Creation Stories and Columbus Day
Creation stories are important and powerful. Origin stories define how we perceive our identities and purpose, and shape our world view.
Columbus is the pivotal character in the creation story of the United States. He functions to legitimize the erasure of the original tribal nations. Elevating and celebrating Columbus as a national icon raises questions about the role of racism and ignorance in perpetuating state abuse of power, which is also part of this nation’s creation story. Columbus Day is, at its core, a celebration of white supremacy, Christian exceptionalism, and the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
Although Columbus was a key figure in the origin story of the United States, the ideology that legitimizes the oppression of Indigenous Peoples has its roots in the merger between the Roman State and the Roman Catholic Church. In exchange for the Emperor Constantine making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Church endorsed the Emperor’s wars of aggression to spread its influence. Through the centuries, the Church continued to promote conquest to expand its influence and increase its wealth.
An example of this occurred in 1095 AD when Pope Urban II called on Christian monarchs to send armies to liberate the so-called Holy Land from “infidels.” This initiated the Christian Crusades and the resulting brutalities against Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians was nothing less than mass butchery. The Crusades helped entrench the fanatical ideology of Christian empire.
By the fifteenth century, a clear ideology had developed in which any nation that had not sworn allegiance to the Pope was considered “non-Christian,” being defined as uncivilized, barbaric, savage, pagan, heathen, Church enemies, backward, and inhuman. It was the responsibility of Christian Monarchs to search out these nations: invade, capture, vanquish, subdue, enslave, and take the land, property, and persons for the March’s use and profit. The Pope also instructed Monarchs to build churches and preach Christianity in order to gain more followers. Any person who refused or objected to Christian domination was subject to torture and death.
That is the ideology under which the Pope purported to award the Western Hemisphere to Portugal and Spain, and the terms under which Columbus conducted his rampages through the Americas. This is known as the Doctrine of Discovery.
Soon, the Spanish monarchs realized that the Pope could withdraw their mandate at any time, so lawyer Franciscus de Victoria was tasked with writing a new version of the Doctrine of Discovery to entrench and legitimize its domination of Indigenous peoples. Victoria restated the Pope’s justification as religious natural law rather than Church law. Claiming that discovered peoples were bound by Christian duty to follow Christian natural law, Victoria justified Spain’s free access to and exploitation of Indigenous Peoples’ homelands, forbade tribal custom and ceremony, and usurped Tribal leadership. This had the effect of justifying anything to which Spain subjected Indigenous Peoples.
One of the principles of Victoria’s new ideology was just war. Much like the Pope’s version of the Doctrine of Discovery, Victoria’s just war principle stated that when Indigenous Peoples violated Christian natural law, Spain would be justified in conducting war against them, enslaving them, taking their land and property, and killing them. This so-called “Just War” remedy was often the first iteration the Spaniards had with tribes, rather than a measure of last resort. This shows that the spaniards did not follow their own legal principles. Victoria wrote the justifications specifically to validate Spain’s corrupt practices. The Spanish monarch was pleased with Victoria’s work product, and so were other European Christian monarchs. The principles Victoria concocted were widely adopted throughout Christendom and became the foundation of international discovery law.
Great Britain enthusiastically embraced the corrupt Spanish Doctrine of Discovery. British colonists who arrived on the east coast of North America did so under the law oc Christian discovery. The land title of all the states in the eastern U.S. are rely on the rights of Christian discovery. In 1823 the United States Supreme Court legitimized the use of Christian discovery principles in its racist and discriminatory Johnson v. M’Intosh opinion. The Court relied on the corrupt International law of discovery as an excuse to dispossess Tribal nations of their ancestral homelands.
Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that, as Britain’s successor, the United States unequivocally accepted all the principles of Christian law to which other Christian nations had agreed, including “that principle which has been received as the foundation of all European title in America.” This includes the genocidal principles of Christian domination that made the modern land title system possible.
Marshall characterized discovery as a legally binding transaction in which Christian nations received absolute freedom to dominate Indigenous nations in exchange for introducing their religion and civilization.
Did you catch what Marshall did?
He characterized the Christian religion as a commodity. Preaching it to tribes, then, amounted to a commercial transaction in which the discoverer’s compensation was the right to deprive tribal nations of their independence and property.
As outrageous as that sounds, it is the claim that the US relies on to establish its right to dominate Indigenous tribes and deprive them of their property.
Mohawk Scholar Taiaiake Alfred explains why this fiction is so important to the State. He writes:
To justify the establishment of non-indigenous sovereignty, aboriginally /.. must necessarily be excluded and denied. Otherwise, it would seem ridiculous that the original inhabitants of a place should be forced to justify their existence to a crude hoard of refugees from another continent … State sovereignty depends on the fabrication of falsehoods that exclude the ingenious voice.
So, the political State that occupies indigenous territory requires a narrative - a creation story - that silences and erases the original inhabitants. That is why the official version of Columbus bus’ discovery of America glorifies discovery, largely erases Indigenous Peoples, and is silent on the genocide that was required for the United States to come into existence.
The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is also seen in the domestic policy of Manifest Destiny: the destiny of the Christian nation to acquire the whole continent, driving out the wolves and heathens in the process, as the official story goes.
Religion is a bad thing in and of itself. The truth about the origin story of the United States is that injustice is inevitable when Christian ideology is used to define law and policy. Christianity is based on faith rather than evidence. This means that it is irrational by definition. In a legal system that requires fact and evidence, legal principals that rely on irrationality introduces contradiction and bias. Because common law in the United States is based on precedent - meaning that it builds on previous judgments - a precedent that incorporates religious ideology will continue to perpetuate irrationality and bias unless the religious ideology is rooted out.
The Christian Doctrine of Discovery has become standard operating procedure for American institutions, even though its use violates the Constitution’s first, fifth, and fourteenth amendments. The institutions of the United States are fully aware that they operate under Christian law. We can’t expect them to voluntarily embrace any efforts to change that.
It is important to understand that the Christian Doctrine of Discovery is not merely a problem of Native people. As Vine Deloris Jr. pointed out, Native people are the canary in the coal mine. Columbus Day echoes of nationalism, religious zealotry, and racial superiority. These are all phenomena that converge to create genocidal conditions. Colonization is inherently genocidal. This means that the creation story of the United States is a creation story of death and destruction.
The question that each of us should ask on Columbus Day is whether we will be complicit in ongoing genocide, or accept the responsibility to stop the barbarism of Columbus.