The peaceful Native Water Protectors who have been resisting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on sacred land belonging to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have succeeded in winning federal accommodations to temporarily halt DAPL construction, but the energy company behind DAPL has pledged to proceed (with state support). Knowing the enduring historic and structural nature of this modern struggle — a struggle in which the Water Protectors have courageously confronted violent local, state and private militarized forces, inspiring support from thousands of US military veterans — is vital to understanding its significance.
While the origins of the legal doctrine that facilitated conquest, genocide and the structure of settler colonialism in the US is well known to Native people throughout North America (and beyond), they are less known to current generations of white settlers.
The Doctrine of Discovery, Colonialism and White (Christian) Supremacy
The Crusades were launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II and his papal bull (an official papal decree), Terra Nullius. Terra Nullius, Latin for “land that belongs to no one” permitted European Christian kings and princes to “discover” and claim land occupied by non-Christians. During the Crusades in 1240, the canon lawyer Pope Innocent IV penned a legal commentary on the rights of non-Christians that questioned if it was lawful to invade a land that “infidels” possess. Innocent went on to respond that it was, because the Crusades were “just wars” and were being fought in “defense” of Christianity and to take back lands that rightfully belonged to Christians. Innocent asserted a Christian right to legally dispossess pagans of sovereignty and property.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave King Alfonso of Portugal the God-given right to conquer and enslave sub-Saharan Africans. In the bull, Nicholas V mandated Alfonso to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever … to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors … and to convert them to his and their use and profit.” In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued another bull, the Romanus Pontifex, to King Alfonso — and extended to all Catholic monarchies — the right of “discovery” and seizure of all lands that were not inhabited by Catholics. It also encouraged the enslavement of the non-Christian inhabitants of all stolen lands. Thus, when Christopher Columbus landed on Guanahani island in 1492, he performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land in the name of the king and queen of Spain, as ordained by the church. Columbus was also following church doctrine when he wrote in his personal diary about his intentions for the Indigenous people he encountered by claiming, “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.”
A year later, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which gave Spain the Americas, while Africa and India were allotted to Portugal (and later, land that would become Brazil, as well), for the purposes of colonization and to convert and enslave the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. Inter Caetera also justified the enslavement of Africans. Inter Caetera established the Law of Nations (also known as the Law of Christendom), a papal and thus legal decree stating that “one Christian nation did not have the right to establish dominion over lands previously dominated by another Christian nation.”
All together these papal decrees (between 1095-1493), originating from the Crusades, served as a bedrock for the ideology of white supremacy as tied to the establishment of international law under the Doctrine of Discovery (or the Doctrine of Christian Discovery). This ideological doctrine was fundamental in the creation of sovereign rights in settler colonial nation-states and the legalization of European claims to own, occupy, colonize and exploit the continent of Africa and the entire Western Hemisphere, condemning Indigenous 