A few years ago, while filming
a documentary on the Crow reservation in south-central Montana, I
saw a New Yorker cartoon thumb-tacked to a door
in the tribal offices. It showed two Indians sitting beside a fire,
watching a rocket blast off into space. One says to the other:
“Somebody told them we still have land on the Moon.”
I
forgot about that cartoon until a few months ago, when local
newspapers began tracking the adventures of the Lewis and Clark
Bicentennial Commemoration. The stories reported great excitement
over the celebration in our nation’s thinly populated
midsection, stories that were sometimes coupled with caveats
written by native people, who tried to challenge perceptions about
the Corps of Discovery. As I read these pieces, I reflected on
words spoken several years ago by Gerard Baker, the Mandan-Hidatsa
native who was named director of the National Park Service’s
Lewis and Clark celebration.
“This will be a celebration
of native people who made this expedition possible, a national
celebration of their ancestors, their stories, their cultures,”
said Baker. “It’s long overdue.”
So why is it, I am
often asked by non-natives, that many Native Americans still feel
such anger about this celebration? Why, while on a visit to
Washington, D.C.,last week, was there a news commentary written by
Mary Annette Pember, former president of the Native American
Journalists Association, that began: “The Lewis and Clark
Bicentennial Commemoration celebrates discovery by conquest, and as
an American Indian, it sticks in my craw.”
Pember
explained that it sticks in her craw because the Corps of Discovery
signaled the beginning of a century of trauma and genocide that
ended on the frozen banks of a creek called Wounded Knee in
December 1890. In effect, Pember asked, “What’s to
celebrate?”
That’s a good question. When I was
asked to speak at the Lewis and Clark Commemoration last month, I
invited several judges and attorneys to join me in a panel
discussion on “Compacts and Covenants: Two Hundred Years Downstream
with the Doctrine of Discovery.” My idea was to throw a bridge
across the cultural gulf that continues to divide America.
Most of us are familiar with the Lewis and Clark
adventure: Fifty-two men set out from Missouri in 1804, traveling
West into the unknown; only one of them died. The official purpose
of the mission was scientific. Fewer of us know that this was the
26th expedition of outsiders to reach the Mandan Villages on the
upper Missouri River. Judging from the full auditorium in Bismarck,
N.D., last month, fewer Americans know that the philosophy
underlying the trip came from a medieval European pope justifying
colonial expansion.
In1532, a brilliant thinker in Spain,
Franciscus de Vitoria, delivered a lecture “On the Indians Lately
Discovered in the Americas.” Basing his arguments on the humanism
of the Greeks, Vitoria argued that the native people living across
the ocean possessed what he called “natural law rights,” much like
any free and rational people. As such, he said, they held title to
their lands.
Vitoria’s lecture drew a stormy
response from Pope Alexander, who declared that natives in the new
lands were all savages and infidels. Under the pope’s
Doctrine of Discovery, native people had a choice: They could be
conquered, colonized and civilized by the agents of the church, or
they could suffer the consequences.
Fast forward to
Philadelphia, in 1787. There, our founding fathers enthusiastically
embraced the 250-year-old Doctrine of Discovery. Furthermore, notes
legal scholar Robert Williams, “… by denying self-determination
to tribal peoples, the new republic found the Doctrine of Discovery
to be the perfect instrument of empire.”
Once ashore, the
Doctrine of Discovery had many children. It spawned the odious
Dawes Act of 1887, which abrogated dozens of treaties and opened
tens of millions of acres of the American West to outright theft by
Congress. It gave birth to the Religious Crimes Code which outlawed
religious freedom to native people, and in our time, it spawned the
Termination Era of the 1950s, a scandalous campaign that sought to
disband Indian tribes altogether.
Thankfully, this last
effort failed. But to America’s first citizens — and to
journalist Mary Annette Pember — these episodes serve as a
reminder that the Doctrine of Discovery is still very much with us.
A rocket blasting off to a new frontier carries different symbolic
meaning to people still fighting to recover their “inalienable
rights.”
Paul VanDevelder is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is the author of the recently
published, Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the
Trial that Forged a Nation. He lives in Corvallis,
Oregon.
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