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A few weeks ago, I finally visited the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The artifacts preserved in the space were awe-inspiring. As I walked through the Great Hall, gazing up at the stunning, magnificent cedar posts with beautiful carvings telling the origins, lineages, and histories of the families which once dwelled in the longhouses they held up, I could not help but wonder: how could anyone, presented with such stunning creations, have declared this land to be devoid of history? How could they?

Terra nullius, meaning “nobody’s land”, is the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, which is a set of beliefs and legal framework born out of a series of edicts – known as “papal bulls” – issued by the pope in the 15th century. The edicts asserted that any lands not inhabited by Christians were empty, unowned, and available to be discovered and claimed. The Doctrine of Discovery was used as a justification for European exploration around the world, and enabled colonial powers to simultaneously extract resources from newly “discovered” lands while framing the violence on Indigenous populations as necessary – even “virtuous” – work of mission and civilization. This was injustice done in the name of God.

The Doctrine of Discovery is now widely condemned.

In 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which called out “all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences” as “racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust” (UNDRIP preambular para. 4).

In that same spirit, the final report released by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 has called on all parties to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, including churches and the government, to “repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples, such as the Doctrine of Discovery” (TRC Call to Action #46).

In 2018, at the 39th General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Synod voted to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. The motion (A086) also requested each Diocese and the larger Church to “be made aware of the doctrine and its effects”, “review ways that its systems still manifest the effects of the doctrine”, and “reflect upon its history and encourage all Anglicans to seek a greater understanding of Indigenous Peoples”.

Following Pope Francis’s visit to Canada in 2022, during which he offered an apology for the Catholic Church’s role in widespread abuses which took place at residential schools, in 2023, the Vatican officially repudiated “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’” (Summary of Bulletin, Holy See Press Office, 30.03.2023).

These are all important first steps. But what of becoming more aware of the lasting effects of the doctrine, reviewing ways that the systems of the Church still manifest the effects of the doctrine, and reflecting on our history and seeking a greater understanding of Indigenous Peoples?

In My Conversations with Canadians, the late Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle expresses her frustration at being asked almost every time she gives a reading or a talk, “What can we do to help?” Maracle points out that this often-well-intentioned question “implies that we [Indigenous people] are responsible for achieving some monumental task we are not up to and so the offer of help is generous. It infers that we had some hand in how things turned out for us.”

Indeed, if we look around, we will find that the task of repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery and undoing its effects still falls disproportionately on Indigenous peoples.

In 2021, the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund was launched by the federal government to support Indigenous communities in locating and identifying missing children. This support has been much needed, but it did not come until after the uncovering of the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. After the official announcement of the finding, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir commented, “Finally, there’s actually something to provide and show proof that the stories are real. What happened to them was real. The pain that they suffered and endured was real.” Haida artist Tamara Bell, who created a memorial at the Vancouver Art Gallery, has similar noted, “It’s horrifying and genocidal and incredibly traumatizing. But we knew this all along. We’ve been screaming for a long time attempting to get some compassion from Canadians and hoping that they would listen to the desires of Indigenous people to receive some kind of validation of what we’ve been through.”

In 1999, the Haida Nation sued the government of British Columbia over the decision of the Ministry of Forests to approve the transfer of a tree farm license from one firm to another without consultation with the Haida Nation. The license covered the lands of Haida Gwaii, which had not been titled to the Haida Nation in any treaty [1], but to which the Haida Nation had long laid claim. In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a now frequently cited unanimous ruling that the Crown had the moral – but not legal – obligation to consult and, if appropriate, accommodate Indigenous peoples, even when Aboriginal title has not been proven.

There is much to unpack here. The framing of the Haida as “claimants” in their own lands continues to deny Indigenous sovereignty while preserving the assumed sovereignty of the Crown. The fact that the obligation to consult with Indigenous peoples is grounded in “the honor of the Crown” rather than the law, and that the Crown’s obligation to consult does not extend to an obligation to reach agreement as long as consultation has been “meaningful” (read: has followed prescribed procedures) further highlights the persistent inequality in how Indigenous sovereignty and Crown sovereignty is understood, protected, and executed under the contemporary legal framework of Canada.

These and other examples bring into relief one of the most lasting but least visible effects of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery: the normalization and naturalization of colonial epistemology.

That’s a lot of jargon, so let’s break it down.

“Epistemology” can be understood as “the ways of knowing”; it is the standard we use to distinguish fact from fiction, to establish what we accept as valid knowledge. Colonial epistemology is European epistemology which was exported to various parts of the world and superimposed on local ways of knowledge through colonization. Not only did European knowledge (what Europeans knew about the world) come to be held up as superior knowledge, but European forms of knowledge (what Europeans used to hold or code what they knew about the world, e.g. the written document and European languages) were also elevated to that status of being the only truly valid way to preserve and communicate knowledge. In that sense, European epistemology (ways of knowing) became the norm: not just “normal” in the sense of being widespread or statistically prevalent, but also “normal” in the sense of being the normative standard, the default, the taken-for-granted. Once it was normalized, European epistemology was further naturalized, that is, framed as the natural, logical outcome of advances in human rationality, that is, of Enlightenment.

The European and Enlightened was positioned in contrast to the non-European and primitive: lands and peoples devoid of civilization, to whom the impartation of European ways of knowing was seen as a step towards “development” and “modernity”. Colonial European epistemology rendered non-European knowledge (e.g. what Indigenous people knew about the world) and non-European forms of knowledge (e.g. what Indigenous people used to hold or code what they knew about the world, such as oral histories) as inferior to, or less rigorous than, European knowledge and European forms of knowledge. Indigenous ways of knowing, in all its breadth and depth, became the exception to the norm, needing to be tested and proven.

Thus, the lived experiences and oral histories of the survivors of Residential Schools needed to be “proven” with ground-penetrating radar searches. And even then, there remain Residential School deniers who, while not necessarily denying that Residential Schools ever existed, insist that the only evidence which can conclusively settle the (non-)debate of whether the Residential School system was genocidal is the exhumed remains of masses of missing children, notwithstanding the new and renewed traumas exhumation might cause.

This search for “objective” truth masks the epistemic injustice that is imposed on Indigenous peoples: it not only dismisses the truths of Indigenous peoples, but also seriously curtails their very ability to assert any truth at all; it perpetuates the superiority of European ways of knowing, such that holders and producers of European knowledge maintain the unquestioned and unquestionable power to adjudicate the merits and legitimacy of different bodies of knowledge and methods of producing knowledge.

The “objective” truth is, as it turns out, not so objective after all. Knowledge, but more importantly, the ability to decide what does or does not count as legitimate knowledge, is inherently political. It is power.

Because epistemology goes to the very foundations of knowing, epistemic injustice is often totalizing. It shows up not simply in the accounts of specific events, but in all the ways that we make sense of ourselves and our relations to the world around us. To truly and meaningfully repudiate terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery, both in theory and in action, we must critically reflect on how we know what we (think we) know: whose stories have been told – or silenced – by whom, and how?

One place to start, building on the foundational work that has already been done by the Cathedral’s Truth and Reconciliation Circles, might be to reflect on how we – the Cathedral community – know ourselves.

The “official” history of the Cathedral is preserved in Living Stones: A History of Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, BC (there is a copy in the Cathedral office if you want to read it!). Drawing on a wealth of historical material, including the autobiographies and biographies of past Rectors, past official histories, material from the Parish, Diocesan, and Vancouver City Archives, and interviews with knowledge holders within our community, Living Stones traces the history of Christ Church Cathedral from its modest origins as a low church to becoming a Cathedral in the heart of one of Canada’s largest cities.

But what of the history of the land – the literal living stones – which held life and liveliness in the reflection of God’s grace, even before this Cathedral was built? What are the stories of this land on which we have built our community and collective history?

As one way to continue the crucial work of repudiating and addressing the long-term effects of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery, the wardens and trustees are proposing, with the support of Neale Adams, Cathedral parishioner and author of Living Stones, a new project to uncover the history of the land on which European settlers built this Cathedral. Insofar as we acknowledge that this land was not terra nullius waiting to be “discovered”, that it held the histories of peoples, animals, tall cedars, and all their relations, it is indeed right, it is our duty and our joy to find out and learn about these histories, and to ponder how these new learnings might reshape the way we see ourselves and what we (thought we) knew to be our history.

In Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer Patty Krawec writes:

“As I told you, Anishinaabe is a verb-based language. In the Anishinaabe way of seeing and naming the world, we are humans being. But this applies elsewhere too. In Anishinaabe, my shirt is not blue; it is being blue. The rock is not hard; it is being hard. The things that we observe are not the inherent qualities of whatever we are looking at. […]

Being a settler or a colonizer is not something you are; it is something you do. It describes your relationship to this land and the people in it. Remember that settlers come to impose a way of living on top of the existing people. Settler colonialism destroys in order to replace. If you are going to stop being a settler and start being kin, that’s where we start. With what you do.”

This Cathedral was built by European settlers, but we do not have to continue being a colonial institution and doing those things which perpetuate the injustices of colonialism. We need to tell stories differently, we need to prioritize voices that have for too long been silenced, we need to develop more reciprocal relationships with the world around us. Examining and repositioning our relationship to the land on which we stand is a start. It is a foundation on which we can become kin and live in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. We can, as Patty Krawec suggests, show up more for Indigenous peoples: showing up to powwows, protests, and events organized by Indigenous groups, following Indigenous-led groups and movements into restoring relations. There is much work to be done, and we have much to learn.

Of course, some might wonder: the Church has already formally apologized, how long do we have to keep saying and being sorry? Seven times? Seventy times seven? Is it not in the interest of all parties to move on?

To that, I would suggest that we might move on when we learn to stop asking the question of “are we there yet”. When a loved one shares a story from their life, would you ask, “how long do I have to keep listening to these stories?” I am admittedly not a particularly patient parent, but even when my toddler alerts me for the seventy-seventh time that the garbage truck will be coming in some unspecifiable meaning of “soon”, underneath the annoyance I feel in any given moment, there is always a part of me that wants her to tell me more, to continue sharing her world with me. I delight in hearing her voice.

When we learn to love all our relations, listening to their stories will cease to be a chore.

On Palm Sunday, Rev. Rob James preached on becoming more like a donkey. The biblical donkey, he pointed out, may not have the ability to solve differential equations, learn the grammar of language, or follow a recipe, but it has a far superior awareness of its surroundings and of God than their human masters. As Rev. Rob suggested, “let’s be a bit more like a donkey”. Let us not assume that “we” who inhabit “modern” ways of knowing are more intelligent than “they” who are still fighting to prove and preserve what they have known for generations and generations. In suspending our presumptuous intellect and rising to the level of a donkey’s humble intellect, as we reflect on our collective history, may we all discover something deeper about our God and the humanity of all our relations. 

[1] Haida title to Haida Gwaii has since been formally recognized. On April 14, 2024, the Haida Nation and the Province of British Columbia signed the Gaayhllxid/Gíihlagalgang “Rising Tide” Haida Title Lands Agreement. This Agreement recognizes that the Haida Nation has Aboriginal title to all of Haida Gwaii. This landmark, historic step comes after decades of the Haida Nation fighting for their Aboriginal title to be recognized and vindicated.

 

Click this link to learn more about the New Living Stones Project