Category: 1493 papal bull

Ethnogeology

Roger Amerman is enrolled Choctaw, but grew up in Pendleton and is married to a Nez Perce woman and lives now on the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. A few years ago, before the pandemic, Roger taught a beading workshop at the Josephy Center. It was a good one, and, when he was done, he fished for something more. He’d majored in geology—and had worked as a cultural interpreter for National Parks and the Forest Service. Roger suggested we do an ethnogeology workshop on a bus. We would start people in Pendleton and bus them to Wallowa Lake, stopping along the way to explore geological features and Native stories. He knew some elders who would love to do it.

And then came Covid!

But the idea didn’t die. “We have,” Roger said, “ethnobotany and ethnobiology. Why can’t we have ethnogeology and look at our Native landscape through the eyes of geologists and Tribal elders?” I introduced Roger to geologist Ellen Morris Bishop, and we were off.

We brought Nez Perce elder Allen Pinkham Sr. into the project, and made a short video with the three of them talking at Wallowa Lake. We wrote grants and visited Nez Perce village and fishing sites in Wallowa County with Tribal elders and the two geologists. USDA Nez Perce Historic Trail saw and liked what we were doing, and with their help we mounted a big program to get our two principles and several elders up the Snake River, and to Tolo Lake, where the Nez Perce stopped after being forced from the Wallowa Valley. We would also go to Cooper’s Ferry, where Oregon State geologist Loren Davis had documented human habitation for over 16,000 years! We found a videographer and two young Nez Perce photographers to document the journey.

And here we are with an exhibit we call “Heads and Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes.”

We had a grand opening on July 18; over 90 visitors went through pounds of Nez Perce smoked salmon, read the panels, looked at the photos and maps, and watched Nez Perce storytellers on looped videos tell the stories themselves. The exhibit, and the videos, will be here at the Josephy Center until September 13, but we made a book of it too, so you can follow the ethnogeology story more closely from home. Or you can watch a virtual exhibit too, at https://josephy.org/event/heads-and-hearts/.

But the best is to come in to the Center and see the big photos and maps—and also see the fine artwork of three Native artists from Oregon, Joe Cantrall, Lillian Pitt, and James Lavadour. We have two framed prints from each on lone from Crow’s Shadow’s permanent collection, and unframed limited edition prints for sale. The prints are not in the catalog, but I think one of Jim Lavadour’s landscapes would make a fine advertisement for the show–and for ethnogeolgoy, “Seeing landscape through Native Eyes.”

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Image is of Spring 2023, a limited edition lithograph by James Lavadour

Vatican rescinds “Doctrine of Discovery”

I have written and spoken about the impact of the “Doctrine of Discovery” on Native American affairs for years. This “new” news from the Vatican is astounding. I think that, for the most part, the Vatican and the Catholics in general have tried to forget this piece of “ancient” history that basically says that Christian nations have the right to discover—and rule over—lands inhabited by non-Christians. In other words, all of the Americas were subject to the doctrine, and our USA, in Supreme Court opinions developed by Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1820s and 1830s, declared “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” Native peoples were left with a doctrine of “occupancy” and “limited sovereignty.”Read Rich’s Post →

A 500 year-old fiction

Years ago, when I knew much less of the Indian story in the Pacific Northwest, I had an informal Nez Perce history class here at the Josephy Center. A dozen of us were on the balcony one day when Tamastslikt director Bobbie Conner and her mother came in the door. I shouted down that we were talking about the Stephens Treaties of 1855. Bobbie shouted back that any discussion of Indian treaties had to begin with the Doctrine of Discovery.Read Rich’s Post →

The Doctrine of Discovery and the Malheur Refuge

I’ve been wondering where to start in understanding the Bundys and the militia takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge—and I keep getting pushed back in time and place. My journey started with the obvious—the Paiutes, but it didn’t take me long to get to the Pope!

Let me explain: A couple of years ago, a group of us at the Josephy Center spent a few weeks examining the Nez Perce and early white settler history in the Wallowas. 
On the day we were talking about the treaties of 1855 and 1863 (the Paiute and US Indian treaties being my initial starting point in my Malheur quest) that led up to the 1877 Nez Perce War, Bobbie Conner, the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the nearby Umatilla Reservation, showed up at the Josephy Center. We asked her to join us, and she jumped in immediately with the Doctrine of Discovery: “You can’t understand Indian treaties without understanding the Doctrine of Discovery.”
So we went on to discuss that doctrine, and how it played out in transfer from the Pope to protestant Englishmen and the ideas of Manifest Destiny, western expansion, Indian treaty-making, and the ultimate displacement of American Indians across the continents.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York has an early version of the document—pictured here—and this is what they say about it:
The Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493… stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” This “Doctrine of Discovery” became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” In essence, American Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished.
So the indigenous people who had lived in the Americas for millennia had occupied it, but had no ownership of it. Ownership was reserved for good Christian nations, and, presumably, for their mercantile companies—Hudson’s Bay; Dutch East and West India companies, etc. Modern versions of these 17th century giants might be the Army Corps of Engineers and Exxon Mobil. Or beleaguered western ranchers who maybe trace holdings to the Homestead Act of 1862?
“Occupancy” was another road I tried in my understanding of the Malheur situation. That immediately gets one to “joint occupancy,” which is what we—the Oregon Territory, including the Malheur—lived under from the 1818 treaty that finally resolved territorial questions of the War of 1812, until 1846, when a new treaty setting the boundary line at the 48th parallel forestalled another conflict between Great Britain and the United States.
To summarize: the search for “original” owners of the land that is now the Malheur Wildlife Refuge—who the current hostile occupiers say they are looking for—took me first to the Paiutes. But that didn’t work, because they only lived there, occupied it and did not own it. Which took me to the United States and Great Britain, which, at least initially, only jointly occupied the land but did not own it (along with the Paiutes, who also jointly occupied in fact if not in law). 
Actual ownership of the Malheur country begins with the United States and the 1846 treaty, which rests on the 1823 Supreme Court Case, which in turn rests on a 1493 Papal Bull. The land in dispute was not included in the Northern Paiute Reservation, although the Indians are allowed by treaty to have access—occupy—for hunting, fishing, and gathering. It was never, in my brief exploration, homesteaded, so no private rancher has ownership rights based on that.
Which means that the land is “owned” by the US Government by treaty and law going back to the Pope. Which sets up some kind of religious battle between Catholicism and a long-dead Pope and the God who told the Bundys that they should undertake their mission.
If this is all bewildering, Alvin Josephy, who always seems to have something to say about current events involving tribes, says in several places that one of the initial mis-understandings between Europeans and indigenous Americans was the concept of private land ownership. He thought, correctly it seems, that that misunderstanding still prevails.

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