Rationalized by the “Doctrine of Discovery”
. . . violence with its many faces enabled the taking our lands by ethnic cleansing and authored historical trauma in first dispossession, and then the erasure of our identities. This is the writing on the wall in every Tribal community today which is shackled by socio-economic bondage.
Crystle Lightning (Trickster/Yellowstone), internationally respected Elder and Environmental Ambassador, Casey Camp-Horinek (Reservation Dogs), and Juliet Hayes (Say Her Name) have come together to create a 70-minute documentary about the devastating impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery.
Kukpi7 Chief Judy Wilson, Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs
CRYSTLE LIGHTNING
“We have forgotten that our bodies are sacred land. Your body is a definition of sovereignty. Your mind is a definition of sovereignty.
I am a shape of the Earth. Born of the flesh and blood of our Mother and the Stars. Our bodies are living history whether our minds permit memory or not in the violence of severance, one lost generation at a time.
I know which tribes I’m made out of, and I know that I am the sum of my genetic memories. As are you. I come from a matriarchy that existed for millennia. As do you.
But without discrimination to the sexes, we are required to exist within a patriarchal system that has been centuries in the making.”
CASEY
CAMP-HORINEK
Since they got here, the colonizers have used and abused. I never thought I’d see anybody buying water when I was young.
Their way of buying and selling the sacred, their crazy schemes like carbon capture and carbon trading, are unnatural.
Their disconnect from our Mother, the Earth, is leading to humans becoming like lemmings and jumping off a cliff.
Our species is in danger.
We must, as Indigenous people, teach our ways that have informed us for millennia. We must do this so that others can understand and save themselves, and by doing so, save our species and save all of our generations to come.”
JULIET
HAYES
History is only counted from Anglo-European so-called ‘discovery’ which speaks to its enabling Doctrine of Discovery which devastated us and the Earth as one.
We are relegated to the prehistoric. We are pre-history then? History only counts when Anglo-Europeans say it does, so our history doesn’t matter. That’s the message, overt and subliminal.
The Doctrine of Recovery is also a reclamation project.
As tribal people - not only on this continent but every continent – we need to reclaim our history.
As women and Indigenous people, we cannot allow these false narratives to define us anymore.
There’s a big healing that has to happen and
the Earth is in a place of purification right now.
They call it ‘climate change’ . . .
Elder Casey Camp-Horinek, from The Doctrine of Recovery