Doctrine of Discovery: A conversation with Mark Charles
In February, we were joined by Mark Charles for a robust Climate Cafe Multifaith conversation that touched deeply on the themes of the Climate Justice movement. Mark Charles is co-author with Soong-Chan Rah of the book Unsettled Truths, the Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, as well as a public speaker, consultant, and cultural conversant through platforms such as youtube, twitter, and Patreon. He grew up in the Christian Reformed Church tradition, but as a person of both Navajo and Dutch heritage, he learned to ask big questions of himself, his community, his nation, and the Creator.
“I talk about things around faith, politics, society and…on decolonizing our understanding of Creator.”
—Mark Charles, My Second Cup of Coffee.
Photo by Patrick Federi, Mt. Denali, Alaska.
Mark Charles brings big questions to his work. It is work that has taken him from sunrise to sunrise across the country. As a speaker and leader he offers up the invitation for others to join him in engaging the big questions of colonization, environmental stewardship, and our stories of creation. He challenges us to bring a spirit of goodwill and a heart ready to be moved as the conversation unfolds both personally and in community. For our cafe, he further brought that big discussion together with the crisis we face in climate change.
“The reason Western Christianity does not know how to care for creation is because it has a Doctrine of Discovery.”
—Mark Charles
Photo by Sophie Louisnard, cropped.
At the core of his conversation and teaching at the cafe was Charles’s observation that “Western Christianity has lost its own understanding of creator.” Charles asserts that as people in the West lost connection to their indigenous roots, they searched for stories to fill that gap—stories that were not necessarily their own. Christianity, then, changed the religious landscape of Europe at the same time as Europe experienced a growing aspiration for wealth and power. What resulted was a Christianity not as salvation for the poor but as dominion for an empire. And when Christianity married conquest in the west, it anointed itself with a genocidal law: the Doctrine of Discovery.
What is the Doctrine of Discovery? Charles shares that it was his father who first invited him to learn the answer to that question. What he learned horrified him. Says Charles, “The Doctrine of Discovery is essentially the church in Europe saying to the nations of Europe, wherever you go, whatever land you find not ruled by white, European Christian rulers, those people are subhuman and their land is yours to take.” This Doctrine, issued and signed by two Catholic Popes in the 1400s, gave permission—in the name of ‘Christendom’—to monarchs to enslave, capture, and dispossess other human beings for profit, land and power.
“It was the Doctrine of Discovery that let Columbus—who was lost at sea—
land in this new world—which was already inhabited by millions—and claim to have discovered it.”
—Mark Charles
Photo by David Dilbert, cropped.
What has resulted is a legacy of global destruction too extensive to name, with pollution to air, land, and waterways and deadly consequences to people, plants and animals, and planetary systems. “Today,” says Charles, “empire and faith are so intertwined in our nation, we can't even separate it.”
This intertwining of ‘faith and empire’ wound itself into the events that surrounded the emigration of Europeans to Turtle Island / North America. Instead of a shared encounter between peoples, Europeans saw themselves as rightful owners and discoverers. Emigration became colonization against native peoples and ecosystems, “enacting” explains Charles, “one of the most horrific and nearly complete genocides in the history of the world.”
To get a sense of the human cost of the harm to Native Peoples from colonization and the Doctrine of Discovery, order a copy of Mark Charles’s book. This is a history that cannot be shared by adjectives of horror or in recounting of statistics, or scholarship alone. We need to hear the story and its impacts, human to human.
Photo by Manny Becerra, cropped
Mark Charles shares, too, his own journey in learning about the Doctrine of Discovery, how it informed colonization, and the lasting harm that continues to this day. His experience as a preacher of Gospel in the Reformed Christian Church and then his life on the Navajo Reservation, come together in this process. What he learns, what he puzzles over, and what he teaches pours out of him with earnestness, frustration, and hope. He sincerely seeks a world where we confront the paradigms of harm and treat each other and our planet differently.
“My grandparents were boarding school survivors,” Charles explains. “It was in the boarding school my grandmother became a Christian. Her faith was very, very sincere, but it was also highly colonized. …Both my grandparents were Christian, both of them were boarding school survivors, and so they didn't teach the language or the culture to my father, so he didn't know how to teach it to me…. And so the faith that was passed down to me was highly, highly colonized.”
What happened for Charles in returning to the Navajo community in Colorado lead to both a deepening of his faith and a crisis of it. He became a student of the destruction wrought by ‘dominion’ such as pipelines and poverty. He also reclaimed his native language and turned to age-old Navajo practices and wisdom, such as watching the sun rise every day, regardless of the weather. “I decided to get up every morning before the sun rose, and walk outside and greet the sunrise with my prayers. …as I lived there, month after month, year after year and eventually over a decade, I realized that when you wake up every morning and watch the sunrise, something very different happens in your soul.”
“It was through that experience [of watching the sun rise] that I began to have —
at a very deep level, as my people had done for hundreds even 1000s of years—I began to build a relationship with Creator.”
—Mark Charles
Colorado Sunrise by Joshua Woroniecki, cropped.
He explores this teaching—who is Creator?—in his work, especially lately as he seeks to deepen the questions that surround Christianity, empire and environment. Says Charles, “if you want to work on your environment, if you want to be a better steward of the land you're living on, you have to understand, to know, Creator.”
This teaching is best offered in Mark Charles’s own words, a short but powerful lesson shared in this video:
There was so much conversation shared at the Cafe that cannot be wrapped up neatly in any follow up post. The conversation reached wide and deep in seeking to name both harm and remedy. As people of faith, we can approach the topics with courageous and necessary truth telling. We can ask, ‘What does in mean to live better in this land?’ And we can listen to those who have seen 1000s of years of the sun’s risings as they introduce us to the mountains, the rivers, and this place of home.
There is hope ahead. Mark Charles shares not just words, but practices of hope. These are practices we, too, can share.
Mark Charles is a dynamic and thought-provoking public speaker, writer, and consultant. The son of an American woman (of Dutch heritage) and a Navajo man, he teaches with insight into the complexities of American history regarding race, culture, and faith in order to help forge a path of healing and conciliation for the nation. He is one of the leading authorities on the 15th-century’s Doctrine of Discovery and its influence on US history and its intersection with modern-day society. Mark co-authored, along with Soong-Chan Rah, the new book titled “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery ” (IVP, 2019). Mark ran as an independent candidate for the US Presidency in the 2020 election.
Find Mark Charles also on Patreon.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.