Editor’s note: The 1493 Doctrine of Discovery has formed the basis of Western expansion and oppression of original peoples globally for more than 500 years. In March 2023, Pope Francis repudiated the Doctrine. This is the first in a series of interviews with Indigenous leaders about the Doctrine of Discovery and the implications of the Pope’s announcement.
Shawnee/Lenape (leh-NAH-peh) scholar Steven Newcomb’s introduction to the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery was the book “God is Red” by the late Standing Rock Lakota lawyer Vine Deloria Jr., which Newcomb read as a teen. Later, while attending the University of Oregon, he studied the 1823 Johnson v McIntosh ruling in a federal Indian law course. He had a hunch that Johnson and Deloria’s book were connected, which sparked a lifelong investigation into Vatican decrees, U.S. Federal Indian Law and Policy, and international law.
Newcomb is the director of Original Nations Advocates. His book “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” was the basis of the film “Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code.” He has visited the Vatican twice, calling upon the Pope to revoke the Papal Bulls. He worked closely with the late Birgil Kills Straight, traditional ceremonial man of the Oglala Lakota Nation, from 1992 until Birgil’s passing in 2019. Together they founded the Indigenous Law Institute.
He spoke to The Sopris Sun in April. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For those who may not be familiar with the Doctrine of Discovery, what is it?
What’s typically been called the Doctrine of Discovery, at one point was called the Right of Discovery. The idea behind it is that the first Christian people to locate lands inhabited by natives, who were heathens back during the 15th and 16th centuries, supposedly had a right to assert ultimate dominion or a right of domination over those lands, despite the fact that original peoples had been living there for thousands and thousands of years.
It became incorporated into United States law in 1823 in the Supreme Court ruling Johnson v McIntosh. This is the 200th year since that ruling. [Johnson] is premised upon ideas and patterns that are expressed in a number of 15th century Vatican documents, called Papal Bulls or papal decrees, that were directives issued to monarchs, particularly the monarchs of Portugal and Spain. The patterns found within those documents, particularly in the Latin version and the English translation, exhibit what I call a claim of a right of domination over everyone and everything.
So, the context is the original free existence of our nations and peoples, extending back to the beginning of time through our oral histories and traditions, contrasted with the system of domination brought by ship across the ocean and imposed on everyone and everything. Once we have those two sides of that contrast, then we have a view from the shore of our ancestors looking out at those invading ships sailing toward them, and a view from the ship moving toward our ancestors with the intention to establish domination where it did not yet exist. That sets up the context for all of these conversations and patterns that we see manifesting today across the planet, not just for Indigenous nations and peoples, but for everyone and everything.
How is it possible that U.S. policy and federal Indian law is still based on something that was written in the 15th century?
If you purchase a house or a property, invariably there will be a title search all the way back to the origin of the title of that property. The United States has something called organic law or fundamental law, and it’s based upon a title search. When you go into certain books published by the United States government, such as federal and state constitutions, colonial charters, and other organic laws of the United States, the reference to organic laws means the origin of the title.
The colonial charters — Papal Bulls, the prerogatives to Columbus, the charters to John Cabot and his son, to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Virginia Charters — those are all originating documents of the framework of the United States. The Johnson v McIntosh ruling is a reference to that origin. It’s a creation story of the United States — the origin story, once upon a time. But they don’t say “once upon a time”. They say “on the discovery of this vast continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire.”
So they’re telling you a story that goes back to those ancient Vatican documents because that’s the origin point of the entire international world order. We usually hear about the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia, all these various documents. But the average person is not aware of these other subtleties of the historical and legal and political record. The Doctrine of Discovery/Domination is interwoven into the roots of the United States. It’s the conceptual roots of the United States, the patterns of ideas and behavior.
When you go into those documents and you read the Latin and the English, you begin to see the patterning. You get into some of the fundamental concepts of society, such as the word “civilization”, the word “state” or “sovereignty”, “descendancy”, “dominion”, “property”, “empire.” These seven terms of domination are the threads of the entire political and legal system of the United States. They’re the strands of meaning, and each and every one of those terms goes back to “domination.”
They are created by people who know how to use words and ideas to create reality. The creation of reality through words is a form of magic; it’s casting spells. These people have skill in being able to use these terms in a manner that creates meaning and reality for themselves to their own benefit and to the detriment of everyone else. They’re working on maintaining the reality they already have. And we’re trying to change that reality. That’s where the conflict comes in.
Talk about how the Doctrine of Domination, as you call it, has impacted every Indigenous person in the world who has gotten in the way of European conquerors, and how it continues to impact indigenous lives today. I would say examples include the Catholic schools that have taken indigenous youth over the decades, the Willow Project, Oak Flat and Rio Tinto, and the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.
Well, all of those are excellent examples. Murdered and missing Indigenous women for 500 years. That’s not a recent phenomenon. The destruction of our languages and cultures and spiritual traditions, the theft of our children and putting them in those so-called schools — indoctrination institutions — to hammer “civilization” into them, which is really just the patterning of domination.
And, the ecological systems of our nations and peoples, our lands and territories, and the way in which our sacred sites have been devastated or taken over, the way in which all the place names have been projected by people from across an ocean. They said, okay, we’re gonna claim it by naming it. Their metaphorical overlay is on everything that we have thousands of years of experience with.
So I would say that not only every Indigenous person, but all peoples, all nations, all ecological systems, all waterways, every single part of the planet has been negatively, destructively impacted by these patterns that we’re talking about. The claim of a right of domination has been made into the organizing principle of the planet by way of these Vatican documents.
What are the implications of this so-called repudiation?
It gives the issue visibility. If enough pressure has been applied to budge the Vatican, a 2,000-year institution, the modern day manifestation of the Church of the Roman Empire, that’s pretty significant. The fact that we can have a conversation like this one as a result of what’s called a repudiation, I think that’s terrific.
So it assists us in raising the kinds of insights and understandings that we want to put forward. It’s a new paradigm. We need a paradigm that’s not premised upon domination, but is premised upon life, that accentuates and heightens life and beauty and love and all those things.
These are the knowledge and wisdom systems that the world has been deprived of as a result of the war against [Indigenous] wisdom systems, against our languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions. That war is still ongoing because there’s nothing that the domination system hates more than that which is fundamentally at odds with itself, especially if it’s able to model something beautiful and positive and true.
Listen to an extended version of this interview with Steven Newcomb on KDNK this Thursday, June 8, at 4pm during Everything Under The Sun. The archive will be posted at KDNK.org