SUBSCRIBE

Get new posts by email:

How to Use this Blog

CHANGES to format AGAIN - click older posts!
BOOZHOO! We've amassed tons of information and important history on this blog since 2010. If you have a keyword, use the search box below. Also check out the reference section above. If you have a question or need help searching, use the contact form at the bottom of the blog.

PLEASE follow this website by clicking the button above or subscribe.

We want you to use BOOKSHOP! (the editor will earn a small amount of money or commission. (we thank you) (that is our disclaimer statement)

This is a blog. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, not a sponsored publication... The ideas, news and thoughts posted are sourced… or written by the editor or contributors.

Blogger forced a change to our design so please SCROLL past the posts for lots more information.

Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ . THANK YOU MEGWETCH for reading

NEED HELP WITH AN ADOPTEE SEARCH? Have questions? Use comment form at the bottom of this website.

email: tracelara@pm.me

SEARCH

Monday, August 15, 2022

What the hell is a Papal Bull?

 

What you should know: Doctrine of Discovery

Nederlands: Paus Nicolas V oil on panel 1612-1616
Nederlands: Paus Nicolas V oil on panel 1612-1616 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Volume 2, Issue #11, American Logo newsletter by Bill Annett

We are not descended from men who kept silent.  -Edward R. Murrow

 

Ask an average American (or Canadian): “What is the Doctrine of Discovery?” You’re likely to get a blank stare, an uncomfortable pause, the changing of the conversation to politics or rock stars, or perhaps the stuttered response: “You mean like Dr. Oz?”

And yet the DoD, as it is referred to by academics, unsuccessful politicians, native people and others on the receiving end, is a basic legal assumption, born of Holy Writ and therefore both sanctified and legal, 500 years ago, when the sun rotated around the European world and the earth was flat. Was it just a naïve part of that past, that ignorant and illiterate peasant flotsam of Western Europe, and now long forgotten?

Hell, no. That incredible, inhuman law, mindset and modus operandiis still alive and well, solidly embedded in the ubiquitous practice of governing law.  And where? Today, it dominates, subtly but pervasively as a daily fact of life, over 1.5 million people in Canada, three million in the U.S., six million in Mexico and a massive population in the rest of the Hemisphere, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and large swatches of Southeast Asia and Oceania.  Perhaps 400 million people in total, more than the entire U.S. population.

What is it and how did it get its start?

Pope Nicholas V, on the 18th of June, 1452, stamped his bulla, or papal seal, on the bottom of a document, a papal bull known as Dum Diversas. Dumb indeed, but with enormous ramifications.

Actually, Pope Nicholas V was a builder, and like Hitler’s autobahns in  the Thirties, he repaired infrastructure such as aqueducts destroyed during the collapse of the Roman Empire. That construction, as a matter of  fact, was analogous to the Roman Church’s succeeding the Roman Empire as the confluence and tributary conveying the brutality of empire masquerading as civility and Christian humanism.

But Nicholas is best remembered for his political balancing act between the Portuguese king and the threat of the Ottoman Empire.  One element was the papal bull Dum Diversas, which granted Portugal  “full and free power”:

 to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be… and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.

A follow-up document, Romanus Pontifex, allowed that same empire to seize for itself the lands of any non-Christians they encountered. The Doctrine of Discovery was established.

After Columbus’s “discovered”  the New World, (although indigenous people had practised Occupy Turtle Island for some 10,000 years) Pope Alexander VI in 1493 issued another bit of papal bull known as Inter Caetera, commanding Spain

to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents and dwellers therein in the Catholic faith, and train them in good morals…”

opening the way for Catholic missions to conquer everything and anybody in the new world, except for the newly arrived Portuguese.

England quickly got into the act four years later, when King Henry VII granted John Cabot rights to possess all lands in the New World not already claimed by Portugal and Spain. In return, John Cabot, like an obedient Mafia soldier, wet the beak of his king with 20% of the total take.  All of which not only legitimized but commanded the enslavement, pillaging and killing of millions of indigenous peoples all over the world. The toll (as we palefaces like to journalize) so far for the Western Hemisphere alone totals around 100 million people.  According to one academic, (Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge) “the greatest re-engineering of a civilization in history.”

Does the DoD still live?  One early Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823, according to Robert Miller,* resolved a tribal land dispute, ruling that Native American land is inalienable. They cited the Doctrine of Discovery, which stated that Christian Europeans owned all land explored and claimed, and in any event, only the federal government could buy land occupied by Native Americans, meaning that the federal government could therefore pretty much name its own price.

Supreme Court cases as recent as 1973 and 1990 have used the Doctrine of Discovery to delimit native rights to prosecute any individuals on their lands for crimes. In 2005, certain tribes were denied sovereignty and the ability to repurchase traditional land previously held.

Apparently, Euro-Americans possessed the only valid religions, civilizations, governments, laws, and cultures, and Providence intended these people and their institutions to dominate the North American continent. The human, governmental, and property rights of Native Americans were almost totally disregarded as Discovery and then Manifest Destiny directed the United States’ expansion. Under Manifest Destiny it was ‘clear’ that God wanted Indians to get out of the way of American progress.”

In other words, a significant part of  American political practice blindly follows the Doctrine of Discovery, that ancient tossing off of political intervention by the Roman church we all accept whether we want to or not. (It’s part of of the Holy Church’s Concordat with all civilized nations.) American acceptance of this Doctrine is a modern world atrocity that parallels a universe of conflicting opinion, often denied, pernicious in its global fact.  

Slavery, war, genocide are all facts that flow from this medieval nonsense.  It defined the treatment of the world’s indigenous people that remains today in all but the most enlightened societies.  It has even – in a minor key – warped our confusion about immigration, notably the migration of indigenous peoples in the Americas, many of whom are in constant flux (perennially fluxed) and on the move because U.S. policy vis-a-vis Latin America has delimited economic opportunity.

Professor Miller has delineated and compared the Doctrine’s effects as well as practice in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, England, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and (of course) the United States.

*The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis, Robett J. Miller, Lewis & Clark Law Review

This was published with permission back in 2012

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please: Share your reaction, your thoughts, and your opinions. Be passionate, be unapologetic. Offensive remarks will not be published. We are getting more and more spam. Comments will be monitored.
Use the comment form at the bottom of this website which is private and sent direct to Trace.


Happy Visitors!

They Took Us Away

They Took Us Away
click image to see more and read more

SIXTIES SCOOP NEWS

Blog Archive

Most READ Posts

Bookshop

Canada's Residential Schools

The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.

You are not alone

You are not alone

What our Nations are up against!

What our Nations are up against!

To Veronica Brown

Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

Did you know?

Did you know?
lakota.cc/16I9p4D

WATCH THIS

Diane Tells His Name


click photo

60s Scoop Survivors Legal Support

GO HERE: https://www.gluckstein.com/sixties-scoop-survivors

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines
click to read and listen about Trace, Diane, Julie and Suzie

ADOPTION TRUTH

As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.”
The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.

NEW MEMOIR

Original Birth Certificate Map in the USA

Why tribes do not recommend the DNA swab

Rebecca Tallbear entitled: “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe”, bearing out what I only inferred:

Detailed discussion of the Bering Strait theory and other scientific theories about the population of the modern-day Americas is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it should be noted that Indian people have expressed suspicion that DNA analysis is a tool that scientists will use to support theories about the origins of tribal people that contradict tribal oral histories and origin stories. Perhaps more important,the alternative origin stories of scientists are seen as intending to weaken tribal land and other legal claims (and even diminish a history of colonialism?) that are supported in U.S. federal and tribal law. As genetic evidence has already been used to resolve land conflicts in Asian and Eastern European countries, this is not an unfounded fear.

GOOGLE

In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines. This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation. In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet. - https://desultoryheroics.com/2023/11/12/internet-censorship-everywhere-all-at-once

Google Followers