I most valued the discussion about Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery, which I think would especially interest @Mervin_Bitikofer. Few of us are aware of this legal doctrine and the disasterous consequences it has had for indigeous peoples worldwide. And few of us consider the damage that such worldly endeavors do to christendom, when “the church” involves itself in them.
Transcript from about 35:00 —
Stump:
Yeah. Okay. This leads to another topic that our organization has increasingly addressed, which is, what does it mean to be human? I mentioned earlier you’ve co-founded an organization called Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. Let’s address this more directly here now. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I had not heard of the Doctrine of Discovery until fairly recently. On the one hand, some might think I should be forgiven for that since it was a doctrine formulated what some 500 or 600 years ago. But on the other hand, I’ve come to learn just how wide-reaching its effects have been on our world as a whole and on Indigenous peoples more specifically. Start here if you would, by describing… When did this doctrine come about and then how does it connect specifically to this question I’ve asked of what it means to be human or at least who gets to be counted as fully human?
Augustine:
Sure. I’m going to begin that by saying that the Doctrine of Discovery is a legal doctrine in the United States today and around the world. It is a paradigm that we live in that is invisible to us because we’re living in it, but it is the state of reality in our law. It was embedded in our legal system in 1823 by a series of supreme court decisions that were written by Chief Justice Marshall. There isn’t one law about the Doctrine of Discovery. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of laws rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. That is to say, all of our institutions reflect this logic because it is so deeply ingrained in our society. What is the it that I’m talking about? Well, the Doctrine of Discovery says it was a doctrine that was created by the church at the time of when Europeans had the technology to be able to traverse oceans and go around the world and begin to expand.
The church wrote a doctrine that justified why it was not only okay, but it was God’s will that Europeans would go and subdue and dominate the whole earth and basically enslave all the peoples of earth, including Indigenous peoples. That is called the Doctrine of Discovery or the discovery doctrine. One of the main tenets of this doctrine is what’s called terra nullius. It’s another legal term. Obviously, it’s in Latin. It means empty land. What this original doctrine said, it was in a series of papal bulls, it said that if terra nullius means empty land, if European monarch or the representative came upon a land that was inhabited, it was considered empty of human beings if it was not ruled by a Christian monarch. Anyone who was non-Christian was considered to be a pagan or an infidel, and that they were something other than human. That God had ordained that the church represented God and God’s will were therefore empowered and emboldened and justified in going to all the places of earth and claiming those lands for the church.
This doctrine of discovery is enshrined in our law today. As recently as 2005, that’s the most recent supreme court decision that was based on the Doctrine of Discovery. That was the Oneida Nation that was buying back land they had lost and wanting to add it to their reservation. They didn’t want to pay taxes for that because it was trust land. They wanted land to go back into trust. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion saying, “Based on the discovery doctrine, that land does not belong to you. It is the land of the United States because of this discovery doctrine.” The discovery doctrine says those people that were discovered do not have absolute title to their lands, only the European force that came and discovered them. Our work is dismantling that doctrine.
Stump:
Good. Forgive me for continuing to try to push you into theological directions.
Augustine:
Sure, I don’t mind. That’s okay.
Stump:
My own discipline comes before I hear the questions I’m thinking of, but back on episode 115 on this podcast, we talked to African American theologian Willie James Jennings, who’s researched some of the theology that colonizers used to rationalize their conquests. I don’t think anybody today disagrees that what people did back then was horrible and absurd. You tell in the book how it became the practice that a priest coming with the conquerors to new lands would read in Latin the theological statement that the Indigenous people there must submit or be subjected to violence, and it would be their own fault if they… This is absurd, right?
Augustine:
Yep.
Stump:
I wonder, and here I’m trying to invoke perhaps some circles that would continue to feel that maybe there was something okay, not about the violence, but maybe about spreading the gospel that justifies some degree of colonization in conquest.
Augustine:
Yeah.
Stump:
What’s wrong with that view from a theological, even a biblical perspective for why, “No. That is not the way that we as Christians ought to think about these people who are indigenous.”
Augustine:
You bet. I’m going to start with the lot and then I’ll get there. In 1823 when Chief Justice Marshall was writing these decisions, he said that the Indigenous people here in the United States had been justly compensated for the loss of their land because they received two things. One is civilization and the other is Christianity. That Indigenous people in the United States were justly compensated for the loss of their lands. That is all of their wealth, all of their self-determination that they still do not have to this day that was taken away, and the compensation was Christianity and civilization. Theologically, from my point of view, Jesus states his mandate in Luke 4, Jesus has just come out of the desert where he has been fasting for 40 days. The next story is he goes into the temple and he’s reading a text from Isaiah and he says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has ordained me to bring good news to the poor.” That’s what he says.
What is that good news? The spirit of God is upon me because he has ordained me to bring good news to the poor. He had list out what those things are, freedom for the oppressed, cite for the blind, release for the prisoner, and to pronounce the year of our Lord’s favor, which is Jubilee. I would interpret Jubilee as the just reordering of human systems, Jubilee—
Stump:
Western civilization wasn’t one of those things Jesus said he was coming to proclaim into everybody.
Augustine:
This is what he said as a liberator. This is what he says is his mandate. These four things, right? He’s there to do those four things. When he senses disciples out with the Great Commission and says, “Go into all lands and all people and teach this good news.” That good news was not domination, war, dominion, enslavement, genocide, that is not the gospel of Christ. That’s the first thing I will say. Another thing I will say is that, so much of the way our society is arranged, an individualist society, is a extracting society that is to say, a refusal to acknowledge that you were embedded in a closed system of mutual dependence. I can go into a place as an individual, and if I have the money to buy it, I can strip it of all of its natural resources, I can sell those to anyone I want to.
If I have enough money, I can go into another country like Suriname or French Guiana and buy that and strip it of all the natural resources and I can’t pollute that. I can pollute the waters. We know that mining waste, the impact it goes on for centuries. The impact is profound, but through this extractive mindset where I am the center, the most important thing. All I need is money to be able to go in and do that. That extractive mindset is… Well, I would say it runs counter to the gospel of Christ. I would also say that it destroys our ability to live as a species on this planet.
I believe that we are participating extraction to the extent, we’re changing climates, we’re like a geophysical force of nature, humanity on the planet now. We don’t have the power to destroy life itself, but we can destroy our ability as human beings to live here. Yes, we can. We are on the road to doing that. When we engage in decolonization and saying, “No, we want to live a different way. We’re going to live a different way based on discipleship.” We are actually saving ourselves, right? Not just Indigenous people, not just nature. We are returning to a sense of mutuality.
Stump:
Yeah, I think it may be easy for some of us to hear you talking about these extractive technologies and companies that are doing this, and for us in the church to think, “Yeah, they’re bad. They need to stop doing that.” But I don’t want you to let us off the hook too soon here quickly either, and how we ourselves, we the church with, I hope, the best of intentions, but have contributed to this as well, so much so in fact, that you quote somebody here in chapter five of your book that I just thought was so powerful. You’re quoting Stan McKay who says this really provocative thing—
Augustine:
A pre elder from Canada.
Stump:
Okay, he’s part of the Cree—this really provocative thing that I think not many Christians will hear, but I want you to talk about this as a way that we in the church need to hear, because he said, “I feel the activity of proselytization should cease until the people of the church, both settler and Indigenous, comprehend how the Doctrine of Discovery presently influences them.” When I was saying earlier that some people are going to want to try to justify some of this colonization in terms of spreading the gospel. Here, the response is, “You know? Maybe we need to just stop that altogether until we really realize how embedded those practices have been with this Doctrine of Discovery.” Can you give us maybe a few examples of how, again, with good intentions, the missionary activity has not followed this example of Christ that you were just describing?
Augustine:
Well, missionaries are often the vanguards of economic development. Economic development in the international economy is what we say, “Hey, economic development is for the good.” Right? The UN has economic development goals, but it’s almost always the case that vulnerable people and Indigenous people among them are the people who are paying the price for that economic development. Missionaries often will come into settings, round up people and make way for economic forces to come in and begin the process of extraction that. That relationship is well documented and those two things go hand in hand. Basically, Christian missionaries come in and part of their job is to Westernize the people that they’re proselytizing to, right? It’s not just about sharing Jesus, it’s about sharing Western culture and justifying western culture as the superior culture and the morally superior culture.
That process of asking people to give up their own culture, step away from their own history and understanding of reality. Step into a Western vision, creates the opportunity to come in and exploit that place. One thing I want to say too, and I think this is really important for the church to grapple with. The largest private landowner on earth, is the church. When we’re talking about land return, you don’t have to begin with governments. You can begin with church bodies. Huge beneficiaries of colonization have been the Christian Church. A primary beneficiary of colonization is the Christian Church. Christian churches are also financially embedded in extractive industry. That is to say, retirement funds, not only 401(k)s, but also trust funds that churches have, or the wealth that churches have is invested in mining, gold mining, copper mining. It’s invested in oil extraction, natural gas, because these are the most profitable industries, right?
Just like every other major corporation, churches are invested in these without any consideration for the impact on the people who have to live in the impact zone of where that extraction is taking place. As we are trending towards a green economy and there’s a lot of emphasis on that and a push to do that. Many Christians are advocating for additional investment in copper mining, lithium mining, without any regard to the people that are living in those impact zones. Habitually, there’s this process of saying, “Oh, if we’re going to live in a green way, that doesn’t mean we want to live sustainably. We’re just going to extract a different set of resources, regardless of the consequences.”
Stump:
You had really fascinating suggestion then for those of us who really do feel the spreading the gospel mission of Christ to be something we should take seriously, that instead of going to those Indigenous communities, maybe we go to the big mining corporations, these extractive industries, the financial institutions, and be missionaries there. You’re serious about this, right?
Augustine:
I am serious. It’s not a metaphor. I really mean it. I really mean it. If you think about it. Whose immortal soul is at risk? Is it people who are living in cooperation gently on the land, or is it people who are at the helm of this earth destroying extraction? What would it mean to send missionaries to mining executives and to world leaders? To me, we would have print postcards with the pictures of the missionaries. We would say this family based in Toronto or Denver, and they would go learn the language, spend time, and witness to the people who are at the helm of the systems of death.
Stump:
Well, it’s not hard to imagine which side Jesus would be on when you put those two groups of people next to each other, right?
Augustine:
Amen.
Stump:
Well, Sarah, our time is coming to a close here. I’ve really, really appreciated your conversation in this work. I’ve mentioned your organization, Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. You also have a podcast by that title. I’ll mention the book again, which is called The Land Is Not Empty. Any other resources you’d like to point our audience toward?
Augustine:
Sure. Thank you for asking. On March 10, there will be a free webinar that’s hosted by Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It’s called Unraveling the International Law of Colonialism: The 200th Anniversary of Johnson versus M’Intosh. If you want to learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery and how it remains embedded in our legal system, please check out this webinar. It’s an all day event. I’ve sent the website to use if you want to put it in your liner notes. The other, just quick plug I will make is that Sheri Hostetler, who’s my co-host for our podcast, and I are working on a book and that will come out in the fall and it is called, So We and Our Children may Live Following Jesus and Confronting the Climate Crisis, and it will be published by Harold Press in the fall of 2023.