Jefferson, Pope Innocent IV, and American Indians
by Cecil Poole

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were commissioned by the polymath lawyer, plantation owner and President, Thomas Jefferson to traverse the continent from St Louis on the Mississippi through the “Louisiana Purchase” to the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific coast in Oregon territory.  The purpose of the mission was to establish American sovereignty over the land occupied by numerous Indian tribes along the Missouri River and to circumvent European, particularly British, claims to the Oregon Territory.   Lewis and Clark took over two years to complete their mission, from May 1804 to September 1806.

Academic Indian Lawyer Robert J Miller wrote of this expedition in “Native America, Discovered and Conquered, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny” (2006).  This book “traces the racist, greedy religiosity of Manifest Destiny used to seize Indian land, especially in Oregon, showing it also as the basis for laws applied to Native Americans that appallingly continue into the present.”   Here is part of his introduction to that work.

“My Tribe, and many other American Indian tribes and Indian people, were conflicted by the observance of the Lewis and Clark anniversary.  Similar to how Indian tribes had viewed the five hundred year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World, the vast majority of Indians and tribes did not want to “celebrate” the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Instead of something to celebrate, Indians saw the expedition as the forerunner of centuries of conquest, oppression and destruction.  Understandably, tribes were very cautious about becoming involved with the anniversary.  Consequently, tribal representatives and Indian members of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Committee communicated this concern.  The committee came to understand this issue and expressly decided not to call the Lewis and Clark anniversary a “celebration” because it realised that this was not the case for American Indians.  The National Committee called the event a “commemoration”, a remembrance of an important event in American history.  But the only aspect of this anniversary that Indian people and nations wanted to celebrate was that they were still in existence even after the Lewis and Clark expedition and American Manifest Destiny had rolled over them.  The Indian nations are still here, as they had been for thousands of years before Lewis and Clark, and as they will be for thousands of years into the future.  This is something worth celebrating.”

Interestingly the Doctrine of Discovery can be traced back to the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands in 1096 – 1271.  Pope Innocent IV wrote extensively around 1240, underpinning much of the “legal” basis for the Doctrine of Discovery that was formalised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Franciscus de Victoria and Hugo Grotius among others.  Pope Innocent considered whether it was legitimate for Christians to invade infidel lands, and answered yes.  He focussed on the right of Christians to dispossess infidels of their dominium, their governmental sovereignty and their property.  His finding was based on “the papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world.”

Make of that what you will.  Passive Complicity will look at this in more detail in coming weeks.