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For Further Study:  Documents and Videos on the Doctrine of Discovery

 

Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery- Robust timeline of Doctrine of Discovery's historical influence across the world, 2015

NPR News -Native American Boarding Schools 101 (7 min video) 2012: History of US Indian Boarding Schools, interviews up to today

September 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

 

Articles on current connections:
Web resources and Activism:
  • Indigenous Environmental Network- is an alliance of grassroots Indigenous Peoples whose mission is to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from contamination and exploitation by strengthening, respecting, and maintaining traditional teachings and natural laws.

  • Indian People Organizing for Change - Our inherent responsibility to do what is right on behalf of our ancestors and those to come.  Co-founder Corrina Gould is currently working on trying to protect the West Berkeley Shellmound in Berkeley, the oldest of the Shellmounds (~5700 years old). Facebook page: "West Berkeley Shellmound"

  • Indian Country Today Media Network. Current news in Indigenous communities primarily located within the U.S.  

  • Indigenous Law Institute.  The Indigenous Law Institute assists American Indian and other Indigenous communities to work toward a future of restoration and healing. They do this by working to develop a radically new basis for thinking about Native rights, from a Traditional Native Law perspective, and by contending that Native nations and peoples have an inherent right to live free of all forms of empire and domination.

  • Ally Bill of Responsibilities - Dr. Lynn Gehl, PhD., Gii-Zhigaate-Mnidoo-Kwe, Algonquin Anishinaabe, MekinaNdoodem.
     
  • The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is a non-profit corporation, incorporated in June 2012 under the laws of the Navajo Nation.  The Coalition was formed to discuss and develop a national strategy to focus public attention and foster healing for the wrongs visited upon individuals, families, communities, American Indian and Alaska Native Tribal Nations by the Indian Boarding School policy of the United States.
Documentary Videos and Films:
Books
  • An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014
    • Told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, this classic bottom-up people’s history reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the American empire. It radically reframes US history and explodes the silences  that have haunted our national narrative.

  • “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 other myths about Native Americans, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, 2016.

  • Pagans in the Promised Land by Steve Newcomb
    • An important text that gives an overarching history of the doctrine and its religious underpinnings.

  • The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890 by Robert M. Utley
    • An important text that gives an overarching history of the doctrine and its religious underpinnings.

  • In the Light of Justice - Walter Echo-Hawk
    • In 2007 the United Nations approved the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. United States endorsement in 2010 ushered in a new era of Indian law and policy. This book highlights steps that the United States, as well as other nations, must take to provide a more just society and heal past injustices committed against indigenous peoples.

  • Not From Here A Memoir - Allan G. Johnson, 2015          
    • Throughout this book the author raises questions – what does it mean to be white? what does it mean to be American? what does it mean to be from a place and belong to it?

  • Native America, Discovered and Conquered, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and Manifest Destiny - Robert J. Miller, Esq.,2008.

  • Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights - by Blake Watson, 2012.

  • The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, by Andrés eséndez

  • An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 - Benjamin Madley

  • A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California's Indians by the Spanish Missions - Elias Castillo.
Quotes:

"I would like to quote a very prejudicial doctrine that was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1823. It said that the Indian Nations do not have title to their lands because they weren't Christians. That the first Christian Nations to discover an area of heathen lands has the absolute title. This doctrine should be withdrawn and renounced to establish a new basis for relationship between indigenous peoples and other peoples of the world."

- Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman (1936–2007)

"Through consciousness, our minds have the power to change our planet and ourselves. It is time we heed the wisdom of the ancient indigenous people and channel our consciousness and spirit to tend the garden and not destroy it."

- Bruce Lipton

"Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.

From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.

Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.

Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it."

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait , 1963