Indigenous Values Initiative

1 minute read

In 2022 Syracuse University received a Henry Luce Foundation grant to support the work of Philip P. Arnold and the Indigenous Values Initiative’s Doctrine of Discovery Project (doctrineofdiscovery.org). We received three years of funding for “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh (JvM): Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism.” This grant and project has been a collaborative initiative made possible through relationships developed over 30 years between academic and Indigenous communities. At its core, the project seeks to interrogate and critically examine connections between the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD), the Catholic Papal Bulls that undergird the Doctrine, and the Doctrine’s pernicious influence on United States Indian Law today.

The 200th anniversary of JvM provided an excellent moment to challenge the theology and jurisprudence of the DoCD and this critical Supreme Court decision. The project delved into a range of products and written works such are included in this volume. The essays, podcasts, conference, and public outreach activities of the project grant have helped to raise awareness about the harmful impacts of the DoCD.

[…] We are excited to be collaborating with CrossCurrents on this special edited volume as we believe it will provide support to this global, inter/intra-religious movement to: (1) dismantle existing knowledge paradigms about DoCD; (2) increase the number of religious leaders and their followers who have publicly repudiated the DoCD; and (3) apply pressure on the Vatican to rescind the Catholic Papal Bulls that have created the foundational justification for the Doctrine.

The work of CrossCurrents and its parent organization The Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life (APRIL) has highlighted issues of inter-cultural contact between different religious communities that has dominated the field of religious studies for the last 50 years or more.2 Along these lines, our work extends that of historian of religion Charles Long, for example, who examined religion’s role in settler-colonialism and the oppression of Indigenous Peoples. In Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) this reached a peak around the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. In more recent decades, multiple academics and activists have been focused on the DoCD.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Indigenous Values Initiative, "CrossCurrents Vol. 74. No. 4. Special Issue: 200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh: Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism," Doctrine of Discovery Project (30 June 2025), https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/podcast/200-years-of-johnson-v.-mintosh-indigenous-responses-to-the-religious-foundations-of-racism/.

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