From the archive: You, me, and Sarah Augustine

On March 30, 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, a set of legal principles that validated European Christian settlers’ sovereignty over the land and inhabitants of the Americas. In this piece from our archive, New York-based writer and therapist Tess Thompson reflects on spending Lent 2022 reading and discussing Sarah Augustine’s book The Land is Not Empty, which unpacks the Doctrine of Discovery and its impact on Indigenous cultures. Augustine will be joining Call To Action in May for a member-wide discussion of her book and Indigenous organizing.

Image courtesy of Abby Rampone.

In New York City, it’s still wintertime for most of Lent. It’s 2022, a few hundred years since Dutch settlers took the land where I live away from the Canarsee people, and almost two dozen years since the turn of the millennium, that hyped-up New Year’s Eve party where it awkwardly seemed like God never showed up. Every morning I lay in bed in the dark too long, waiting for the days to get longer, cold from my feet to my nose to my fingertips. I spend a lot of time thinking about Jesus wandering in the desert. I spend a lot of time thinking about how all of us, as a culture, are so lost.

This Lent, about a dozen of us CTA members, living in many places across this land, have been gathering online regularly to read and discuss Sarah Augustine’s book The Land is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. This Doctrine is often associated with Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 papal bull “giving” much of the land that makes up South America to the Catholic monarch of the kingdom of Spain for resource extraction and Christianization. At times the term is also used to refer to the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson vs. M’Intosh, where the idea that Europeans could simply own any land that they “discovered” regardless of any existing non-Christian (ie: Indigenous) inhabitants became US law.

More accurately, the Doctrine of Discovery describes the many church decrees and practices, as well as the laws and government policies that grew from them, which justify settler seizure of Indigenous lands, restriction of the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, and the eradication of Indigenous cultures – particularly in order to replace those cultures with Christianity.

Sarah Augustine describes learning about the Doctrine of Discovery after a life-changing event while visiting her husband, an environmental researcher, who was conducting a project among the Wayana people in Suriname. In the process of assisting the researchers with some interviews, Augustine is confronted by an elder Wayana woman named Dina who demands to know if Augustine will really, really work to help her people. Refusing to accept a tepid response, Dina repeats, “Help us! Help us, or go away”.

A descendant of the Pueblo (Tewa) people, Augustine describes the praxis of the Doctrine of Discovery throughout the Americas, both historically and personally, in a way that encompasses and explodes the categories of political and personal. She shares the shame that some Native Americans experience from not knowing their erased cultures and identities. She explains how that yawning gap is purposeful, not accidental – the logical outcome of policies such as the Dawes Act and Allotment Act that removed Indigenous peoples from their lands and created the reservation system, the cultural decimation wrought by that forced displacement combined with assimilation and institutional suffering in the forms of missions and residential boarding schools, and the poverty, intergenerational trauma, and intimate experiences of abuse left to Indigenous people in its wake. Augustine further shows how the colonial process continues, wave by wave, by drawing connections between historical events in the US context with the cresting outcomes of similar policies in Suriname today.

A Mennonite convert by conviction, Augustine breaks apart scripture, questioning the interpretation and at times even the validity of certain tales such as Jacob and Esau or Moses and the Exodus, and highlighting ways in which passages have been used to justify imperialism and genocide. Augustine also pulls from figures such as the Canaanite woman to show what kind of faith and persistence must be embodied in acting for justice and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Augustine’s advocacy is a sobering example of how to continue despite setbacks and adversity. In one chapter, she recounts how she and other advocates painstakingly crafted a series of resolutions the World Council of Churches could adopt in order to dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, only to learn that the WCC intended to “adopt” them by simply posting them on their website.  

I love meeting with my fellow CTA members, sharing space and supporting each other in grappling through the difficult material and questions contained in Augustine’s book. I also spend a lot of time thinking about if all I am going to be moved to do by all this is post this article on a website. I spend a lot of time thinking about if we as Catholics can simultaneously wield our power as members of the Church, our gargantuan, rage-filled Mother, and accept in that process the necessary state of being powerless – so as to follow Indigenous leadership in their ongoing creation of self-determination and justice, rather than “save” faceless Others by taking them only on the paths where we think they need to go.

Sarah Augustine has more faith than me. Seven generations behind me, I see my ancestors in servitude and famine. Today around me, 2022 – I see pestilence and war. Seven generations ahead of me I see pollution and death. Apocalypse. I find it hard to be hopeful. I find it hard to act.

By contrast, Augustine writes joyfully about how in collaborating with the Creator’s will for creation, in supporting mutual interdependence, the human needs for air, land, water, and shelter, love and compassion and all the things that make up our survival, we are choosing life. Fighting for the life and lives of Indigenous peoples, therefore, is a fight that cannot see ultimate defeat. She proclaims this testament with an assurance which goes beyond the rigor of Christian millennialism, that concept Faye Marie Getz relates to “the axiomatic notion […] that we bear witness to the unfolding of a master narrative of progress from a dark age into an enlightened era.” Hers is the assurance of Dina, the Wayana people, and all Indigenous peoples. 

The millennium is only coming if we make it. You, me, Sarah Augustine, and everyone. All the Body of Christ, and indeed all bodies. I don’t know how to work, really work, toward it, but I say to myself get up, spring is coming – try again today to learn how. There is still time for reparation, healing, and life – Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief. Indigenous peoples will get their land back and the Doctrine of Discovery will die, and not through our leadership but with our solidarity. And the Church and the State and we as non-Indigenous peoples will lose our ill-gotten power, as is right – I pray this in the name of Jesus, who I still try to follow, even when I am lost. Grant Lord I pray, the spirit of Esther, the triumph of Easter, the tenacity of Sarah Augustine, who says: “Do not be afraid. The ever-unfolding process of life, the Spirit of Life, the Creator, is a power with no end, and cannot be overcome.”