christian Native spirituality had to go “underground” to be performed in secret, hidden from Bureau of Indian Affairs officials. This is a clear example of the animosity and hatred that Christian European society expressed toward traditional ways, deeming them “heathen,” “pagan,” “infidel,” and “savage.”

Christian preachers and missionaries helped to define the “Indian Offenses,” by targeting ceremonies and ceremonial items. Traditional items were burned or otherwise destroyed. The people were prevented from interacting freely with their ceremonially ways in their Sacred and Significant Places. This was all a direct consequence of the Christian European tradition of claiming a right of domination against Native peoples and enforcing that claim by destroying teachings, languages, and lines of communication that held the free existence of our nations and peoples together.

Despite this clear record of Christian bigotry toward original nation spirituality, to my knowledge legal briefs involving what are called American Indian Religious Freedom cases have never quoted Secretary Teller’s language or cited the American society’s record of hatred for, and destructive behavior toward, non-Christian Native ceremonial ways. Nor have attorneys for Native people in religious freedom cases focused on the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination against our original nations and peoples.

The U.S. Government’s Reasoning Process Regarding Our Sacred and Ceremonial Places

Let us now combine the above pieces of information and see what sort of holistic picture is revealed with regard to our Sacred and Significant places. The claim by “Christian people” that they have an exclusive right of domination (otherwise known as “property” ), based on Genesis 1:28 in the Bible, as acknowledged by William Blackstone, has resulted in a specific form of argumentation used by the United States government against our original nations and peoples, and against our Sacred and significant places. On that biblical basis, Christian European intellectuals regarded our non-Christian Native ancestors as “nullus” (non-existent) with regard to allocation of rights of property, as explained by Wheaton, Hinsdale, Lieber, and Story.

In the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh ruling, for example, Chief Justice John Marshall acknowledged what is aptly called the Doctrine of Infidel Non-Existence when he said the following, “So far as respected the authority of the [British] crown, no distinction was taken between vacant lands and lands occupied by the Indians.” ^[38] Here, Marshall for the U.S. Supreme Court has pinpointed a powerful piece of the puzzle: The intellectuals of Christendom were able to mentally conceive of lands where our Native peoples were living as vacant lands by mentally negating our ancestors who were living there. In his book The International Law of John Marshall, Benjamin Munn Ziegler says, “the term ‘vacant lands’ refers of course to lands in America which when discovered were occupied by Indians but unoccupied by Christians.” ^[39] (emphasis added)

The most immediate conclusion for us to reach is that Christendom considered the lands they had newly identified as being “vacant” because no Christians were living there. But specific language from the Vatican papal bulls provides us with an additional insight: those lands were considered vacant because no right of Christian domination had ever been asserted there. This insight follows from language found in the papal bull Dudum siquidem, issued by Pope Alexander VI on September 26, 1493.^[40] The opening of the English translation reads:

A short while ago of our own free will, out of our own certain knowledge, and the fullness of our apostolic power, we gave, transferred, and assigned forever to you and your heirs and successors, the kings of Castile and Leon, all islands and lands, discovered and to be discovered, toward the west and south, that were not under the temporal rule of any Christian powers.^[41]

In keeping with the Latin wording of Dudum siquidem, however, there is a less pleasant way of translating “not under the temporal rule of any Christian powers,” which in the original Latin refers to “insulas” (islands) and “terra firmas” (firm lands) “que sub actuali dominio temporali aliqurorum dominorum Christianorum constitute non essent,” or, in English: islands and firm lands “that are not under the actual temporal domination (“dominio” ) of any Christian dominators” (“dominorum Christianorum” ).^[42] No right of Christian domination (“property” ) had ever been claimed over and in relation to that non-Christian place where “barbarous” peoples were living. This is the reasoning process that the United States government is now applying to San Francisco Peaks, and other Sacred and Significant Places.

That Was Then, and Its Still Operational Now

There are those who might respond “Well, that was then this is now,” as if to say that the claim of a right of domination is no longer being used by the United States against our original nations. In addition to the fact that the claim of domination in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling is still regarded as “good law” by the United States, we are also able to point to decisions such as City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation^[43] from 2005. In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg^[44] placed “the doctrine of discovery” in the first footnote of her ruling against the Oneida Nation.^[45] In that footnote, Ginsberg quotes from Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y. v. County of Oneida 414: U.S. 661, 667 (1974): “It very early became accepted doctrine in this Court that, although fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign — first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States — a right of occupancy in the Indian tribes was nevertheless recognized. That right, sometimes called Indian title and good against all but the sovereign, could be terminated only by sovereign act.” ^[46]

Later in that 1974 ruling, Justice White for a unanimous Court cited to United States As Guardian of the Hualpai Indians of Arizona v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co. (1941),^[47] which acknowledges Johnson v. McIntosh as the starting point of the framework of an “Indian right of occupancy” :

“‘Unquestionably it has been the policy of the Federal Government from the beginning to respect the Indian right of occupancy, which could only be interfered with or determined by the United States.’ Cramer v. United States, 261 U. S. 219, 261 U. S. 227. This policy was first recognized in Johnson v. M’Intosh, 8 Wheat. 543, and has been repeatedly reaffirmed. Worcester v. Georgia, 6 Pet. 515; Mitchel v. United States, 9 Pet. 711; Chouteau v. Molony, 16 How. 203; Holden v. Joy, 17 Wall. 211; Buttz v. Northern Pacific Railroad[, 119 U. S. 55]; United States v. Shoshone Tribe, 304 U. S. 111. As stated in Mitchel v. United States, supra, p. 34 U. S. 746, Indian ‘right of occupancy is considered as sacred as the fee simple of the whites.’”^[48]

Use of the word “whites” is a reference to individuals termed “white,” which means that the so-called right of occupancy is deemed by the Court to be “as sacred as” but not the same as the fee simple property right of individual “white people.”

McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020)

Additionally, in McGirt v. Oklahoma, Justice Neil Gorsuch references a property law treatise from the 1860’s in the decision he wrote just three years ago. In the 5-4 decision, Justice Gorsuch states: “The federal government issued its own land patents to many [non-Native] homesteaders throughout the West. These [federal] patents transferred legal title and are the basis for much of the private land ownership in a number of States today. But no one thinks any of this diminished the Unites States’s claim to sovereignty over any land. To accomplish that would require an act of cession, the transfer of a sovereign claim from one nation to another.” Here he references “E. Washburn, American Law of Real Property *521-*524.” Legal scholar Peter d’Errico found the Washburn treatise cited by Gorsuch, and the cited wording reads as follows:

Nor has any title, beyond the right of occupation, been recognized in the native tribes by any of the European governments or their successors, the Colonies, the States, or the United States. The law in this respect seems to have been uniform with all the Christian nations that planted colonies here. They recognized no seisen [property ownership] of lands on the part of the Indian dwellers upon it…The sovereignty [domination] and general property [domination] of the soil . . . were claimed . . . by right of discovery.^[49] [emphasis added]

And d’Errico observes: “Washburn footnoted this sentence with a citation of Johnson v. McIntosh.” ^[50] What is the significance of the most pro-Indigenous Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court harkening back to the “right of discovery” and to the patterns of domination expressed in the Johnson ruling? Rather than being up front and candid about the claim of a right of domination by the Christian nations of Europe, Gorsuch used a footnote to hide the fact that he was reaffirming the claim of a right of Christian domination which is at the root of the anti-Indian ideas and arguments called “federal-indian-law.”

A View-from-the-Ship Parsing of Johnson v. McIntosh

Let’s now take a closer look at what Justice Gorsuch, on behalf of a majority of the Court, reaffirmed just three years ago by citing a passage from a mid-nineteenth century property law treatise which cites to the Johnson ruling. Because the view-from-the-ship-perspective treated the “Indians” as null and void (“nullus” ) with regard to “property” (the claim of a right of domination), the Christian Europeans would not allow the Native peoples to be, as Justice Joseph Story put it, deemed (judged) as possessing “the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign, and independent nations.” This wording was an effort on his part to explain away the original free existence of our nations and peoples.

In the Johnson ruling, Marshall explained how the Supreme Court had reached its decision. He said the U.S. government, including the Court, acknowledged that what he termed “civilized nations” possessed “perfect independence.” ^[51] He said that acknowledgment was based on “principles of abstract justice,” principles which “are admitted to regulate in a great degree the rights of civilized nations.” ^[52] However, when it came to thinking about what he later termed “natives,” who were defined as “heathens” ^[53] (non-Christians) Marshall cryptically said the Supreme Court had quite consciously not relied upon principles of “abstract justice,” but “principles” other than those of “justice,” “which our own government has adopted in” this “particular case and given us [the Court] as the rule for our decision.” ^[54]

This was Marshall’s acknowledgment that the Court and the rest of the government was quite conscious of the fact that the Johnson case was not being decided on the basis of principles of justice. Although people tend to be quick to claim that “conquest” is the basis of the Johnson ruling, Chief Justice Marshall later said that the “law which regulates and ought to regulate in general the relations between the conqueror and the conquered was incapable of application to” Native nations and peoples.^[55] In other words, the Court did not apply the standard rules of conquest to the Indians. This is why Marshall went on to say that “®he resort to some new and different rule better adapted to the actual state of things was unavoidable…” ^[56] [emphasis added]

The phrase “resort to” means “to do something you do not want to do but you do it anyway because you cannot find any other means of achieving an objective.” Marshall is saying that the United States had come up with a “new and different rule” that the Supreme Court was expressing in the Johnson ruling. He went on to say, “Every rule which can be suggested [by this Court] will be found to be attended with great difficulty” ^[57] because any such rule was, by the Court’s admission, being based on principles of injustice directed at “heathen” nations and peoples.

Marshall expressed as follows the new rule of the United States: “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it [the asserted principle]; if the property [domination] of the great mass of the community originates in it, it [the principle] becomes the law of the land and cannot be questioned.” ^[58]

In other words, the United States government would pretend to “convert” the Christian “discovery” of the geographical location of a country already inhabited by non-Christians, into a position of domination (“conquest” ) toward that country, and toward the non-Christian nations and peoples living there. On the basis of the Supreme Court’s “new and different” rule of “pretended conquest,” a rule arrived at by applying to the case principles other than “abstract justice,” the “Indians” would be regarded by the U.S. government as subject to U.S. domination (“ultimate dominion” ). Once this way of thinking was fully adopted by the United States government, it was treated as “the law of the land,” and as a U.S. domination/Native subordination reasoning process, fully accepted by the US government which Marshall claimed “cannot be questioned.” That reasoning process is still being deployed today by the U.S. government against the Native nations.

The Accompanying Principle: An Indian Title of Occupancy

Marshall went on to say in the Johnson ruling, “So, too, with respect to the concomitant principle that the Indian inhabitants are to be considered [thought of] merely as occupants, to be protected, indeed, while in peace, in the possession of their lands, but to be deemed [judged] incapable of transferring the absolute title to others.” ^[59] (emphasis added) That which is concomitant is something that “naturally accompanies or follows something else.” Defining the Indians as being mere “occupants” of the land naturally followed from the Supreme Court’s “extravagant pretension,” or pretense, of mentally treating the idea of “discovery” as if it were literally the same as a physical “conquest.”

The word “pretense” is derived from the Latin verb praetendere, and the past participle praetensus, both meaning, “to assume” without a supportive basis, “a claim made or implied,” especially “one not supported by fact.” A “pretension,” the word Marshall used in the Johnson ruling, means, “an allegation of doubtful value: [a] PRETEXT.” Marshall’s use of “pretension” amounts to him “pretending something is true even though it isn’t.” This matches precisely the idea of a “model or metaphor,” the use of which “involves the pretense that something is the case when it is not.”

With regard to metaphor, Colin Turbayne states in The Myth of Metaphor: “Just as often, however, the pretense has been dropped, either by the pretenders or by their followers.” ^[60] “There is a difference between using a metaphor and taking it literally, between using a model and mistaking it for the thing modeled. The one is to make believe that something is the case; the other is to believe that it is [the case].” ^[61] (emphasis added) What began as an extravagant pretense on the part of the Supreme Court eventually began to be treated or regarded as if it was a physical conquest of “the Indians.”

What U.S. government officials have habitually called “conquest,” and “the Indian title of occupancy,” are two ideas that are the product or result of a body of metaphorical pretensions that those same government officials have mastered. They are words and ideas that are mentally and verbally projected onto our original nations and peoples, and which then end up being treated as if they are a fixed human reality.

This principle is cited in Felix Cohen’s Handbook of federal-indian-law “Conquest renders the tribe subject to the legislative authority of the United States.” ^[62] This, however, is not referring to an actual physical “conquest.” It is a figurative, poetic, and imaginative expression. It is a doubtful allegation made by the United States. It is a pretext that U.S. government officials have been using against our Native nations and peoples for two centuries by means of the Johnson ruling, and that U.S. officials continue to use to this day in relation to our Sacred and Significant Places, such as San Francisco Peaks and the Black Hills of the Oceti Sakowin.

That is the fictional premise that U.S. officials, such as Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the U.S. Supreme Court use as the starting point for an extended argument about “the concomitant principle” Marshall mentioned, meaning, the mentally fabricated idea of an “Indian title of occupancy,” contrasted with the U.S. government’s presumed right of Christian domination (“property” ). This framing has been accepted as an unquestionable given by practitioners of federal anti-Indian law. And this unquestioned acceptance has prevented these mental fabrications from being fundamentally challenged by pointing out the fact that they are merely mental and metaphorical constructions created by intellectuals in the employ of the political experiment called the United States of America.

The Supreme Court’s Use of the Doctrine of Christian Domination in Lyng

In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association,^[63] for example, we may assume that the attorneys for the Native plaintiffs never mentioned the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination over the Sacred and Significant Area of the Native peoples. But a close reading of Justice Sandra Day O’Conner’s 1988 decision in Lyng shows how the Supreme Court relied on the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination (termed “property” ) over the traditional territory of the Native people, a location called the Chimney Rock area of a place now designated the Six Rivers National Forest, adjacent to the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation.

In her majority ruling in Lyng, Justice O’Conner also quotes Sherbert v. Verner: “For the Free Exercise Clause is written in terms of what the government cannot do to the individual, not in terms of what the individual can exact from the government.”^[64] O’Conner further states: “Even if we assume that we should accept the Ninth Circuit’s prediction, according to which the G-O road will ‘virtually destroy the . . . Indians’ ability to practice their religion,’ 795 F.2d at 693 (opinion below), the Constitution simply does not provide a principle that could justify upholding respondents’ legal claims. However much we might wish that it were otherwise, [the] government [the domination] simply could not operate if it were required to satisfy every citizen’s religious needs and desires.” ^[65] Justice O’Conner could have finished that last sentence with: “such as the Native peoples’ need and their desire for the government to not engage in activities that will virtually destroy their religion.”

Toward the end of her decision, O’Conner said, “Whatever rights the Indians may have to the use of the area, however, they and their rights do not divest the Government of its right to use what is, after all, its land” ^[66] (emphasis added). Here O’Conner is asserting a U.S. right of domination over the area in question. The word “its” is a possessive pronoun and is defined as “of or belonging to it,” whatever “it” might be. The word “belong” in this context means “to be the possession or rightful property of,” and, as we have repeatedly stated in this essay, “property” is a right of domination.

In other words, the United States has created an ongoing conceptual system of domination which accords to the Native peoples merely the “use” of the lands within their traditional homeland over which the U.S. government now claims a right of domination. But within that U.S. conceptual system, the first “Christian people” to have arrived at a non-Christian geographical location are portrayed within the U.S. system of ideas as being in “possession” of the land, and thus “vested” with the “property” right of domination. The idea-system of the United States does not acknowledge the original Native peoples as being vested with the right of domination because, within the U.S. conceptual system, that status is reserved for the first Christian monarch to have identified that particular location of non-Christian lands, and it is accorded to the political successors of that first Christian monarch, such as the individual “States” and the United States.

Given that orientation, Justice O’Conner was stating that “the [U.S.] Government can do what it wants with its property,” i.e., it’s right of domination, over that entire area in Northern California, including over an area where the original nations have never ceded or relinquished their lands by treaty. In other words, by means of the majority decision in Lyng, the Supreme Court asserted a right of domination over the Chimney Rock area, regardless of how many thousands of years the Native peoples had been living in cultural and spiritual relationship with that place. This matches the situation at San Francisco Peaks for the traditional spiritual people of various original nations.

From the viewpoint of those employed as intellectuals by the United States government, such as members of the U.S. Supreme Court, every American Indian Religious Freedom case is dealt with by the U.S. government as a property law case, in which the U.S. claim of a right of domination (“property” ) is deemed to be potentially threatened by the spiritual priorities of the Native peoples in relation to the land.

In Lyng, Justice O’Conner acknowledged for the majority what it saw as a specific threat to the United States: the Native peoples might place lands deemed by the federal government to be “federal lands” in a form of “religious servitude” and “de facto beneficial ownership of . . . public property [domination].” ^[67] “Respondents attempt to stress the limits of the religious servitude that they are now seeking to impose on the Chimney Rock area of the Six Rivers National Forest” .^[68] As O’Conner states:

No disrespect for these practices [of the Native peoples] is implied when one notes that such beliefs could easily require de facto beneficial ownership of some rather spacious tracts of public property. Even without anticipating future cases, the diminution of the Government’s property rights, and the concomitant subsidy of the Indian religion, would in this case be far from trivial: the District Court’s order permanently forbade commercial timber harvesting, or the construction of a two-lane road, anywhere within an area covering a full 27 sections (i.e. more than 17,000 acres) of public land.^[69]

A view-from-the-shore assessment of the above language reveals that the majority would not decide in favor of the original nations of that Northern California region because a win for the original peoples might effectively challenge the federal government’s presumed right of domination over the traditional lands of the nations and peoples of that part of the continent. Behind these concerns was the covert and ancient assumption, examined above, that the U.S. government has a right of domination over the lands of Native nations on the basis of Christendom’s ancient distinction between Christians and non-Christian “heathens,” “pagans,” and “infidels,” which, by means of the Johnson precedent, the Supreme Court relies upon as a basis for U.S. property law.

Justice Brennan’s Dissenting Opinion in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association

In his dissent in Lyng, Justice Brennan (joined by Marshall and Blackmun), says that the Court majority “embraces the Government’s contention that its prerogative as landowner should always take precedence over a claim that a particular use of federal property infringes religious practices.” ^[70] (emphasis added) Brennan further notes that, “as the lower courts found, the proposed logging and construction activities” would “virtually destroy respondents’ religion, and will therefore necessarily force them into abandoning those practices altogether.” ^[71]

When written with a view-from-the-shore perspective, that sentence is accurately restated as follows: “The U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination [“property” ], will therefore necessarily force them [the Native peoples] into abandoning those practices altogether.” Justice Brennan continues:

Here the threat posed by the desecration of sacred lands that are indisputably essential to respondents’ religious practices is both more direct and more substantial than that raised by a compulsory school law that simply exposed Amish children to an alien value system. And of course respondents here do not even have the option, however unattractive it might be, of migrating to more hospitable locales; the site-specific nature of their belief system renders it nontransportable. . . .^[72]

In the final analysis, the Court’s refusal to recognize the constitutional dimension of respondents’ injuries stems from its concern that acceptance of respondents’ claim could potentially strip the Government of its ability to manage and use vast tracts of federal property [domination]. [citation deleted] In addition, the nature of respondents’ site-specific religious practices raises the specter of future suits in which Native Americans seek to exclude all human activity from such areas. Ibid. These concededly legitimate concerns lie at the very heart of this case, which represents yet another stress point in the longstanding conflict between two disparate cultures — the dominant Western culture, which views land in terms of ownership and use, and that of Native Americans, in which concepts of private property are not only alien, but contrary to a belief system that holds land sacred.^[73] [emphasis added]

When we reword the above sentence with a view-from-the-shore perspective, we see an acknowledgment of “. . .the longstanding conflict between two disparate cultures—the dominating Western culture, which views land in terms of domination [“property” ] and use, and that of Native Americans, in which concepts of the domination of the land is not only alien, but contrary to a belief system that holds land sacred.” The Brennan dissent continues:

Rather than address this conflict in any meaningful fashion, however, the Court disclaims all responsibility for balancing these competing and potentially irreconcilable interests, choosing instead to turn this difficult task over to the Federal Legislature. Such an abdication is more than merely indefensible as an institutional matter: by defining respondents’ injury as “nonconstitutional,” the Court has effectively bestowed on one party to this conflict the unilateral authority to resolve all future disputes in its favor, subject only to the Court’s toothless exhortation to be “sensitive” to affected religions. In my view, however, Native Americans deserve—and the Constitution demands—more than this….

Today, the Court holds that a federal land use decision that promises to destroy an entire religion does not burden the practice of that faith in a manner recognized by the Free Exercise Clause. . . I find it difficult, however, to imagine conduct more insensitive to religious needs than the Government’s determination to build a marginally useful road in the face of uncontradicted evidence that the road will render the practice of respondents’ religion impossible. Nor do I believe that respondents will derive any solace from the knowledge that, although the practice of their religion will become “more difficult” as a result of the Government’s actions, they remain free to maintain their religious beliefs. Given today’s ruling, that freedom amounts to nothing more than the right to believe that their religion will be destroyed. The safeguarding of such a hollow freedom not only makes a mockery of the “policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the[ir] traditional religions,” ante at 485 U. S. 454 (quoting AIRFA), it fails utterly to accord with the dictates of the First Amendment. I dissent.^[74] [emphasis added]

The U.S. Government’s Free Exercise of Domination on the Basis of the Bible

An 1830 U.S. congressional report explains that “Christian and civilized nations” had laid the “foundations of the States which constitute this confederacy.” ^[75] The report said that the nations from Western Europe “were instructed or misled as to the nature of their duties by the precepts and examples contained in the volume [the Bible] which they acknowledged as the basis of their religious rites and creeds.” ^[76] Specifically, to “go forth, to subdue and replenish the earth, were received as divine commands or relied on as plausible pretexts to cover mercenary enterprises by the Governments which gave the authority and the adventurers who first discovered and took possession of the New World.” ^[77]

The U.S. congressional report was referring of course to the “subdue and dominate” language from Genesis 1:28 in the Bible. The report was saying that the biblical language to “go forth” to other parts of the planet and “subdue” (dominate) the earth was either interpreted as a command from “God,” or else biblical language was treated by “Governments” and “adventurers” as a basis for identifying geographical places that had been previously unknown to them, which they claimed to take possession of. This explains the basis upon which so-called Christian and civilized nations claimed a right of domination over (the right to subdue) whatever non-Christian lands they were able to identify. The report continues:

Whether they were right or wrong in their construction [interpretation] of the sacred text [of the Bible], or whether their conduct can in every respect be reconciled with their professed objects or not, it is certain that possession, actual or constructive, of the entire habitable portion of this continent was taken by the nations of Europe, divided out, and held originally by the right of discovery as between themselves and by rights of discovery and conquest [domination] as against the aboriginal inhabitants." ^[78]

On the basis of the Christian Bible, specifically the passage Genesis 1:28, the U.S. federal government claims what William Blackstone called “the sole despotic dominion” (a property right of domination) over the Sacred and Significant Places of Native Nations and Peoples, including San Francisco Peaks.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Apeals applied this way of thinking in Navajo Nation v. USFS, when the Court said: “And Congress specifically noted that Roy and Lyng would apply in cases such as this one: '[P]re-Smith case law makes it clear that strict scrutiny does not apply to government actions involving only management of internal Government affairs or the use of the Government’s own property or resources.” Applying an apostrophe ‘s’ to the word “Government,” and the phrase “own property,” are two means by which the Court maintains the framework of domination.

The complete phrase “the Government’s own property” (emphasis added), demonstrates the U.S. Government’s claim of a right of domination over the Sacred and Significant Places of Original Nations, such as San Francisco Peaks. Those were the places with which the Original Nations and Peoples of the continent continue to have a cultural and spiritual relationship. And that relationship extends back thousands of years prior to when the political system called the United States came into existence.

The claim of “property” that the United States government is presently asserting is traced back to Christendom’s claim of a right of domination against all non-Christians. This explains why some framework such as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was needed in the first place, to address the fact that a Christian/non-Christian bigotry had been applied to our original nations and peoples for generations. It is this Christian religious framework of domination that is still being used by the United States government at San Francisco Peaks against non-Christian spiritual and ceremonial practitioners in the name of the “property” (domination) rights of the United States.

Why Religious Freedom Arguments Are Not Designed to Defeat The U.S. Government’s Claim Of A Right of Domination Against Original Nations and Peoples

We need to make clear and unambiguous our steadfast opposition to the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination over our lives as Native peoples. Our original free existence is and always will be the default position for our nations and peoples. We have the fundamental right to live free from domination. And, we now have the ability to clearly identify the system of domination being used against us.

The argument presented here is quite different than insisting that the human rights of dominated (“Indigenous” ) nations and peoples must be upheld. There is no international human rights framework that accords people the right to live free from the domination of “the State,” which is considered a given, and not open to challenge.

When we do not openly name and oppose the domination system of the United States, it’s as if we as Native people are accepting (which we are not) the idea that we, by our very nature, subject to a dominating political power. Because the United States was founded on the basis of a system of domination, it stands to reason that it’s the very nature of the United States to dominate our nations and peoples. We are able to identify and oppose the system of domination by using the specific words “the claim of a right of domination.”

The argument that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution accords traditional healers and spiritual leaders the right to pray and to conduct ceremonies is not an effective means of opposing the U.S. government’s claim of a right of domination (“property” ). Imagine a scenario in which federal government officials have stated to traditional spiritual people: “The federal government of the United States has the right to use its system of domination (“property” ) against you.” Meekly responding “Well, we have the right to pray and conduct our ceremonies” based on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does not in any way challenge the U.S. government’s claimed right of domination over our lands and our lives as original nations.

A Three-Pronged Counter Argument to the U.S. Claim of a Right of Domination Against Our Original Nations and Peoples

There is, however, a way of responding that has yet to be advanced: 1) Our original nations are first in time, and therefore first in right. This is a response to the “first invaders in time, first invaders in right” argument; 2) Void when initiated, you cannot grant what you don’t possess. This means the Vatican papal bulls and royal charters of England were null and void from the moment they were issued.

Why? For the simple reason that the Roman Catholic popes and the kings of England had no rightful jurisdiction beyond the immediate boundaries of their home country. This is illustrated by King Henry VII Instruction to the Cabots to “geting unto us” the “jurisdiction” (“jurisdictionem” in Latin) and “domination title” (“titulum dominium” in Latin), wording which contains the king’s admission that he had neither of those two things at the time he issued his commission to John Cabot and his sons.^[79]

Christian popes and other monarchs certainly had no rightful jurisdiction thousands of nautical miles across the Atlantic Ocean. They could not rightfully send their own home-jurisdiction by proxy across an entire ocean, and rightfully claim a right of domination over the lands of the free and independent nations living in distant places.

And, lastly, 3) “Anything wrong from the beginning can never be made right, because it was wrong, and thus invalid, from its inception,” as expressed by Western Shoshone Elder Glenn Wasson. Their claim of a right of domination will never become valid, because their claim was invalid from the outset. Threat, duress, and coercion do not give rise to or create any valid authority over those who have been wrongfully subjected to the claim of a right of domination.

Conclusion

These days, it is typical to hear the United States of America being portrayed as a “democracy” even though they (the “States” ) have operated for more than two centuries as a federal system of domination in relation to the original nations and peoples of this continent. This is especially true when it comes to our Sacred and Significant Places. Federal employees of the U.S. government, and even tribal government officials, are not likely to have known before now the information about domination found in this essay. No one, however, who ends up reading this essay, will be able to feign ignorance about the U.S. claim of a right of domination.

As a model of a way forward for Traditional Healers and Ceremonial Leaders, a powerful challenge to the United States was presented by the Yakama Nation in the amicus legal brief that the nation submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Cougar Den case in 2018. The Yakama Nation, guided by the leadership of Chairman JoDe Goudy, and influenced by the framework of domination found in this essay, decided upon that course of action. It marks the first time that an Original Nation of the continent has directly challenged the U.S. government’s claim of a right of discovery and domination.

Anyone who might wish to make a counterargument to oppose what we have presented here, is going to have a difficult time crafting a meaningful and effective response to rebut the information we have provided. After all, it would be senseless for anyone to claim that the language of domination found in the Vatican papal bulls, or in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling, and elsewhere does not actually exist. It does exist. Authoritative sources spanning centuries contain this information, even those documents which illustrate the organic laws of the United States.

Our responsibility is to have dialogue with U.S. government officials, including, when possible, members of the U.S. Supreme Court,^[80] and hold them accountable to end their nefarious claim of a right of Christian domination over our spiritual people, over our Sacred and Significant Places, and over our Original Nations and Peoples and our Homelands. We need to transition to decision-making based on the Natural Laws of Creation that sustain all Life, which are the basis for our ceremonies. Those Laws of Creation guided our Ancestors and Spiritual Ways of Life before and after the invasive arrival of the ships of Christendom.

Notes

Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land, Chapter 4, “Colonizing the Promised Land,” pp. 37-50. For example, Genesis 17:2-8: The “God” of the Bible said: “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed [sperm] after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession.” ↩︎
And the “Lord” said: "And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan [by analogy, all the lands of “North America,” including the so-called “San Francisco Peaks” ] for an everlasting possession. ↩︎
For example, Psalms 2:8 “Ask of me and I shall give to thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” This conceives of the original nations and peoples, and their lands, as being the inherited property of the “chosen people” as per “God’s” will. This expresses the claim of a divine right of domination pursuant “God’s mandate” and thus “His will.” ↩︎
21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
See generally Peter d’Erricio, Federal Anti-Indian Law, Praeger, 2022. ↩︎
Robert T. Coulter and Steven M. Tullberg, Indian Land Rights, in The Aggressions of Civilization, pp. 185, 190 (Sandra L. Cadwalder & Vine Deloria, Jr., eds., 1984). ↩︎
European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States, ed., Francis Gardner Davenport, Carnegie Institution, 1917, pp. 56-63. ↩︎
See Steven Newcomb, “The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in federal-indian-law,” N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1993, p. 304. ↩︎
Christopher Columbus Book of Privileges: 1502 The claiming of a New World, Library of Congress, eds., John W. Hessler, Daniel De Simone, and Chet Van Duzer, Delray Beach, Florida: Levenger Press, pp. 30-31. ↩︎
For example, my friend Peter d’Errico (professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts) and I, have been studying this field of knowledge for some fifty years. We have been engaged in conversation and collaboration together for more than thirty years. ↩︎
State v. Foreman, 16 Tenn. (8 Yer.) 256, 277 (1835). ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: with a Sketch of the History of the Science, Vol. I, London: B. Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1836. ↩︎
Elements, Vol. 1, Chapter 1, § 11 “Definition of international law,” p. 54. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 205. ↩︎
Elements, Vol. 1, Chapter IV, § 5 “Conquest and discovery,” pp. 206–207. ↩︎
“The Right of Discovery,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, Vol. II, Dec. 1988, No 3. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 4. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 4. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 16. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 17. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 17–18. ↩︎
White v. University of California, No. 12-17489, August 27, 2014. At footnote 2, we find: Aboriginal interest in land generally is described as a tribe’s right to occupy the land. It is not a property right, but “amounts to a right of occupancy which the sovereign grants and protects against intrusion by third parties.” Tee–Hit–Ton Indians v. United States, 348 U.S. 272, 279 (1955). The right, which is residual in nature, comes from the legal theory that discovery and conquest gave conquerors the right to own the land but did not disturb the tribe’s right to occupy it. See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 8 Wheat 543, 588–91 (1823). ↩︎
Hinsdale, “Right of Discovery,” pp. 16–17. ↩︎
Wheaton, Elements, Vol. 1, Chapter IV, “Property,” § 5, p. 207. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 207–210. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 210. ↩︎
Marshall D. Ewell, A Review of Blackstone’s Commentaries with Explanatory Notes for the Use of Students at Law, Second Edition, Albany, New York: Matthew Bender & Company, 1915. “Book the Second,” “Of the Rights of Things,” Chapter I, “Of Property in General,” p. 137. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Public Law No. 95-341, 92 Stat. 469 (August 11, 1978). ↩︎
Lyng, Secretary of Agriculture, v Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. 485 US 439 (1988), at 444. ↩︎
U.S. Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed., Francis Paul Prucha, 1990, p. 160. ↩︎
21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) (1823) at 596. ↩︎
Benjamin Munn Ziegler, The International Law of John Marshall, p. 45-46 (1939). ↩︎
European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, Vol. I, ed., Francis Gardner Davenport, pp. 79-83. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 82. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y. 544 U.S. 197 (2005). ↩︎
Many people find it surprising that the person who was regarded as one of the most “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court would use the “doctrine of discovery” against the Oneida Nation. ↩︎
Footnote 1 in City of Sherrill begins: “Under the ‘doctrine of discovery,’ County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., 470 U. S. 226, 234 (1985) (Oneida II) ‘fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States, . . .’” ↩︎
Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y. v. Country of Oneida 414 U.S. 661, 667 (1974) at 667. ↩︎
United States As Guardian of the Hualpai Indians of Arizona v. Santa Fe Pacific Railroad Co. 314 U.S. 339 (1941) ↩︎
Ibid., at 348. ↩︎
Emory Washburn, American Law of Real Property (Boston: Little, Brown, 1864), Book III, Ch. III, Title by Grant, § 1 Public Grant. ↩︎
Personal Correspondence, RedThought.org Presentation on McGirt v. Oklahoma, with Jode Goudy (Yakama Nation), Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), and Peter d’Errico, professor emeritus at UMass Amherst. ↩︎
Johnson v. McIntosh, at 572. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid., at 577. ↩︎
Ibid., at 572. ↩︎
Ibid., at 591. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid., 591. ↩︎
Colin Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press), 1971, p. 3. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
United States of America v. Consolidated Wounded Knee Cases, 389 F. Supp. 235 (D. Neb 1975) January 17 1975, at 237. Quoted from Cohen’s Handbook by Judge Warren Urbom: "The whole course of judicial decision on the nature of Indian tribal powers is marked by adherence to three fundamental principles: (1) An Indian tribe possesses, in the first instance, all the powers of any sovereign state. (2) Conquest renders the tribe subject to the legislative power of the United States . . . " ↩︎
Lyng, Secretary of Agriculture, v Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. 485 US 439 (1988) ↩︎
Ibid., at 451. ↩︎
Ibid., at 451-452. ↩︎
Ibid., at 453. ↩︎
Ibid., at 453. ↩︎
Ibid., at 452. ↩︎
Ibid., at 453. ↩︎
Ibid., at 465. ↩︎
Ibid., at 467. ↩︎
Ibid., at 467–468. ↩︎
Ibid., at 473. ↩︎
Ibid., at 473 and at 476–477. ↩︎
21St Cong., 1st sess., H.R. Rep. No. 227, Feb. 24, 1830. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Francis Newton Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies New or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, Compiled and Edited under the Act of Congress of June 30, 1906, Vol. I, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909, pp. 45–46. ↩︎
What Justice Scalia Said He Didn’t Know About U.S. Indian Law, Steven Newcomb, ICT News, 26 Feb 2016 ↩︎

Revoke the Papal Bulls

2023-05-03T00:00:00Z

In response to the Papal Bulls issued

530 years ago today and tomorrow (3 and 4 May 1493):

Indigenous Law Institute
and Original Nations Advocates

“Revoke the Papal Bulls”

A View-from-the-Shore Analysis of the
Vatican’s 30 March 2023 Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery

by Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape)

The Context

Let us set the context for this discussion. The context begins with the free existence of our Native nations and peoples, extending back to the beginning of our time through our oral histories and traditions, contrasted with the system of domination that was carried by ship across the ocean and imposed on everyone and everything. From that starting point we end up with a non-Christian view-from-the-shore with our Ancestors looking out at the invading ships sailing from Western Christendom, and a view-from-the-ship perspective, with the colonizers moving toward our Ancestors with the intention of establishing the Christian empire’s system of domination where it did not yet exist. Below we discuss the recent Vatican Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery with a view-from-the-shore perspective, while realizing that the Vatican officials wrote their statement with a view-from-the-ship (church) perspective.

The Indigenous Law Institute

In 1992, Birgil Kills Straight (1940-2019) (a traditional Head Man and ceremonial leader of the Oglala Lakota Nation) and I founded the Indigenous Law Institute (ILI), and began a global campaign regarding the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery.” We began of efforts by calling upon then Pope John Paul II (JPII) to formally revoke a 1493 papal bull, Inter Caetera, which Pope Alexander VI issued shortly after Columbus returned to Western Christendom from the Bahamas. In 1993, we presented our call for a revocation of the papal bull of May 4, 1493 to the Parliament of the World’s Religions, and assisted with the drafting of a resolution titled, “Declaration of Vision: Toward the Next 500 Years.”

Guided by our deep appreciation of Birgil’s wisdom and mentorship, we continue with our efforts, and we are maintaining our call for the Holy See to revoke the papal bull of May 4, 1493. We continue to carry on our global campaign against the patterns of domination unleashed on the planet by those ancient Vatican documents, which have been imposed on Indigenous nations and peoples and incorporated into U.S. federal-indian-law and Canadian Indian law.

After thirty years of effort and momentum, the Vatican Dicastery for culture and Education, and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, issued a “Joint Statement” on the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The Vatican stopped short of a revocation of the May 4th papal bull, issuing instead a “repudiation of the doctrine of discovery.” The following analysis is intended to take a closer look at the Vatican statement, while explaining some usually overlooked connections between the Bible and what we prefer to call the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination.

Matthew 28:18-20 in the Bible Expresses a Mandate to Baptize All Nations. That, and the Mandate of Genesis 1:28, are Traced to a Number of Papal Bulls Issued During the Fifteenth Century

The opening sentence of the Vatican’s March 30th statement refers to a “mandate received from Christ.” That mandate is sometimes known as “the faith-sharing mandate” and “The Great Commission.” In that biblical passage from the Vulgate Bible (Matthew 28:18-20), Jesus is quoted as saying, “All authority [potestas, in Latin] in heaven and on earth has been given to me [Jesus Christ]. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (emphasis added) In other words, baptize them and make them followers of Christ. This has been described as “the Lord’s world-wide commission.” (A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, Ed., Gore, Goudge, and Guillaume, 1928, p. 204)

Some Vatican officials might say that the reference to a “mandate” in the March 30th Statement is not “reducible to a single text” from the Bible, otherwise that specific text would have been quoted. They might say that the reference to “the mandate received from Christ” is “a general summary mandate that reflects Scripture, as well as the evolving understanding of the Church’s mission.” Nonetheless, the word “mandate” is accurately interpreted as being inclusive of what has been expressed as the “world-wide commission” found in Matthew 28:18-20.

In the context of a world-wide mandate, the phrase “Go therefore” is accurately interpreted as, “to move forward and proceed on a course or path toward the fulfillment of an intention or a destination.” In order to fulfill the biblical mandate (intention) to make disciples of all nations, baptize them, and teach them to obey (be properly subordinate to) the commandments of Jesus, certain popes understood that it was necessary to identify or discover the distant and remote location of all non-Christian nations of the world.

No Pope was going to set sail on a voyage of “discovery.” However, certain popes did issue documents purporting to give or grant Christian monarchs the divine right to “discover and conquer” the distant lands of infidels. This pattern demonstrates how the Catholic Church’s Great Commission, based on Jesus Christ’s directive to make disciples of, and baptize all nations, logically resulted in a papally authorized effort to “discover,” “conquer,” and establish domination over distant non-Christian nations and their lands.

Pope Francis’s Environmental Encyclical, Laudato Si

In 2015, Pope Francis issued his Encyclical Laudato Si, which is regarded as the most comprehensive papal statement on the environment. Although we only have space to reference it in passing, we do want to acknowledge the Encyclical as being applicable to this discussion. Laudato Si begins:

_“LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”._In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.
2. This sister [the Earth] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. [emphasis added]

While the above style of writing sounds positive, it appropriates without attribution the “Indigenous” expression “Mother Earth,” and the words of the above passage lack both historical context and any acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples. Use of the third person “we” and “our” is ambiguous. To whom do “we” and “our” refer? No doubt the Holy See has used those words with the intention of referencing humanity as a whole. The document is written in a manner that implies that the Vatican and the Holy See have always subscribed to St. Francis of Assissi’s view of nature.

What seems odd about the above use of language by Pope Francis, however, is that it fails to acknowledge the worldviews and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, and the fact that they do not consider themselves to be “lords and masters” of the Earth, or consider themselves entitled to “plunder” the Earth at will. These are Christian European conceptions that include the Vatican papal bulls of the fifteenth century (three of which we quote below), and the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination.

The Book of Genesis in Laudato Si

Chapter Two of Laudato Si, is titled “The Gospel of Creation.” There we find the subheading: “II. The Wisdom of the Biblical Accounts.” At paragraph 66, Pope Francis states:

“The creation accounts in the book of Genesis contain . . . profound teachings about human existence and its historical reality.” Pope Francis says that “human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself.” He further says that “three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us.” He continues:

This rupture is sin. The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our mandate to “have dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to “till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). As a result, the originally harmonious relationship between human beings and nature became conflictual (cf. Gen 3:17-19).

Harmony is defined in Webster’s as, “agreement between the parts of a design or composition giving unity of effect or an aesthetically pleasing whole.” (emphasis added) Webster’s also defines harmony as, “A systematic arrangement of parallel passages, as of the Gospels, to show their agreement.” The opposite of “agreement” is “disagreement,” “a state being at variance.” To disagree is “to fail to agree, to differ.” Webster’s defines “genesis” as, “to be born,” and “The coming into being of anything,” as well as, and in a biblical context, “a first account of creation.”

In a sense Genesis of the Bible forms the premise of the story of creation and of the Christian European universe. Strangely, however, part of the mandate from God which is portrayed in Genesis 1:28—to subdue and dominate—assumes a position of hostility, enmity, and opposition toward the Earth, and, by implication, and eventually, toward the Indigenous nations and peoples of the Earth. The term subdue suggests “to conquer and bring into subjection” which are terms of war.

Pope Francis’s claim in Laudato Si that there was an original “harmony” between “the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole” is contradicted by the Latin words in Gen. 1:28 found in the Vulgate Bible: “. . .Crescite et multiplicamini [grow and multiply] et replete terram [and fill the earth], et subicite eam [and subdue [i.e., dominate] it], et dominamini piscibus maris [i.e., dominate the fish of the sea], et volatilibus caeli [and the birds of the air] et universis animantibus [and all living things], quae moventur [which are moving] super terram [above ground].”

Laudato Si refers to Genesis 1:28 as a “mandate.” Pope Francis says that humans “presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations”
was what “distorted our mandate [from God] to ‘have dominion’ over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to ‘till it and keep it’ (_Gen_2:15).” To distort is “to wrest from the true meaning; to pervert.” He appears to be saying that the mandate to “subdue” and “dominate” the Earth is a mandate to have a “harmonious relationship” with the Earth. Laudato Si suggests that this “correct” interpretation of “subdue” and “dominate” has wrongly portrayed humans as being in conflict with the Earth.

However, the Latin words for mandate (imperatum, iussum, and mandatum) definitely convey a sense of domination and conflict, as do the words “subicite” and “dominamini” from Genesis 1:28 in the Latin Vulgate Bible. It thus makes no sense to conceive of a God-given mandate to subdue and dominate the Earth (and “all living things which are moving above ground”) as creating a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. Given God’s command to subdue and dominate the Earth (“nature”), in that context the biblical story of creation portrays humanity as being in_conflict_ with the Earth, and by extension in conflict with the Indigenous peoples of the Earth. We see this manifested in the history of Christendom invading war against non-Christian nations and peoples and waging war against them.

The Collective Punishment and Domination of Women in the Bible

In Chapter Two, Laudato Si cites Genesis 3:17-19, thereby conveniently avoiding Genesis 3:16, according to which “a loving God” condemns Eve, and, by extension, all women after her, to an everlasting collective punishment: “To the woman also he [God] said: I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions; in sorrow shall thou bring forth children, and, thou shalt be under thy husband’s power [“potestate” in Latin], and he shall have dominion [dominabitur, in Latin (i.e., domination)] over thee.”

All across the planet women have suffered and continue to suffer from the application of this kind of theologically backed thinking and behavior toward them, based on the belief that God condemned womankind to existing “under” the potestate (power) of the husband and subject to the idea that “the husband shall have dominion [domination] over his wife” as ordained by God. As a present-day example, think of the murdered and missing Indigenous women in both Canada and the United States.

Genesis 3:16 quoted above, and 3:17-19 quoted below, tell us that the deity of Genesis does not behave in the dignified manner of an Indigenous Elder, but instead judges and condemns, for the God of the Bible is depicted as saying to Adam: “Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life.” (emphasis added) Genesis 3:18 states: “Thorns and thistles shall it [the earth] bring forth to thee; and thou eat the herbs of the earth.” And, at Genesis 3:19, we find: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to earth, out of which thou was taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.

Paragraph 66 of Laudato Si refers to “sin” as being “manifest in all its destructive power in wars, the various forms of violence and abuse, the abandonment of the most vulnerable, and attacks on nature.” The Holy See produced documents repeatedly during the fifteenth century that authorized and encouraged “wars, [and] various forms of violence and abuse,” as well “attacks on nature.” It’s March 30th statement fails to acknowledge this.

Paragraph 67 states “We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us.” Laudato Si continues: “This allows us to respond to the charge that Judeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man ‘dominion’ over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church,” says the Pope. Laudato Si continues:

Although it is true that we Christians have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures, nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures. [emphasis added]

“Nowadays” is the key word. This is evidently an updated way of understanding the Bible. However, it is not the interpretation of the Bible that was used as the basis of the papal decrees from the fifteenth century, which are traced to the story of the Chosen People and the Promised Land.

The Chosen People Promised Land Narrative Used Against Indigenous Nations and Peoples

At Genesis 15:7 we find “the Lord” [Dominus, “he who has dominated” in Latin] telling Abram “I am the Lord who brought thee out from Ur of the Chaldees, to gibe thee this land, and that thou mightest possess it.” The deity does not merely give the land to Abram; he is also giving the Indigenous peoples who were already living in the “promised land” of Canaan. Thus the Old Testament deity says to Abram (who becomes Abraham):

That day God made a covenant with Abram, saying: To thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great river Euphrates.

The grammatical colon indicates that a list of items is to follow, and, in this case, the items listed are the Indigenous peoples living in the land the Old Testament deity is promising to Abram: “The Cineans and Cenezites, the Cedmonites, And the Hethites, and the Pherezites, the Raphaim also, And the Amorrhites, and the Chanaanits, and the Gergesites, and the Jebusites.” (King James version: “The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”)

Abram and his descendants are to receive from the deity the land and the Indigenous peoples, as it states in Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I will give thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.” (King James version: “Ask of me and I shall give to thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”) Given that an inheritance is a form of property, which has been defined as “the first establishment of socially approved physical domination over some part of the natural world” (Liebman and Haar, Property and Law, 1986, p. 1), Psalms 2:8 presupposes a right of domination [“property”] over the Indigenous peoples.

Additionally, in Deuteronomy 20:10-18, the Old Testament deity commands the Hebrew soldiers to apply a genocidal logic and behavior toward the Indigenous peoples living in the lands the deity promised them:

But of those cities that shall be given thee, thou shalt suffer none at all to live: But shalt kill them with the edge of the sword, to wit, the Hethite, and the Amorrhite, and the Chanaanite, the Pherezite, and the Hevite, and the Jebusite, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. [emphasis added]

King James version: But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: but thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perrizites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord thy God has commanded thee. [emphasis added]

This command to “utterly destroy” and thereby nullify Indigenous peoples is also a biblical mandate. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, and later centuries, the Holy See and monarchies of Christendom, lifted the Old Testament narrative of the chosen people and the promised land from the geographical area of the Middle East and began carrying it over, metaphorically, to the rest of the globe, particularly to the western hemisphere. Key biblical passages provided a mental basis for the globalization of the Chosen People-Promised Land model of thought and behavior during the so-called Age of Discovery.

Attitudes from the Old Testament covenant tradition have had a tremendous ability to persist in Christian European thought over time. In 1557, for example, four and a half centuries after the sacking of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D. during the First Crusade, Pedro de Santander, an official of the Catholic Church, advocated for Philip II, emperor of Spain, to apply the Old Testament conceptual tradition of the Promised Land in his treatment of the Native peoples in Florida:

This is the Land of Promise, possessed by idolator, the Amorite, Amulekite, Moabit, Canaanite. This is the land promised by the Eternal Father to the Faithful, since we are commanded by God in the Holy Scripture to take it from them, being idolators, and, by reason of their idolatry and sin, to put them all to the knife, leaving no living thing save maidens and children, their cities robbed and sacked, their walls and houses leveled to the earth.

The Right of Discovery

In his 1888 article, “Right of Discovery,” B. A. Hinsdale elaborated on this Catholic way of thinking that considered it acceptable to genocidally nullify or negate the original nations and peoples of the continent. He explains the emergence of the category “nullus,” which, he says, Francis Lieber traced to the Catholic Church. As Hinsdale explains:

Practically, discovery, when consummated [by possession], was conquest [domination], but theoretically, it was something very different. An enemy overcome in battle was nullus according to the Roman law, but another definition, and one more consonant [in keeping] with the temper of the times, was now adopted. This definition was supplied by the Roman [Catholic] Church.

The new definition of nullus was, a heathen, pagan, infidel, or unbaptized person. “Paganism, which meant being unbaptized,” says Dr. [Francis] Lieber “deprived the individual of those rights which a true jural morality considers inherent in each human being.” The same writer [Dr. Lieber] also states that the Right of Discovery is founded “on the principle that what belongs to no one [may] be appropriated by the finder,” but this principle becomes effectual only when supplemented by the Church definition of nullus. That definition supplied the lacking premise in the demonstration. Grant that res nullius is the property of the finder; that an infidel is nullus; that the American savage is an infidel, and the argument is complete. That the Church, one of whose great duties is to protect the weak and helpless, should have supplied one-half the logic that justified the spoilation and enslavement of the heathen, is one of the anomalies of history.

In his essay, Hinsdale follows Francis Lieber’s lead in making a direct connection between the Roman law concept of res nullius, the Catholic Church’s religious concept of nullus (notice the different spelling of the two terms), and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. McIntosh ruling of 1823, which distinguishes between “Christian people” and “natives, who were heathens”. Nullus is the basis of what we are able to accurately term the Doctrine of Pagan or Infidel Non-Existence. It isn’t that the peoples don’t exist physically. It’s that the intellectuals of the Christian world mentally refused to allow non-Christian peoples to be regarded as possessing a right of domination (i.e., “sovereignty,” “property,” and “dominion”) that could enable them to block and protect themselves against the Christian monarchs’ claim of a right of domination against them.

A number of Catholic theologians such as Bartolome de Las Casas, and Juan Sepulveda, and Francisco de Vitoria followed these lines of argumentation in their leading positions in the intellectual world of Western Christendom during the so-called Age of Discovery. In his amazing book Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law(2004), international law scholar Antony Anghie points out that Francisco de Vitoria, for example, “based his conclusion that the Indians are not sovereign on the simple assertion that they are pagans.” Anghie further says:

The distinction [that Vitoria made] between the Indians and the Spanish was . . . emphatic and well developed. Indeed, in the final analysis, the most unequivocal proposition Vitoria advances as to the character of the sovereign is that the sovereign, the entity empowered to wage a just war, cannot, by definition, be an Indian.

Anghie continues:

Since the Indians are by definition incapable of waging a just war, they exist within the Vitorian framework only as violators of the law. [emphasis added] The normal principles of just war, which would prohibit the enslaving of women and children, do not apply in the case of the pagan Indians:

Anghie then quotes Vitoria as follows:

And so when the war is at that pass [point] that the indiscriminate spoilation [plunder] of all enemy-subjects alike and the seizure of all their goods are justifiable, then it is also justifiable to carry all enemy-subjects off into captivity, whether they be guilty or guiltless. And inasmuch as war with pagans is of this type, seeing that it is perpetual and they can never make amends for the wrongs and damages they have wrought, it is indubitably lawful to carry off both the children and women of the Saracens into captivity and slavery. [p. 27]

This Christian “logic” of treating non-Christians as enemies provides a rationale for the theft and kidnapping of Indian children from their families, and wrongfully forcing them into deadly boarding “schools” and residential “schools” as part of the genocidal process of intentionally destroying whatever holds a People together (e.g., their language, culture, and spiritual traditions) as a distinct nation. Anghie continues: “Once fault is established” [based on an imposed framework of domination] “as the above passage suggests, the war waged against the Indians is, in Vitoria’s phraseology, ‘perpetual’. Similarly, in his discussion of whether it is lawful and expedient to kill all the guilty, Vitoria suggests that this may be necessary because of the unique case of the unredeemable Indian. Vitoria further states:

and this is especially the case [in a war] against the unbeliever, from whom it is useless ever to hope for a just peace on any terms. And as the only remedy is to destroy all of them who can bear arms against us, provided they have already been in fault. [emphasis added]

Anghie sums up by saying: “These conclusions stand in curious juxtaposition to other parts of Vitoria’s work, where he emphasizes the humanity of the Indians.” And, “it is the Indian who acts as the object against which the powers of sovereignty [domination] may be exercised in the most extreme ways.” This mentality can be traced into U.S. federal-indian-law and policy, such as the doctrine of the plenary power of Congress.

A Hypothetical Scenario

In a spirit of historical truth-telling, Pope Francis could have stated the following in Laudato Si: “A number of my predecessors, during the fifteenth century, supported Christian monarchs to view themselves as ‘lords and masters’, whom we believe, were entitled, with the support of the Divine Majesty, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy See, to plunder the Earth, and the Indigenous peoples of the Earth.”

Pope Francis would have exhibited tremendous courageous if he had stated: “In the papal bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455, for example, we find the Holy See’s support for the belief in a divine entitlement to plunder the Earth, and establish domination over the Indigenous peoples of the Earth.”

Some Text from Romanus Pontifex

The connection between Romanus Pontifex, Genesis 1:28, Genesis 15:7, Matthew 28:18-20,2:8, Psalms:2:8 and other biblical passages contradicts Point 6 of the Vatican’s March 30th statement, “The ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church.” Given that Matthew 28:18-20 is one of the central teachings of the Catholic Church, and given that a fulfillment of Matthew 28:18-20 logically requires that the location of all distant non-Christian nations be identified, it is nonsensical and farcical for the Vatican to assert that the claimed right of discovery is not part of the teachings Catholic Church.

After all, Jesus Christ’s mandate to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations and baptize them” frames the Christian teaching to go forth to carry out Christ’s “mandate.” From within the Christian worldview, Christ’s mandate creates the claimed right to carry out the mandate. The opening of Romanus Pontifex helps to illustrate this point:

Nicholas, bishop, servant of the servants of God. For a perpetual remembrance.

The Roman pontiff, successor of [St. Peter] the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom and vicar of Christ, contemplating with a father’s mind all the several climes [regions] of the world and the characteristics of all the nations [emphasis added] dwelling in them [those regions] and seeking and desiring the [Christian] salvation [through the baptism and obedience] of all [infidel nations]. . . [European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, 1917, pp. 20-21]

The phrase “all the nations” in the bull Romanus Pontifex matches the phrase “all nations” in Matthew 28. In order to make disciples of “all nations” and to baptize them, it is first necessary to identify (“discover”) the geographical location of those nations, so that a right of Christian domination can be asserted over and against them.

More Evidence of the Connection Between Matthew 28:18-20, the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex, and the Theology of Domination

Romanus Pontifex continues: The Roman pontiff “wholesomely ordains and disposes [gives,] . . . [after] careful deliberation [upon] those things which he [the pontiff] sees will be agreeable to the Divine Majesty [i.e., God] and by [means of] which he [the pontiff] may bring the [infidel] sheep entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold, and may acquire for them the reward of eternal felicity [joy], and obtain pardon for their souls.” [European Treaties, p. 21]

The view that the pope is referring to “infidel” sheep is illustrated by a section of the book Kings Or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (1978, p. 254), by Reinhard Bendix, where we find reference to a papal bull issued one year prior to Romanus Pontifex: “The papal bull of 1454 granted Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) ‘the right, total and absolute, to invade, conquer, and subject all the countries which are under the rule of the enemies of Christ,’ adding the missionary charge that these ‘perfidious enemies of Christ should be brought into the Catholic fold’.”

Lyle N. McAlister, in Spain and Portugal in the New World (1984), explains the rationale behind the papal bulls of 1452 and 1454, as it was espoused by Cardinal Henry of Susa (d. 1271), better known as Hostiensis:

When Christ came into the world, Hostiensis declared, temporal as well as spiritual lordship over all its peoples passed immediately to Him. This faculty he transmitted to His legitimate successors, the bishops of Rome, who came to be called popes. Roman pontiffs, in turn, could delegate lordship over non-Christian lands to a Christian prince, thus conveying a just title to such lands, and, if the inhabitants resisted, a just war could be waged against the recalcitrants. [p. 52]

In Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V says he has deliberated carefully upon those things which he believes would be agreeable to God (the Divine Majesty), and by means of which he, as pontiff, may successfully bring the infidel sheep entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold, and thereby acquire for them the reward of the Catholic faith and Christian religion. As we shall see below, this is to be carried out by vanquishing and subjecting the infidels. The bull Romanus Pontifex continues:

This [effort to bring the sheep entrusted to us. . . into the single divine fold] . . . will more certainly come to pass, through the aid of the Lord [Domino in Latin], if we [the pontiff] bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, who . . . not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels . . . but also vanquish [crush] them [the infidels] and their kingdoms and habitations, though situated in the remotest parts [of the world] unknown to us, and subject [dominate] them to their [the monarchs’] own temporal dominion [domination], sparing no labor and expense, in order that those kings and princes, relieved of all obstacles, may be the more animated to the prosecution of so salutary and laudable work [of evangelism]. [emphasis added]

The language from Romanus Pontifex illustrates the connection between “the doctrine of Christian discovery” and the Theology of Domination. “Discover” refers to the sailing expeditions to identify what Pope Nicholas V called those “remote parts of the world” where non-Christian peoples (“infidels”) were living and where Christian domination had not yet been imposed. The pope’s language expresses an intention to “subject” the infidels to the temporal domination (“dominio” in the Latin text) of the Portuguese monarchy. The language of Romanus Pontifex provides strong evidence that the Holy See at that time believed that the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination was intrinsic to “the teaching of the Catholic Church.”

Additional Content from the Vatican’s March 30th Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery

The Vatican’s March 30th statement claims that the “mandate received from Christ” causes the Catholic Church to strive to promote “universal fraternity and respect for the dignity of every human being.” Again, no historical context for the statement is provided. The statement says “the Popes” have worked to uphold that mandate by condemning “acts of violence, oppression, social injustice and slavery, including those committed against indigenous peoples.”

The phrase “the Popes have condemned acts of” makes it seem as if all popes throughout the history of the Catholic Church have condemned such acts. The exception to this assertion would be any popes who encouraged Christians to commit acts of violence and oppression, slavery and social injustice against non-Christian nations and peoples. Pope Nicholas V and his documents Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex are glaring examples of such as exception.

The Vatican’s implied claim that all popes in the history of the Church condemned acts of “violence, oppression, social injustice and slavery” is patently ridiculous and demonstrably false given Nicholas’s papal directive to King Alfonso V of Portugal in Romanus Pontifex. In fact, by using language from the 1452 papal bull Dum Diversas, Nicholas V exhorted the Portuguese king to send his representatives to the western coast of Africa in order “to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” all non-Christians, “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery” and “take away all their possessions and property.”

In the aforementioned Kings or People, Reinhold Bendix continues: “Portugal had pioneered this expansion [of domination], but soon the other European powers vied with Portugal for commercial supremacy on the high seas and in overseas settlement. Westward expansion [of domination] to the Americas also began from the Iberian peninsula.” (p. 255) Thus we see evidence of papal advocacy in favor of acts of violence, oppression, injustice, and slavery against non-Christian nations and peoples. The papal bulls of 1493 also express patterns of domination that were carried to the Western Hemisphere and to other areas of the globe, as illustrated in our discussion of Point 6 below.

Point 3 of the Vatican statement says: “[R]espect for the facts of history demands an acknowledgment of the human weakness and failings of Christ’s disciples in every generation. Many Christians have committed evil acts against indigenous peoples for which recent Popes have asked forgiveness on numerous occasions.” The category “Christ’s disciples” includes the popes who called for the domination of non-Christian Indigenous nations and peoples. It is a massive trivialization to say that the language directing Christian monarchs to establish domination over non-Christians is merely evidence of “human weakness” and “failings.”

Point 4 of the Vatican statement reads: “In our own day, a renewed dialogue with indigenous peoples, especially with those [indigenous people] who profess the Catholic Faith, has helped the Church to understand better their [indigenous] values and cultures. With their help, the Church has acquired a greater awareness of their sufferings, past and present, due to the [papally sanctioned] expropriation [domination] of their lands, which they consider a sacred gift from God and their ancestors…” In contrast to our insertion of clarifying words here, the Vatican statement does not acknowledge that some popes sanctioned the expropriation of Indigenous peoples and their lands.

Point 4 refers to the “sufferings” of Indigenous peoples, resulting from “policies of forced assimilation [domination], promoted by governmental authorities of the time, [policies which were] intended to eliminate their indigenous cultures” [and to genocidally eliminate the indigenous peoples themselves]. Point 4 continues: “As Pope Francis has emphasized, their [Indigenous peoples’] sufferings [brought about by the language of the Vatican papal bulls issued over the course of generations,] constitute a powerful summons to [the Church to] abandon the colonizing mentality and to walk with them side by side, in mutual respect and dialogue, recognizing the rights and cultural values of all individuals and peoples.”

The degree of denial exhibited in the Vatican’s March 30th statement does not signal a willingness to be explicit about the consequences of the “colonizing mentality” that the Vatican now says needs to be “abandoned.” The Vatican Statement goes on to say: “It is in this context of listening to indigenous peoples that the Church has heard the importance of addressing the concept referred to as the doctrine of discovery.”

As noted above, since 1992 the Indigenous Law Institute has communicated with priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and with three popes by letter, and with Pope Francis in person, about the idea-patterns and behavioral patterns of domination created by the papal bulls of the fifteenth century. But the Vatican has failed to take seriously and explicitly acknowledge the central and crucial aspect of our analysis. The Vatican claims their statement is an effort to “walk with” indigenous peoples “side by side,” in “mutual respect and dialogue.” Yet the Vatican has declined to adopt Steven Newcomb’s well-documented terminology of domination in its March 30 statement even one time.

Point 4 ends by stating: “In this regard, the Church is committed to accompany indigenous peoples and to foster efforts aimed at promoting reconciliation and healing.” Note that the word “reconciliation” is a term of art in Catholic theology. It refers to a ceremony of restoration of a person’s relationship with the Church. It implies that there was an original beneficial relationship between a person and the Church that can be restored. By using that word in its statement, the Vatican is implying that the invading colonizers had a beneficial relationship with the original nations that fell apart and needs to be “restored.” But authentic healing must be premised on a candid reckoning with past patterns of destruction in the papal bulls which continue to afflict us in the present.

Point 5 of the Vatican statement reads: “It in this context of listening to indigenous peoples that the Church has heard the importance of addressing the concept referred to as the ‘doctrine of discovery’.” Notice how the Vatican continues to make it seem as if the concept of “discovery” is the important issue that Indigenous nations and peoples have been calling for the Holy See to address. In actuality, what we have been wanting to discuss and address with the Vatican is the claim of a right of domination expressed in the Vatican papal bulls that has been extended throughout the world.

The Vatican’s statement attempts to draw the reader’s attention away from the Holy See with the following words: “The legal concept of ‘discovery’ was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries . . .” A discerning eye will notice that this focus on the sixteenth century avoids the fifteenth century, which is when the papal bulls in question were issued that sanctioned what happened in the sixteenth. This makes it seem as if the Catholic Church was not one of the “colonial powers.” Additionally, it was Catholic theologians who debated the significance of the Native identity.

Point 6 of the statement begins: “The ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church.” This assertion has been partly dealt with above at the outset of this analysis, and in the paragraph above. Let us now add some text from the papal bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander VI, dated May 4, 1493 to show the theme of domination found in other papal bulls:

Among other works well pleasing to the Divine Majesty [God] and cherished of our heart, this assuredly ranks highest, that in our times especially the Catholic faith and Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for [through baptism] and that barbarous nations be overthrown [forced under domination] and brought to the faith itself. . . . [W]e therefore are rightly led, and hold it as our duty, to grant you . . . those things whereby . . . you may be enabled for the honor of God and the spread of the Christian rule [domination] to carry forward your holy and praiseworthy purpose so pleasing to immortal God.

We have indeed learned that you . . for a long time had intended to seek out and discover certain islands and mainlands remote and unknown and not hitherto discovered by others, to the end that you might bring to the worship of our Redeemer and the profession of the Catholic faith their residents and inhabitants . . .[Y]ou have purposed with the favor of [God’s] divine clemency to bring under your sway [domination] the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith. Commending in the Lord this your holy and praiseworthy purpose, and desirous that it be duly accomplished, and that the name of our Savior be carried into those regions, we exhort you very earnestly to the Lord and by your reception of holy baptism, whereby you are bound by our apostolic commands, and by the bowels of the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, enjoin strictly, that . . . you purpose also . . . to lead the people dwelling in those islands and countries to embrace the Christian religion. . . [W]e, of our own accord, . . . out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the Authority of Almighty God conferred upon us in blessed Peter and of the vicarship of Jesus Christ, which we hold on earth, do by tenor of these presents, . . . give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, with all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands, found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered. . . [European Treaties, 1917, pp. 75-77]

Point 6 of the Vatican statement asserts: “Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith. At the same time, the Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples.”

The Vatican statement fails to say what historical research it is referencing as the basis for the above assertion. It seems strange for the Vatican to claim that the papal documents of the fifteenth century are not “expressions of the Catholic faith.” We have quoted above many examples of the Catholic faith in the “Divine Majesty” and “Almighty God” being invoked in those documents. Faith may be understood as having “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”; in the papal bull of May 4, 1493 we find a sentence that is an expression of the Catholic faith: “We trust [confidentes, in Latin] in Him from whom empires and dominations and all good things proceed.”

An expression of faith or confidence in the deity of the Catholic Church (“Him”) is certainly an expression of Catholic faith. In this language we see the assertion by Pope Alexander VI that the Deity of the Catholic Church is the source or origin of empires and dominations and “all good things” (wealth and power) that result from empires and dominations, such as the 177 million acres of land and incalculable wealth in the possession of the Vatican as a result of the fifteenth century papal bulls.

Point 6 of the statement continues: “The Church is also aware that the contents of these documents [of domination] were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples, that were carried out, at times, [for centuries], without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities. It is only just to recognize these errors, acknowledge the terrible effects of [the Holy See’s papal bulls of domination, as well as] the assimilation policies and the pain experienced by indigenous peoples, and ask for pardon [for the Church oppressing them for centuries].”

Point 6 states: “Furthermore, Pope Francis has urged ‘Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others’ [in keeping with the patterns of domination found in the papal bulls].” There is also no mention or disavowal of “the idea that one religion is superior to others.”

Point 7 of the statement reads: “In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic [Universal] Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’.” This implies that the Church’s magisterium has always upheld “the respect due to every human being,” which is obviously contradicted by the Holy See declarations that non-Christian “pagan” and “infidel” peoples are to be invaded, captured, vanquished, and subdued, reduced to perpetual slavery, so that all their possessions and property could be plundered and stripped from them, and expropriated by the Christian world.

Point 8 of the statement reads: “Numerous and repeated statements by the Church and the Popes uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, in the 1537 bull Sublimus Deus, Pope Paul III wrote: ‘We define and declare […] that […] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possessions and property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect’.”

While the Vatican had no difficulty quoting the positive language from the papal bull Sublimis Deus, the March 30, 2023, statement does not include any quote from the language of domination found in the earlier papal bulls. The Vatican statement also fails to include the fact that the Sublimis Deus was revoked under pressure from Spanish Emperor, Charles V.

In the book Red Man’s Land, White Man’s Law (1971), Wilcomb Washburn quotes the papal bull _Sublimis Deus_issued by Pope Paul II in 1537. In part the language states that the Indians are to be considered “truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.” That declaration was in keeping with Matthew 28:18-20, to make disciples of all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Washburn then states: “It was a noble try but to little avail. Emperor Charles ordered confiscated and returned to the Council of the Indies all copies of the bull that might have found their way to the New World. At the same time he [the Emperor] prevailed upon the Pope, ten days later, to revoke the bull. Minaya, [the Dominican priest who appealed to Pope Paul III to issue a papal bull favorable to the Indians], was imprisoned for failing to go through proper channels, was thrown in prison by the general of the Dominican order.” (p. 13) The pope removed all ecclesiastical penalties associated with Sublimis Deus, such as excommunication and interdict.

Papal Bulls Invoked in 1680 by the Spanish Crown in the Compilation of the Laws of the Indies

The papal bull Sublimis Deus did not revoke the earlier papal bulls from the fifteenth century, which were made by Pope Alexander VI, for example, “en perpetua” (eternally or forever). In A Violent Evangelism (1992), Dr. Luis Rivera-Pagán points to the 1680 Compilation of the Leyes de Indias [Laws of the Indies], produced one hundred forty-three years after the papal bull of 1537. Rivera-Pagán states: “In the juridical area, the Alexandrine bulls maintained their authorized character, as shown by the first sentence in the first law of the first chapter of the third book of ‘the Compilation of the Leyes de Indias’ (1680), which recognizes them [the papal bulls of 1493] as the first foundation for the possession in perpetuity of the Americas by the Crown of Castilla.” (emphasis added) If those bulls had been abrogated or revoked by the papal bull of 1537, there would be no basis upon which the Spanish crown could continue to invoke them:

“By donation from the Apostolic Holy See . . . we are Lord of the Western Idies, isles and mainlands of the Ocean Sea, discovered and to be discovered and incorporated into our Royal Crown of Castile . . . [so that] they may always remain united for their greater perpetuity and firmness, we forbid them being taken away.”…

“This law,” says Dr. Luis Rivera-Pagan, “is based on consecutive royal declarations by Carlos V and Philip II, who during the sixteenth century propounded the doctrine of Castilian dominion [domination] in perpetuity over the Ibero-American peoples. All those declarations alluded to the Alexandrian bulls as the crucial point of reference.” [p. 32]

Point 9 of the statement reads: “More recently, the Church’s solidarity with indigenous peoples has given rise to the Holy See’s strong support for the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The implementation of those principles would improve their living conditions and help protect the rights of indigenous peoples as well as facilitate their development in a way that respects their identity, language, and culture.” Unfortunately, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples itself does not explicitly and thoroughly address the system of domination that is being used against Indigenous nations and peoples.

Conclusion

Today Indigenous nations and peoples live with the psychological and other forms of wreckage brought about by the fifteenth-century Vatican documents issued by various popes. How many nations and peoples are no longer existing as a result of those documents? How many languages, evolved over thousands and thousands of years by the ancestors of original nations and peoples, are no longer existing as a result of those destructive documents? How many acres and hectares of land of the original (Indigenous) nations and peoples are now under the claim of a right of domination as a result of those papal bulls? The number of potential questions regarding all of the torment and abuse and suffering caused by the legacy of those documents is staggering.

The Vatican March 30, 2023 statement on the Doctrine of Discovery heightens awareness of the roots of the patterns of domination found in the Vatican papal bulls that were adopted into United States law in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, two hundred years ago this year. Evidence of those religious domination patterns is found in the distinction made in the Johnson ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall between “Christian people” and “natives, who were heathens,” and in his claim of United States “ultimate dominion” [domination]” over “heathen” Native nations and their lands. The U.S. Supreme Court has made the 15th century claims of a right of domination foundational to U.S. federal anti-Indian law and policy, and the claim of the “plenary power” of Congress over “Indians.” This must be changed if there is to be any rightful relationship between the descendants of the colonizers and Indigenous nations and peoples today.

The patterns of domination that were unleashed on the planet by means of the Vatican documents have had devastating consequences that have been manifested in, for example, the theft and kidnapping of our children from their loved ones and families, as well as murdered and missing Indigenous women, the expropriation of our lands and waters, the destruction of our original free existence by robbing us of our liberty and forcing us under a system of domination, the poisoning of our lands, waters, air, and our bloodstreams with toxic chemicals, the attempt to intentionally kill our languages (i.e., Linguicide), intentionally teaching the abuse of women and children, the destruction and desecration of our Sacred and Significant Places, to name just some of the ways in which the Holy See’s papal bulls of the fifteenth century have destructively impacted and continue to destructively impact our original nations and peoples.

How much land of our original nations does the Vatican currently hold as “property” throughout the Western Hemisphere? Every acre [or hectare] of land in the Western hemisphere that is in the possession of the Vatican and the Catholic Church is a result of the papal decrees of the fifteenth century that we are talking about here. If the Vatican is sincere, let’s talk about its land holdings, how the church got ahold of all that land of Indigenous nations and peoples, and how much of their claim of a right of domination they are willing to pull back.

We at the ILI, in solidarity with Original Nations and Peoples, will continue to call upon the Holy See to not simply “renounce” the “doctrine” inherent in the papal bulls, but to revoke the papal bulls themselves. We do this as part of our effort to publicize and challenge the patterns of domination globally and to challenge the patterns of domination expressed in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling and in other legal decisions that are based on Johnson into the 21st century.

The Doctrine Of Discovery: Unmasking The Domination Code

2023-04-30T00:00:00Z

The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code

The film directed by Sheldon Wolfchild, (Dakota) and co-produced by Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape), The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking The Domination Code is a compelling presentation premised on the book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. The film tells the story of how little-known Vatican documents of the fifteenth century resulted in a tragic global momentum of domination and dehumanization. This led to law systems in the U.S. and Canada, and throughout the world, that are still used against Indigenous Nations and Peoples to this day. The film concludes with traditional teachings developed over thousands of years that provide a much-needed healing alternative for humanity and Mother Earth at this time.

Pagans in the Promised Land Book

2023-04-10T00:00:00Z

Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery decodes the hidden Old Testament basis of the Doctrine of Discovery and domination in U.S. federal-indian-law and policy. The book traces the origin of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh to Vatican papal decrees of domination issued by various Catholic popes in the fifteenth century. Those documents claimed the right to locate and dominate non-Christian heathen lands, and Indigenous peoples throughout the planet. Pagans in the Promised Land is an expose which explains how the mentality of the Christian Empire gave birth to federal-indian-law and policy in the United States, and continues on to this day.

Buy the book now.

From pages 112-113:

Why Indian Nations Continue to Be Rightfully Free

Today, the aggregate of ideas known as federal-indian-law and policy posits that indigenous nations and peoples ceased being free as soon as Christian Europeans began mentally categorizing them as less than free. This presupposes, however, that indigenous nations and peoples are subject to the mental processes of the Christian Europeans, and it also assumes a particular understanding of causation: for, according to this viewpoint, the Christian European mental activity of categorizing and conceptualizing is tacitly considered the cause that has had the effect of “making” indigenous peoples no longer free and independent. But given our initial acknowledgment that the indigenous peoples were originally free and independent of the Christian Europeans both physically and mentally, from an indigenous perspective it follows that indigenous peoples were also rightfully free and independent of the Christian European mental activity of categorization and conceptualization. The Europeans could categorize and conceptualize to their hearts’ content, but the indigenous nations still remained rightfully independent of European ideas and judgments. In other words, according to this perspective it is impossible for the ideas and judgments of the Christian European mind to have caused indigenous peoples to no longer be rightfully free. Indeed, according to this view, the original independence of indigenous nations would permanently prevent Christian Europeans from ever legitimately making indigenous nations and peoples unfree by means of Christian European categorization and conceptualization.

These observations raise a curious paradox for the United States. Before one can presume, as the Johnson ruling does, that indigenous nations ceased being free and independent as a result of Christian European mental activity (categorization), it is first necessary to explain how originally independent indigenous peoples had become subject to the mental activities of the Christian Europeans to begin with. Once we posit that the indigenous peoples were independent of the mental activity of the Christian Europeans, then Christian European mental activity could not have caused independent indigenous peoples to be subject to Christian European mental activity. So then what caused indigenous peoples to cease being rightfully free and independent? The answer is nothing did. Indigenous nations and peoples continue to this very day to be rightfully free and independent of the United States and of the mental activity of U.S. government officials. However, federal-indian-law is predicated on the view that the U.S. government has a legitimate plenary authority of dominion over American Indian nations on the basis of the “extravagant pretension” that Christian people discovered heathen lands during the so-called Age of Discovery.

The Doctrine of Christian Domination, the Apache People, and Oak Flat

2021-04-07T00:00:00Z

Sunrise Dance Ceremony at Chi’ Chil Bildagoteel (“Oak Flat”). (Photograph with family permission). © Robin Silver Photography.

By Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape)

The Apache Stronghold case, regarding the Apache Sacred Site (Chi’ Chil Bildagoteel) called “Oak Flat,” is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case has created global publicity, and a number of Christian church groups have filed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs. Those briefs support the Apache peoples’ right to defend their sacred lands, ceremonies, and way of life.

The main argument being made is that the Apaches’ right and freedom to engage in their spiritual traditions at a place on their traditional lands that is deeply sacred to them is about to be destroyed. The Apache people will be irrevocably harmed if their sacred area is destroyed by a corporate effort to accumulate more profit with a proposed copper mining project.

Oak Flat is now threatened by a proposal for a copper mine that will obliterate, by wiping from the face of the planet, the entire existence of that sacred area, by carving it out of the ground. If the project is allowed to go through, it will leave a massive hole one thousand feet deep and two miles wide in the earth where the sacred area is now located.

I find it positive but ironic that Christian church groups are advocating on behalf of the Apache sacred area. It is ironic because the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will be using a Christian-premised reasoning process of domination that is dehumanizing and racist, and based on the mental categories “heathens” and “infidels.” This reasoning process, which is hundreds of years old, regards non-Christians as “enemies” of the world of Christendom.

Let’s begin by examining the premise of the bigoted reasoning process that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will be applying to the Oak Flat case. That premise begins with the belief that the political powers (“the sovereigns”) of the Christian world, and the later successors of those political powers (such as the United States), have a fundamental right to engage in patterns of domination against those peoples the Christian world historically labeled as “heathens” and “infidels.”

Accordingly, if those political powers believe it is necessary to destroy the traditions and ceremonial areas of so-called heathens and infidels because such destruction will benefit “human and Christian civilization [domination],” then so be it. Their sacrifice and suffering is deemed necessary for the greater good of “human society.” After all, it is a long standing tradition of Christendom to regard “heathen” and “infidel” non-Christians as also being “barbarous” and thus not part of the category “human.”

The plain truth of the matter is that the political and legal system of the United States is premised on its claim of a right of Christian domination against Native nations and peoples, such as the Apache. This is based in part on an assertion made in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling of 1823, that a “Christian people” (in the words of Chief Justice Marshall) has a “superior genius” that the “Christian people” are entitled to mentally impose on “natives, who were heathens” (in Marshall’s words).

Using the “character and religion” of the continents’ Native inhabitants as a justification, the “superior genius of Europe” could and did “claim a right of ascendancy,” meaning a right of domination over the Native inhabitants. The claim of a right of domination by a “Christian people” over “heathen” non-Christians is still regarded as the “Supreme Law of the Land” in the United States to this day. This is because the domination reasoning contained in Johnson v. McIntosh is still being actively being used by the U.S. courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

That form of reasoning will be the basis of the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision in the Oak Flat case for the simple reason that those concepts of Christian domination are foundational to the entire U.S. federal-indian-law system, a system which is also traced to the Latin words and ideas of domination found in the Vatican papal bulls of the fifteenth-century and royal charters of England.

As difficult as it may be to believe, it is an inescapable fact that the Ninth Circuit Court will deploy those categories and that kind of domination reasoning toward the Apache and Oak Flat, even if none of those specific words are used. That pattern of reasoning, no matter how wrongful it may seem from today’s viewpoint, will be contained in the reasoning of the judicial precedents that the Ninth Circuit Court will cite and apply to its present day reasoning process.

As the Ninth Circuit Court deliberates on the Oak Flat case, it will continue to prevent our original free and independent nations from living a free existence by relying on the US claim of a right of Christian domination in U.S. law. No matter how cleverly it is kept hidden, this is the mental context framework within which the Oak Flat case is being addressed by the U.S. court system.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has already demonstrated its willingness to apply the domination reasoning process toward the Kumeyaay Nation. It did so in a 2014 ancestral remains case, White v. University of California. In footnote 2 of its decision, the court cited to both Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States (1955) and Johnson v. McIntosh (1823). The content of that footnote along with the court’s citation of the Johnson ruling make it evident that the Ninth Circuit Court was using a reasoning process based on the claim of a right of Christian domination. Footnote 2 in White v. University of California reads:

“Aboriginal interest in land generally is described as a tribe’s right to occupy the land. It is not a property right, but amounts to a right of occupancy which the sovereign grants and protects against intrusion by third parties. Tee–Hit–Ton Indians v. United States, 348 U.S. 272, 279 (1955).”

The phrase “the sovereign” translates to “the dominator” (dominor in Latin). According to the overall mental rules of the domination system, the Dominator (“sovereign”) “grants” the Indians a mere “right of occupancy” that does not included any power of dominion. That language means it is up to the United States as the Dominator (“sovereign”) to decide what kind of rights, if any, it is willing to concede to the Indians in the mental world of the United States.

The U.S. government has decided that “Indians,” such as the Apache, are to be categorized as “tribes,” that, from the mental viewpoint of the United States, have no a right of “property” to the lands with which they have traditionally experienced a cultural and spiritual relationship for thousands of years.

The Dominator (“sovereign”) U.S. government refuses to accept the idea that any Indian nation or “tribe” may contradict the Dominator’s right of domination, otherwise known as “property.” The Dominator refuses to recognize the Indian “right of occupancy” that it has mentally imposed on Native nations and peoples as including a right of property.

Stated differently, the Dominator U.S. government refuses to recognize the present day successors of the “heathens and infidels,” such as the Apache, as having a right of domination in their traditional lands. The U.S. government does not want to concede to the “natives, who were [and perhaps still are] heathens,” the immense power contained in the concept of property, which is defined as “not the material object itself, but the right. . . [of] domination rightfully obtained over such object.” (Ballentine’s Law Dictionary, 1969) (emphasis added)

As Dominator, the United States has mentally invented the doctrine (an well accepted belief) that the U.S. will never recognize an Indian nation or “tribe” as possessing a right of domination (“property”) in and to its original Native lands and territory. The goal of the U.S. is to prevent any Native nation or people from ever being able to deploy a thought process that can successfully contradict the U.S. government’s claim of a right of Christian domination over and to those lands. In the Johnson ruling, Marshall called that claimed right of domination the “ultimate dominion” of the sovereign.

Who and what is “the sovereign?” The Ninth Circuit Court provides an answer with its reference to “the legal theory that discovery and conquest gave conquerors the right to own the land but did not disturb the tribe’s right to occupy it. See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 8 Wheat 543, 588–91 (1823).” “The sovereign” is one of the “conquerors” (dominators), and “conquest” is, once again, domination.

When translated, the “theory” expressed by the Ninth Circuit Court becomes, “that discovery and domination gave the dominators the right to dominate the land but did not disturb the tribe’s right to occupy it.” This reasoning was also the basis of the U.S. government’s February 5, 2021 legal brief, in response to an Apache Stronghold request for a temporary injunction for the mining proposal at Oak Flat. We know this because in their brief the U.S. attorneys quoted that same wording from Tee Hit Ton Indians v. United States, which cites to Johnson v. McIntosh.

Justice Stanley Reed wrote the majority ruling in Tee Hit Ton Indians v. United States. In a dissenting opinion he penned eight years earlier, Reed revealed the fact that the Johnson ruling deploys a reasoning process about the right of domination (“sovereignty”) assumed to be held by “Christian nations” as soon as they locate (and invade) the lands of non-Christians.

In Alcea Band of Tillamooks v. United States (1946) Reed said in his dissent that the Johnson ruling put forth “the theory that discovery by Christian nations gave them sovereignty [domination] over and title to the lands discovered.” When the representatives of a Christian Dominator (dominorum Christianorum in Latin) locate lands not yet under Christian domination (dominio in Latin), the mental world of the Christian dominators immediately assumes control of the reality-construction process in that newly located geographical area.

The theory is that Christian nations, as self-declared Christian “sovereigns,” (dominorum or “dominators”) claimed a right of domination (“sovereignty”) over and to the lands of the Native nations. To put a finer point on the matter, we can quote Johnathon Havercroft in Captives of Sovereignty (2014), where Havercroft defines sovereignty as meaning “an unjust form of political domination that limits human freedom.”

Returning now to footnote 2 in White v. University of California, the Ninth Circuit Court cites to Tee Hit Ton Indians as its source for “the legal theory” that “discovery and conquest [domination] gave conquerors [dominators] the right to own the land.” The word “own” takes us to “owner,” which is defined in Ballentine’s Law Dictionary (1969) as “One who has complete dominion over particular property.”

In Ballentine’s this takes us to “ownership,” “The rights of an owner. Title to property. Dominion over property.” Property takes us to the definition provided by the eminent English jurist William Blackstone, “despotic dominion,” which is definitely domination. Imagine if the Christian groups that are advocating on behalf of the Apache had challenged in their amicus briefs the extraordinary claim embedded in U.S. law, that Christian Dominators have a fundamental right of Christian domination over the lands of heathens and infidels.

The question remains, where is the sense of outrage about the and religiously bigoted and racist reasoning process of Christian domination, based on the Bible, that is foundational to the entire political and legal system of the Dominator United States with regard to our Native nations and peoples? – Steven Newcomb

Oak Flat and Pope Alexander VI’s Papal Decree of Domination in U.S. Law

2021-02-02T00:00:00Z

Traditional Apache Religious ‘Changing Woman’ Sunrise Dance Ceremony at Chi’Chil Bildagoteel (“Oak Flat”). (Photograph with family permission. © Robin Silver Photography).

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape)

Prior to the invasion of this continent (“North America”) by representatives of the monarchs of Western Christendom, the original nations and peoples of the continent, such as the Apache, were living their own free and independent way of life.

We can think back on the thousands of years during which no Christian European system of domination was existing on this continent. For millennia no such system was being imposed on the original nations and peoples, as, for example, the Apache, who are now trying to save their sacred area “Oak Flat” from being destroyed by a massive copper mining project.

There is a specific context for every major conflict, including the dispute over Oak Flat, between the original nations and peoples of this continent and the society of the United States. That context is found in the contrast between the original free and independent existence of Native nations and the system of domination that, centuries ago, was first carried by ship across the Atlantic Ocean to this part of the world.

That system of domination’s premises were formally articulated as part of U.S. law in Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh in 1823. They were restated in more “polite” language by Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg as recently as 2005, by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014, and covertly by Justice Gorsuch in the McGirt v. Oklahoma ruling in 2019.

These premises include the claim made by Chief Justice John Marshall that the mere presence of a “Christian people” on this side of the Atlantic Ocean “necessarily diminished” the original free existence of the “heathen” nations and peoples already living here. The premises include the claim that the “discoverers” had the right to mentally assign to themselves an “unlimited independence” on the continent, and then assert that “discovery” had given them “unlimited independence.” On that basis, they assumed a right of domination over all of our original nations.

These premises are being relied upon today by those advocating the destruction of “Oak Flat.” This conflict involves either accepting or rejecting the resulting system of domination and its basic premises. These ideas are traced to various documents (e.g., Vatican papal bulls issued by Catholic popes, or royal charters issued by monarchs) that were created in Western Europe, which was then known as “Western Christendom.”

Associate Justice Joseph Story, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1812 until his death in 1845, drew a direct connection between the origin of the legal and political system of the United States and a Vatican papal bull of domination from 1493. He did so in Volume I of his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Story titled his first chapter “Origin and Title to Territory of the Colonies.” He began with the first voyage of Columbus, and he also quotes Latin language from a papal bull that was issued by Pope Alexander VI to the king and queen of Spain in 1493.

In that first chapter, Story is paraphrasing a Supreme Court ruling that he helped to decide in 1823, Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh. That decision was written by his best friend and mentor, Chief Justice John Marshall. For example, Story writes: “The Indians were a savage race, sunk in the depths of ignorance and heathenism. If they might not be extirpated for their want of religion and just morals, they might be reclaimed from their errors.” Story continues:

They [the Indians] were bound to yield to the superior genius of Europe, and in exchanging their wild and debasing habits for civilization and Christianity they were deemed to gain more than an equivalent for every sacrifice and suffering.

That wording was Story’s way of paraphrasing Marshall’s statement in the Johnson ruling that the “character and religion” of the continent’s “inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy.”

The definition of “ascendancy” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary includes the word “domination.” This fact enables us to accurately translate the idea being put forward by both Story and Marshall: The Christian European colonizers were able to utilize their “superior genius” to claim a right of domination against the original Native inhabitants of the continent, on the basis of their “character and religion” (Story called their religion “heathenism”). Story continues:

The Papal authority, too, was brought in aid of these great designs; and for the purpose of overthrowing heathenism, and propagating the Catholic religion,7 Alexander the Sixth, by a Bull issued in 1493, granted to the crown of Castile the whole of the immense territory then discovered, or to be discovered, between the poles, so far as it was not then possessed by any Christian prince.8 [footnotes 7 and 8 in the original text]

At footnote 7 Story wrote: “‘Ut fides Catholica, et Christiana Religio nostris praesertim temporibus exaltetur, etc., ac barbarae nationes deprimantur, et ad fidem ipsam reducantur,’ is the language of the Bull. 1 Haz. Coll. 3.” The quote is from the Latin language version of Pope Alexander’s document. The phrase “ac barbarae nationes deprimantur” means “and barbarous nations be reduced,” meaning “subjugated” or “dominated.” Footnote 8 also traces to the Latin language of the papal bull of 1493. And that completes section 5 (§5).

Story opens section 6 as follows: “§ 6. The principle, then, that discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made, against all other European governments, being once established…” (italics added). The word “then” refers back to Pope Alexander VI’s papal bull of May 4, 1493, and the next twenty-two words, which I’ve italicized, Story lifted verbatim directly from the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling.

In the Johnson ruling, Marshall used those twenty two words to express what he identified as a “principle” of “discovery.” “This principle was that, discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made, against all other European governments.” (italics added) Story put no quotation marks around those twenty-two words, and he did not include any reference to let the reader know that those words were a quote from the Johnson ruling.

Nonetheless, the linkage between section 5 and section 6 of Story’s Commentaries, is Justice Story’s admission of a direct connection between the language of domination from the Vatican papal bull and the language of domination from the Johnson ruling. That language, and overall system of domination it constitutes, is the context for today’s dispute over the Apache sacred area known as “Oak Flat.”

Why is the United States government regarded as having the ultimate right to decide what will happen to Oak Flat, which is sacred to the Apache? Because, based on the claim of a right of domination found in the papal bulls and woven into the Johnson ruling, the United States claims to have an ultimate right of Christian domination in relation to the supposed “heathenism” of the Apache nation with regard to Oak Flat. From the viewpoint of the United States, its political succession to the claim of a right of Christian and Catholic domination over the land is regarded as negating whatever spiritual views or traditions the Apache have in relation to Oak Flat.

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is the co-founder and director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008). He co-produced the documentary movie “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code” (2015), which is based on Pagans and his four decades of research.

The Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) Territory

2020-12-10T00:00:00Z

What “#LandBack” Leaves Out of Focus

“A return to an earlier or normal condition” is one definition of the word “back.” In relation to land and Native nations or peoples, the word “back” is often expressed as, “they should give the land back to the Indians.” “#LandBack” has now become a popular meme among some activists.

A question arises: From where should the land be “returned”? Or, stated differently, the activists are advocating a “return of the land back from what location”? It is accurate to point out that the word “back” does not contemplate a physical movement of the land. The word “back” is meant to be figurative or metaphorical. It’s as if the land the land were being physically “moved” when in point of fact the land itself will not have move one inch.

We’re talking about three different conceptions. The first conceives of an earlier time when the original nation or people had possession of the land. The second conceives of the invaders and colonizers as having obtained possession of the land. And the third conceives of possession of the land being returned to the original nation or people. In other words, the #Landback activists are advocating for “a return” of the land (or some portion of it) back into the possession of, and therefore under the control of, the original nations and peoples.

However, talking about the dominating society “giving land back” is problematic for a Native nation that has never ceded, relinquished, or surrendered its lands or territory to the United States by treaty or by any other document. Use of the word “back” assumes, for example, that the land and territory of a particular Native nation are now in the possession of the United States, while providing no explanation as to how those lands supposedly got into the possession of the United States.

Because of the dominating society’s viewpoint that “possession is 9/10ths of the law,” conceding to the idea that the United States have actual possession of the land, would appear to concede to a presumption that the United States have 9/10ths of “the law” backing them.

It can thus be argued that using the word “back” in that context concedes to the idea that the United States government has 9/10ths of “the law” on its side. And this is an easy assumption to fall into when looking at it from the viewpoint of the U.S. government’s system of “law.”

Or take the Black Hills of the Oceti Sakowin as another example. Use of the word “back” in the phrase “Give the Black Hills back,” concedes to the idea that the United States has “possession” of the Black Hills and, therefore, 9/10ths of “U.S. law” is on the side of the United States.

There is another potential argument that has not been adequately expressed: The United States is not “in possession” of the territory of the Oceti Sakowin (“the Great Sioux Nation”); it is illegally occupying the territory of the Oceti Sakowin in violation of the fundamental organic law of the United States.

The 1861 congressional act establishing the Territory of Dakota says very specifically that no Indian land (e.g., the Oceti Sakowin territory) shall become part of any state or territory until the Indians consent for that to happen in a treaty with the United States. To this day that consent has never been obtained in a treaty with the United States.

In his Second Annual Address to the legislature of the Territory of Dakota, which he delivered in December of 1867, territorial governor A. J. Faulk, gave thanks to his “God,” whom he called “the Giver of all good,” for the healthy climate of the Oceti Sakowin lands he called “Dakota.” His remarks are recorded in part as follows:

“Our first duty should be to give expression to our feelings of gratitude to the Giver of all good for the favorable circumstances which surround us. The blessings of health, to a degree almost unknown in other parts of the Union, have been vouchsafed to us during the whole of the past year; while the season of crops has been more than usually favorable. Immigration has added largely to our numbers, and the most favorable evidences of prosperity and increase are springing up everywhere within our borders. I have heretofore expressed unbounded confidence in our natural advantages; and in the salubrity of the climate, and the inexhaustible fertility of the soil of Dakota.”

Governor Faulk’s claim, on behalf of the Territory of Dakota, to “the inexhaustible fertility of the soil” of the Oceti Sakowin, which he was claiming as “the soil of Dakota,” provides clear evidence of the U.S. system of domination that was being imposed on the Oceti Sakowin Nation within its own territory. Faulk delivered these words one year prior to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, a treaty which did not cede or relinquish the territory of the Oceti Sakowin to the United States. In the following passage, Governor Faulk admits that the Indian title to the Black Hills had not been extinguished:

“Like most of the region north and west of the Yankton cession, the Indian title had never been extinguished to this locality, and strictly speaking, we had no right to occupy or use it until, by suitable treaty or treaties with the Indian tribes in possession, we had obtained their consent. [emphasis added] But blame does not justly attach to us for this omission [of obtaining the consent of the Indians].”

What did Faulk mean by “strictly speaking”? In this context, “strictly” means “in a way that involves rigid enforcement or that demands obedience.” But enforcement of what, and obedience to what? The answer is enforcement of and duties imposed upon the U.S. Congress by passing legislation called “the Organic Act” that established the Territory of Dakota. Upon his return from a lengthy leave of absence, Faulk stated to the assembled Dakota territorial legislature: “After the lapse of a year you again have met to discharge the duties imposed upon you by the Organic Act” of 1861, which reads in part:

“Provided, that nothing in this act contained shall be construed to impair the rights of person or property now pertaining to the Indians in said territory, so long as such rights shall remain unextinguished by treaty between the United States and such Indians, or to include any territory, which, by treaty with any Indian tribe, is not, without the consent of said tribe, to be included within the territorial limits or jurisdiction of any state or territory; but all such territory shall be excepted out of the boundaries and constitute no part of the Territory of Dakota, until said tribe shall signify their assent to the President of the United States to be included within the said territory. . .”

Let us now repeat what Governor Faulk stated in 1867:

“Like most of the region north and west of the Yankton cession, the Indian title had never been extinguished to this locality, and strictly speaking, we had no right to occupy or use it until, by suitable treaty or treaties with the Indian tribes in possession, we had obtained their consent [emphasis added]. But blame does not justly attach to us for this omission [of obtaining the consent of the Indians].”

By committing acts of domination through the illegal occupation of the lands of the Oceti Sakowin, without obtaining the consent of the Lakota people, “the Territory of Dakota” violated the Organic Law and the Organic Act establishing the Territory of Dakota. Governor Faulk admitted that, “strictly speaking,” this had indeed happened. But he then said that blame for a violation of the Organic Act and Organic Law of the Territory of Dakota “does not justly attach” to the Legislature of the Territory of Dakota. What Governor Faulk failed to acknowledge, however, is that any and all acts committed by the White people in violation of the Organic Act and the Organic Law of Dakota are arguably null and void.

In a speech that Governor Newton Edmunds delivered to the Third Annual Session of the Dakota Legislature ten years earlier, in 1863, he made the following statement in which he calls Oceti Sakowin Territory, “our own Territory,” and argued for an invasion of the Black Hills. He spoke about what he called the “Route to the Gold Mines”:

“The importance of opening a direct route to these mines through our own Territory, and turning the tide of emigration this way, cannot well be over-estimated, either to the emigrant, or to the interests of our [White] people. To the emigrant, as a means of shortening his long and tedious marches, by reducing the distance over six hundred miles, and by saving from three to four weeks time—to our own citizens, by affording to our farmers a ready market for all the surplus food at their own doors, thus saving the necessity of cartage and necessary absence from the fields of their labor, and to our merchants and business men, from the increased demands made upon their stocks and business occasioned by the emigrant flowing constantly past their doors, making it necessary for them to establish large and extensive depots of supplies in the way of mining implements, provisions and other articles necessary to supply the wants of a people about to engage in such business. The shortest, best, and most practicable route to the gold fields of Idaho, from any of the Northwestern States, is undoubtedly through the settled portion of our Territory [of Dakota], to the mouth of the Niobrara river or Fort Randall; from thence along the divide between the Niobrara and White rivers; thence under the base of the Black Hills, passing the sources of the Yellow Stone to the forks of the Missouri. . .”

Governor Edmunds continued by acknowledging that the course of action he was proposing would be done without the consent of the Indians:

“This matter is also of vast and vital importance in another point of view, from the fact that this [proposed] route would pass through the very heart of the Indian country, and its effect, in my opinion would be in a very short time, to satisfy the Indians of the folly of their efforts to exterminate the whites, and would soon cause them to come forward, make treaties of peace and amity, and at no very distant day, lead them to locate upon reservations, and by judicious management case them to abandon their present [free and independent] mode of life and turn their attention to agriculture and the arts, ultimately civilize [dominate] and enlighten them, and finally become, as they are undoubtedly capable of becoming, in the course of time, respected and esteemed citizens—no longer . . . a barrier to the advancement of settlement and civilization [the U.S. system of domination].”

Governor Newton appears to be advocating for a policy of encouraging “white settlers to move onto [invade] Indian lands.” Later they could lie to the Indians by telling them that “the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out.”

A decade later, and most interestingly, in the First Biennial Address, which he delivered during the Eleventh Session of the Legislative Assembly of the Dakota Territory (1874-75), Governor John L. Pennington made a highly principled statement regarding the Black Hills:

“The reported presence of precious metals in the Black Hills by the officers commanding and persons accompanying the military expedition made by order of the government of the United States, to that section of this Territory during the past summer, has created a good deal of excitement, not only in Dakota but throughout the country, and a great desire has been manifested to have it opened up to immigration and settlement.”

“By reference to U.S statutes at large, vol. 15, page 635, it will be seen that all that part of the country known as the Black Hills, which lies in Dakota, is embraced in the Sioux Indian Reservation, and that the government of the United States is bound by the sacred obligations of this treaty to protect those tribes of Indians to whom the cession was made, in the peaceful possession of their reservation. While this treaty is of force, any citizen who enters upon the reservation is a violator of the law, and subject to be arrested, tried, and punished for such infraction; and I admonish all citizens of Dakota not to be tempted, even by the fabulous reports concerning gold in the Black Hills, to subject themselves to punishment for a violation of the laws of their country.”

“Your honorable body might with propriety made known the wishes of the people you represent, relative to the opening of the Black Hills, by a memorial to Congress; but while the treaty remains, I advise all citizens of this Territory to keep off the forbidden ground. The law will be enforced, the dignity of the government will be maintained, and all expeditions in that direction, in violation of law, will come to grief.”

Pennington’s statement demonstrates how the Oceti Sakowin Nation and Territory were to have been dealt with based on the Organic Act of Dakota, the Organic Law of Dakota, and the 1851 and 1868 treaties of Fort Laramie. However, he failed to express a key point. The territory described in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie did not involve a “cession from” the United States to the Oceti Sakowin. It involved a “retention” by the free and independent Oceti Sakowin Nation of that vast part of its overall territory.

Furthermore, all Indian land was declared by Congress to be “excepted out of” and shall “constitute no part of” the Territory of Dakota until the Indians consented for that to happen in a treaty with the United States. If and when that happens, the President of the United States is supposed to make an official proclamation stating that Indian title has been extinguished by treaty to that area. To this day, the territory of the Oceti Sakowin forms a massive geographical hole in the United States, which is traced to the original free and independent existence of the Oceti Sakowin.—Steven Newcomb

“Conquest” is Another Word for Domination

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War—or the act or state of exerting violence against another—is the context for the word conquest. Another way of understanding “a conquest” is, “having achieved a victory over or triumphed over an enemy.” To triumph or surmount is ‘to gain the upperhand over, to have won mastery or dominance over.’ In other words, conquest is a form of domination. Indeed, conquest and conquer are synonyms for domination. It is accurate to transcode the word ‘conquest’ to ‘domination.’

It is surprising how often the word “conquest” is used when discussing American Indian history or the history of Indigenous peoples. Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1984); Francis Jennings The invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975); Andrea Smith’s Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), being just three examples. Yet, the specific word “domination” does not appear once in the index of any of the books (though Jennings does have one index entry under “Dominance of ethnic stocks”). The point being, that “domination” is not typically used as a framework of analysis.

Jennings was clearly cognizant of the pattern of domination, yet he did not call it by that name. In a remarkable paragraph in his Appendix to “The Invasion of America,” Jennings wrote:

“In one respect colonial America and medieval Europe were exactly identical: this was the process of chartered conquest as described earlier. The stages of that process were as follows: (1) a head of state laid claim to distant territories in jurisdictions other than his own; (2) he chartered a person or organized groups to conquer [dominate] the claimed territory in his name but at private expense; (3) if the conquest [domination] was successful, the conquering [dominating] lord (whether personal or collective) was recognized by the chartering suzerain as the possessor and governor [dominator] of the territory, and the lord in turn acknowledged the charterer’s suzerainty or sovereignty. The charter itself served as new jurisdiction’s legal constitution. More often than not, the conquest [domination] launched ostensibly to reduce heretics or infidels to subjection to a protector or champion of an only true religion, this reason being mentioned prominently in the conquest [domination] charter, and clerics of the appropriate orthodoxy preceded, accompanied, or followed the troops. Usually the conquering [dominating] lord enjoyed considerable independence for a period of time, while his nominal sovereign gradually introduced agencies and officers responsible directly to the central state. Often the lord resisted royal encroachment on his independent sway, especially when the crown began to “give law” directly to its subjects without the lord’s intermediation, and sometimes the medieval sovereign was obliged to conquer the conqueror when a lord turned insubordinate.”

Notice how many words and phrases employed by Jennings indicate domination without specifically using the word itself: “colonial,” “laid claim to distant territories in jurisdictions other than his own,” “conquer,” “conquering lord,” “the conquest,” “reduce heretics or infidels to subjection,” “central state,” “independent sway,” “the crown,” “give law directly to its subjects,” “medieval sovereign,” “conquer the conqueror,” “when a lord turned subordinate.”

The mystery is why the specific word ‘domination’ is nowhere to be found in Jennings’ explanation. With the sole exception of “dominant races,” the phenomenon of domination remains in the background and out of focus. He uses the word “conquest” instead.

A mystery is sometimes termed “a profound secret, or enigma,” which may be eventually resolved through some form or process of interpretation. The Domination Code helps us to begin solving our mystery by transcoding the language of “conquest” and “civilization” into the terminology of domination. In other words, when we begin associating “conquest” and “civilization” with domination, certain patterns become exceedingly clear.

In Savagism and Civilization, by Roy Harvey Pearce, we find a photograph of a sculpture titled “Rescue Group” that was erected in 1853. A tall Romanesque figure wearing a helmet has grabbed a slender and diminutive looking Indian warrior from behind; the Indian warrior is brandishing a tomahawk. Off to one side behind the Roman-looking figure is a white woman cowering with an infant.

The Roman figure’s right hand has a firm grip on the wrist holding the tomahawk, and, with his left arm, the Roman figure has locked onto the Indians’ left arm. The Native man is completely naked except for a cloth wrapping his loins. He is staring up at the face of the Roman man sternly peering down at him. It is a perfect image of a Roman warrior dominating a Native warrior. Consistent with the title of Pearce’s book, the Indian warrior symbolizes “savagism,” and the dominating Roman warrior symbolizes “civilization.”

The opening sentence of his first chapter reads: “The Renaissance Englishmen who became Americans were sustained by an idea of order.” Pearce went on to say that they were certain “of the existence of an eternal and immutable principle which guaranteed the intelligibility of their relations to each other and to their world and thus made possible their life in society.” (p. 3). This principle, said Pearce, “was to be expressed in the progress and elevation of civilized men who, striving to imitate their God, would bring order to chaos.”

To the average American reading these words, this explanation seems entirely natural, even praiseworthy. After all, what could possibly be wrong with “the progress and elevation of civilized men?” In English, for example, the word “order” seems quite benign, even necessary based on the belief that without order there would be chaos.

From an original nations’ perspective, however, a deeper meaning is discernible by those who have been made aware of the Domination Code and how to interpret its signs and symbols.

For example, forcibly imposing a foreign “order” (the civis) on peoples that have lived for thousands of years free and independent of foreign rule or control takes us right back to the concepts of domination and dominance, as in sense that “giving an order” is associated with the idea of command and control (‘ordinance’).

Using coercion to impose a Christian European cultural pattern (civis) on original nations and peoples fits the classic understanding of domination: “Domination . . . consists in living under the arbitrary will of another, having to conform one’s actions to a will external to one’s own,” which, of course, antithetical to self-determination.

From the perspective of Indigenous peoples who have been and continue to be forced into a state or condition of subjection to oppressive conditions, what has been typically called ‘civilization’ is more accurately called ‘domination.’ How do we know this? To arrive at the answer, it is necessary to examine what has been said about the ‘civilizing process’ by which Western ‘civilization’ has been expanded. The following from Webster’s is a prime example:

Civilization: “the process of becoming civilized…” “the act of civilizing; esp the forcing of a particular cultural pattern on a population to whom it is foreign.” (emphasis added) Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1996.

The word ‘forcing’ is the clue. This matches what Roy Harvey Pearce has said about “order,” for this clearly indicates a process of setting up and constructing an Order that works against the will of the free nations and peoples upon whom the foreign cultural pattern has been and is being forcibly imposed. For one people to force its arbitrary will upon another people, or on many other peoples, is termed domination. And the result is devastating, for as Pearce put the matter:

“Aware to the point of self-consciousness of their specifically civilized [domination] heritage, they found in America not only an uncivilized [undominated] environment, but uncivilized [undominated] men—natural men, as it was said, living in a natural world. And they knew that the way to civilize [dominate] a world was to civilize [dominate] the men in it. Theoretically, savages, as men, were capable of being civilized ; practically, they were bound to be. But practice did not support theory. Indians were not civilized but destroyed.”

Above, Pearce does not acknowledge that domination is integral to the “civilizing process” by which a foreign cultural pattern is imposed on originally free and independent peoples. Indeed, an apt word for this so-called “civilizing process” is domination. Thus, the ones engaged in the process of forcible imposition on the free people are correctly termed “dominators.” However, not preferring to call themselves by such a negative name, they typically and euphemistically call themselves “the civilized” people.

Part of the challenge for anyone writing from an Indigenous perspective is to advocate on behalf of what the dominating perspective considers to be chaos, negative, and a threat to a well-established sense of order.–Steven Newcomb

The 1977 UN Conference On “Indigenous Populations”

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The International Indian Treaty Council’s Intervention

In September of 1977, representatives of Indigenous nations and peoples from around the world traveled to the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. They went there to attend the International NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations held at the UN Palais des Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland. Now, forty-three years later, it is fascinating to read the document that the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) prepared for and delivered to that conference.

Introduction

Back in the mid-1970’s, those with the skill to write such a document for circulation in the international arena had a particular worldview. They saw the planet as being divided into different “States,” a word typically spelled with a capital ‘S’ as a honorary device used to denote a “higher level status.” In his essay “politics as a Vocation” (1919), German sociologist Max Weber explained the nature of “the State.” He called the state “a relation of men dominating men.” “In order for the state to exist,” he said, “the dominated must submit themselves to the authority claimed by the powers that be.” As a result of that domination-oriented worldview of “the State,” the International NGO Conference held in Geneva in 1977 was centered on “Indigenous populations” rather than “peoples.”

Each “State” was framed as having an overall “population” that was obligated to live “in” or “within” a “civil order.” This meant they were considered obligated to live subject to the ultimate authority or system of domination of the “State.” The entire population of “the State” was seen as being divided into different “sectors,” and one of those “sectors” that was regarded as being “subject to the authority of the state” was called “indigenous.”

This sense of “sectors” is illustrated by the more contemporary UN description of “indigenous peoples,” which depicts them as considering themselves to exist “distinct from other sectors of the society now prevailing,” meaning “now dominating.” This wording presumes that those termed “indigenous” are not separate from the “body politic” of a particular “State,” but are rather sort of politically integrated in some sense into the conceptual fabric of the “State.”

The UN experts who wrote about “indigenous populations” in the mid 1970s wanted to guard against giving the impression that the people(s) who were termed “indigenous” had the right to one day free themselves from the claim of a right of domination by “the State.” Those experts believed the term “peoples” was to be avoided, or carefully contained within strict limits, because otherwise use of the term “peoples’ might be interpreted to mean that each distinct “People” called “indigenous” had a body politic that was separate from, and rightfully independent of, the body politic of “the State.

The 1977 IITC document provides an early example of the kind of wording that was being used back then to advocate on behalf of those people around the world who were categorized as “indigenous.” Now, more than four decades later, we are able to read the IITC document with a critical eye, and identify the patterns of domination and dehumanization found in the essay. We are able to reach the conclusion that the word “indigenous” means “dominated” or “those who are forced or compelled to live under a system of domination.”

Using the Framework of Domination and Dehumanization

When we search the IITC document for patterns of domination and dehumanization, we find some fascinating examples. The document opens with a quote from an 1837 report of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes to the British House of Commons:

“Savages are dangerous neighbors and unprofitable customers, and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies they become a burden upon the States.”

Notice the use of the dehumanizing term “savages,” which is derived from the French term “sauvage,” meaning “forest dwellers.” The term “degraded” is past tense of the word “degrade,” which means “to reduce from a higher to a lower rank or degree; to deprive of office or dignity.” Those termed “indigenous” were thought of as having been “reduced” from their original free existence to a lower level and subordinated existence subject to foreign control.

Another meaning of “degrade” is, “to lower the physical, moral, or intellectual character of.” Denizens are inhabitants. And the phrase “our colonies” refers to the colonies of an empire that is working to forcibly take over and, by various processes of domination, help itself to the lands and resources of the continent.

Rene Maunier was a professor at the University of Paris, and a member of the French Academy of Colonial Sciences. In 1949 he published In The Sociology of Colonies, Vol. I. The title of chapter two reads: “Definition of Colonies: Domination and Government.” On p. 14 he writes, “A colony is a tentacle of the colonising [sic] State.” He continues: “When we speak of the power which a State exercises, we may imply an actual domination, what the chancelleries call an “influence”, and “expansion”, a “penetration”; an actual bond, at least at the beginning, which asserts and paves the way for a legal imperium, a domination, or a subjection in the proper sense. . .”

Interestingly, the papal bull Inter Caetera dated May 4, 1493, calls for “barbarous nations” to be “reduced,” meaning “degraded” or “dominated.” This suggests that the term “indigenous” as used in the IITC document, at least from the perspective of the dominating society, is a synonym for those who are regarded as being “barbarous” or “savage” and existing under an invading and colonizing claim of a right of domination by the imperium, “of, the Christian empire” as Pope Alexander V put it (“Christiani imperii” in the original Latin).

The IITC document makes the following comment about that above sentence from the 1837 document: “The observation above expresses the general recognition among national governments, then and now, that the existence of indigenous populations in a country represents a significant problem.”

Three phrases in the above sentence deserve closer examination: 1) “national governments” 2) “the existence of indigenous populations” and 3) “in a country.” The phrase “national governments” is referring to systems of domination called “governments.” Those “populations” called “indigenous” are framed as existing “in” or within the “country” of a system of domination called a “national government.”

As we shall see, the prepositions “in” and “within” are connected to the metaphor “IN OR WITHIN IS UNDER.” In other words, if the originally free and independent “Indigenous population” is considered to be “in” or “within” the domain of a “State” or “national government,” then that “population” is interpreted as being “under” the control or domination of that “State” or “national government.”

Populations called “indigenous” are framed as “existing” in or within the claimed domain of a “State,” which is called “a country.” That part of the opening quote which reads, “they become a burden upon the States” lets us know that “States” (or an individual “State” of domination) is the context for the discussion of “populations” termed “indigenous” or “Indigenous.”

The “Significant Problem” of “Populations” Termed “Indigenous”

After mentioning the “significant problem” that the existence of indigenous populations pose for “States,” the IITC document continues as follows:

“Theoretically, two broad solutions are possible: the raising of the ‘savage’ to full social, economic and political equality with the ‘civilized’ citizens of the nation, or the complete eradication of the indigenous population groups. Historically, the practice of nations has tended toward the latter policy, either through indifference or neglect, or through deliberate efforts at liquidation.”

Let’s examine the patterns of domination and dehumanization in the above paragraph. To propose that an effort ought to be undertaken to “raise” the “degraded” “savages” ignores the fact that prior to invasion and colonization the so-called savages (“forest dwellers”) were still living their original free existence. They had not yet been “reduced” down by a process of domination and thereby relegated to a “degraded,” dominated existence.

Furthermore, the proposed “solution” mentioned envisions an outcome in which the people termed “indigenous” would one day be experiencing social, economic, and political “equality” as “integrated” individuals along with the “civilized citizens” of a dominating “state” or “nation.” This would have to be accomplished by means of a specific process, or set of processes, the goal of which would be to one day assimilate or absorb those people termed “indigenous” into the body politic of “the state.” Think of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act passed by the Congress of the United States.

The second proposed solution of “complete eradication” and “liquidation” would result in those termed “indigenous” no longer existing because they would have been physically killed off and annihilated. Notice how the IITC report does not explicitly call attention to the fact that a system of domination is being forcibly imposed on the Aché people or other peoples called “indigenous.” And yet, using other synonyms, the report proceeds to describe patterns of domination and dehumanization forced on the Aché people:

“One particularly well-documented situation . . . that of the Aché (Guayaki) Indians in eastern Paraguay, includes such inhumanities as the sale of adults and children for slavery and prostitution, massacres through systematic “manhunts by hunters and slave traders, withholding of food and medicines from the reservation Indians resulting in death by starvation and disease, the denial and destruction of their cultural inheritance (use of their language, religious rituals, and traditional music), and discouragement of the Indians from seeking education.”

These are all examples of domination and dehumanization, which the report author calls “inhumanities.” Later, the IITC report continues to describe other examples:

“To be fair, the continuing flagrant injustices done to indigenous populations cannot be blamed entirely, or it would seem, even mainly on government malevolence or callousness in failing to protect the indigenous populations under their jurisdiction.”

Because the phrase “flagrant injustices done to indigenous populations” describes a situation of domination and dehumanization, it would be accurate for the IITC report to have used the phrase “the continuing domination and dehumanization inflicted on indigenous populations.” It ought to seem obvious that such “injustices” put the original nations and peoples termed “indigenous” in danger. Interestingly, in his Dictionary of Word Origins (1955) (Littlefield: Adams & Co.) (p. 107), Joseph T. Shipley makes note of a connection between domination (dominium), “danger” and “jurisdiction.”

Under the entry “danger, dangerous,” Shipley writes of “the accepted etymology of danger, from OFr. dangier, from L.L. dominarium, from dominium, rule, English dominion; the early sense of being in danger of being “subject to the jurisdiction of”. The domination/subordination structure is revealed in Shipley’s statement that “this derivation shows how the subjects feared their over lords: power indeed spelled danger to those beneath it!”

The word “danger” in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Second Edition (1953) traces to “L. dominium lordship,” and lists as “archaic,” “Authority; jurisdiction; hence, reach or range, as of a missile.” Also, “Exposure or liability to injury, loss, pain, or other evil.” Additionally, “dangerous” is defined as applying “to that which should be dealt with most carefully.”

The issue of domination comes into focus when we compare the initial free existence of the original or indigenous people to an existence that has been “reduced” down and forced “under” a claim of a right of domininium and thus considered subject to the “jurisdiction” (system of judgment) made by an invading and foreign “state” system. The IITC report continues by describing additional examples of domination:

“Indigenous populations are caught in the wider dilemma of rapid, uncontrolled technological development of resources, with resulting commercial penetration into their lands, exploitation of their labor, and a general clash of cultures unevenly matched in terms of asserting their respective rights. Acute and wide-spread poverty and underdevelopment in many countries with indigenous populations accentuate these tendencies.”

As a consequence of a process of domination “Indigenous populations are caught in the wider dilemma of rapid, uncontrolled technological development of resources, with resulting commercial penetration into their lands, exploitation of their labor, and a general clash of cultures unevenly matched in terms of asserting their respective rights.”

Three examples of domination in the above wording include:

penetration into their lands
exploitation of their labor
a general clash of cultures unevenly matched

What is being described as a “clash of cultures” is the contrast between the culture of the original nations or peoples (“populations”) of the continent and the foreign “culture” of domination that was being forcibly imposed on the original peoples. The report continues: Nevertheless, these are not sufficient reasons for ignoring the human rights and needs of the indigenous populations concerned.

This mention of “human rights” merits further examination and discussion. From the viewpoint of the colonizing empires and nations from Western Christendom, those peoples termed “savage,” “barbarous,” and “indigenous” were considered to be living a non-human existence. By what means were they going to be “made” “human”?

Their savage and barbarous existence was to be converted into a human existence by the invaders imposing a system of domination on them, under the euphemistic guise of “civilizing” the “savages” and “reducing” the “barbarous nations” to the system of domination of the Christian empire.

As a result of that dominating process, the original or “indigenous” peoples (“populations”) would suffer all the oppression and abuse that the domination system could inflict on them, all in the name of “converting” their lives into a “human” existence, and by imposing Christian domination on them starting with a ritual baptism and by giving them a Christian name.

Instead of accurately identifying “States” as perpetrators of a dehumanizing process of domination, the IITC report refers to “the failures. . .of the States of the world to institute progressive, comprehensive measures to safeguard and advance the indigenous populations within their boundaries. . .” (emphasis added)

Once again we see a use of the metaphor IN OR WITHIN IS UNDER, meaning that “indigenous populations” are framed as being “in” or “within” the boundaries of the different “States of the World,” and, therefore, also framed as subject to the domination and control of whatever particular “State” happens to be claiming those geopolitical boundaries.

The IITC report then states: “. . .this paper proposes to focus on the efforts of the international community and international law in the area of the protection of indigenous populations.” It continues:

As a foundation for the study, indigenous populations will first be defined, and their particular problems and the issues involved will be briefly outlined.

Later we find the heading: “DEFINITION OF INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS.” The IITC document then refers to the International Labour Organization’s (the ILO’s) 1957 “Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Populations.”

Article I of that Convention uses the phrase “independent countries” and uses the preposition “in” in the phrase “in independent countries” so as to utilize the metaphor IN OR WITHIN IS UNDER. In other words, the “States,” otherwise known as “countries” are considered to “independent.” Those regarded as “indigenous” are judged as not “independent” and not entitled to exist in their original non-human state of independence because they are presumed to now be subject to the dominating political control and jurisdiction of “the State.” The key phrase of the definition reads: “a) members of tribal or semi-tribal populations in independent countries . . .”

The next section of the definition says that those “populations” that were living on the continent “at the time of conquest or colonization” are regarded as, or defined as, “indigenous.” When we recognize that “conquest” and “colonization” are two synonyms for domination it then becomes clear that domination is the Frame for the term “indigenous.” This further clarified in the IITC report as follows:

“Building on this ILO definition, the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities special study on indigenous populations proposed the following ‘working definition’”:

“(Indigenous populations are) those descended from peoples who inhabited a land when outsiders came and reduced them down to a non-dominant condition. . .in a State structure . . . of the predominant segments of the population.” (emphasis added)

In other words, those defined as “indigenous” are the descendants of the peoples that were living a free existence on the land when outsiders invaded them and then “reduced them down” to a colonized condition under domination. Despite there being this very clear way to Frame the word “indigenous” in terms of domination, the IITC report goes on to say:

“The Special Rapporteur goes on in this preliminary report to point out that there is no unanimity at the national level regarding what kinds of groups are to be regarded as indigenous.”

The IITC report goes on to clarify that:

“Both of the above definitions . . . emphasize more or less that indigenous populations: (1) constituted the original inhabitants of a region; (2) [they] experienced conquest or colonization [i.e., domination] by an [invading] outside culture. (3) now live in a special type of non-dominant relationship with that [invading] culture, (4) continue to conform to their own customs and institutions rather than to those of the dominant culture [emphasis added].”

Notice the number of times that the theme of domination is mentioned in those four points. Those said to be “indigenous” were originally living a free existence. Then, an invading outside culture or empire imposed a system of domination on them. They now live in a “non-dominant” or subordinate position within that overall framework of the domination of “the State.” They seek to live in conformity with their own customs and institutions rather than in conformity with the invaders’ imposed system of domination.

Further Analysis of the IITC’s Intervention at the UN in 1977

At the opening of page 3 of the IITC document we find:

The Special Rapporteur goes on in this preliminary report to point out that there is no unanimity at the national level regarding what kinds of groups are to be regarded as “indigenous.”

Despite this, the IITC intervention says that both of “the above definitions…emphasize more or less that indigenous populations: (1) constituted the original inhabitants of a region, [and] (2) experienced conquest or colonization [domination] by an outside culture, [and] (3) now live in a special type of non-dominant relationship with that [dominant] culture, [and] (4) continue to conform to their own customs and institutions rather than to those of the dominant culture. “ (emphasis added)

The above four points provide the accurate context for every discussion and analysis regarding original nations and peoples termed “indigenous,” with a lower case ‘i’, or “Indigenous” spelled with a capital ‘I,’ depending on who is doing the writing. That context can be summarized as follows: A nation or people called “Indigenous” consist of those people who were living free and independent in a specific geographical area, which they knew to be their land of origin, and their territory, if you will. At some point in time that free Nation or People was invaded by the representatives of a foreign nation or empire that intended to overrun their territory, and capture, vanquish, and subdue them, or altogether destroy them, by establishing a system of domination on top of them, and thereafter framing (interpreting) them as having been “reduced” to a subordinated (sub-order) existence.

(Notably, U.S. government officials often use the term “sub-national” as a synonym for sub-order or subordinated existence. That breaks down to “sub,” meaning under, down, or below, and “national,” which is an adjective of “nation,” and refers to the “nation” of the United States or the American empire).

Those nations, peoples, or individuals termed “Indigenous,” in other words, are those who have lived and continue to live an existence marked by domination and dehumanization. Once we know this, in any discussion of those called labled “indigenous,” the accurate focus becomes the phenomenon of domination and dehumanization. By explicitly and openly naming that phenomenon in this manner, an entirely new insight emerges. For as Richard Brown states in his A Poetic for Sociology (1977), “The thing itself becomes emergent in the process of being named.” In other words, a “thing” or phenomenon enters into human consciousness through the metaphorical act of naming.

The heading of the next section of the IITC intervention: “Problems of Indigenous Populations and the Issues Involved.” The section begins by using “non-dominance” as a clever maneuver that draws the mind away from the specific phenomenon and issue of domination: “Their [the domination society’s] position of dominance . . . place[s] indigenous populations at a great disadvantage in the modern world . . . in relation to the dominant population.”

When decoded, the above sentence reads: The predicament those peoples termed “indigenous” face on a daily basis of living subject to a system of domination places them at a great disadvantage in the modern world . . . in relation to the dominating population or society.

The next sentence lists a number of the predicaments faced by dominated peoples in the late 1970s as a direct result of the phenomenon of domination and dehumanization: “fundamental threats to their life and physical liberty,” “massacres and enslavement,” “indigenous populations struggle with a wide range of economic, political, and cultural problems.” When we think about it, however, it was as a result of domination and dehumanization that Indigenous “populations” were struggling with a wide range of problems. Although the IITC intervention stops short of explicitly saying this, it does go on to provide a long list of the problems that we now know are evidence of domination and dehumanization:

“ECONOMIC INSECURITY

LAND: restrictions on right of ownership of land, removal to reservations with inferior land and resources, and no modern agricultural training or equipment, disruption of environment by commercial interests, government leasing of land without the indigenous populations consent.

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS: preservation of cultural heritage forbidden or hampered, religious freedom and observation denied.

POLITICAL DISADVANTAGES

JUSTICE SYSTEM: victimization by police and jailers, ignorance of the law and their rights, lack of indigenous lawyers, non-use of lack of legal aid societies, unequal protection of the laws, norms of indigenous law not recognized by dominant legal system [of domination].
ADMINISTRATION OF INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS: abuses of power by officials, lack of regard for indigenous customs, lack of government money for programs, lack of relevant training for officials concerned with indigenous populations.
POLITICAL PROCESS: disenfranchisement of indigenous populations—denial of participation and representation in political office and parties.
RIGHTS OF CITIZENSHIP: denial of equal rights with the rest of the population (i.e. restrictions on movement), no effective legislation to make rights in the Constitution of the country a reality.

The above section is followed up with this quote: “Needless to say, one handicap reinforces another in the indigenous population’s clash with industrial society and a dominant, alien culture.”

The latter part of that sentence is accurately restated as: “one handicap reinforces another as a result of the destructive and dehumanizing effects of the system of domination’s dominant, alien culture.”

NOTE: This completes my analysis of the first 5 pages of a 40 page document! There is also an 11 page ANNEX with additional sources.

(To Be Continued)–Steven Newcomb

Original Free Nations

Riverfront Trail Extension Opens, Linking Downtown to the Valley

Two decades, three mayors, one lawsuit

What riders will find

Eastside United Wins First State Soccer Title in Overtime Thriller

Built over a decade

City Council Approves $312M Budget with Road Repair Surge

Where the money goes

A harder year ahead

Summer Arts Festival Returns to Clinton Square with 90 Artists

What’s new this year

Planning Board Advances Westside Rezone for 240 Homes

Three hours of testimony

Salt City Bakehouse to Open Second Location on the North Side

Betting on Butternut Street

Home Opener Sells Out as Mets Begin Season with 7–2 Win

New faces, new food

Volunteers Pull Three Tons of Debris from Onondaga Lake Shoreline

What they found

A long recovery, still going

Ojai Valley Film Screening

Free Online Film Screening Of The Doctrine of Discovery Unmasking the Domination Code

Film Screening

The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code

An Original Nations’ Examination of “Freedom,” “Human” and “Human Rights”

Our Global Predicament and the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions

An Original Nations’ Perspective

The Domination Translator

The System of Domination

The 1893 Congress of Religions

The 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee

Birgil and I Attended the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions

How Are We Able to Defend Our “Freedom” When We Are Living Under and Subject to the U.S. Claim of a Right of Domination?

The Vatican’s March 30th Statement About the Doctrine of Discovery and Human Rights Failed to Address the Claim of a Right of Domination[17]

The Vatican is Responsible for Our Nations and Peoples Having Been Forced to Transition from Living Free to Living a “Human” Existence Under Christian Domination

The Mission of the Mission System

Is it Possible to Defend a Freedom You’ve Been Deprived of?

Being Whipped and Goaded into Worshipping the “God” of the “Humans”

La Conquistadora (the Female Dominator)

Civilization as Domination

“The State” of Domination

A “Human” Existence Lived Under Domination Creates the Need for “Human Rights”

The Context of the United Nations

The “Human Rights” Framework Provides Us with No Means of Liberating Our Nations and Peoples from the Claim of a Right of Domination

Challenging the Claim of a Right of Domination

Conclusion

Notes

Conflicting Perspectives Regarding the Holy Mountain Called “San Francisco Peaks,” and Other Sacred and Significant Places of Original Nations and Traditional Healers

Prefatory Note: The Free Existence of Original Nations

On Redundancy and the Domination Translator

Some Clarification on Terminology

The Biblical Framework and Context of Federal Anti-Indian Law

The Intention to Establish Domination Where It Did Not Already Exist

Mental Competition between the Traditional Ceremonial People of Original Nations and U.S. Government Officials who Use the United States’ Claim of a Right of Domination

The Benefit of Traditional Ceremonies

Identifying the Linguistic Patterns of Domination

Traditional Native People

Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law and the Doctrine of Infidel Nonexistence

B. A. Hinsdale

Proof of the Christian (Biblical) Basis for ‘the Right’ to Sail to and Identify Non-Christian Lands

More From Wheaton’s Elements of International Law

It’s Time to Identify the U.S. Government’s Claim of a Right of Domination

The Biblical Connection

American Indian Religious Freedom Legal Cases and the U.S. Claim of Property Over the Traditional Lands of Our Original Nations

The U.S. Government’s Reasoning Process Regarding Our Sacred and Ceremonial Places

That Was Then, and Its Still Operational Now

McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020)

A View-from-the-Ship Parsing of Johnson v. McIntosh

The Accompanying Principle: An Indian Title of Occupancy

The Supreme Court’s Use of the Doctrine of Christian Domination in Lyng

Justice Brennan’s Dissenting Opinion in Lyng v. Northwest Cemetery Protective Association

The U.S. Government’s Free Exercise of Domination on the Basis of the Bible

Why Religious Freedom Arguments Are Not Designed to Defeat The U.S. Government’s Claim Of A Right of Domination Against Original Nations and Peoples

A Three-Pronged Counter Argument to the U.S. Claim of a Right of Domination Against Our Original Nations and Peoples

Conclusion

Notes

Revoke the Papal Bulls

The Context

Matthew 28:18-20 in the Bible Expresses a Mandate to Baptize All Nations. That, and the Mandate of Genesis 1:28, are Traced to a Number of Papal Bulls Issued During the Fifteenth Century

Pope Francis’s Environmental Encyclical, Laudato Si

The Vatican’s March 30th Statement About the Doctrine of Discovery and Human Rights Failed to Address the Claim of a Right of Domination^[17]