The AFN supports all 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) to encouragingly be aligned to support and assist all original Nations of families. TRC Call to Action #58 supports the families requests on the Pope to issue an apology to Survivors, their families, and communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools.
“We leave Rome optimistic to receive an apology offered to all our nation of families when the Pope visits Turtle Island later this year,” said AFN Regional Chief Antoine. “I humbly stand in unity with the full AFN, Métis and Inuit delegation respecting all survivors of residential institutions and their families and encourage us to look forward, to host and welcome Pope Francis’s visit to our homeland. There is still much work to be done for the planning and decision making for this potential visit.”The rescinding of the Doctrines of Discovery is the most important requirement as it is the seed that gave birth to genocidal processes which the residential institutions is one of these genocidal processes of domination.
Mar. 31, 2022: CBC – The delegates also urged the Pope to release all residential school records held by his church and revoke centuries-old papal decrees used to justify the seizure of Indigenous land in the Americas by colonial powers. Two papal bulls issued in 1455 and 1493 gave the church’s blessing to explorers’ claims to Africa and the Americas.
The Doctrine of Discovery is based largely on those papal bulls, issued by Pope Nicholas V and Pope Alexander VI. “If you look at our history … what happened since they landed on our shores, then basically it’s genocide,” said Gerald Antoine, Dene national chief-elect and AFN regional chief of the Northwest Territories.
“We need to right the wrong.”
Scrapping the doctrine would fulfil the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to action 49, which urges all religious and faith groups to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and people. The Doctrine of Discovery declared lands held by Indigenous Peoples to be terra nullius — Latin for “nobody’s land.”
Kaluhyanu;wes Michelle Schenandoah, a member of the Oneida Nation, said the basis for the doctrine was the belief that non-Christian Indigenous Peoples were without souls. “Because we didn’t have souls, that gave the right for these explorers to do whatever they wanted with Indigenous Peoples — murder, rape, enslave,” she said.
She also said there’s a direct connection between the doctrine and the disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women in Canada. In many pre-contact Indigenous nations, she said, women had the final say on how the land was used — making them obstacles to European exploration and settlement. “When you look at how these countries have treated Indigenous women, we are on the bottom rung,” Schenandoah said. “Because the doctrine has placed us in this place of being invisible and dispensable, therefore the countries treat us this way.
The doctrine worked its way into law and influenced Canada’s Indian Act, land claims and the residential school system.
Bruce McIvor, partner at First Peoples Law in Vancouver, said the Pope could change things in Canada by renouncing the doctrine. “It would create impetus in Canada for the courts and governments to get serious about addressing this fundamental lie that’s at the foundation of non-Indigenous claims to Indigenous lands in Canada,” he said. McIvor said the federal government could also pass a law revoking the doctrine.
“If the Pope took the first step, that would create impetus for the federal government to do the same thing,” he said.