Abstract
Lisa E. Dahill’s chapter deals with historical, political, and religious developments around conceptions of mission and European conquest of North America. Dahill shows how the lack of a fallibilist stance and disposition underwrote extreme and erroneous convictions about Christian cultural hegemony. She critiques a specific historical development of the horrific “Doctrine of Discovery” and the cognate category of terra nullius, by means of which European political and religious forces devastated the indigenous peoples of North and South America and beyond. As a way out of the fallacies of Euro-Christian domination, she proposes three strategies for recasting Christian mission: renouncing the Doctrine of Discovery, getting to know one’s place and its indigenous inhabitants, and attending to the terra plena, the particular local abundance of the life of the world.
In 1813, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated that Indians could not own real property since “not being Christians, but mere heathens [they are] unworthy of the earth.”
—cited in Yong and Zikmund
We must obey the deeper laws of this place.
—Thomas Berry, “The Wild and the Sacred”
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Notes
- 1.
Lisa E. Dahill, “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” in Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, ed. Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016), 181–82.
- 2.
I find resonance with missiological thinking in the work of Marion Grau, Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion (London: T&T Clark, 2011), and Joerg Rieger, especially “Theology and Mission Between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism,” Mission Studies 21:2 (2004): 201–27. The single volume most helpful for this chapter is Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions about Christian Mission, ed. Amos Yong and Barbara Brown Zikmund (Eugene: Pickwick, 2010), the fruit of an extraordinary 2007 conference bringing together Native American and Christian theological/missiological voices, several of whose essays I cite here.
- 3.
These connections are not only ancestral. Members of my family on my mother’s (Chapman) side have been engaged in American Baptist mission efforts in Congo since 1957. Their primary emphases were and are education (theological education and, more recently, the founding of a university) and agricultural development. In the past eight years, those presently serving have been working on ecological questions, conservation, and integration of ecology into the vision of the Gospel being proclaimed and embodied.
- 4.
This seems a good place to give background on how I approach this volume’s broad topic of fallibilism and its attendant intellectual and moral dispositions in relation to Christian mission. As will become clear, I am positing that a key foundation of European missionary efforts in North America (and beyond), namely the Doctrine of Discovery, rests on a series of fallacies having to do with European denial of the full humanity of the indigenous people they encountered in the “New World.” I examine the Doctrine of Discovery as a horrific case of what can happen when missionaries and those who send them, out of prejudice or a sense of cultural superiority, make fallacious claims to know more than they may possibly know, and then act on those claims as if they were infallible. By way of that negative example, I am arguing that Christian mission requires a fallibilist stance vis-à-vis knowledge of the Other in order to embody more adequately the life of the world in a given place.. Thus, my chapter focuses on fallacious reasoning on the part of the European powers, the effect of which is false convictions with regard to those indigenous humans and wrong action toward them. This fallacious reasoning is central to what Charles W. Mills calls “the epistemology of ignorance”: practices of knowing that willfully misread the world in order to support the knower’s position of power. The title of Mills’ book, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), refers to pre-modern and modern European/white construction of this ignorance with the “assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular” (18). For broader immersion in post-colonial epistemologies, see, for example, Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000/2012), and Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).
- 5.
This chapter builds on earlier work emphasizing the importance of develo** distinctively local place-based forms of faith and practice. See “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” cited earlier, as well as two essays exploring place-based interreligious encounter: “Water, Climate, Stars, and Place: Toward an Interspecies Interfaith Belonging,” in Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, eds. Eboo Patel, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah Silverman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 158–168; and “Lent, Lament, and the River: Interfaith Ritual in the Ashes of the Thomas Fire,” Liturgy vol. 34:4 (2019): 4–14.
- 6.
Several works trace the history and continuing impact of this doctrine. For a grounding in how Christian assertions of legal superiority over non-Christian peoples and lands shaped Western legal frameworks, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Books, 2008). For the means by which these claims came to permeate the legal systems of British (former) colonies—specifically Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—see Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For shorter summaries, see Tony Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery: The Legacy and Continuing Impact of Christian ‘Discovery’ on American Indian Populations,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39:3 (2015): 41–64; and Robert J. Miller, “Christianity, American Indians, and the Doctrine of Discovery,” 51–67.
- 7.
Romanus Pontifex (January 8, 1455), in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 12, 23; cited by Castanha, 45.
- 8.
Inter Caetera (May 4, 1493), in European Treaties, 71; cited by Castanha, 45.
- 9.
Miller, “Christianity,” 58. Note 36 appears after the word “vacant” in this quote, reading: “Terra Nullius essentially ignored the title of original inhabitants based on subjective assessments of their level of civilization; cf. Alex C. Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law, 1982), 63, reprinted in Heather McRae, Garth Nettheim, and Laura Beacroft, eds., Aboriginal Legal Issues: Commentary and Materials (North Ryde, NSW, Australia: Law, and Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt, 1991), 10. The term has two meanings: ‘country without a sovereign recognized by European authorities and a territory where nobody owns any land at all’; see Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (NY: Viking Penguin, 1987), 173.” As this note indicates, the language of terra nullius originated in nineteenth-century Australia in reference to its Aboriginal populations. Miller and many others use it in reference to the logic of earlier Christian conquest of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia and Oceania as well, since it encapsulates the Doctrine of Discovery’s view that indigenous peoples were sub-human and thus not sovereign over their land and that all places not governed by European Christian powers were therefore “vacant” and available for conquest. See Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 38:129 (2007): 1–15.
- 10.
Tony Castanha cites an eighteenth-century treatise on international law that notes that “the ‘voyages of discovery’ commissioned by sovereigns justified the taking of ‘uninhabited lands.’ … [The American indigenous population’s] ‘occupancy of these vast regions can not be held as a real and lawful taking of possession; and when the Nations of Europe … come upon lands which the savages have no special need of and are making no present and continuous use of, they may lawfully take possession of them.’” Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” 47, citing Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law: Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns [1758], vol. 3, trans. Charles G. Fenwick (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 84, 85.
- 11.
Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S., 572–73. Italics added. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/21/543/ (accessed December 28, 2018).
- 12.
Johnson v. M’Intosh, 573.
- 13.
Miller, “Christianity,” 62, citing Thompson v. Johnston, 6 Binn. 68, 1813 WL 1243 (Pa. Sup.Ct. 1813), 2, 5.
- 14.
Vine Deloria Jr., “American Indians and the Wilderness,” in Bohannon, Religions and Environments, 92.
- 15.
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (NY: Times Books, 1979), 18–23; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 335. “Carter’s reference here is to writings about Australia’s native peoples, but it is equally applicable throughout the colonized regions of the globe.”
- 16.
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.
- 17.
Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Whitney Bauman, Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York: Routledge, 2009). On connections between missionary monotheism and the suppression of gender-balanced Native worldviews, see Barbara Alice Mann, “A Failure to Communicate,” in Remembering Jamestown, 29–48.
- 18.
Expansion of this economy was the purpose of the slaughter and uprooting of Native Americans as well as the kidnap**, terrorizing, and importing of millions of Africans over hundreds of years. The face of this false Gospel is land theft, state-enforced boarding schools for Indian children, African and Native slave-fueled plantation agriculture, later fossil-fueled production of all kinds, and present-day extractive globalized capitalism. For the full sweep of this process, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), and on the New England context in particular, see Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
- 19.
Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); James A. Sandos, “Christianization Among the Chumash: An Ethnohistorical Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 15:1 (1991): 65–89; and journalist Elias Castillo’s A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions (Fresno: Craven Street Books, 2015).
- 20.
See, for example, the horrifying statistics and accounts of causes and patterns of mission Indian deaths—including so much maternal/infant death that the population was unable to sustain itself—documented via exhaustive research in Hackel’s chapter, “Dual Revolutions and the Missions: Ecological Change and Demographic Collapse,” 65–123.
- 21.
The World Council of Churches vote took place on February 17, 2012: see https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/statement-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples (accessed April 15, 2019). For a list of other church bodies that have repudiated the Doctrine, along with links to their respective formal statements, see http://spinterfaith.org/healing-minnesota-stories/doctrine-discovery/denominational-statements/ (accessed April 15, 2019).
- 22.
Miller, “Christianity,” 66–67. See https://episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2009-d035
- 23.
Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” 48–54.
- 24.
The language of the “more than human world” comes from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
- 25.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 64. She continues, “Thus we think too narrowly by far if we imagine reciprocity with the natural world as an ‘interspecies communication’ in which one being expresses itself in its way and then the other expresses itself in another way. … Reciprocity in this sense is intimacy. What emerges into our field awareness emerges into intimacy with us.”
- 26.
The primary theologian pioneering this approach is Ched Myers; others are picking up this initiative as well. See Myers, ed., Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016).
- 27.
“Lent, Lament, and the River.” I echo Martin Luther’s metaphor of the “Babylonian Captivity” of the church of his day, but I do not intend with this language to suggest that indoor worship is always a problem. Prayer indoors has many good and necessary functions in the Christian spiritual life and community, not least the capacity to hold profoundly beautiful instances of human symbol and art. See my “Indoors, Outdoors: Praying with the Earth,” in Shauna Hannan and Karla Bohmbach, eds. Eco-Lutheranism: Lutheran Perspectives on Ecology (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2013), 113–124. The problem is confinement of worship solely indoors.
- 28.
An example of bioregional quizzes testing knowledge like this is Kevin Kelly, “The Big Here Quiz,” in Cool Tools (https://kk.org/cooltools/the-big-here-qu/), accessed December 22, 2018.
- 29.
“Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” 181–187; see also “Living, Local, Wild Waters: Into Baptismal Reality,” in Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-than-Human World, ed. Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 151–165.
- 30.
The Wild Church Network is found at https://www.wildchurchnetwork.com/ (accessed December 22, 2018). The leader of the Ojai, CA, Church of the Wild community now is Julie Tumamait, a Chumash elder.
- 31.
“Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” 189–90; see also “Bio-Theoacoustics: Prayer Outdoors and the Reality of the Natural World.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 52/4 (Winter 2013): 292–302. I am indebted to Victoria Loorz for the metaphor of “conversation” as a better translation for Logos than “word,” and to Kristen Daley-Mosier for the proposal of salmon-based paschal metaphors available to those in watersheds where salmon still run, earlier in the essay.
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Dahill, L.E. (2021). “Unworthy of the Earth”: Fallibilism, Place, Terra Nullius, and Christian Mission. In: Hastings, T.J., Sæther, KW. (eds) The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_5
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