B48 British Columbia Parliament, Victoria, British Columbia CANADA 1858

I’m a member of the Secwepemc Nation from the Interior of British Columbia, Canada, Canada’s most Western province, and we are still fighting against the bitter legacy of European colonialism that has been given a legal basis by one of your predecessors Pope Nicholas V. Pope Nicholas V charters gave the Church’s blessings to the slave trade and legitimized genocide against what he described as ‘pagans and Saracens,’ which included everyone in the world other than the European Christians. This began the organized, international, European assault, with the goal of stripping the world of its wealth and reducing its people to servitude. The goal of raw theft and enslavement remained the same, and they are still the ultimate legal justification for European colonialism in the Americas as well as the ultimate constitutional basis for settler colonialism. That is why my people — and Indigenous peoples around the world — have asked you to publicly renounce the Doctrine of Discovery and the papal bulls of Pope Nicholas V. You alone in the world have the power to do this, and such an act would help to restore the faith of many of my people and the justice of the church. It will also, in no small measure, assist us in winning justice here in Canada, because those church doctrines remain, more than 500 years later, the core legal justification for the confiscation of our land and subjugation of our peoples.

— Arthur Manuel, “Open Letter to Pope Francis,” 2016

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