What is the Doctrine of Discovery?

“What is the Doctrine of Discovery?,” an Outcome archive entry by Philip P. Arnold, Sandra Bigtree. The entry belongs to the featured collection and connects readers to scholarship, public history, and organizing around the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian domination, Indigenous sovereignty, law, religion, land, memory, and accountability.

In brief, it addresses Papal Bulls of the 15th century gave Christian explorers the right to claim lands they ‘discovered’ and lay claim to those lands for their Christian Monarchs.. For readers arriving from the main Doctrine of Discovery site, this post functions as a pointer rather than a replacement for the full Outcome record. The canonical page preserves the complete context, metadata, author information, citation links, media, and neighboring materials in the archive.

The source text highlights terms and contexts including INTRODUCTION “We were planting corn and they were planting crosses.” ~ Faithkeeper Oren Lyons The Doctrines of Christian Discovery (DoCD) originate with 15th century Papal Bulls that were issued by the Vatican and implemented by Monarchies, sanctioning the brutal Conquest and Colonization of non Christians who were deemed “enemies of Christ” in Africa and the Americas. These Papal Bulls were a continuation of what had been going on since at least the 8th century from Charlemagne, through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the war on witches, to the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1823, the “Doctrine of Discovery” was first articulated as a legal formulation in U.S. Supreme. Read the canonical Outcome page for the complete entry.

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