Category Archives: History

From Ancient Indigenous People to Resistance Against American Intrusions

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Brockville is a city in Eastern Ontario in the Thousand Islands Region, one of the most beautiful places in Canada. We did not venture into that area this area, as we decided, unusually for us, to explore the city rather than the surrounding countryside. We had visited the Thousand Island region in the past and loved it, but today it was time to explore the city.

Brockville was previously inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and later the Oswegatchie people. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians established a cluster of palisaded agricultural villages in the vicinity of what became Brockville from about 1450 until the 1500s. They were farmers! Before that the Point Peninsula People, as they are now called, inhabited the upper St. Lawrence River from at the least the Late Middle Woodland Period.

 

In the archaeological cultures of North, the Woodland period spanned a period from about 1000 CE until European contact in the 16th century. The phrase “Woodland Period” is a term used to describe prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers to the Mississippian cultures.  The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covers what is now Eastern Canada south of the Subarctic region, the Eastern United State, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a period of constant development in stone and bone tools, leather crafts, and textile manufacturing. The people also cultivated the soil and constructed shelters. Many Woodland peoples used spear and atlatls until the end of the period when they were replaced by bows and arrows. The southern Woodland peoples also used blowguns.  I was not aware of any of most of that before this trip.

Increasingly the people used horticulture and developed what has been called the Eastern Agricultural Complex that consisted mainly of seed plants and gourd cultivation. They also became less mobile over time and in some places constructed and occupied villages and even cities. The period from 1000-1400CE was a period of what has been called “intensive agriculture,” which was likely continued until about 500 years ago. The people also made use of pottery that arisen earlier during the Archaic period in some places. The forms of pottery were widely diversified.

During the period of 1000-200 BCE the Early Woodland period, included times when people engaged in extensive mound-building, regionally distinctive burial complexes, and traded exotic goods across a vast part of North America that involved substantial interactions with other Indigenous peoples of North America. During that time, many people relied on both wild and domesticated plant foods and mobile subsistence strategies to take advantage of seasonally available resource such as fish, shellfish, nuts, and wild plants with which the people were intimately experienced.  Pottery then was widespread across North America.

By 1751, the Oswegatchie people had occupied much of the north shore of the St. Lawrence in the region we travelled. They withdrew from the North Shore of the St. Lawrence after negotiating with the British in 1784

Later it was settled by United Empire Loyalists and the city of Brockville became named by one of Britain’s most famous Generals, Sir Isaac Brock. English settlers first arrived in 1784 when thousands of refugees arrived from the American colonies after the American Revolutionary War. They were often referred to as United Empire Loyalists because they continued their allegiance to King George III.  They struggled with the American colonies in the years 1776 to 1783 and these skirmishes seriously divided the loyalties among people in some of the American colonies such as New York and Vermont.

 

The British capitulated to the Americans in 1782 and when the six-year war, which ended with the Americans who remained loyal to the British crown being treated harshly by the Americans who saw them as traitors. Many of them lost their properties in America.

Many Loyalists chose to flee north to the British colony of Quebec and Great Britain opened up the western regions of Canada at the time called Upper Canada and later Ontario. In fact, the British crown purchased land from the First Nations so they could allocate land to the loyalists in compensation for their losses and then helped them to establish settlements.

The first settlement by loyalists in the area arrived in 1785 and the first settler was William Buell Sr. Christiane and I walked on a street named after him in Brockville.  Later in the evening we dined at Buell Street Bistro. Buell was an ensign who left the King’s Rangers in the state of New York. Locals called the first settlement Buell’s Bay in his honour. Later, in 1810, the name was changed to Elizabethtown and then even later, Brockville.

 

General Isaac Brock was a celebrated as a hero in the area and even a saviour by some in view of his success in repelling Americans and securing their surrender of Fort Detroit during the War of 1812. He was fatally wounded while leading troops up the heights near Queenston.

Brockville became the first incorporated self-governing town on January 28, 1832, two years before the town of Toronto.

A patent medicine industry developed there around 1854 and features such illustrious products as Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, Dr. McKenzie’s Worm Tablets, and later Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. Those must be good.

Brockville along with many other towns in Canada West [now Ontario]  were targets of the threatened Fenian invasion after the American Civil War ended in 1865. In June 1866, the unruly Irish-American Brotherhood of Fenians invaded Canada! The raids were launched across the Niagara River from Vermont into Canada East (now Quebec).

Those unsuccessful raids were a significant catalyst to the confederation of Canada as the people of what became Canada saw their neighbours to the south as lawless ruffians who must be resisted.  Not that differently than today in other words. A year later, in 1867 the new Canadian Prime Minister John A. MacDonald called upon volunteer militia in every town to organize to protect the country from these American rabble rousers. That led to the organization of the Brockville Infantry Company and the Brockville Rifle Company (now called The Brockville Rifles).

Now in 2025 the American president is trying to lure, or perhaps bully, Canada into becoming the 51st state and make what he calls one big beautiful country.

Who ever said Canadian history is boring? Probably many, but not me.

 

Pluralism around the Sault

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Moral Humility, Pluralism

 

 

The Clergue blockhouse at Sault Ste. Marie

 

The Clergue blockhouse was right beside the Ermatinger house and was part of the original North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. Both of which were right beside our hotel.  Of course, I don’t think too many elites stayed in this block house. That was for the lessers.

This area of North America where Lake Huron and Lake Superior meet, including Sault Ste. Marie, Ignace Michigan, the Mackinac Straits, and St Joseph’s Island, were vitally important in the fur trade. There were many varied First Nations, and the French and English, and later the Americans and Canadians. Barbara Huck called it “The Crossroads of Humanity.” Often they fought each other; at other times they lived together peacefully. As Huck explained,

“For a half-century. Michilmackinac [a little south of Sault Ste, Marie] flourished. Living at a crossroads of humanity, the people of the straits were at home with diversity, unfazed by racial, linguistic, or religious  differences. A multilingual, multiracial community evolved as French traders married local Odawa and Ojibwe women. Prefacing the Metis community that would grow up around the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in Manitoba a century later, their mixed blood children soon became the dominant population of the straits.”

In Manitoba as well the Métis people became dominant, for a while.  When Manitoba became a province of Canada in 1870, 80% of the people were Métis. A lot of Manitobans have forgotten this. Some of the Indigenous people had left and the hordes of European immigrants, including Mennonites were not yet there.

It was also interesting what happened after America declared its independence from England. As Huck said,

“In 1775 the New England colonies rebelled, and the British turned to their new-found native allies.  Weighing the situation, the Odawa, Ojibwe, Winnebago, Sauk, Fox, Menominee, and Sioux decided that as rigid and obtuse as the British might be, they were not as bent on clearing and settling the land as the American rebels were.”

 

Where many nations live together, they have to make serious efforts to recognize each other and not assume, that all wisdom resides in their own community. They did learn that in the area around Sault Ste. Marie. Sadly, such lessons are sometimes hard to learn and too often not passed on to the next generation. I am a great believer in pluralism. It breeds humility, something always in short supply. Live and let live. We can all learn from each other. None of us have a monopoly on the truth. Pluralism is not always easy, but it sure beats warfare.

As Sally Gibson wrote in a chapter of Huck’s book,

“Sault Ste. Marie has long been a stopping place for travellers. Once a seamless zone of trade, the area is now separated by the Canadian-American border and twin cities name Sault Ste. Marie on either side of the St. Mary’s River Rapids. The rapids drop almost seven metres over less than three kilometres, draining Lake Superior. Travellers today can enjoy the natural beauty of the area and find remnants of the fur trade that stimulated early European settlement.”

 

Of course, once European countries arrived on the scene it did not take them long to make claims on the land. That’s what Europeans (later Canadians or Americans) do.  As Gibson said,

“The territory around Sault Ste, Marie was claimed for France by Sieur de Saint Lusson in an elaborate ceremony…recognizing the importance of the location, New France granted a seigneury on the St. Mary’s River to Chevalier de Repentigny in 1751.”

 

Of course, Gibson did not say by whose authority France did that because none of the people from Europe had any authority to make such grants. Americans always claimed land by conquest, but the locals in Canada had never been conquered. And the locals had never ceded the land. So there really was no basis for the grants. France could have used some humility.

Chevalier de Repentigny farmed the property and fortified it but he left within 5 years as soon as the 7 Years War broke out between France and England. After the French fell in that war, the English took over, but they really had no authority either. Of course, that did not stop the English from granting exclusive rights to the land in 1765 to an English trader Alexander Henry. He was given authority to the Lake Superior area. What did mean? I would say, as a recovering lawyer, that such a grant would be void for uncertainty. What area was covered by the grant, if the grant was otherwise valid?

I have always wondered what would be the legal effect of the United States placing a flag on the moon?  Would that give the Americans ownership of the entire moon?  Half the moon?  The light side of the moon? A square mile? An acre?  Or no part? How can you make such a decision? When you get right down to it claims of “ownership” are usually dubious at their root. Once more that should generate some humility.

Take another example. Indigenous people roamed the North American continent for thousands of years. Many of them were nomadic. Others were more sedentary farmers. What part did each First Nation own? How can you tell? By what right?

Really all claims of ownership are dubious?  Whether you are talking about the jungles of the Amazon or the plains of North America or the city of Steinbach?  All of them are fundamentally dubious!

I taught real estate law at the University of Manitoba Law School for about 10 years and nothing I learnt or taught there gave me any more certainty.

Life of the Elite During Fur Trade

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Ermatinger House, Sault Ste, Marie, Ontario

Without realizing it, when I last read Barbara Huck’s book, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, she was writing about Sault Ste. Marie! In fact, about places right next to our hotel. Was this coincidence or miracle? And our hotel was minutes away from what she talked about in the book.

Within a couple of blocks of our hotel in Sault Ste. Marie we visited some of the places referred to in the book by Barbara Huck that I was reading that very morning. Huck even had photos in her book of the same buildings I photographed like the one above. There were some weird coincidences on the trip and this was clearly one of them.

First, the stone house of independent fur trader Charles Ermatinger was built on the shore of the St. Marys River, is obviously not an ordinary house. As Sally Gibson wrote in Barbara Huck’s book on the Canadian fur trade, the house was ‘constructed in a classic Georgian style, with ground sloping to the water, it was an imposing sight for early 19th century travellers on the waterway.”I  accept that. I certainly was impressed. Thousands of visitors go to see the house each year. It has been completely restored and refurnished.  She wrote that the house is underpinned in the basement, which I did not see from outside, by cedar logs at least 38 centimetres in diameter and “has stone walls almost a metre thick.” It was built to last through dangerous times.

This house was part of the North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. The Ermatinger family lived there until 1828 when they moved back to Montreal. But Ermatinger was an independent fur trader after he left the company in 1808. No doubt he and his family, consisting of a wife and 13 children, enjoyed life there.  His wife was Mananowe (Charlotte) and was the daughter of a prominent Ojibwe policy maker by the name of Katawabeda. The occupants were the elites of 2 of the founding nations of this country; Indigenous and French. That too was impressive.

As Gibson explained, “In this gracious environment, the Ermatinger family offered hospitality to both area residents and weary travellers.” Apparently, invitations to the annual caribou dinner at the house were keenly sought by locals. I know I would love to have attended one of those. It was established as a National Historic site in the 1960s.

 

Prosperity Ever Depression Never: Steinbach in the 1930s

Books, History

 

I write today to enthusiastically recommend a fine work of history written by a friend of mine, Ralph Friesen. The book is called Prosperity Ever Depression Never: Steinbach in the 1930s. It is a brilliant analysis of the town of Steinbach, which is introduced to us by one of its peculiar aspects, a road that travels at an angle from the North West to South East. Ralph analyses the town and its people by looking at each lot along that big wide road. I found that strange device for story-telling often helped me to orientate myself and thus understand whom he was talking about based on their location.

Ralph is a subtle and skilled story teller who constantly sneaks up on the reader without bombast, malice or ideological thunder. Yet there was something of interest on every page.  Ralph tells stories of common folk and captains of industry, teachers and athletes, professionals and local historians, and many more all with keen and subtle language. He tells us of the good times and dark times.

There are shocking stories of Steinbach businessmen that included Nazi sympathizers and stories of Mennonites who wanted to be separate from “the world” and others who wanted to take advantage of the world in order to prosper. There were staunch ministers and rebels too. He mentions in passing, the uncomfortable fact that

 “there was no understanding or even curiosity about the fact that the land had been part of traditional Ojibway and Métis migratory territory, and since Indigenous Peoples had little participation in the capitalist economy, they were looked down upon.”

 

Ralph does not hide the warts on the fine faces of Steinbachers. He tells stories of generosity and faith, and yet admits there was also abuse of women by unsavoury men.

He compares Steinbach with other communities without bragging. For example,

“Other towns, especially those populated by Anglo-Canadians, often built stores or houses of well-to-do citizens with red-brick, an investment in the appearance of permanence. But the post office was the only brick building in Steinbach, almost as if Mennonites had been hedging their bets on their tenure in Canada.”

He told of Henry Reimer of the famous family that created a store “just like Eatons,” but where the man in charge “was a philosopher” who “would just as soon visit as sell.”

I cannot avoid talking about his story of my amazing grandmother, Anna Siemens Neufeld, who came to Canada with her husband and 5 young children. Sadly, her husband died within a couple of years after their arrival, leaving her with 5 young children, few skills, and little or no social assistance I always wondered how she could survive. Well, she became a seamstress making dresses for the wealthy women in town, and sadly, sometimes those women pleaded a shortage of funds and refused to pay. This forced her to send two of her young sons, including my father and uncle to try to collect legitimate debts from rich women while feeling like beggars.

This probably was not unusual, for Ralph mentions that during that time 22 households were headed by single mothers. I found that a shocking fact.

Steinbach was “a God-soaked Community,” in which, “with the exception of the Schoenwieser, each of the Mennonite subdenominations held the view that their interpretation of the faith was superior to the others.”  At the same time many thought their religion was also superior to that of surrounding Catholics and Ukrainians among others. “Yet”, as Ralph says, “self-interest had not flown out the window. The Mennonites all did business with one another and with their non-Mennonite neighbours and with Anglo-Canadian and Jewish wholesalers and buyers in Winnipeg.” After all, business is business.

The book also describes how people survived the Depression through an informal barter system coupled with large gardens, that of course only worked during short growing seasons. At the same time, while the townspeople were often justifiably proud of how they coped during tough times, it was also true that government relief measures, like construction of the highway to Piney, also helped the community.  Individualism is important but so is community.

In summary, I cannot commend this book too strongly. The last chapter, a careful summing up, is alone worth much more than the modest price of the book. Ralph shows how the churches helped support those in need, as in fact did generous businessmen. He also shows how the town had very competent business people but also commendable community co-operative efforts. The people of Steinbach managed to navigate between the “the World” and “the Kingdom of God.”

Steinbach has always been proud of its economic and religious success. Ralph concludes,

“Commerce itself, while accepted as necessary insofar as it supported the agrarian way of life which denoted a humble faith, was also suspect because it so easily could lead to attachment to material things and to thinking of oneself as superior to one’s poorer neighbour. Conservative elements were also suspicious of theology of American fundamentalism, with its emphasis on salvation achieved through prideful individual declarations of belief in a personal Saviour, as contrasted with salvation as a process occurring in a community setting, in relationship with one’s neighbours.”

I almost forgot to mention the incredible array of interesting photographs.  This is history from a master story teller.

After reading this book, one can’t help but appreciate the wonder of Steinbach and its people in the 1930s. Wonder with challenges.  This really is a magnificent book. Everyone should read it.

 

European Savages

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, civilization, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

On our trip across eastern Canada I had many opportunities to consider Canadian history.

The Indigenous people encountered by Europeans were definitely not savages.  They were members of sophisticated societies that all too often the Europeans did not well understand. Many of the Europeans were blinded by prejudice thinking that they could bring civilization and God to the barbarians and heathens. This was nonsense that the Europeans believed and passed on to their descendants and was largely responsible for the creation of white male supremacy favoured by their clans, but clearly absurd.  The indigenous people were civilized people and had a lot to teach the European newcomers while they were prepared to learn a lot from them as well. That is a wise attitude isn’t it?

It certainly was not true, as many Europeans thought, that this new land was empty of people. England, for example adopted the concept of terra nullius, a Latin phrase meaning “nobody’s land,” to justify their bloody claims. According to this theory, terra nullius included territory without a European recognized sovereign, where no one who counted lived.  Again, this was nonsense.

Contrary to such barbaric unfounded prejudices there were people all over the entire western hemisphere when Europeans arrived and these people mattered just as much as the visitors. The Europeans had no monopoly on civilization. In fact, often they revealed a startling lack of civilization. As Barbara Huck said in her book,

“Parts of North and Central America were among the most densely populated places on Earth. Some anthropologists have estimated the total population of the continent 500 years ago, including Mexico and Central America, at between 112 and 140 million. Mexico, the spectacular Aztec capital, was one of the three largest cities in the world when the Spaniards first laid eyes on it.

Much of Canada and the United States was considerably less populated than that—estimates put the total population of both between nine and 12 million—but North America was not, as some have imagined it, terra nullius, a land without people. And many societies, such as the Iroquoians, were healthier, more prosperous and less class-bound than their European counterparts of the same period.”

 

If first contact was indeed a case of civilization meeting barbarity, it is likely that the Europeans were the barbarians!  

It is also noteworthy, the Indigenous people who first encountered these Europeans in many ways did not share European attitudes and values. As Huck said,

“…the Americas were literally a world apart and North American values and beliefs were very different –in some ways almost directly contrary to the perspectives of the strangers who began to arrive on their shores in the early 1500s, the beginning of the contact period.”

 

For example, I have pointed out elsewhere that indigenous people of North American had views that were by no means all the same. They had many diverse views, just like Europeans.  The spiritual beliefs of indigenous people, for example, were very different from the newcomers, and in my view often preferable. We are of course, each entitled to our own views on that and I intend to continue commenting on those differences.

 

They also had very different views about how societies should be organized and how they should be governed and how wealth should be produced and shared. I find the differences profoundly interesting.  Barbara Huck in her book also commented on them:

 

“Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two more conflicting world views. Whether farmers or hunters, the vast majority of the people of what are now Canada and the United States lived communally in groups of varying sizes. The territories they inhabited were not owned, as we recognize land ownership, but rather commonly acknowledged  to be theirs to use. They governed by consensus, valued generosity and self-reliance, and loathed acquisitiveness and coercion. Stinginess and miserly behavior were strongly condemned. Almost everywhere it was considered immoral to allow anyone to go hungry if food was available.”

 

Not a bad way to live. Maybe the Europeans were the savages.

 

History is Important

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Critical thinking, Death of Truth, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Truth Seeking

 

 

I believe there is a lot to be learned from history.   And much history can be learned from travel. History teaches us the truth about the past. At least it always tries to find the truth. Sometimes that truth lies underneath decades or even centuries of obfuscations or outright propagandist lies. Those lies were designed to obscure uncomfortable truths.  I want to face those truths; not escape from them.

Barbara Huck’s book has helped to do that and it has enriched our journey.  Huck made some very interesting comments about our Canadian history. As she explained,

Today, on the cusp of a new millennium, North Americans have more tools than ever before for travelling through time. Thanks to new technologies and new perspectives, we are well equipped to imagine life five thousand or five million years ago. We can contemplate doing blood tests on the body of  an ancient trader found high on an Alpine pass or cloning a woolly mammoth in China. Yet for the most part, an appreciation of life here just 500 years ago eludes us.

 

I did not want to elude that story. I wanted to approach that history on this journey.  I think it is important.

History is important because the truth is important. Nowadays a lot of people don’t want old monuments to be taken down.  Some say that is erasing history. I disagree. Paying homage to old statues, or refusing to critique history is to erase history. Many people don’t want to look at our past history because it might make them uncomfortable.  They prefer self-satisfying illusions.  Personally, I would rather be disturbed in my comfortable pew than sit there in ignorance ignoring the truth. If the truth is not challenging its probably not the truth.

 

 

A Call for Love, Truth, and Justice

Catholic Church, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, racism, religion

 

Friends have asked me what I thought of Pope Francis’s recent words in Canada during his pilgrimage of penance. As I said earlier, it is up to indigenous people to say whether or not the apology is satisfactory, but I want to comment on some of his other statements.

 

The vicious Doctrine of Discovery, has for more than 500 years held that it is justifiable for Christians to steal land from indigenous people and brutalize and murder them in the process and then force them to be become Christians. What could be worse than that? Even if the doctrine was dismissed by former Popes, the doctrine was used to exploit indigenous people right up to the 20th century. Pope Francis while in Canada was implored to reject that doctrine  And guess what?” He did it! At least that I is my interpretation of his words, for what he said is clearly incompatible with that doctrine.

According to Niigaan Sinclair, writing in the Winnipeg Free Press, “Pope Francis has rebuked over 500 years of how the church and Catholics treated Indigenous people.” Sinclair pointed out how in 1550, almost 500 years ago, a trial took place among Catholic leaders at Valladolid where the question was: are Indigenous Peoples human? Today, it seems incomprehensible that such a question could even be asked, but in 1550, the idea that indigenous people might be human was radical. Until then, the Popes had declared that indigenous people could be robbed of their land and must be converted while authorizing the use of brutal and even murderous force against them. It was a heinous doctrine that required a heinous world view—white male supremacy—to found it. It was not confined to Catholics but was the common European attitude to indigenous peoples everywhere.

Catholic leaders had a hard time coming to a final decision on the issue and hence acquiesced in violence, evangelization and yes, even genocide for the next 500 years. At least that was the case until now. On July 28 in Quebec City, Canada, Pope Francis asked a monumental question: “How about our relationships with those who are not ‘one of our own,’ with those who do not believe, with those who have different traditions and customs?”

 The question is astoundingly simple and yet astoundingly profound. Then the Pope gave a very clear answer to his own question: “This is the way: to build relationships of fraternity with everyone, with Indigenous brothers and sisters, with every sister and brother we meet, because the presence of God is reflected in each of their faces.”

 Pope Francis gave a theological answer to the question. I would have given a more naturalistic answer. I would have said, this is because ‘we feel the humanity in the indigenous people as we feel it in our ourselves.’ But either way, the answer really is the same.

 Niigaan Sinclair said this in response: “In a simple statement that rebuked over 500 years of Catholic doctrine, the Pope had pronounced Indigenous cultures and traditions are valuable, worthy on their own terms, and represent “the presence of God.”

Sinclair explored the idea further by speculating what this revolutionary idea of Pope Francis means in practice:

 “Bishops and priests must now “build relationships of fraternity” with Indigenous ways, instead of forcing us to give up our songs, stories, and traditions. Because, finally, after 500 years, the church finally recognizes us as human. Forgive me if I don’t give the Pope a standing ovation — as the priests and bishops did — but I do recognize a step when I see one.”

 

So far, I have not read any other pundit who has recognized the significance of Pope Francis’ remarks, but Sinclair has done so. This is how he characterized those remarks: “The impact of Pope Francis’ new doctrine is nothing short of a game-changer for Catholicism in Canada (and, I guess, the world).”

Sinclair showed how significant the Papal comments are:

“It means Indigenous languages, cultures and ceremonies must be recognized as legitimate spiritual expressions by every member of the Catholic Church. It means any effort to destroy Indigenous traditions is to attack the “presence of God.” It means the purpose of the Canadian residential school system — to eradicate “the Indian in the child,” to use an infamous phrase — was invalid in the eyes of this Pope.”

 

I acknowledge that I scoffed at the suggestion that the Pope would discard 500 years of Catholic history—even ignominious history such as the Doctrine of Discovery—but that is exactly what he did. It was a historical moment! Indigenous people should be proud of what they have achieved. It is truly, deeply momentous.

Pope Francis summed up his thoughts in Quebec this way:

 “Thinking about the process of healing and reconciliation with our Indigenous brothers and sisters, never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”

 

I am not aware of any more profound remarks made by any Pope in the past 500 years and they were made in Canada at the behest of the indigenous people of Canada! This was a great day.

So forget about the Pope’s apology, forget about the doctrine of discovery, what Pope Francis said in Canada was a miracle.  It was magnificent.   I think in his own humble way, without fancy words, Pope Francis did do what Niigaan Sinclair wanted him to do—he called for truth, love, and justice.

The Doctrine of Discovery Moves from Religion to Politics and Law

Catholic Church, Colonialism, Exploitation, History, Indigenous People After Contact, racism, religion, White Supremacy

The Doctrine of Discovery originated as policy in the 15th century as a result of Papal Bulls (decrees) to the monarchs of Portugal and Spain.  According to According to Olive Patricia Dickason and William Newbigging in their book A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations this amounted to a “virtual declaration of war against all non-Christians and an official sanction of the conquest, colonization, and eventual non exploitation of non-Christian people and their territories.”

Yesterday, I promised that I would opine on the historic comments of Pope Francis in Quebec last week.  I have decided to make a few more comments on the Doctrine of Discovery today before I do that tomorrow.

As a result of a conversation yesterday, with a friend who is a professor of Religious studies, and clearly knows a lot more about the Doctrine of Discovery than I do, and says that the Doctrine of Discovery was repudiated by Catholic Popes and church leaders more or less from the beginning. However, the attitudes that underpinned it, namely white supremacy and its corollaries, dominated western thinking for centuries. Those attitudes allowed the people from Europe to believe they had an inherent right, if not a religious right, to dominate the people of what they referred to as the New World. According to Olive Patricia Dickason and William Newbigging,

 

“The main principles of the discovery doctrine was accepted by European colonizers and remained an unspoken assumption until the famous U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall noted that the European colonizers had assumed dominion over North and South America during the Age of Discovery, and that the indigenous peoples had lost their rights to absolute sovereignty, but they did retain the right of occupancy in their own lands. In addition, Marshall claimed that the United States of America, upon winning it independence from Great Britain, simply assumed this right of discovery and the authority of dominion from the British. Succinctly put, the colonizing powers assumed the right to claim possession of the Americas by virtue of their belief in the superiority of Christianity and its adherents . In turn, the US Supreme Court ruled that they had inherited their right of possession, by way of the British, from the doctrine of a fifteenth century pope who was attempting to curry favour with the King and Queen of Spain.”

 

The basis of the policies that flowed from the doctrine were based on a fundamental assumption of European superiority over indigenous people. That attitude poisoned the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous peoples for centuries even if Popes repudiated it.  The religious leaders could not erase the attitudes of assumed European supremacy.

 

Doctrine of Discovery: As Vile as Vile can Be

civilization, Colonialism, Exploitation, History, Indigenous People After Contact, racism, religion, White Supremacy

People have been asking me what I think about the recent apologies of Pope Francis. Some were complaining it did not cover everything he ought to have covered. Others told me they hate apologies. I have been resisting a reply as I consider an answer.  I know this is not like me. I usually allow whatever inane thought has entered my head to plop out ungraced. This time I wanted to do better. I am glad I waited because on his second last day in Canada, Pope Francis made a momentous statement, which in my opinion dwarfs all else. He got to the root of the problem and he apologized for that and said we must do better. Frankly, it was a shocking statement that many have not taken note of. He has effectively ended, in words at least, more than 500 years of an important plank of white supremacy and hate that has been a stain on western civilization that urgently required redress.

 

First, about the apology I don’t claim the right to tell indigenous people what form of apology they should accept or what wording is good enough. That is for them to decide.  I think however I can comment on what Pope Francis has done to remove a deep dark stain on so-called western civilization for the benefit of beneficiaries of that civilization like me. Pope Francis made some astounding remarks about the foundational notion of white male supremacy and its corollary doctrine of discovery. Few have commented about that.

I have often said that Pope Francis is my Pope. I have never been taken seriously in comments because I not a member of any organized religion and certainly not the Catholic Church. So I have no claim to ownership of the Pope.  Part of the reason I have been opposed to organized religion is that it has been used for so long to buttress the thinking that produced the Doctrine of Discovery. That doctrine is based on an underlying philosophy of white male supremacy, which is the real original sin.

The Doctrine of Discovery is a doctrine as vile as vile can be and it was produced in the name of religion by Catholic Popes starting in the 15th century. In those days statements by the Pope were important. They were almost like laws. To many they were laws because  all of Europe was Catholic. But on July 28, 2022, in Canada, the current Pope poked a hole in it so deeply that it is bound to sink. This was a truly historic moment. I applaud the Pope.

To begin with, we should note that the doctrine of discovery (or discovery doctrine) is a concept of public international law that was produced by the Roman Catholic Church and adopted by the European monarchs in order to justify and legitimize the colonization and evangelization of lands outside of Europe. These lands were often ludicrously described as “uncivilized” or “savage.”  The inherent dehumanization of non-Europeans in the eyes of Europeans was used to legitimize the theft of foreign lands by Europeans by giving a thin veneer of legality and religion to that organized theft.

This doctrine was used from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century to permit European countries to seize land that was inhabited by indigenous people around the world and in particular in the recently contacted western hemisphere.

The idea of the doctrine was that any land not occupied by Christians could be seized by Christians for their own uses. This idea was the basis of colonization. It really was doctrine invented by Popes and European monarchs to try to justify (weakly) their invading, of the western continent, and raping and pillaging its inhabitants  in the name of the Catholic Church and European monarchs. it really was a doctrine that authorized exploitation.

The doctrine was often promulgated by written statements made by Pope that were called Papal Bulls. A papal bull is a type of public decree, such as  letters patent, or charter issued by a pope of the Catholic Church. It got the name from the lead seal the Popes used to make their statements look official.  Most of now think of them as bullshit, but actually for centuries those decrees were very important and had serious consequences attached to them because of the prestige of the Popes.

The doctrine emerged during the Age of Exploration. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued what was called, most appropriately, a Papal Bull, Dum Diversas that authorized Portugal to conquer non-Christian lands seize the inhabitants as slaves and consign them to perpetual servitude. Is it possible to imagine a viler doctrine that this? In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued another Papal Bull that permitted Spain to claim the lands visited by Christopher Columbus on behalf of his patron Spain. In 1494 the two competing Christian nations concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the western “New World” between the two of them. As if they had the right to do that. It showed the extreme arrogance of Christian Europeans that gave them the confidence that they could own and control the world while ignoring the wishes of people that already lived there.

France and England, for a while at least, also used the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their dubious claims in the New World even though they refused to recognize the Spanish-Portuguese hegemony. Francis I of France said he wanted to see the “testament of Adam” that divided the world between Spain and Portugal. When Christian nations quarrelled over disputed western territories, they sometimes asked the Pope to arbitrate the disputes. Inhabitants of course, being savages, had no say in what was decided. Their lives did not matter.

After the English Reformation when England no longer recognized the supremacy of the Papal Bulls, it retained the Doctrine of Discovery to sanction its own bloody deeds. It was just that after that the English monarchs had the supreme authority, rather than the Pope but it did not cede jurisdiction to local people. The effect on indigenous people was the same.

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued a Bull Sublimis Deus that forbade the enslavement of the indigenous people of the Americas that he called the “Indians of the West and the South.” The Pope stated that “Indians” are fully rational human beings who have the rights to freedom and private property even if they are not Christians. That was a radical idea. It was so radical that European monarchs often ignored it.

The Doctrine of Discovery continues to this day to be referred to in American and Canadian judicial decisions and it continues to influence American treatment of indigenous people. The doctrine was expounded upon by judges of the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of cases most notably Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823. In that case, demonstrating the poverty of American common law, the Supreme Court Justice John Marshall had large real estate holdings that would have been adversely affected if the case were decided in favor of one of the litigants, Johnson, so rather than recusing himself, Justice Marshall wrote the decision of the unanimous court in a manner that protected his personal interests. The court ruled that the ownership of land came into existence by virtue of discovery of the land which in that case was discovered by Great Britain and then lawfully transferred to the United States, again without consent by the indigenous inhabitants.

The Doctrine of Discovery has been roundly criticized as socially unjust, racist, and in violation of basic human rights. In 2012, the UN called for a mechanism to investigate land claims. Speakers at the UN conference noted how the doctrine had been used repeatedly over centuries to allow for the transfer of land from indigenous people to colonizing authorities or dominating nations without consent of the indigenous.

Numerous religious bodies have condemned the doctrine, including the Episcopal Church in 2009, the Unitarian Universality Association in 2012, the United Church in 2013, the Christian Reformed Church in 2016, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) also in 2016 and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In November 2016, a group of 524 clergy publicly burned copies of Inter caetera, a specific Papal Bull that underpinned the doctrine as part of the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests near Standing Rock  Indian Reservation.

The Canadian bishops have called on the Catholic Church to issue a new Doctrine of Discovery and stated that they “reject and resist the ideas associated with the Doctrine of Discovery in the strongest possible way.”

Finally, in July of 2022, without mentioning the doctrine specifically, Pope Francis during his penitential pilgrimage to Canada  made some profound comments that seriously undermine the legitimacy of the doctrine. It really was a historical moment. I will get to that in my next blog post.

Icelandic Punk MuseumIceland

2018 Trip to Iceland, History, Music

 

 

 

 

Iceland has many attractions. I am not sure that this is one of them, but I loved the anarchic spirit of the posters around this former site of a public washroom. I don’t think my tour guides would have recommended it. the museum wanted to make sure there was no mistaking it for its former position.

 

The museum wants to make sure that it not mistaken for the former “loo.” It  was formally opened in 2016 by Johnny Rotten. The museum claims to be a small museum with a big attitude. It contains photos, sounds, posters, instruments, clothes and various other memorabilia from the 80-90’s punk scene in Iceland.

 

 

Thankfully, it makes few claims for redeeming social merit.  Who needs that anyway?

 

 

Start the revolution without me