On April 27, 2010, the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See (The Vatican) to the United Nations delivered its official statement on the Doctrine of Discovery at the 9th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The statement serves as an excellent example of obfuscation and historical falsification. So, let’s take a closer look.

The Holy See’s statement claims that the 1493 papal document “Inter Coetera [sic], as a source of international law…was abrogated by the Treaty of Tordesillas.” This does not speak to the point we have been raising since 1992: the papal bulls of 1493, and their predecessor documents are the genesis of the domination of our original nations and peoples of Great Turtle Island and this hemisphere. The Holy See is, in our view, attempting to shift focus away from the issue of its authorization of domination by attempting to focus our attention on the irrelevant question of whether the Inter Caetera document is a source of international law.

The Holy See’s 2010 statement also says that “the division of lands between Castile-Aragon (Spain) and Portugal” was “abrogated by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.” Upon being informed of this argument, Anthony Padgen, an eminent scholar of that historical era said to me in an email: “I fail to see how an agreement [the Tordesillas treaty] between two civil powers could possibly abrogate a papal bull.”