Our Spiritual Movement to Challenge the Doctrine of Discovery

By Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape), Indigenous Law Institute and Original Nations Advocate

I want to take this opportunity to thank Stephen Dinan and The Shift Network team, as well as my daughter, Shawna Bluestar Newcomb, for organizing the Global Indigenous Wisdom Summit as a way to honor Indigenous Peoples Day. Since about 2002, when we stayed in the Mt. Shasta area, I have heard Shawna talking about “the Great Shift” away from the paradigm of patriarchy and dominance. It thus seems fitting that Shawna is now working with The Shift Network on this Indigenous Wisdom summit.

As Indigenous people, we have the ability to think back on the free and independent existence of our ancestors and our nations. That original free existence extends back to the beginning of time through our oral histories and traditions.

That was the period when our ancestors evolved our languages. Our languages are the repository of our knowledge and wisdom traditions, based on our Original Instructions which our ancestors used as a way to maintain our ecological systems and a Spiritual Way of Life, in our respective national homelands. Each day was begun with an expression of gratitude for the Sun and the Waters and all the elements of Life on Mother Earth. Prayerful ceremonies were conducted over millennia to express that thankfulness.

My friend and mentor Birgil Kills Straight is an Oglala Lakota ceremonial person and a Traditional Headman of the Oglala Lakota Nation. When he and I founded the Indigenous Law Institute in 1992, we understood that we were embarking on a spiritual movement to honor and respect Original Nations, while calling for an end to the “Age of Subjugation.” We were calling on Pope John Paul II to formally revoke important Vatican documents of empire and domination from the fifteenth century that had been used to rob our Nations and Peoples of our free and independent existence.

By 1992, I had spent a decade researching those Vatican documents, the history of that period, and the ideas and arguments of U.S. federal Indian law. I had intensively studied those and other topics so as to better understand what had happened to our original nations and peoples as a result of colonization. In October of that year, Birgil and I traveled to Milan, Italy and went on a speaking tour in Northern Italy to announce our campaign against the Vatican papal bulls. The following year, 1993, we wrote an open letter to Pope John Paul II explaining the connection between the papal bulls and U.S. federal Indian law.

I felt incredibly honored to be working with Birgil. A fluent speaker of his language, he had grown up with ceremony, and had been an assistant for amazing spiritual leaders such as Curtis Kills Ree, Frank Fools Crow, and Pete Catches. By 1983, Birgil began to dedicate his life to traditional ceremonies, such as the Purification Lodge and the Sun Dance, in dedication to upholding the Seven Laws of the Oglala Lakota Nation. In 1986, he worked to organize the Chief Bigfoot Memorial Horseback Ride. This involved great sacrifice and commitment by riding on horseback for several hundred miles through harsh winter conditions. The riders made that trek annually as a way to honor the Dakota ancestors, women, children, and men, who were massacred at Wounded Knee by the 7th Cavalry of the United States. This courageous feat required tremendous endurance.

After I dove deep into my research, I found that the papal documents of the fifteenth century express a long-range plan for the globalization of Christendom’s universal system of domination. In order for Christendom to extend its empire, however, the location of all unknown and un-dominated “heathen” and “infidel” lands had to be identified by men who went in search of those places. When the search for the geographical location of non-Christian lands was successful, it was called “a discovery.” This eventually led to the phrase “the doctrine of discovery,” or what I prefer to call “the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination.”

My extensive research and writing enabled me to recognize that the overall Pattern is found throughout the historical record. One example is the letter issued by “Their Catholic Majesties,” King Ferdinand and Queen, to Christopher Columbus in 1492. The monarchs give Columbus authorization to “discover and subdue [dominate] some Islands and Continent in the ocean [that] will be discovered and conquered [dominated] by your means and conduct. . .”

The letter is evidence of a monarchical system of domination. Colonizers used that system and its wording of domination to send reconnaissance ships to locate (“discover”) non-Christian lands that had not yet been forced under their system of domination so that they “will be discovered and conquered [dominated]” for the benefit and profit of what Pope Alexander VI later referred to as the Christian Empire (imperii Christiani, in the Latin language of the pope).

What are now typically called “Indigenous peoples” are the Original Nations and Peoples that have been continuously assaulted by what the British historian Arnold Toynbee called “the assailant societies” that are the present-day political successors of Western Christendom. Indigenous nations and peoples have experienced, and are still experiencing, the trauma that results from persistent and chronic domination. By using the phrase Original Nations and Peoples, we are acknowledging that our existence long predates the invading system of colonization and domination.

On September 4, 2015, my friend Sheldon Wolfchild and I released our documentary movie, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. The movie is based on my book and body of work. It is now used as a powerful educational tool, and, as one example, it has been used by Yakama Nation Chairman JoDe Goudy to inform the Yakama Nation Council about the doctrine. In a major development in a fuel tax dispute, on Monday, October 1, 2018, the Yakama Nation issued to the U.S. Supreme Court an amicus curiae (friend of the court brief) to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination, in a major fuel tax case. Our work has finally made its way up to the Supreme Court.

As the next phase of our work, we are launching what we are calling “Original Nations Advocates,” including our new website, Original Free Nations. We will be continually providing updates with new and cutting-edge content found nowhere else. We look forward to communicating with you. We encourage you to get involved by subscribing to our newsletter and watching our movie.

Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008). He has been studying federal Indian law and international law since the early 1980s, and has published several law review articles, including “The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Plenary Power,” (1993), published by New York University School of Law. Steven is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Doctrine of Discovery based on the 40 years he has spent investigating and writing about these issues. He has been a tireless advocate for Indigenous nations and peoples for decades and his work has now become a global movement.