The Vatican earns the slowest of claps for distancing itself from genocidal doctrine.
PHOTO: REUTERS / GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE
By Andrea Palframan
This week, the Vatican released a statement that repudiates the Doctrine of Discovery, the decree that has been used to subjugate Indigenous Peoples for half a millennium. But how should Canada reconcile the Church’s statement with what we see unfolding right now — another RCMP raid on Wet’suwet’en territory and the arrest of people protecting their unceded land?
These are the sorts of violent contradictions that have come to define Canada, a country whose justification for removing land from Indigenous Peoples is — rather embarrassingly for a 21st-century liberal democracy — a series of papal bulls from the 1490s.