PRESS
RELEASE
INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES GATHER AT MEXICAN CONSULATE IN NEW YORK TO LINK DISAPPEARANCE OF 43 AYOTZINAPA
STUDENTS TO DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY’S CONTINUING ROLE IN OPPRESSION OF NATIVE
PEOPLES
LEADERS CALL ON POPE FRANCIS, FIRST POPE FROM THE
SO-CALLED NEW WORLD, TO CURE THE PATHOGEN THAT CONTINUES TO INFEST THE WORLD
15TH CENTURY PAPAL BULLS AUTHORIZED
EUROPEAN NATIONS TO SEIZE AND DOMINATE LANDS UNOCCUPIED BY CHRISTIANS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER
25, 2015
Indigenous peoples from around the
Western Hemisphere came to the Mexican consulate in New York today to demand
justice for 43 students who disappeared one year ago in Ayotzinapa,Guerrero, Mexico calling on
Pope Francis to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery which continues to provide
the legal underpinnings for on-going oppression of native peoples across the
Americas.
“The deaths of these 43 Ayotzinapa
students is another example of the body count that has piled up since 1493 when
the Doctrine of Discovery provided the roots of impunity and immunity with
which the so-called discoverers of the so-called New World considered citizens
of indigenous nations as less than human because they were not Christians,”
said Tupac Enrique Acosta, a member of the Nahuatl Nation and firekeeper for
the Continental Confederacy of Original Nations.
“The threats of globalization so widely
discussed today began for indigenous peoples in the 15th century
when the Euopeans brought an unholy combination of genocidal economic
exploitation and evangelization,” Enrique Acosta said. “The first Pope from the
Americas must seize the opportunity to remove this pathogen that continues to
this day to provide the legal and evangelical underpinnings for the continuing
oppression.”
The group of indigenous leaders arrived
in New York to take part in the International Tribunal of Justice upon the anniversary of the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students on September 26th 2014. The International Tribunal of Justice will
begin Friday evening and continue through Saturday at New York University.
Pope Francis gave great encouragement
to indigenous peoples during a Mass in Bolivia in June when he said, "I
humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but
also for the crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called
conquest of America.”
He did not simply blame the
conquistadores who carried out the genocidal campaign of cultural, religious
and economic exploitation. He blamed the Church itself for providing the
evangelical and legal justifications for those crimes.
But he stopped short of renouncing the
Doctrine, which authorized European explorers who “discovered” new lands
unoccupied by Christian to consider them empty and seize them in perpetuity
from the “barbarous nations” that lived there.
“There can be no justice for Indigenous Peoples until his Church
renounces the instrument used for more than 500 years to ignore and dismiss the
rights of Indigenous Nations and Peoples,” said Betty Lyons, the president of the American Indian Law Alliance and a
citizen of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s Onondaga Nation’s Snipe
Clan.
“The Doctrine of Discovery is not
ancient history to Indigenous Peoples in this country, or to Indigenous Peoples
around the world,” said Tadodaho Sidney Hill, the traditional leader of
the Haudenosaunee. “It is a living insult to our rights as citizens of the
world and must be renounced. We are on the Earth to heal the world. This wound
must be healed.”
Religious leaders around the world –
including the World Council of Churches, the Episcopal and Methodist
conventions, the Friends (Quakers) and the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious, an association of nuns – has called on the Church to renounce the
Doctrine.
The World Council, in a resolution,
denounced the Doctrine as
“fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ” and urged governments “to
dismantle the legal structures and policies based on the Doctrine of Discovery
and dominance, so as to empower and enable indigenous peoples to identify their
own aspirations and issues of concern.”
The
Leadership conference said, “We humbly and respectfully ask Pope Francis to
lead us in formally repudiating the period of Christian history that used
religion to justify political and personal violence against indigenous peoples’
cultural, religious and territorial identities,” the Leadership Conference of
Women Religious, an association of nuns, said.
The
Philadelphia Friends Yearly Meeting’s Indian Committee declared the Doctrine provided justification for
European explorers “to take over indigenous lands and
possessions, and to enslave, kill, or subject the indigenous peoples they
encountered . . . For us to continue to remain silent would be tantamount to
our giving continuing approval to these abusive acts of theft and cultural
genocide."
Indigenous leaders have met with Church
officials at the Holy See, and pressed their case at the United Nations through
the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the UN Committee on
Decolonization. But despite protestations by the Papal Nuncio at the UN that
the Doctrine is ancient history, it remains the bedrock of U.S. Indian land
law.
The Doctrine was explicitly cited as
recently as 2005 by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in rejecting
a case brought by the Oneida Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy
concerning land in upstate New York that had been part of the original
footprint of land set aside for the Haudenosaunee in the 1793 Treaty of
Canandaigua signed on behalf of the United States by George Washington.
“Under the Doctrine of Discovery, fee
title to the land occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested
in the sovereign – first the discovering European nations and later the
original state and the United States,” Justice Ginsburg wrote in City of
Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York.
As Pope
Francis visits Great Turtle Island or Abya Yala (North America), indigenous
leaders have been encouraged by his vision for his papacy, in his respect for
the sanctity of Mother Earth, and for his acknowledgment of European
colonizers’ appalling actions in seizing our lands with impunity.
But they
argue there can be no justice for Indigenous Peoples until his Church renounces
the instrument used for more than 500 years to ignore and dismiss the rights of
Indigenous Nations and Peoples.
“If the
first Pope from the so-called New World cannot take this step, we despair at
the Church ever seeing its way clear to right this historic, and ongoing, grave
injustice,” said Lyons from the American Indian Law Alliance.
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