Pope Francis faces calls to renounce the DoctrineOfDiscovery, which underpins Europe’s heist of the Americas and a mass dispossession of Indigenous peoples that remains foundational to Canadian sovereignty.
next week, he faces mounting pressure from the Assembly of First Nations and others to revoke the Doctrine of Discovery. Such a task is well beyond the powers of the Vatican, but the strange history of the doctrine could be said to serve as a warning“The story of the doctrine is the story of how you can obtain other people’s land by magic,” said Harry LaForme, who was Canada’s first Indigenous appellate judge before his retirement in 2018. “You just sprinkle these papal bulls and you get it.
The blue vertical line on the left of this 1502 map marks the boundary agreed to in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.The bulls stated that Portugal and Spain were entitled to the “free power, authority and jurisdiction of every kind” over all non-Christian lands,, discovered in their respective hemispheres.
Explorers employed various rites when taking possession of unfamiliar land. Cartier’s crew erected a nine-metre cross on the Gaspé Peninsula.Henri Julien/Library and Archives Canada “He stated that Indigenous peoples have rights and ownership over their land,” said Douglas Lind, a Virginia Tech professor whose research focuses on the philosophy of law. “The people might have universal power to try and convert people everywhere to Christianity, but that doesn’t give the pope the right to designate lands on the basis of discovery.”
By the 19th century, the United States had begun grappling with the question of how it came to possess such broad territory in a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings. In the landmark 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh case, two people claimed ownership of the same piece of land. One said he had acquired it from an Indigenous tribe, and the other said he had obtained it from the federal government.
“The right derived from discovery and conquest, can rest on no other basis,” he wrote, “all existing titles depend on the fundamental title of the crown by discovery.” Frank Calder, Chief of Chiefs of the Nisga'a Nation and British Columbia's first Indigenous cabinet minister, talks to media in Ottawa in February 1973 after meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chretien.Chief Roger William, right, of the Xeni Gwet'in First Nation.
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