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Time to burn the Document of Discovery

April 7, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Since I first learned about and mentioned the Document of Discovery some months ago, it has really hit the headlines with the visit of the Indigenous representation to Pope Francis in Rome. Anyone following the news of Francis’ apology, his meagre first step to what must surely follow, will have heard of this Papal Bull issued in 1492. Titled the Inter Caetera, the Document of Discovery decreed that explorers from Europe had not only the right but the obligation to go forth to unchartered lands, to claim those lands for their own sovereigns. Whenever they encountered native peoples if they were not already subjugated by other Europeans, if they were not baptized, then they were to be considered subhuman and as such to be enslaved, abused or killed. 

History shows the enthusiasm of how this edict was embraced by the brutality with which conquest and domination spread across North and South America and Africa.

Here is the continued bad news: the Document of Discovery has never been rescinded, cancelled, burnt. No government has passed a law or a motion to declare once and for all that the Document of Discovery is no long part of the legal structure of that government.

The United Church has rescinded it. There have been burnings of paper copies during Indigenous ceremonies.

However, the Document of Discovery is still law here in Canada but our federal government has not repudiated it; has not passed that law or motion which declares for all time that this document is no longer a part of Canadian law. 

It was after attending a Buffy Saint Marie concert, that wonderful woman who says it all and who never backs away from telling the story of how these lands were conquered and the peoples living here were included and are included in the victimization the document insists upon. She did not drag us through the issues on the stage that evening but she sang her songs of protest against war and injustice. She made us think while she gave us a couple of hours of wonderful entertainment and we could only come away filled with respect and admiration for her.

A few days later, I watched her gave a talk to senators and Indigenous leaders and others gathered to honour her life as a musician, singer, teacher and activist. It was then that I learned about the how and why of European insane slaughter and brutality here in the Americas and Africa but I didn’t learn how they became people who were prepared to treat other beings in such a way.

What happens in the soul of a person who will willingly enslave, torture by sex or other violence on fellow humans? Or anything that lives? How does a person agree to execute and commit harm – unprovoked – on another?

Unleash an evil and it will do the work of corruption.

Pope Alexander VI distributed the Document of Discovery far and wide to his “Christian” followers and the seeds of poison it planted have thrived into this very 2022, unabated.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, the angel rolls away the stone blocking Jesus’ burial place and he tells Mary Magdalene and the women with her that Jesus had risen that she should go and tell the others. The long and short of it is that the disciples went to Galilee as they were told to meet and find the risen Christ.

There he appeared and he told them in verse 19: (St. James version printed 1957) “Go forth therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

He instructs them to teach what he taught them but nowhere does he talk about subjugation and torture, although this is the passage that is credited with influencing the initial decree about exploration.

How did it ever happen that we would let our hands drip with the blood of others to prove our power over them and how can it ever stop? Everything begins and ends by thinking. Gestures, opinions and dictums of the powerful who forget over and over as their power ruins their logic and makes delusional monsters of them – they fail to remember they are only powerful as long as the people on whose shoulders they stand agree.

For all our history, we have indulged such people until we topple them but in the meantime, we betray our essential goodness to perform the devilment they demand of us. Now it is time to topple, to bring down and abolish the Document of Discovery. That was issued by a man, a single person whose ideas of exploration, conquer and gain lay in the devastation of others, regardless of their worth which was never a consideration.

In spirit, this same document has been expanded to the conquer and ruin of an established and similar land not as a new finding but as a mindless and mad determination to dominate.

Yet who are the soldiers who agree in this 21^st Century to make this happen? Do their mothers weep?

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