Advocacy Note: Thoughts on a (Not) Empty Land, Part 2
In May, Pastor Kristin, Martha Debelak, and I attended the Indigenous Justice and Christian Spirituality Symposium at Mesa View United Methodist Church. One of the sponsors was the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. When Coalition co-founder Sarah Augustine addressed us, I was riveted. In her compelling talk, she invited us to think about the earth in a new way, to understand the land and our collective body of humanity as one being.
She asked us to think about the massive extraction of minerals globally as an injury to the land and, by kinship, to us. To Sarah, “us” means all. For example, when we decide to trade our conventional car for an electric vehicle, please consider all of us, she urged. Consider the land and people near the mines that are in the supply chain for EV batteries. Mining can displace local communities, hurt indigenous economies, and toxify air, land, and water. Illnesses can result. For those reasons, Sarah called us to move beyond our current environmental strategies and be land and water protectors together. After listening to her speak, I ordered her book.
Sarah Augustine, a Mennonite of Tewa descent, walks with Jesus. She reveals her journey in her book’s title: The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. The Doctrine, as she implies, is not the way of Jesus but rather a theological and legal construct that came about through papal bulls issued in the 15th century. As Sarah notes, one provision of the Doctrine proved particularly helpful to the sovereigns of Europe: terra nullius, or “empty land.” “Empty land” was defined as a place not ruled by a Christian prince. As Europe’s explorers fanned out across the globe in the 1400s and beyond, they claimed the “empty” lands for their monarchs. All that was found on those lands became subject to a new world order. Terra nullius is the premise under which most of us live in North America today.
Sarah notes that today the Doctrine of Discovery still secures land rights for the descendants of colonists and immigrants in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court illustrated her very point in 2005. In a decision against the Oneida Indian Nation in a land case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the Court’s majority opinion, saying, “. . . [F]ee titles 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.”1
So there it was. As Justice Ginsberg indicated, after the Europeans arrived, the new world order was set. Many of the original people, who had experienced North America’s land differently than the European settlers, lost both the land and their way of being on it.
Sarah Augustine didn’t give solutions to our strange “empty-land” problem, but she did invite us on the journey to regard the land and all its peoples in greater oneness. Next month, I'd like to share her ideas for advocacy and healing as we follow Jesus toward wholeness. As we will see, she is greatly inspired by Luke 4 and Isaiah 58.
Judy Messal