Christian Control Of Women And Mother Earth: The Doctrine Of Discovery And The Doctrine Of Male Domination

How did the world come to be? How did humans come to be? What is the origin of all living beings? The myth-history of who we are begins with the creation stories we tell. These stories guide us on the path to who we will become and how we understand ourselves and our relation to the planet and the other life on Earth. We settler colonialists have our origin story in the Christian Bible, the fiction that set our Western worldview on the path to Christian male domination of the earth and women. It set us spiritually, politically, economically and socially in a trajectory toward destruction. This is the best knowledge I can share with you after over 50 years of learning from Indigenous people, studying their history and examining my own settler colonialist world view.

Mother Earth to Indigenous people is the sacred and generous creator of everything that we need to survive; to Christians it is their real estate, taken by the force of spiritual superiority. Earth is nothing but dirt, which is synonymous with evil: a dirty mind, lower than dirt, etc. The Christian earth is the resistant enemy that Adam must overpower to survive. It begins with the Bible’s creation myth.

The _Bible’_s first creation story in Genesis, chapter one declares that God creates “mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”¹ There is no reciprocity indicated; nothing akin to the Indigenous belief in the relationship of responsibility among all living things including humans, each having their own gift to offer toward the balance of life.

Notice the pronoun, “they.” Mankind is plural. The next passage further clarifies: “male and female he created them.”² Woman and man are created together.

But then, given that the Bible was written by different authors over time, a different creation story emerges in the next chapter of Genesis. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”³ God creates just man with no mention of woman in this tale. Seeming to realize He has forgotten something, “… the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”⁴ In this version of the story, God doesn’t create woman the way He did in the first Genesis telling. She is not molded in His image, equally with man. Instead, God put Adam to sleep “and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”⁵ Adam, who has named the other living things, now does his final naming, saying, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”⁶ Man starts the whole human race; his rib provides the first birth, according to the Bible.

God then sets Adam and Eve up in the Garden of Even surrounded by beautiful trees bearing tasty food, but with one rule. You can eat from all of them, God instructs, except for “… the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”⁷

A serpent appeals to Eve’s reason. God doesn’t want you to eat it, the snake says, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”⁸

This is the critical moment in Christian history when everything will be decided from this time forward. The woman faces the ultimate decision. Will she act on faith or reason? God has told man that he’ll die if he eats the fruit from the tree. But her eyes, her mind, tells her a different story. “…the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes.” In addition to feeding the body, it would feed the mind, for God had said it would “make one wise.” Woman, who was to be a help meet, acts instead as an agent, choosing nourishment and wisdom and “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.” Not only that, she goes beyond agent to decision-maker “and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”⁹

Eve brings sin into the world by eating fruit from the forbidden tree and convincing Adam to try it, too. Discovering her disobedience, an angry God decrees, “ I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over there.”¹⁰ God robs woman of her autonomy as punishment for her noncompliance.

Because Adam listened to Eve, he is also punished: “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.¹¹

Genesis establishes hierarchy as God-ordained. Adam has already been given authority over every living being in the Bible’s first creation story. In the second version, man’s punishment sets earth up as an enemy he must subdue to his will. Men are given the power to decide the fate of every creature alive and an antagonistic power over the earth. The direct agent of God, the Pope, will later require it in his papal bulls.

Where does this Biblical account of creation leave us? All living creatures are put on earth for man to rule over; Adam is set into perpetual warfare with the earth. The position of women, however, could either be established as autonomous, if the first creation story of equality is followed through in the Bible, or as submissive, if the Eve-apple version becomes the dominant narrative throughout the Christian Holy Book. The rest of the Bible settles the question clearly. While Galatians 3:28 affirms, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” this voice is drown out by the clear message repeated throughout the Bible from Corinthians through Ephesians, Colossians, Timothy and Titus to Peter, “wives, be in subjection to your own husbands.”¹²

Papal Bulls later enforced these Biblical edicts about the power of men over women and the earth. Around the time Columbus “discovered” the “New World,” Catholic Popes issued papal bulls giving religious sanction to a hierarchy that devastated the lives of women, Indigenous people and the earth that continues today.

A series of these Papal Bulls – variously labeled the Doctrines of Discovery or Christian Domination – were issued before the Protestant Reformation, when the Catholic monopoly on Christianity remained. The Doctrine of Discovery established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. Foundational elements of the Doctrine of Discovery can be found in a series of papal bulls, or decrees, beginning in the 1100s, which included “sanctions, enforcements, authorizations, expulsions, admonishments, excommunications, denunciations, and expressions of territorial sovereignty for Christian monarchs supported by the Catholic Church,” according to a Doctrine of Discovery description in the Catholic Benedictine University Library.¹³

Because God had given instructions to man about how he was to dominate the earth as eternal punishment for his sin, it made logical sense that if any men had not received their proper Christian instruction, they would not know what their relationship to the land should be. It should not be surprising, then, that Papal Bulls declaring if land wasn’t inhabited by Christians, it was vacant and available to be claimed by European monarchs would become the legal basis for the wholesale taking of Indigenous (read pagan) land.

This logic may have been enhanced by the shocking awareness that it was not Indigenous men who were cultivating the land; it was women. Women working the land was an outright violation of the Bible’s instructions of men and women’s roles. Titus 2:5, for example, instructs women “To be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”

It was clear: Christians must control the land if God’s will was to be carried out. Further, it was the sacred responsibility of Christians to spread the word of the gospel, for only by faith in Jesus Christ could one attain eternal salvation.

Pope Alexander VI, a Valencia native, Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull, Inter caetera in 1493. In it, he greeted the good news that “our beloved son, Christopher Columbus, a man assuredly worthy and of the highest recommendations and fitted for so great an undertaking” had “with divine aid…discovered certain very remote islands and even mainlands that hitherto had not been discovered by others.” His highest priority, the pope told King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, the venture capitalists funding Columbus’ mission, is that the “Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” To do this work of God, the pope explained in Inter caetera, the Bull he issued, the invaders must take possession of “all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered” so the Pope made sure to “give, grant, and assign” to the Spanish royalty, and their “heirs and successors…all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, within this area forever.”¹⁴

While the Doctrine of Discovery established the spiritual explanation for the Christian appropriation of land inhabited by Indigenous people, it set the stage for the political and legal justification as well.

The Doctrine of Discovery Catholic mandate for Christian seizing of Indigenous land was joined by a Doctrine of Male Domination issued during the same time period. Based on a foundation of spiritual control of women going all the way back to Eve in the Bible, this doctrine also established the spiritual foundation for the political and legal control of women by men.

A Papal Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, issuing protection for the Inquisitors who were enforcing the torture and murder of the wise, empowered women called witches was issued in 1484, nine years before Inter caetera. It may not be a coincidence that the colonization of Indigenous land and the colonization of women were religiously established in concert.

Pope Innocent VIII had appointed two Dominican scholars, “our beloved sons Henricus Institoris (Heinrich Kramer) and Jacobus Sprenger (Jacob Sprenger)” as Inquisitors to ferret out and punish heretics and witches. However, the pope bemoaned, “It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us,” that in parts of Germany “certain of the clergy and of the laity” had openly revolted against the activity of Kramer and Sprenger, declaring that the church had no authority to prosecute those it deemed witches. Pope Innocent VIII felt it necessary to “decree, by virtue of our apostolic authority, that it shall be permitted to the said inquisitors in these regions to exercise their office of inquisition and to proceed to the correction, imprisonment, and punishment of the aforesaid persons for their said offences and crimes.”¹⁵

Pope Innocent VIII was acting on the instruction found in Exodus 22:18 and elsewhere in the Bible that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” when he issued his Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus (“desiring with supreme ardor”). He had to act because heretics and witches “heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage.”¹⁶ Women deemed as witches were practicing birth control and abortion; they were controlling reproduction.

To carry out their witch hunting, Kramer and Sprenger produced their Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”) in 1486. Although it never received Official Imprimatur of the church and may have been disavowed by the church four years later in 1490 the widely popular book became the de-facto handbook for witch-hunters and Inquisitors throughout Late Medieval Europe.

Among the seven methods the Malleus Maleficarum identified by which witches “infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the womb” are “obstructing” the “generative force” of men, destroying it in women and “procuring abortion”. Abortion and birth control had not just been developed, of course; ancient records of both are abundant.

Birth control and abortion were among “the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses,” the church decreed, sins that were punishable by burning alive at the stake. There was another horrendous sin. Assisting a woman in childbirth and relieving the pain she was experiencing was an act against God and a violation of His edict that woman should suffer in childbirth because of Eve’s sin. The evil of helping a woman in childbirth spread beyond the “witch” midwife to anyone who enabled or benefited from the midwife’s work. They, too, should be punished.

Sprenger and Kramer asserted that “the greatest injuries to the Faith as regards the heresy of witches are done by midwives.”¹⁶ Evil was women having control of their own bodies. Goodness rested in men having control of reproduction.

The witch-hunters use this justification to prove why there were more women heretics than men:

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable…Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils. More such reasons could be brought forward, but to the understanding it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft. And in consequence of this, it is better called the heresy of witches than of wizards since the name is taken from the more powerful party.¹⁷

In justifying the targeting of women, Kramer and Sprenger held forth with a misogynistic diatribe in their Malleus Maleficarum. These Inquisitors quoted partly from Ecclesiasticus, a book which appeared in the Bible at the time they were writing. The book of Ecclesiasticus was part of the apocrypha, the portion of the Bible appearing between the Old and New Testament until removed from the King James Bible in 1885. Malleus Maleficarum cites Ecclesiasticus 25:13-26 as a source of Biblical proof of woman’s inherent evil nature, and then goes on:

There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman… All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman…What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!…they are more credulous; and since the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather attacks them … since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft… Women also have weak memories; and it is a natural vice in them not to be disciplined, but to follow their own impulses without any sense of what is due… Justly we may say with Cato of Utica: If the world could be rid of women, we should not be without God in our intercourse. For truly, without the wickedness of women, to say nothing of witchcraft, the world would still remain proof against innumerable dangers…she is a liar by nature… the sin which arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment of sin…woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.¹⁸

The witch-hunts went on for over three hundred years, taking a staggering toll, the practice picked up by the Protestants and governments after the Reformation. The total number of women tortured and killed first by the church and then the state in Europe and the United States is in scholarly dispute. Studying historical records, suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1893 estimated that nine million people were put to death for witchcraft in the three hundred years after 1484. Her estimate, she pointed out, didn’t include “the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation.” While others have used a similar figure, most scholars today put the figure much lower, between 40,000 and100,000. Whatever the total, all agree many were slaughtered, and an overwhelming majority of them were women.¹⁹

Whatever the number of women executed, charges of witchcraft were good for business. The church killed single women of wealth, seized their property, and fattened its coffers.²⁰ It was this money from the witch-burnings, Seneca scholar John Mohawk speculated, that funded the venture capitalists’ excursion into the “New World.” If true, Columbus travelled on blood money taken from women burned at the stake as witches.

Both The Doctrine of Discovery and the Doctrine of Male Domination papal bulls began with the same justification. Since a belief in Christ was the only key to get into heaven, and the Catholic church in this pre-protestant reformation time had a monopoly on religion, Summis desiderantes decreed “that the Catholic faith should especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, and that all heretical depravity should be driven far from the frontiers and bournes of the Faithful.”²¹ This Bull was issued out of concern for the souls and salvation of the human race, as was Inter caetera, which began, “Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”

Both Bulls ended with the extreme threat: Through the “fullness of power” bestowed upon him by Christ through Peter both popes warned that “if any dare” to oppose these Bulls “upon him will fall the wrath of Almighty God, and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”²²

The Doctrine of Male Domination laid the foundation for the political and legal oppression of women. As canon, or church law became the basis for common law, the British Blackstone Code adopted by the Founding Fathers decreed that, as the two became one in marriage and the one was the man, women were “dead in the law.” Required to promise obedience to her husband in the church wedding vows, a wife lost the right to her possessions, her children, her political voice and even her body. A husband had the right to all his wife brought into the marriage, inherited or earned; could will-away an unborn child, rape her and also beat her if she disobeyed him, as long as he didn’t inflict permanent injury. She could not vote nor decide whether or not to have children. This was the law of the land, enforced state and federally, until the women’s suffrage movement 175 years ago began the demand for women to have their own identity; not exist as the property of their father or husband. The struggle continues today.

The impact of the Doctrine of Male Domination continues as well. The “preeminent priority” in public policy of U.S. Catholic bishops today is to outlaw abortion. Initially the Catholic Church did not condemn abortion until quickening, which was the moment when the pregnant woman felt fetal movement, a point only she could determine.

While Catholics today recite a catechism affirming “the moral evil of every procured abortion,” they may not be aware that it wasn’t until scientists understood in the mid-nineteenth century the biological course of reproduction, beginning with the union of egg and sperm that Pope Pius IX, in 1869, decreed abortion at any point in pregnancy, from the moment of conception, to be a sin punishable by excommunication. By then, the emerging Protestant religions were winning over Catholics, and the church was concerned about needing more parishioners.

As the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women constitutional protection of equality came within reach in February, 2023, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed their alarm, strongly urging senators to oppose the ERA. The Bishops fear that the amendment would be used to strike down reproductive choice laws, further public funding for abortion and restrain the ability of federal and state governments to enact other measures regulating abortion.

The Malleus Mallifacarum also carries over into our day when contemporary Crusaders who burn clinics and murder abortion providers are, to them, simply practicing traditional Christianity. They are the modern-day Inquisitors, the witch hunters.

Similarly, the political and legal effects of the Doctrine of Discovery continue today. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivering the opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court in the 2005 case of City of Sherrill, New York, Petitioner v .Oneida Indian Nation of New York et al, wrote_:_ “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 nation and later the original States and the United States.”²³ The decision denied the Oneida their right of sovereignty over their aboriginal land, which had been guaranteed to their nation under treaties dating back to the 18th century. The Doctrine of Discovery – the Catholic edict that land not inhabited by Christians wasn’t inhabited – trumped the treaties, the Supreme Court ruled.

The Sherrill case is only the most recent in the long history of law upholding the legitimacy of the Doctrine of Discovery and the right of “Christian people” to seize the lands of “heathens”, established in the 1823 Supreme Court ruling in Johnson & Grahams Lessee v. MacIntosh. Steve Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery documents the embedding of the Doctrine of Discovery in United States law “which left Indigenous nations with just the ‘right of occupancy’ to their lands, while the United States claimed the ‘ultimate title’ to all lands within the claimed boundaries of the United States”.²⁴

Courts in Australia, Canada and New Zealand have repeatedly joined United States courts in citing Johnson to hold that the Doctrine of Discovery granted European settler societies “plenary power” over Indigenous Peoples along with the legal title to their lands. Plenary power is rarely granted in the United States, given the reality that it takes power absolutely from another body. The result, according to the World Council of Churches has “diminished sovereign, commercial and international rights for Indigenous Peoples and governments”.²⁵

While Pope Francis, after decades of demands from Indigenous people to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery formally “repudiated” it on March 30, 2023, he did not rescind it. The damage remains.

We are back to the original question of where do our creation tales lead us? Who creates life? A male God creates the world and all living beings in the Christian myth. Indigenous knowledge answers the question with scientific/myth precision. Females are the creators of human life. Mother Earth, the land on which all life lives, gives what is needed to sustain life: food, water, air and shelter. This simple truth has become so shrouded in patriarchal control that the answer does not come quickly. In whose interest is it that we settler colonialists don’t see, and live with, this obvious reality? If you control women and land, you have the means of controlling humanity; you control the production of life and the reproduction of daily life. Was that the underlying goal of the early Catholic church?

To Indigenous people, woman has always been the sacred creator of life who also, as the agriculturalist, was the creator of life from the soil. She was deposed from this revered status as Earth lost its creative power in Genesis and woman became the source of evil.²⁶ Earth was magically disempowered in the patriarchal mind from an active agent, the creator of life, to a passive receptacle into which men placed their seed. Woman’s image followed. Her vibrant, God-like creative powers followed Earth into submission; her body simply became a receptacle for men’s seed. Just as woman had been exalted by her creative connection to Earth in pre-Christian times, man, who was now the creator of the seed of life, recreated God in his image. The Earth Mother was deposed by the Sky Father. The circle of relational life was sacrificed upon the hierarchical, linear cross of Christianity. 

Christians who have been looking skyward for our salvation have wrestled Mother Earth into submission, just as God required in Genesis. We’ve poisoned and polluted and plundered Her, assuming She would be there for us always, like a good and obedient wife and mother. We’ve poisoned her with fertilizer and pesticide to force her to produce more. We are paying the price of domination. As the Earth warms, the seas rise, and the weather is increasingly powerful, Mother Earth is speaking to us, and She is fed up. She’s demanding respect or She’ll shake us off like so many irritating fleas. Survival requires that we go through an attitude change about what, and who, is sacred.²⁷

Women, who the Bible placed under the authority of men as punishment from God for bringing evil into the world, are now rising to take leadership. Survival of life on the planet requires us to renew our pre-Christian reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth and all living beings and return women to their sacred position as the creators of life. Appropriately, it is Indigenous women who are leading this process of “rematriation,” returning the sacred to the mother.²⁸

Footnotes

1. Italics are the author’s. Innocent VIII: BULL Summis desiderantes, Dec. 5th, 1484 Bullarium Romanum (Taurinensis editio), sub, anno 1484. The Bull is also printed in full at the head of the Malleus maleficarum. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/witches1.asp ↩

2. Genesis 1:26. ↩

3. Genesis 1: 27. ↩

4. Genesis 2: 7-8. ↩

5. Genesis 2:18. ↩

6. Genesis 2: 21-22. ↩

7. Genesis 2:23. ↩

8. Genesis 2:17. ↩

9. Genesis 3:5. ↩

10. Genesis 3:6. ↩

11. Genesis 3:16. ↩

12. Genesis 3:17-19. ↩

13. See, for example: 1 Corinthians 11:3, 8, 9; 1 Corinthians 14: 34, 35; Ephesians v. 23; Colossians 3:18; I Timothy 2: 11-14; Titus 2: 4,5; 1 Peter 3:1. ↩

14. “Doctrine of Discovery: About the Doctrine”, Benedictine University Library. https://researchguides.ben.edu/doctrine-discovery/about ↩

15.  ”Inter caetera”, European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648*, Frances Gardiner Davenport, editor, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917, pp. 75-78.  ↩

16. Innocent VIII: BULL Summis desiderantes, Dec. 5th, 1484 Bullarium Romanum (Taurinensis editio), sub, anno 1484. The Bull is also printed in full at the head of the Malleus maleficarum. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/witches1.asp ↩ ↩²

17. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum: The Hammer of Witches, Pennethorne Hughes (ed.), Montague Summers (trans.) (London: the Folio Society, 1968), p. 128. Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1978), p.36. ↩

18. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Part I, Question VI. “Concerning Witches who copulate with Devils. Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?” The Malleus Maleficarum.  Transcribed by Wicasta Lovelace and Christie Jury. http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/?p=19 ↩

19. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Part I, Question VI. “Concerning Witches who copulate with Devils. Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?” The Malleus Maleficarum.  Transcribed by Wicasta Lovelace and Christie Jury. http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/?p=19 ↩

20. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State: The Original Expose’ of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex (Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press, 1980), p. 106-7; William Wood, A Casebook on Witchcraft (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), p. 26. Quoted in Gena Corea, The Hidden Malpractice (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1977), p. 23. Barstow, Anne Llewellyn, (Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (Pandora, 1994) says 100,000 while Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford Univ. Press), says 40-50,000 executions took place between 1428 and 1782, arguing that Barstow “has misunderstood” her sources.  ↩

21. Walter Senner, “How Henricus Institorus became Inquisitor for Germany: The Origin of Summis desiderantis affectibus.” Praedicatores, Inquisitores 1 (2004): 402. ↩

22. http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/introduction-to-online-edition-continued/ ↩

23. The translation of this Bull is reprinted from “The Geography of Witchcraft,” by Montague Summers, pp. 533-6 (Kegan Paul). “The Malleus Maleficarum” was transcribed by Wicasta Lovelace and Christie Rice; “Inter caetera”,European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, Frances Gardiner Davenport, editor, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917, pp. 75-78.  ↩

24. Under the “doctrine of discovery,” County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y.,470 U.S. 226, 234 (1985) (Oneida II), “fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign–first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States,” Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y. v. County of Oneida,414 U.S. 661, 667 (1974) (Oneida I). City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y. (03-855) 544 U.S. 197 (2005) 337 F.3d 139, reversed and remanded. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-855.ZO.html ↩

25. World Council of Churches Executive Committee, “Statement on the doctrine of discovery and its enduring impact on Indigenous Peoples”. 17 February 2012. http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/bossey-february-2012/statement-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-Indigenous-peoples.html ↩

26. Ibid. ↩

27. McElvaine, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History, p. 128. ↩

28. From Commencement Address the author delivered at SUNY Environmental Sciences and Forestry, Syracuse, New York, May 9, 2009. ↩