The Land Is Not Empty

Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery

Sarah Augustine

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781513808314
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

White settlers saw land for the taking. They failed to consider the perspective of the people already here. In The Land Is Not Empty, author Sarah Augustine unpacks the harm of the Doctrine of Discovery—a set of laws rooted in the fifteenth century that gave Christian governments the moral and legal right to seize lands they "discovered" despite those lands already being populated by indigenous peoples. Legitimized by the church and justified by a misreading of Scripture, the Doctrine of Discovery says a land can be considered "empty" and therefore free for the taking if inhabited by "heathens, pagans, and infidels." In this prophetic book, Augustine, a Pueblo woman, reframes the colonization of North America as she investigates ways that the Doctrine of Discovery continues to devastate indigenous cultures, and even the planet itself, as it justifies exploitation of both natural resources and people. This is a powerful call to reckon with the root causes of a legacy that continues to have devastating effects on indigenous peoples around the globe and a call to recognize how all of our lives and our choices are interwoven.
?
What was done in the name of Christ must be undone in the name of Christ, the author claims. The good news of Jesus means there is still hope for the righting of wrongs. Right relationship with God, others, and the earth requires no less.

ONE

The Doctrine of Discovery and Me

I LIVE AMONG THE YAKAMA PEOPLE in central Washington State, specifically on a small ranch just below the precise place where the sky touches the earth: Toppenish Ridge. The place where I stay is nestled against a series of curved foothills, along the southern edge of the earthen bowl surrounding the Yakima Valley.¹

I am blessed to be welcomed as a neighbor among the Yakama people because in a nation that equates freedom with the open road, gasoline, and automobiles, I’m a walker. Cars have always made me nervous; I was an adult before I took my first driving test and earned a license. Although I have a car, I have owned one for just half my adult life. This “walking” sensibility is a gift where I live. It allows me to see fully the world and community around me.

Although I live in a rural community where small towns are dozens of miles apart, it is a walking place to many people, especially among the Yakama peoples. You may notice if you visit this place that Yakama people pop up in unexpected places. Seemingly empty lots. Medians. The “blank” spaces between buildings.

When driving-culture people look at an unfamiliar place, they look to roads. Homes, neighborhoods, businesses, even landmarks like mountains and rivers are viewed in relation to roads. Maps define communities by the roads that snake through them, guide travelers from where they are to where they wish to go.

If a person is looking at a place through the frame of roads, roadless places are not visible. This is why a road-centric person who is pumping gas at the Yakamart gas station may be startled when a local person is suddenly standing nearby. Where did this person come from? The road-centric person looks to the left and the right. No car drove in. Did this person materialize out of the weeds? Actually, the person was rendered invisible by simply inhabiting the space that is irrelevant when traveling by road.

As a walking person, I am open to thinking about space in shorter distances, since I walk to familiar places accessible easily on foot. Whether in Manhattan or on the reservation, distance and time take on different meanings without a car. When I walk the three miles of Island Road from the main road to my house, the farms along the fence do not seem small or uniform at all, as they might to someone whizzing by in a car. If you walked with me, the burning sensation in your calves would force you to notice the hill we would crest, the place where the pavement peters out into gravel. You would see the clear distinction between the overgrazed pastureland on the east side of the road and the wildlife preserve to the west. You would notice the difference between a field worked with large equipment (tilled into neat rows) and pastures meant for livestock (plenty of weeds). You would appreciate the different foliage on the hills (green orchard grass or brown wheatgrass) and in the hollows (riparian toolies and cattails).

If you imagine space through a walking perspective, what may appear to be an “empty lot” from a car window becomes a rich ecosystem. What seemed to be a strip of land between buildings is actually a wide thoroughfare. From the walking perspective, any land good for foot travel is a safe distance from the dusty, reckless roads.

As a walker, as one who dwells on a reservation that is ill-defined by the dominant culture, the world between the spaces where most people travel is where I live: off the map.

Now imagine with me traveling to the Wayana people in Suriname, located on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. To get there requires a series of international flights, either through Europe or the Caribbean. Once in the capital, Paramaribo, one must either charter a bush airplane or travel on the Tapanahony River for three days through dense rainforest to get to the village of Apetina. Imagine the difference between flying over the dense canopy for two hours and traveling by canoe for three days, sleeping in the rainforest for three nights. The difference in the experience of the distance traveled is astonishing.

In Suriname, the national government claims that the rainforest that makes up most of the country is predominantly uninhabited. From the vantage of an airplane speeding high above dense rainforest canopy, it certainly seems to be. But traveling the slow way, the way of the Wayana, you may see things differently.

Indigenous Peoples persist in traditional cultivation, hunting, and gathering cycles to provide the food, building materials, and medicines to support their population. Originally, low-population-density tribes in this rainforest planted gardens and hunted in large areas on a cycle that could span decades.² This ensured that the poor rainforest soil would replenish itself after light cultivation.

In the 1980s, Christian missionaries in Suriname began the process of consolidating the twelve distinct tribes of Indigenous Peoples into village clusters.³ Village clusters were established to efficiently proselytize communities (from the missionary viewpoint), and to remove inhabitants from potentially resource-rich regions (from the government viewpoint). Once mission villages were established, the Suriname government declared the interior “empty” and therefore open for resource exploration and extraction.

The Suriname government does not take an actual census of the rainforest population. The official numbers reported, an estimated 4 percent of the national population, are based on the imposed “village” population estimates only. Meanwhile, according to the government, the interior lands are “uninhabited” by humans.

Terra nullius

Suriname’s policy toward Indigenous Peoples did not originate in this small region. It is based on the principles defined by terra nullius, a Latin phrase meaning “empty land,” a theological and legal doctrine that gave land title to Christian European states who would assume sovereignty over “discovered lands.” Under terra nullius, “discovered” lands were considered devoid of human beings if the original people who had lived there—defined as “heathens, pagans, and infidels”—were not ruled by a “Christian prince.” The terra nullius doctrine became the cornerstone of the Doctrine of Discovery.

The “Doctrine of Discovery” does not refer to just one church doctrine, nor are its impacts confined to theological issues. The Doctrine of Discovery is a theological, philosophical, and legal framework dating to the fifteenth century that gave Christian governments moral and legal right to invade and seize Indigenous lands and dominate Indigenous Peoples. This pattern of oppression began with papal bulls, or decrees. One of the most infamous is Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455. This bull granted the Portuguese king the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery” and to “apply and appropriate to himself and his successors” all of these peoples’ sovereign lands, possessions, and goods.⁴ In other words, Romanus Pontifex justified enslaving and seizing the land and possessions of anyone who was not a Christian, setting the stage for colonization as well as the enslavement of African people by Europeans. Christopher Columbus, under the direction of the Spanish Crown, was similarly instructed to “discover and conquer,” “subdue,” and “acquire” distant lands, and John Cabot was given similar direction by the British Crown. North and South America were colonized according to this pattern, as were Australia and New Zealand.

The Doctrine of Discovery may sound like something from the past, a discrete historical event from back when Christians didn’t “know better.” Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The Doctrine of Discovery formed the deep structure of colonization that continues to oppress Indigenous Peoples and dispossess them of their land today. Papal decrees had the force of law in a time when there was no such thing as the separation of church and state. Over time, these decrees dictating who was able to own land in colonized countries became the basis of international law, and most Western countries incorporated this international law into their national laws and policies as well.

For instance, in the United States, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall said that Christian European nations had assumed “ultimate dominion” over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery and that upon “discovery,” the Indigenous People had lost “their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations” and retained only a right of “occupancy” in their lands. According to Marshall, the United States, upon winning its independence in 1776, became a successor nation to the right of “discovery” and acquired the power of “dominion” from Great Britain. As late as 2005, Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the landmark 1823 decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York. The ruling held that the repurchase of tribal lands did not restore tribal sovereignty.

We can see the Doctrine of Discovery manifest in Arizona today, where the San Carlos Apache are battling to protect a sacred site called Oak Flat (Chi’chil Bildagoteel). Because of the Doctrine of Discovery, the San Carlos Apache do not legally own this place of ceremony and prayer near Phoenix that they have visited from time immemorial. Instead, the land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service. As of this writing, the U.S. Congress plans to transfer this land to an Australian copper mining company in the first quarter of 2021. Mining will desecrate this sacred site. This is but one of thousands of examples of how the Doctrine of Discovery operates today. All around the world, the Doctrine of Discovery legitimates resource extraction from ancestral Indigenous lands. Mining, fracking, logging, water theft, plantation agriculture, and other extractive industries take resources from Indigenous communities to benefit those descended from Europeans and colonial or postcolonial nations. In addition, these extractive industries often pollute the lands, water, and bodies of Indigenous Peoples on Indigenous homelands without penalty or censure.

I have found that most people are amazed when they hear this. The dominant narrative in the United States explains that Indigenous Peoples either sold their lands in a fair bargain or lost their lands as a result of legal war. Regrettable, but “just how it goes.” Few people have heard of the Doctrine of Discovery and are surprised when they realize that these injustices are perfectly legal. Because European and Western legal systems are based on precedent, the land-rights issues that Indigenous Peoples face today—reflected in legal decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court and high courts around the globe—are a result of policy set by the church before Columbus and reinforced by legal structures for five centuries. Land and resource theft has been perfectly legal for more than five hundred years!

A paradigm of domination

However, the Doctrine of Discovery affects more than just who owns the land. It is actually a paradigm of domination that is threaded through all our societal institutions, not just in the United States but around the globe. This is because, to legitimize the taking of land, the Doctrine of Discovery had to establish the ideology that Indigenous Peoples were subhuman and fundamentally inferior to Europeans.⁵ As I will discuss in more detail in chapter 6, Old Testament interpretations that justified genocide became a religious and moral framework that then shaped every human institution in the “discovered world,” and its worldview was reinforced in every aspect of social life. It has been repeated and practiced by every generation to this day, evident in everything from who is incarcerated to who enters a foster home to who receives prenatal care to the way we teach American history in the public education system to Supreme Court decisions relating to land tenure.

Once the inferior status of Indigenous Peoples was defined, the second strategy was to deny our existence. Defining the status of Indigenous Peoples as inferior to Europeans was effective strategy in the early stages of land occupancy when open conflict was still commonplace. However, denial that Indigenous Peoples exist was a strategy created with longevity in mind. For instance, in the United States, segregating Indigenous Peoples onto “reservations” (portions of land that are often the poorest in natural resources and lacking in infrastructure) isolated the problem of “the Indian” and swept it out of the view of the dominant culture. The U.S. Allotment Act of 1887 privatized the vast majority of Native American land and broke up Indigenous collective holdings of Indigenous land. Those who belonged to tribes that were unlucky enough to be denied federal recognition were defined out of existence. Tens of thousands were forced to assimilate in large cities away from their homelands and were stripped of their identity in the collective consciousness, that is, the shared beliefs, ideas, and moral norms in popular culture.⁶ What is an “Indian” off the reservation?

Those who belonged to tribes denied federal recognition were defined out of existence, since “real Indians” are issued a card and assigned a number. Outside their history, language, and relationship to a homeland, Indigenous People who have not been assigned a number are not recognized by the dominant culture. Nostalgia for “Indians” is held in the collective North American consciousness, at least for the ones who come from a bygone era defined by rebellion, horses, and Hollywood mysticism. But “real Indians,” our collective mythology holds, are long gone. The assimilated Native Americans of the present day are simply in the crowd of brown faces on the margins of the mainstream, assumed to be recent immigrants from foreign shores.

I am one of those brown faces, which is all I can ever claim to be. Like many Indigenous People who dwell in North America, I am the product of a diaspora: the history, language, tradition, and genetics of my people were wrenched from a place and thrown to the wind, divided for all time. In the language of the arrow of time, where progress moves in one direction, I am an assimilated person.

My lineage is similar to Indigenous People throughout the Americas. My mother’s people are originally from southern Colorado, a people twice colonized: first by the Spanish, then by the northern Europeans. Although not one of her relatives can be traced to a border crossing, her childhood was marked by white locals telling her to “go back to Mexico.” My father was raised in a Catholic boys’ home. Segregated orphanages like the Catholic charity where he grew up were common in the 1940s, as was the practice of removing Native Americans from their homes and relocating them to cities. Both of my parents grew up on the margins of society, neither with parents. When I asked my mother where I came from, she would say, “The Planet Earth. Your father and I are like Adam and Eve.”

No history. No extended family. No identity.

This process of un-naming, of depatriating, of denying, is ongoing in Suriname. As the rainforest is eradicated by deforestation, hydropower generation, and mineral extraction, thousands of Indigenous and tribal people are streaming to the capital city. Their government denies their existence as a matter of policy. Th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Quotes
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Doctrine of Discovery and Me
• 2. Laying Down Our Nets . . . or How We Came to Live on a Reservation
• 3. Is Everyone at the Table Who Needs to Be Here?
• 4. The Doctrine of Discovery and Me, Again
• 5. We Don’t Need Help, We Need Relatives
• 6. Reimagining Our Theology
• 7. Follow the Money
• 8. Solidarity and Repair
• 9. My Cosmology
• 10. People of Faith, Rise Up!
• Resources for Further Reading
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• The Author