Steven Newcomb: System of domination built into Indian law

More than five centuries ago, various popes in Rome, on behalf of Christendom, unleashed the paradigm I’m talking about. It may surprise you to learn that the Empire Domination Model of Christianity has been interwoven into the laws and policies of the United States, and into the laws and policies of many other countries, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That hidden code of Christian Empire has worked for more than five centuries toward the dissolution of our Original Nations of Great Turtle Island and Abya Yala to the south.

The idea patterns of domination and so-called Christian Discovery have been written by jurists into U.S. federal Indian law, where they remain to this day. Those ideas are traced to papal documents of the fifteenth century and to royal charters of England which claimed a right of domination as against non-Christian lands, “which before this time have been unknown to all Christian people.” In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined the pattern of Christian discovery and domination in U.S. case law in Johnson & Graham’s Lessee versus M’Intosh.

We can trace the pattern to 1452, when Pope Nicolas V, in the papal document Dum Diversas, directed the King of Portugal to go to the Western coast of Africa, and to non-Christian lands anywhere, and “to invade, capture, vanquish, subdue,” “all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and “to take away all their possessions and property.” Several Papal bulls or decrees of 1493, were issued by Pope Alexander VI, which called for the propagation of the Christian empire, imperii Christiani in Latin, and called for “barbarous nations” be reduced and subjected to the Catholic faith and Christian religion.