"DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY"

DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY

            This month is Native American Month, but tomorrow is also the end of the election time in the USA.  If you voted early, thank you!  If you have not voted, please do so – your future and all of our futures depend upon it.  

            I attended our denomination’s consultation on anti-racism work in October.  This consultation was in response to an overture that our General Assembly passed earlier this year.  It endorsed the idea of the Decade of the Intercultural Church beginning in 2020.  Its central foci will be a celebration of all the cultures that comprise the Presbyterian Church USA and deliberate work on diminishing the power of racism in our 90% Anglo denomination.  We clearly have our work cut out for us. 

            At the October consultation we experienced a very powerful presentation by Native American representatives on the Doctrine of Discovery.  I had heard a bit about this previously, but it struck me very strongly on this occasion.   We began the consultation by noting the native peoples who had lived on the land prior to the Europeans’ arrival. We gave thanks for their witness and their continuing ministry.  We expressed our remorse that Anglo culture had led the way in removing them from their land, and we lamented that some native cultures had been obliterated by the European hunger for cheap land and labor.

            The Doctrine of Discovery was the “official” church and political doctrine that enabled Europeans to steal land and labor from indigenous people all around the world.  In America, it began in U.S. law in 1823 when the US Supreme Court decided in Johnson v. McIntosh that the native Illinois and Piankashaw tribes had no right to sell their land to speculators in Philadelphia and Baltimore, some 50 years after the purchase.  Justice John Marshall wrote for the majority that only the US government had the right to sell native lands, because the “doctrine of discovery” gave land title automatically to European, Christian nations when they “discovered” lands (and people) previously unknown to Europeans.  This was so, even though indigenous people had occupied and used the land for millennia.

            This doctrine did not originate with SCOTUS, however.  It began during the Crusades in 1245 when Pope Innocent IV wrote a paper, which indicated that Christians had property rights to lands occupied by non-Christians, when the Christians “discovered” the land.  This doctrine continued through the centuries, and indeed, Justice Marshall cited a patent case issued in 1497 by King Henry VII to John Cabot, articulating the doctrine of discovery.   This doctrine continues in effect to this day, with the struggle by the Standing Rock Lakota tribe against placing an oil pipeline under the Missouri River being the most famous recent example.   

            Our PCUSA denomination repudiated this doctrine at its General Assembly in St. Louis this summer, and as usual, we were one of the last mainline denominations to do this (Presbyterians were the last mainline denomination to re-unite after the Civil War, waiting until 1983 to do so).  That repudiation included a confession by Presbyterians that we were complicit in the doctrine of discovery, and it also included instructions to begin actions of repair, usually known as reparations.  It also included instructions for all General Assembly groups to begin their meetings with an acknowledgment of whose land the meeting is being held on and a welcome from the indigenous peoples currently living on the land.  If you’d like to read more on these actions, here is a link to the General Assembly action: 
https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doctrine-of-Discovery-Report-to-the-223rd-GA-2018.pdf

            Those of us who are not indigenous peoples must begin our acknowledgment of Native American Month in this way.  I am not seeking guilt here – rather recognition and repentance, to use the first two steps of my list of Seven Steps that we must use to engage the power of racism in our individual and communal lives.  The entire list will be brought into use on this:  recognition, repentance, resistance, resilience, reparation, reconciliation, and recovery.  Especially in this month of November, when we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us recall the indigenous peoples who made European survival possible in the harsh conditions.   The peoples already here did not see the land as the enemy or as possession but rather as partner to be nurtured and celebrated and protected.  May we learn from them in the midst of our drive to get so much stuff that we are destroying the planet for us all.

            Let us non-indigenous people begin this month with recognition.  Our son David taught us about this in 1992, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus bringing the doctrine of discovery to the western hemisphere.  David was a 6^th grade student, and he was given the Good Citizenship Award by DAR (the Daughters of the American Revolution!)  On the day he received the award, he wore a shirt with a slogan, which repudiated the doctrine of discovery – “how could Columbus have discovered America when there were people already living here?”