What is the Doctrine of Discovery?

"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 Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823. As this case fundamentally defines international property law today, it continues to be used by multi-national corporations and Nation-States in their extraction of resources in indigenous territories around the world. The global scale with which the DoCD expressed itself in the “Age of Discovery”—first in Africa, then the Americas, and beyond—created a unified Christendom, which became the opposing force against the great global plurality of cultures. This Doctrine governs United States and international law today and has been cited as recently as 2005 in the decision City Of Sherrill V. Oneida Indian Nation Of N.Y..

To understand how the Doctrine of Discovery continues to operate, it is important to see both its religious and legal dimensions together. Philip P. Arnold and Sandy Bigtree’s 10 Religious Dimensions show how Christian ideas about domination, conversion, land, and non-Christian peoples shaped the worldview that made conquest appear morally and spiritually justified to European powers. These dimensions help explain why the Doctrine was never only a legal technicality; it was rooted in a religious imagination that denied the full humanity, sovereignty, and spiritual traditions of Indigenous Peoples.

Robert J. Miller’s 10 Legal Dimensions trace how those religious claims were transformed into legal doctrines of title, sovereignty, discovery, conquest, and domination. Robert J. Miller’s analysis shows how the same logic that animated the Papal Bulls later appeared in international law and U.S. Federal Indian Law, especially through Johnson v. M’Intosh. Read together, these two resources show the Doctrine of Discovery as a system: religious justification supplied the moral framework, while legal doctrine gave colonial governments and courts tools to dispossess Indigenous Nations and normalize that dispossession across centuries.