Forum

Tony Castanha, Ph.D.
Paper - NAISA Conference Sacramento
May 19, 2011 (Copyright (c))

Influences of the Concept of Discovery on Contemporary Globalization
Policies

INTRODUCTION
Aloha kakou and guatiao. I would first like to note that this paper is a work in progress. It is sort of a profound intellectual exercise, but the subject matter has also had some dire historical and contemporary consequences for society as a whole. It is the result of about fourteen years of experience, back to 1997, when I first learned that the 1493 INTER CAETERA papal bull was directed against my Carib or Jibaro ancestors in the Caribbean. So this exercise has been importantly a personal journey of understanding, too. Before I talk about contemporary globalization policies, it's important to provide some historical and theoretical background to show how so-called "discovery," in a DE FACTO sense, has been very influential over time until today. I should add that I certainly do not adhere to the idea that the discovery principle forms the legal basis of the international system, most importantly because our ancestors rejected and disagreed with these laws and the subsequent actions that were ushered in.

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In his book EUROCENTRISM, Samir Amin writes that the European colonization of the world beginning in 1492 marked a decisive break in world history. Up until that time, a capitalist system had not fully formed and certainly not on a global scale. This does not take place until "Europe becomes conscious of the universalist scope of its civilization, henceforth capable of conquering the world."  The European encounter in Africa, the Americas, parts of Asia, and origin of the transatlantic slave trade marked the dawn of the global economic or globalization system as we know it today. It was capitalist and brutal.

The fifteen century Western concept of discovery, as viewed through Christian European eyes, provided both the legal and moral framework for the system to flourish. Despite the utter impossibility of a European "discovery," the sheer absurdity of the concept, as articulated over time by some international scholars like Vitoria and Grotius, and the native rejection and resistance to the bulls of Alexander VI, the large majority of European scholars, jurists and monarchs upheld that they had a "god given" right to establish legal title to non-Christian lands and convert the local populations they came into contact with. Indeed, this sentiment and enactment had been passed down since the eleventh to thirteenth century medieval Crusades era whose discourse, as Robert Williams, Jr. has alluded to, "unquestioningly asserted that normatively divergent non-Christian peoples could rightfully be conquered and their lands could lawfully be confiscated by Christian Europeans enforcing their peculiar vision of a universally binding natural law."  Of course that "binding natural law," or the Law of Nations as understood up until that time, was grounded in a Eurocentric vision of the world based on Roman law. The non-Christian way of life then became qualified by what Christendom deemed as essential to the spiritual well being of humanity.

Christian dominion based on the discovery principle was the dominant ideological and legal discourse exercised BY EUROPE until at least the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, thus seen as the basis of so-called "international" law. This is clearly documented in Davenport's listing of the many treaties and agreements between European powers based on the papal bulls and the language of discovery. Yet, the peace or treaties signed at Westphalia were first and foremost about creating a sustainable peace process to end the Thirty Years' War in Europe. While it has often been said that Westphalia became the basis of the modern state system and international law, these peace treaties did not revoke or annul previously established treaties and they certainly did not revoke the many papal decrees that had been passed down over time. Indeed, although ultimately denied, Pope Innocent X swiftly issued a papal bull condemning the Peace of Westphalia as utterly obnoxious. The "secularization" of the system had much to do with granting PROTESTANT rights to worship, something the Roman Catholic Church had vehemently denied. Christendom still reigned supreme. The treaty signed at Munster in 1648 begins with the words, "In the name of the most holy and individual Trinity" and is addressed, in part, to the "Benefit of the Christian World." The first article starts by saying, "That there shall be a Christian and Universal Peace." In the post-Westphalian treaties documented, references to lands outside of Europe do not get their colonial authority from Westphalia but inevitably revert back to discovery. Westphalia allowed for Christian European nations to establish a process of peace among themselves while keeping with their marauding and genocidal ways against indigenous lands and peoples globally for the next two hundred and fifty hundred years.

While the language of Christian dominion became increasingly deemphasized in international law, the discovery principle continued to be invoked when necessary. In the "enlightened" Swiss scholar E. de Vattel's mid-eighteenth century Law of Nations, the "voyages of discovery" justified the taking of so-called "uninhabited lands" in North America. Of the indigenous inhabitants, he also wrote that their "uncertain occupancy of these vast regions can not be held as a real and lawful taking of possession; and when the Nations of Europe, which are too confined at home, 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 and establish colonies in them."  In addition, we all know of U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall's blatant use of the "doctrine of discovery" in the JOHNSON and CHEROKEE decisions, as he noted that the "exclusion of all other Europeans necessarily gave to the nation making the discovery the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives, and establishing settlements upon it." Thus, despite the many important gains that North American native peoples have made in recent decades, U.S. federal Indian today remains grounded in the thought of superior rights of Christendom. The papal grant was further used at the beginning of the nineteenth century to discredit the Latin American independence movement, and the discovery concept still spoke at the turn of the twentieth century as Venezuela's claim against Guiana [in 1894-1899] was made by virtue of the "great importance" of the 1493 bulls. Finally, despite the Vatican's ruling in 2001 that INTER CAETERA is "no longer juridically valid," they continue to refuse to revoke it. If it is no longer valid under their law, what do they have to fear?

At this point, it is obvious to express that what was taking place five hundred years ago, in terms of the Christian domination of the planet, is not the standard today. Yet, it can be said to be a much more subtle undertaking as "discovery" can manifest itself in various ways. It is both subtle and overt, represented as an ingrained ATTITUDE just as much as a physical tool of domination. It can be seen as an attitude as expressed in Roman law, where "everything in this world can be owned,"  including intellectual property and one's DNA. It is an attitude of arrogance, egoism, and extreme material and spiritual greed as displayed through the continued exploitation of world resources and maintenance in the conversion of souls. Thus, there is an important link to be made between the past and present. It is one that has been articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein when he wrote that monotheism as the origin "of universalism as an ideology of our present historical system" AND the ideology of universalism as "appropriate to a capitalist world-economy" are not necessarily contradictory ideas. The two have influenced each other for the past five centuries in terms of universalist ideologies and the exercise of power. Christian colonial ideology of the past is interwoven into and now blatantly performed through certain globalization policies. So while Christian dominion was the order of the past, corporate dominion is the order of today and, as we know, indigenous peoples and peoples of the global South often bear the brunt of such policies.

There are many links that can be made between the two periods and ideologies. For example on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Zapatistas) "lashed out against the poverty and injustice that each year kills thousands in Chiapas and grinds tens of thousands more into landless dependency" by capturing several towns in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas.  This was merely a continuation of the resistance to the policies first implemented under the Spanish ENCOMIENDA system and later by the policies of the state of Mico. The crack down was brutal as testimonies of "summary executions, torture, disappearances, arbitrary detentions and indiscriminate bombings of civilian communities" were collected by a network of human rights organizations.  One might guess that this governmental oppression was of the sixteenth century Spanish atrocities but, "no," it's happening today. The thirst for profits and material greed as sacralized during the sixteenth century mining of gold and silver remain vital processes and dominant attitudes driving the current world economy. Recent modern-day massacres in Guatemala, El Salvador, Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor, and the many subtle genocides taking place such as the continued relocation of the Dine [in Arizona] onto toxic radioactive lands to make way for [coal and uranium] mining, in addition to the spread of disease among the Yanomami in Brazil by government-backed GARIMPEIROS (gold miners), are clear indicators that cultural violence and genocide are still strikingly prevalent when it comes to the "money god."

Of course, the desecration of native sacred sites and excavation of ancestral remains are of utmost sensitivity to indigenous peoples. Even with the occasional victory, our modern society as a whole still looks down on and disrespects that which is perceived to be "ancient" and of a spiritually different dimension. In Hawai'i, it happens every day. Whether it's the building of a Wal-Mart, or a private home on top of a Kanaka Maoli grave site, or even the profound case of a Hawaiian Christian church excavating, in addition to traditional burials, a primarily Hawaiian CHRISTIAN cemetery to make way for a multi-million dollar recreational center, unimpeded development will trump native concerns as you can just tell the public that our beloved ancestors are in "heaven," as the head priest of Kawaiaha'o Church recently did. When corporations like Wal-Mart can take control of lands and build their structures over native cemeteries, the ancients are viewed as less than human, just as non-Christians were, and therefore expendable.

In my native homeland of Boriken (Puerto Rico), it's the same. In 2007,
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers indiscriminately shipped off about seventy five boxes of skeletal remains, artifacts, ceramics and rocks via Federal Express to the state of Georgia for study. This took place after a major indigenous site had been uncovered at Jacana near Ponce in the building of a dam. A native elder expressed to me that if Christ had come down at that moment and witnessed this desecration, there would have been BIG TROUBLE. She also said that if she took someone out of a Christian cemetery, she'd go to jail. A final example can be drawn from the use of telescopes on native sacred lands. Whether it's Mauna Kea or Haleakala in Hawai'i or Bear Butte or Mount Graham here in Turtle Island, sacred science usually gets its way when it comes to the cosmos. However, as Henrietta Mann has written, it would be sacrilege for biblical sites to even be considered for development.  The Vatican's construction of one of the telescopes on Mount Graham is also a curious thing. The observatory's deputy director, Father Chris Corbally, was quoted saying: "If civilization were to be found on other planets and if it were feasible to communicate, then we would want to send missionaries to save them, just as we did in the past when new lands were discovered."  So there we have it - the discovery "mentality" continues to live on.

To conclude, Amin noted that "it is believed that Christianity carried the seeds of capitalist advancement within it from the beginning" because, as compared to other religions, it strongly favored the individual and had the ability to dominate nature. Therefore, both the concepts of "discovery" and "globalization" are ideologies resulting in the domination, exploitation and subjugation of peoples, cultures and the natural environment. Both concepts are Western based and span a mere five hundred year gap within the modern system. Globalization influenced by the policies of many multinational corporations and intergovernmental organizations, like the IMF, operates under an international system of law grounded in the same mentality as the Christian Law of Nations. While there are of course positives, globalization today contributes to the extreme disparity of wealth among nation-states, particularly the global divide between north and south where half the planet lives in poverty. Thus, Christianity's role in the advancement of capitalism is assured and not a contradictory idea. Used as an ingrained attitude of dominion and as a tool of physical domination, Christian ideology heavily informs contemporary global policies in a real and practical sense.

What "solutions" do I have to such an enormous issue? Not many as I did say that this presentation was importantly an intellectual exercise of understanding. However, I do think that we need to continue to press for the revocation of the INTER CAETERA papal bull. It's a curious thing that the Vatican refuses to revoke it when at the same time saying it's invalid in law. If they fear that the house of cards is going to fall, then I guess that would provide us with the answer as to what this system is really about. But I think they would have to revoke the bull for us to really find out.