Explanation: As To How Christian European Colonial Assumptions Of Domination-Subordination [Of Indigenous Peoples] Originated

by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer



Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is an Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN) columnist and internationally renowned Indigenous activist. He is at the forefront of the global Indigenous decolonization movement. He works closely with the United Nations. We occasionally correspond. Newcomb has helped me with some of my activist initiatives. He helped me draft a resolution that was introduced to the Minnesota legislature. It includes a statement about the harm that the Doctrine of Discovery brought upon Minnesota's Indigenous peoples.

On January 27, 2014 a column/article of his Domination And Northern Gateway Pipline was published in ICTMN. Five selective comments were posted on the article. The first three comments are my comments. Newcomb's ICTMN article and my comments are located here .

In the ICTMN article Newcomb wrote:

"When Christian Europeans first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean they brought with them assumptions about their divine right to colonize (and dominate) any and all non-Christian lands and nations throughout "the Americas." And we were all non-Christians back then."

"The following sentence from Ms. Tremonti's article on the situation in the Canadian context clearly demonstrates the lack of power for nations and peoples termed 'indigenous': 'After 180 days of hearings in 21 communities across B.C. [British Columbia] and Alberta, the [federal] Joint Review Committee signed off on the pipeline proposal yesterday.' Those being termed 'First Nations' in Ms. Tremonti's story are not the ones with the final decision-making with regard to their own lands and territories. Why? Because the final decision-making is characterized as being 'up to' those who are termed 'federal' decision makers in 'Ottawa.'"

"How in the hell did those rules and their DOMINATION-SUBORDINATION assumptions get started to begin with?"

My first comment

Biblical scriptures describe the ancient Hebrew God, a God who would become the God of Christians, as a God of war, thievery, ethnic cleansing and slavery. The Bible says that "God" commanded his "chosen people" to invade and occupy the land of the First Nations of Palestine, and to also dominate-subjugate them. What the European Christians did to the First Nations of the Americas is similar to what the Hebrews did to the First Nations of Palestine. "This is how you will know that the living God is among you and that he will certainly drive out before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites and Jebusites." (Joshua 3:10) ...While Joshua defeated many of the kings of these peoples, they were not entirely destroyed, as this reference from Solomon's time, three hundred years later, indicates: "All the people left from the Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, that is, their descendants remaining in the land, whom the Israelites had not destroyed -- these Solomon conscripted for his slave labor force, as it is to this day." (2 Chronicles 8:7-8)

My second comment

The worldview that sanctioned people of a biblical-based religious persuasion [Christianity] to take the land, property, and very lives of other human beings because "it's God's will, and is therefore destined to occur" partially originated when "God told Abraham" that Palestine was to belong to him and his people and that they were to invade Palestine and use military force to take procession of the land that belonged to the area's First Nations. ...In the 1400s this ancient Hebrew biblical-based sanctioned, ethnic cleansing, belief was modified, and expanded to a worldview by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. It became known as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery worldview and it was used to establish the colonizing, international laws of Western Christendom, which were then used to dispossess First Nations' lands around the world, and also subjugate them. During the American colonizing of the "Wild West" the biblical-based ethnic cleansing belief was called "Manifest Destiny, which can be understood as an American application of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. This Christian doctrine provides the legal foundation for the most important US Supreme Court decision ever decided affecting the Indian tribes of this land, Johnson v M'Intosh. This legal decision says America's First Nations people have no legal title to the land they lived upon for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years, only a mere right of occupancy, and that the tribes were no longer independent indigenous sovereign nations, or that their sovereign nation rights had been diminished. ...To understand the ancient-Hebrew religious connection to the origin of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery is an essential understanding if an informed person wants to act to contribute to the effort of dismantling this Christian Doctrine's heinous effects in the world. [by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer]

My third comment

President George W. Bush told an audience of his: "When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he quoted the words of [the Hebrew prophet] Jeremiah 51:10: 'Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.'" Bush also said: "The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan." ...In a best-selling book about the history of the American West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "Many of the best of the backwoodsmen were Bible-readers. They looked at their foes as the Hebrew prophets looked at the enemies of Israel. What were the abominations because of which the Canaanites were destroyed before Joshua, when compared with the abominations of the red savages whose lands they, another chosen people, should in their turn inherit?" ...Americans found the idea that they were God's new Israel so attractive because it helped justify their partial destruction and total subjugation of this land's indigenous peoples.