More than 500 clergy traveled to North Dakota on November 3, 2016, to show solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the #NoDAPL movement. Photo by Andrea Denault
With Republican Donald Trump headed to the White House, what's in store for the original nations? Steven Newcomb (Shawnee / Lenape) of the Indigenous Law Institute calls for the redoubling of efforts to dismantle federal Indian law and policy:
The nascent Trump-Pence Era raises a key question: Will the coming administration enable us to sharpen and intensify our critique of the Christian dominionist thinking that has resulted in U.S. federal Indian law and policy? (In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall used the dominionist term “ultimate dominion”) Or, will the Trump-Pence era make it all the more difficult for us to raise that critique because Christian dominionist thinking will begin to seem ordinary and normal as the supposed “civic religion” of the United States? Nearly twenty-five years into the global campaign that Birgil Kills Straight and I started back in 1992, when we began calling on the Vatican to formally revoke the Inter Caetera papal edict of May 4, 1493, more than 520 clergy people from throughout the United States convened at Standing Rock. They directly challenged the dominionist Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Some were even arrested. In an act of protest, the clergy burned copies of the Vatican papal decrees of 1493, and challenged the U.S.'s use of the doctrine to engage in militarized actions against Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin. It is ironic, to say the least, that this powerful historic event, by Christians, against a system of Christian dominionism, took place on the eve of a U.S. election which handed the power of the executive branch of the United States to Christian dominionists. We are indeed on the other side of the Looking Glass. Now it’s a matter of being all the more determined to increase our resolve and our efforts against the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination.Read More:
Steven Newcomb: The Dominionist Age of Trump and Our Original Free Nations (Indian Country Today 11/26)
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