In the wake of news of the Columbus voyage 1492, Pope Alexander VI issued his bull, Inter Caetera, opening the above to all the Christian nations of Europe.
He did so by stating that one Christian nation did not have the right to establish dominion over lands and possessions previously claimed and dominated by another Christian nation. And so the Doctrine of Christian Discovery was now fully born and with it came an explosion of imperialism and a violent expansion of christendom the likes of which the world had never seen.
While white supremacy had still not yet taken its place as a guiding principle among European powers, Christian supremacy was paving its way.
By the time the English colonies would rebel from their motherland, whiteness and the white race was now interchangeable with Christian. So the presumption of white superiority over Black and Native people was a well established American principle.
But while that white supremacy designated Black people as property, Native people were assumed to be merely the spoils of a fictitious conquest and valued more for our lands than our lives. That is to say, we were in their way.
Natives were deemed “untamed and untameable creatures” we were declared “wards” of the US government first in legal doctrines of the 1830s and then in law with the Appropriations Act of 1871. As such the legalized racism and imbalance became embedded in every law and policy affecting Native people.
There was both ambiguity and irony in attempting to cast Native peoples into a subclass both beneath and outside of the ever growing population of settler colonialism in their own homelands. A people who at first welcomed and fed destitute travelers were both revered and reviled at the same time. That ambiguity would display itself in many ways and many times.
First let’s start with the land, the place. Our lands were literally called the New World. And while some came to escape what they knew was an old world gone wrong, others came only for profit and opportunities for enrichment. Some saw a world teeming with life and an ecosystem never witnessed before to learn from and understand, others saw opportunities to exploit that life for profit and sales; including slave labor, and the killing and taking and extracting of anything with a potential market in their old world.
But the true ambiguity was well documented by those referred to as “Founding Fathers” and foundational figures in US history. There was not unanimity among those figures on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery nor how it would become a part of a New World attempting to draw some distinction from the old. Treaties and alliances between the Christian nations of Europe and many distinct Native peoples came about from the beginning of contact. And would continue through colonial independence.
George Washington lead armies in conflict with the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee and others caught up in their war for independence. Yet as the first US president, his delegates negotiated treaties with the Six Nations. The Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 repeated three times the acknowledgement of our land ownership.