More work to be done, as First Nations leaders unveil ‘sacred’ items returned by Vatican

AFN Chief Cindy Woodhouse reveals 5 of 47 First Nations items returned to Canada last December

A First Nations woman touches a doll and crib, one of the five items revealed Tuesday, which were returned by the Vatican to the First Nations of Canada. (Photo by Jorge Antunes)

By Jorge Antunes

The return of Indigenous items from the Vatican is an “important and emotional moment for many First Nations across this country,” said Assembly of First Nations Chief Cindy Woodhouse prior to the unveiling of five items on Tuesday.

As part of the continuing process of repatriating Indigenous items that had been held by the Vatican, the Assembly of First Nations uncrated First Nations’ items whose region of origin has been determined, at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

She called the items “sacred,” and not “artifacts” as some people have referred to the items that were once held by the Roman Catholic Church.

The items are a pair of embroidered leather gloves from Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a birchbark sap collector from Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, a baby carrier from Ontario, and a bowl and spoon from Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron.

The exact community where the bowl and spoon came from is known. But for the gloves, sap collector and baby carrier, only their general area of origin is known.

The bowl and spoon were made by the “great, great, great, great, great grand-uncle,” of Grand Chief Linda Debeassige of the Anishnabek Nation in what’s now northern Ontario.

“He signed the bottom of it. True story,” she said with a grin when a reporter asked how she knew her relative had made them.

The majority of the First Nations’ 47 items were not revealed publicly Tuesday, though several chiefs in attendance were invited for a private viewing later in the day.

Grand Chief Linda Debeassige of the Anishnabek Nation was able to determine a bowl and spoon were made by an ancestor because he ‘signed the bottom.’ (Photo by Jorge Antunes)

Until their origins are determined, they will remain hidden, Woodhouse said.

Identification is a complicated process. Each community has its own knowledge that varies from community to community, she added.

“We have to respect First Nations as we identify where they [belong],” Woodhouse said.

When the 62 items first made their way to Montreal from Rome last December, 14 were deemed to be of Inuit origin, including a 100-year-old sealskin Inuvialuit kayak.

Some of those Inuit items were shown at a small gathering of media at a Canadian History Museum warehouse a few days after their arrival in Canada.

Except for the kayak, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami — the national organization representing Inuit across Canada — said in an email last December it could not be sure where they came from until they have been examined further.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami did not return a request for comment Tuesday about the unveiling of the First Nations items.

The 62 items are just a few of, by some calculations, more than 100,000 sent to Rome a century ago by Roman Catholic missionaries for a symposium featuring Indigenous cultural items at the Vatican.

Woodhouse said she hoped the day will inspire other institutions across the world to consider repatriation plans for the thousands of items still out there.

“First Nations will not rest until all of our items that were wrongfully taken are returned to us,” she said.

Is the return of 62 Indigenous cultural belongings a big step for truth ...

Sixty-two Indigenous cultural items previously held in Vatican museums and vaults for a century are being repatriated to Canada.  Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, Chair on Truth and Reconciliation at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., explains why she’s ‘a bit conflicted’ about the return of these cultural belongings.

 

Ancestral Belongings returned by Vatican

 

VIA: Over 80 thousand artifacts – a testament of the peoples and cultures from every part of the world – are on exhibit in the new Anima Mundi Museum, previously known as the Ethnological Museum of the Vatican Museums. 

Pope returns 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada

By NICOLE WINFIELD | Associated Press | November 15, 2025, 

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of the Catholic Church’s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.

Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts, including an iconic Inuit kayak, and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According to a joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church, the pieces were a gift and a “concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.”

The items were part of the Vatican Museum’s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.

Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens that was a highlight of that year’s Holy Year.

The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.

But historians, Indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether the items could really have been offered freely, given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government’s forced assimilation policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”

Part of that policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the 1885 potlatch ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony. Those confiscated items ended up in museums in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, as well as private collections.

Negotiations on returning the Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church’s role in running Canada’s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.

Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: “In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.”

The Vatican said Saturday the items were given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition where they were first exhibited in Rome.

“This is an act of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church in Canada these artifacts, which bear witness to the history of the encounter between faith and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples,” said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.

It added that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy committed to ensuring that the artifacts are “properly safeguarded, respected and preserved." Officials had previously said the Canadian bishops would receive the artifacts with the explicit understanding that the ultimate keepers will be the Indigenous communities themselves.

The items are expected to be taken first to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. There, experts and Indigenous groups will try to identify where the items originated, down to the specific community, and what should be done with them, officials said previously.

As part of its broader reckoning with the Catholic Church’s colonial past, the Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands that form the basis of some property laws today.

The statement marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers, even though it didn't address Indigenous demands that the Vatican formally rescind the papal bulls themselves.

The Vatican on Saturday cited the 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery in its statement, saying Leo's return of the artifacts concludes the “journey” initiated by Francis.

 

EDITOR NOTE:  "ARTIFACT" is the wrong word... it should be an ancestral belongings and not an object to be looted, owned or on display in Rome...These belongings have a spirit...   Trace

 Pope voices willingness to return Indigenous loot, artifacts

READ: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-restitution-indigenous-parthenon-0e486d653bcac89f94854430ce29faf0 

LOOTED GRAVES

ANGEL MOUNDS in INDIANA were looted and destroyed

By Trace L Hentz, blog editor

Looting - that is just one of the topics I research beyond adoption.  It's a pattern really: Looting, Mass Murder, Theft, Mining, Profits, Taking Land, Taking Kids... all of it.  It combines into colonization and all the other terms they use to describe the "making of America" and Canada.

It is very interesting that we are finding out through press releases what was actually looted.  I am still disturbed it took so long.

What did we lose? Pretty much everything: tribes were herded onto reservations, kids taken by gunpoint to residential schools, lands were seized, graves robbed, burial mounds looted and destroyed, and on and on.

2023: Remains of 100K+ Native Americans Held in US Institutions, Research Finds

What can we do about it?

WHAT IS NAGPRA? NAGPRA is the Native America Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. 

Since 1990, Federal law has provided for the repatriation and disposition of certain Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. By enacting NAGPRA, Congress recognized that human remains of any ancestry "must at all times be treated with dignity and respect." Congress also acknowledged that human remains and other cultural items removed from Federal or tribal lands belong, in the first instance, to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. With this law, Congress sought to encourage a continuing dialogue between museums and Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations and to promote a greater understanding between the groups while at the same time recognizing the important function museums serve in society by preserving the past. (US Senate Report 101-473).

A museum can fail to comply with the requirements of NAGPRA and may be assessed a civil penalty by the Department of the Interior.

But there are problems, of course, explained on Native American Calling, when a Lakota elder said their tribal members cannot touch the remains - and the TVA needs to rebury them.  Listen

WHAT HAPPENED:

More than three decades ago, Congress passed a law calling for museums and other groups to return the human remains of Native Americans in their possession.  For years, two major East Tennessee institutions reflected the failure of that law, according to a joint investigation published in March by ProPublica and NBC News.

The investigation found that institutions were failing on a massive scale to return remains to tribes — and that half of the still-unreturned remains are held by a small minority of these institutions. This list is populated in part by prestigious universities like Berkeley and Harvard. But Tennessee was the only state for which multiple institutions — the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the Tennessee Valley Authority — ranked among the top 10.

(READ MORE: Muscogee Nation, Georgia officials will cooperate on restoring the sacred to tribe)

Both have, however, made recent progress, well after the law in question was passed.

After years in which it returned only a small fraction of the Native American remains in its possession, University of Tennessee (UT) has, like many other institutions, lately returned remains at a far faster pace.

TVA cultural resources

In 2019, for example, it made nearly 2,000 Native American remains taken from what is now South Dakota available to tribal descendants, according to data maintained by the National Park Service.

Still, these and other remains the university has made available to tribes account for just 34% of the 6,000-plus Native American human remains the university reported to be in its possession, according to the database.

The university is committed to fulfilling its obligations under the law, spokeswoman Kerry Gardner said by email, adding that it cannot file a notice with the government listing a set of remains as available to be returned until a tribe files claims for them.

Gardner said the school is working on the claims of several tribes.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, for its part, once reported having the remains of more than 12,800 Native Americans — generally found in modern day Alabama and Tennessee — in its possession.

This remained the case until recently, when TVA, like UT, made a significant portion of these available for return: 72% in its case.

The utility said it will soon relinquish these possessions entirely.  Agency spokesman Scott Fiedler said by email that TVA recently determined that all Native American remains still in its possession should be made available — and that they will be, whenever the Federal Register publishes TVA’s public notice of this.

RESEARCH AND INFRASTRUCTURE

UT’s and TVA’s holdings of unrepatriated Native American remains are uncommonly large.  But they are just two among about 600 institutions that have reported possessing what still amount to well over 100,000 unreturned Native American human remains.

(READ MORE: TVA seeks public help combating looters of cultural resources such as Native American artifacts)

In some cases, the excavated remains and other artifacts arrived via a kind of sanctioned looting by researchers probing old burial sites.  For example, around the 1900s, archaeologists excavated burial mounds on a widespread basis in the Southeast.  As the ProPublica/NBC News investigation noted, several of the institutions with the most unrepatriated Native American remains in their possession — the Universities of Alabama and Kentucky also made the top 10 list — are based in the region.

Similar research took place in other parts of the nation as well.

“We never ceded or relinquished our dead,” one Arizona State University professor, a member of the Pawnee Nation, told ProPublica/NBC News reporters. “They were stolen.”

Other Native American remains, such as those generally in the possession of TVA, were dug up amid massive infrastructure projects.

“When we constructed reservoirs in the ’30s and ’40s, a tremendous amount of human remains and funerary objects were removed,” TVA has quoted its archaeologist and tribal liaison, Marianne Shuler, as saying on its website.

More than 20 federally recognized Indian tribes attach religious and cultural significance to land TVA manages, Fiedler said.

As a result of the 19th century Indian Removal Act, many — though not all — of these tribes are now based far away.  Efforts to reach repatriation specialists at the Cherokee Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, the Muscogee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians by press time were unsuccessful.

CULTURAL CONNECTION

Tribal activism paved the way for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed by Congress in 1990. The law sought to make universities, museums and other institutions inventory their artifacts and human remains and consult with Native American groups.

The basic premise was that institutions had to publicly report their holdings and coordinate with tribes to determine to whom the remains should be returned. If a connection was established between the remains and the tribe, the institution would publish a notice on the Federal Register, making the claims available to be repatriated.

Ultimately, few of the institutions with Native American remains in their possession relinquished their holdings in the years following the law’s passage.

Some people resisted the law, sometimes arguing that the remains should stay in museums and universities or that specific modern tribes lack proof that they are the rightful stewards.  UT was among those that avoided the law in the 1990s by categorizing everything in its collection as “culturally unidentifiable,” according to the ProPublica/NBC News investigation.

Asked about this, Gardner, the university spokeswoman, focused on the more recent past, in which the school hired anthropologist Ellen Lofaro in part to spearhead its efforts, and the university’s repatriations increased from 4% to 34% of its holdings.

“Over the last six years, the university has continued to build a program that underscores our commitment,” Gardner said. “We are actively building relationships with and consulting with tribal communities. This work is important, and we are dedicated to continuing to make progress.”

The Tennessee Valley Authority, for its part, began actively consulting with tribes in the 2000s, Fiedler said.  He said tribes prioritized the repatriation of ancestral remains — and that the TVA hired its first Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation specialist in 2009 to focus on the matter.

Since then, the federally-owned utility has made remains available to 11 tribes.

There are thousands of remains left to be passed along. But everything the utility has made available thus far, tribes have taken, Fiedler said.

***

March 31, 2023

 

I was searching for a great great grandmother Sarah A Sparks (on the Cherokee Baker Roll) and up pops Tennessee Valley Authority – which got me very confused – why would they have her name?? – then I googled TVA. I am SO ANGRY. I cannot find where she is buried.  Maybe TVA dug her up?

She was married to CHRISTOPHER H HARLOW, a great-great granddad.  TLH

HAPPENING EVERY WHERE!👇

Sacred items in Barre library's museum to be returned to Sioux

(United States of America)

Mark Pratt (2022). Sacred items in Barre library's museum to be returned to Sioux. Telegram & Gazette. 11 October.

Mass. museum returns sacred Native American items from its collection

(United States of America)

Ryan Mancini (2022). Mass. museum returns sacred Native American items from its collection. Masslive. 11 October.

UC Berkeley to repatriate thousands of ancestral remains to Indigenous tribes: 'Restorative justice'

(United States of America)

Jisha Joseph (2022). UC Berkeley to repatriate thousands of ancestral remains to Indigenous tribes: 'Restorative justice'. Upworthy. 24 October.

University of California, Berkeley repatriates cultural artifacts to Indigenous tribe

(United States of America)

Jeffery Brown, Lena I. Jackson (2022). University of California, Berkeley repatriates cultural artifacts to Indigenous tribe. PBS. 10 October.

Why a small British museum went out of its way to repatriate Haida Nation artifacts

(Canada; United Kingdom)

Mouhamad Rachini (2022). Why a small British museum went out of its way to repatriate Haida Nation artifacts Social Sharing Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reddit LinkedIn. CBC. 30 September.

Going home: Big Medicine will be returned to CSKT tribes from historical society

(United States of America)

Darrell Ehrlick (2022). Going home: Big Medicine will be returned to CSKT tribes from historical society. Daily Montanan. 23 October.

VATICAN?

LISTEN | First Nations curator wants to know what's inside the Vatican's collection of Indigenous artifacts (80,000 objects in collection)

First Nations curator wants to know what's inside the Vatican’s collection of Indigenous artifacts

2:458:55

How early churches used schools to separate Alaska Native peoples from their land

 

April 11, 2023 | Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed 

The Alaska Native Heritage Center says its study of church records that go back to the 1800s is not research for research’s sake, reports Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA.

Researcher Benjamin Jacuk-Dolchok (Kenaitze) says he hopes to reconstruct the story of how early churches used schools to separate Alaska Native peoples from their land, their culture, and their spirituality.

He says the impacts are still felt today.

“You can’t understand what you need healing from, unless you pull back the band aid and understand the wound.”

Jacuk-Dolchok says most Alaskans don’t realize how closely churches coordinated their efforts.

“While these might be different denominations, the ideology was mostly the same. And that was forced assimilation.”

Jacuk-Dolchok says some of the research looks at the role of boarding schools — and how Americanization and Christianity intersected to break the close connections Alaska Natives had with their land.

He says the forced use of English took away the “heart language” of the people, which sped up the process.

“The major takeaway from what we’re doing is understanding the truth to bring healing, so that younger generations can thrive.”

Jacuk-Dolchok has studied Native boarding schools for more than a decade and credits his grandfather, who attended boarding school, for inspiring his work.

The Princeton Seminary graduate says his theology studies has helped him with his research and given him access to important documents.

Jacuk-Dolchok will share some of his research at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage on Friday.

 I call it the international law of colonization, because Europeans use this law to colonize Oceania, the New World and Africa as late as the 1880s.

Mixed feelings for Vatican rescinding 'law of colonization'

By Miles Morrisseau
‘This is only a first step in correcting some of the wrongs in history’ ... 

“Native people went to the UN to talk to church leaders in the 70s to repudiate these papal bulls, which is an order from the church from the 1400s. The church claimed that they had done away with those bulls and 1539 in a papal bull that said Indians were human beings,” Miller said. “Well, that's not the way the European countries of the world took it. And this law developed and as you said, the United States 200 years ago this year, in the case of Johnson v. M'Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall, in the first American Indian law case in the Supreme Court, adopted the Doctrine of Discovery and applied it to Indian rights here.”

continue reading

[AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, file]

👉Johnson v. M’Intosh: 200 years of legal misery for Native people By Renae Ditmer The landmark 1823 Supreme Court case set a precedent that has undermined tribal sovereignty ever since ... continue reading

[AP Photo/John Locher]

The Doctrine of Discovery repudiated

By ICT Newscast with Aliyah Chavez
We meet the author behind the book aiming to support young women called 'Sisterhood.' A short film explores the legacy of the Rapid City boarding schools. The Vatican has repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. We discuss its influence on tribal sovereignty ...  The Vatican officially repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery on Thursday morning. This comes after Indigenous peoples across the world demanded this action. The Doctrine of Discovery originated in the late 1400s, as justification by the Catholic Church to seize lands that were not inhabited by Christians. continue reading

 

The Pope seems to not know about the Doctrine, according to a twitter Native.

First Nations delegates hold news conference in Rome following meeting with Pope...

Media Briefing following the meeting between Pope Francis and the Metis ...

AFN postpones trip to meet Pope, plans to file complaint with UN

By Janet E Silver. Published on Dec 7, 2021 

Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief RoseAnne Archibald pictured in June 2019 (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press)

A trip that Indigenous leaders were supposed to take to Rome later this month for a meeting with the Pope has been postponed because of the pandemic, said RoseAnne Archibald, National Chief for the Assembly of First Nations, on Tuesday.

Leaders with the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) were scheduled to meet with Pope Francis on Dec. 20 to seek an apology for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in running residential schools. The Métis and Inuit were supposed to meet the Pope earlier that week.

Hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered earlier this year at former residential schools across the country. The schools — sponsored by the government and mostly run by the Catholic Church — were set up to assimilate Indigenous youth into Canadian culture by removing them from their families and communities. Many Indigenous children were abused and/or died at the schools.

In September, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops apologized for “grave abuses that were committed by some members of (the) Catholic community” at the schools.

Archibald told First Nations leaders who’d gathered virtually for three days that the AFN has asked the church to: return diocese lands to Indigenous Peoples; increase the $30 million the church announced in September for long-term healing; and encourage the Pope to meet with Indigenous leaders on traditional lands when he visits Canada. The Pope has agreed to meet with Indigenous Peoples when he travels to Canada, but no date has been set for his visit.

Archibald went on to tell attendees that the AFN plans to hold the government to account for forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools.

“We continue to call for accountability,” she said. “Someone must be charged for the deaths of our children. There must be examinations to determine if our children were murdered. Canada must be held to account, and they have to be held responsible for their genocidal laws and policies.”

Archibald said Canada shouldn’t be allowed to investigate itself, and that the AFN would be reaching out to the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to file a human-rights complaint, and to pursue remedies “for the victims of genocide.”

“We need to know the truth before we can walk the road to reconciliation,” she said.

SOURCE

Headlines (November 2021)

 

Indigenous delegates to have private meeting with Pope Francis during Vatican visit

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops says 25 to 30 Indigenous people are to meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican in December.

The delegates are to include elders, knowledge keepers, residential school survivors and youth. A small group of Canadian bishops is also to attend from Dec. 17 to Dec. 20.

“The journey towards healing and reconciliation is a long one, but we believe this will be a significant milestone in the Catholic Church's commitment to renewing, strengthening and reconciling relationships with Indigenous Peoples across the land,” Raymond Poisson, president of the Canadian bishops, said in a news release Wednesday.

First Nations, Inuit and Metis delegates are to have private meetings with the Pope, during which they will tell personal stories about the legacy of residential schools.

KEEP READING

Related Stories

• Indigenous leaders call for apology, compensation from Pope amid possible Canadian visit
• Vatican says Pope Francis willing to visit Canada as Indigenous leaders seek apology
• As Indigenous leaders push for papal apology, residential school survivors look for ways to heal
• Mixed reaction from residential school survivors after announcement of papal visit
  ***
   

By Canadian Press

Murray Sinclair to chair negotiations on federal compensation for First Nations kids

READ

 

 

American Bar Association Calls on Congress to Investigate America's Indian Boarding Schools | Vatican fundraising

MORE NEWS HERE

 

CHICAGO — In a resolution with multiple requests, the American Bar Association House of Delegates, a 597-member policy body, is calling on Congress to conduct oversight hearings on Indian boarding schools. The resolution was adopted by the ABA Monday evening.

GOOD: American Bar Association Calls on Congress to Investigate Indian Boarding Schools | Currents

 Looks like lawyers will get in on the action here in the US... Blog Editor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canadian Bishops convey commitment to healing and reconciliation 

The Permanent Council of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) released a statement on Friday noting its support to Bishops of Saskatchewan who are have issued an “Appeal for Support of Healing and Reconciliation” in favor of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. The project aims to generate fundraising to promote healing and reconciliation. It also foresees cemeteries on the sites of former residential schools, as well as educational and cultural support. The goal of the campaign, according to the Bishops of Saskatchewan, is to "support Indian Residential School survivors and their communities, and to engage more deeply in our own ongoing commitment and response to the Truth and Reconciliation process." - Source: Canadian Bishops convey commitment to healing and reconciliation - Vatican News

 

The world's richest church needs to ask others to pay for their actions? Blog Editor

 Not just in Canada, American has a bad history problem, too...

Against Residential School Denialism

Residential school denialism is not the outright denial of the Indian Residential School system’s existence, but rather the rejection or misrepresentation of basic facts about residential schooling to undermine truth and reconciliation efforts.

Residential school denialists employ an array of rhetorical arguments. The end game of denialism is to obscure truth about Canada’s residential school system in ways that ultimately protect the status quo as well as guilty parties.

Residential school denialists begin and end with a firm belief in innate Indigenous deficiency and settler innocence, often rooted in Christian triumphalism. Their ranks include missionary apologists, writers and academics, right-wing and anti-Indigenous editorialists, and relatives of residential school staff who uncritically refer to personal memory and work to defend their family reputations. These are neither informed nor objective commentators.

GOOD READ: Against Residential School Denialism | The Tyee

Papal Bull declared war on Indians in 1452

"The power to commit horrible crimes against children, and others, and then absolve itself and the rapists and killers it shields within its ranks, has made the Vatican a criminal, rogue body under every international standard of law and morality."

Read about the Papal Bull and what it means to federal laws here today in the US in the article "Ending Catholicism And Related U.S. Imperialism" by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer at http://www.towahkon.org/endofimperialism.html

Papal Bull declares the legitimacy of Christian domination over (Indian) pagans, sanctifying enslavement and expropriation of property:

Romanus Pontifex, January 8, 1455 - …We bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, …athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith… to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and… to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate… possessions, and goods, and to convert them to… their use and profit.* (European Treaties bearing on the history of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, Editor Francis Gardiner Davenport, pages 20-26)

HISTORY: Papal Bulls are the fabric of United States and International law. Papal authority is the basis for United States power over Indigenous peoples, not generally understood. The Doctrine of Discovery is still being used as an active legal principle by the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth-first century, revealed in the case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York decided in March 2005. The case involved a dispute over taxation of ancestral lands of the Oneida Indian Nation. During oral arguments, it became clear that the case would hinge on whether, in the opinion of the Court, the Oneida Indian Nation “has sovereignty status” with regard to the ancestral lands the Oneida Nation had reacquired. To decide the sovereign status of the Oneida Indian Nation, the Supreme Court relied upon the Doctrine of Discovery. Revealed in footnote number one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsbergʼs decision for the Court majority: “Under the Doctrine of Discovery,” wrote Justice Ginsberg, “... fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign — first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States... The Supreme Courtʼs reference to the Doctrine of Discovery places the context for the Courtʼs decision in Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York within the Framework of Dominance, dating back to the era of the Vatican Papal Bulls.”

Empire attitudes and dominance are not dead. ----Trace