The illusion of discovery
How understanding our past can strengthen our future.
Beginning in the mid-1400s — bear with me here — the Catholic Church issued a series of decrees sanctioning the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas. Known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” these decrees were used by European colonial powers to justify centuries of violent subjugation. They underlay the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Native Americans possessed only “occupancy” rights to their land, enabling the further colonization of the West.
Taylor Behn-Tsakoza (Eh Cho Dene and Dunne Zaa), a youth representative for the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, met Pope Francis when she joined a Canadian delegation to Rome in 2022. After Behn-Tsakoza told the pope about her family’s experience of forced assimilation at Catholic-run boarding schools — the emotional and physical abuse, the loss of language and traditions, the fear and shame passed from parents to children — he personally apologized. Behn-Tsakoza welcomed the gesture, but she wasn’t satisfied. Echoing generations of Indigenous advocates, she called on Pope Francis to disavow the Doctrine of Discovery.
In late March of this year, he did. More than five centuries after a pair of medieval popes established the doctrine, the Vatican released a statement repudiating “those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery.’”
The received history of the West is full of illusions, but few are as pernicious as the illusion of discovery, which attempts to erase all who came before it. Stories in this issue of High Country News examine both the costs of imagined discovery and the power of rediscovery, reconsideration and reinvigoration. Writer Melissa Sevigny has rediscovered the story of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, botanists who conducted what might be called a voyage of reconsideration through the Grand Canyon in the 1930s. Artist Micah McCarty (Makah) is reinvigorating a carving tradition that was nearly obliterated by government-enforced assimilation. Readers are rediscovering the award-winning novel Perma Red, too long out of print, as its author, Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish), publishes her new novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. And a curious Great Dane in Craig, Colorado, has prompted the town to reconsider its identity.
Sometimes, acknowledgments of the past can begin to heal wounds. Sometimes, they can help us see familiar stories anew. In any form, they enrich our present and our future.
We welcome reader letters. Michelle Nijhuis is acting editor-in-chief at High Country News. Email her at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
