Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius

The ‘Age of Discovery’ was an exciting, glorious time for European explorers as they sailed the ocean blue and discovered the ‘New World’. As explorers from Britain and France landed on the shores of what is Canada today, they claimed ‘finders keepers’, validated by a framework for international law called the Doctrine of Discovery, which granted European explorers with the authority to lay claim to territories in the name of their sovereign (their monarch).

Specifically, the Doctrine of Discovery authorized Christian European monarchs to assert sovereignty on land not already occupied by Christians. If land was not inhabited by Christian people, it was considered terra nullius – Latin for "nobody's land". Land was seen and legally deemed to be vacant and unoccupied, not inhabited by a sovereign state, and therefore belonging to no one.

But what about the 18 million Indigenous people already living within some 800 sovereign nations on Turtle Island? Since they were not Christians, they were seen to be ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’, ‘inferior and uncivilized’ – essentially deemed unworthy of existence as humans within a legal framework. The concept of terra nullius provided the legal, philosophical, and moral justification for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. For this reason, Crown title underlies all of the land in Canada today.

Where did such a framework get its legitimacy? A series of Papal Bulls (letters of decree or edicts issued by the Pope), particularly in the 15^th century, formalized the Church’s blessing for Christian imperialism: “We grant you [kings of Spain and Portugal] of with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property […] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude” (Pope Nicholas V, Papal Bull Dum Diversas, 1452). These Papal Bulls gave credence and authority to the belief of Euro-Christian superiority and supremacy – the heart of racism that has been called America (and Canada)’s Original Sin.

Compare this to God’s view of humanity in Genesis 1-2. This holy Creation narrative paints a picture of a Creator God who forms each human by his own hands, created in his own image and likeness. Each person is breathed into existence by the very breath of God. The Apostle Paul repeats that God “made the world and everything in it and he himself gives all [people] life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:24). King David, singing psalms of praise to God, discerns that he is knit together by God in his mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made, life ordained by God (139:14-16). By God’s own appraisal, his creation of humans is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Each human is intentionally created, valued, sacred, and loved. Not only so, God created the diversity of the peoples of the earth to seek and find him. Apostle Paul writes that God made every nation “that they should inhabit the whole earth, and determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live”; he did this precisely so that these nations would “seek him… reach out for him and find him… he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26-27).

As the Good News of Christ extended beyond the Jewish people, the early followers of Christ bickered amongst themselves if those of non-Jewish ethnicity and practices were inferior. The Apostles Paul made it clear that these social divisions were not divinely-appointed: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female” (Galatians 3:28). In Colossians 3:11, Paul adds the there is no distinction nor superiority before God between circumcised and uncircumcised (following Jewish religious traditions or not), barbarian (those who could not speak the Greek language, and were therefore considered uneducated, rough, or sometimes brutal), or Scythians (with varying interpretations, the people considered in Paul’s day the lowest kind of barbarian, the most ‘savage’, alien, foreign). In the very moment that the Apostle Peter, in the house of a Roman centurion, declared “how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts [people] from every nation”, listeners were astonished by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses alike, and respond in praise (Acts 10). The Apostle John is also given a glimpse of heaven, where peoples and languages from all nations are gathered (Revelation 7:9).

Paul reminds the church of their humble place before God as recipients of unmerited grace: “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; to many were influential; not many were of noble birth… God chose… the lowly things of this world and the despised things – and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).

Questions to consider:

• Do I believe that I am made in the image of God the Creator, as precious, beloved, and valued?
• Do I believe that every other human is made in the image of God the Creator, as equally precious, equally beloved, equally valued?