The theology of settler colonialism: Dana Lloyd, Jan Pranger, ‘Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies’, Political Theology, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

The theology of settler colonialism: Dana Lloyd, Jan Pranger, ‘Decolonization at the Intersection of Political Theology and Settler Colonial Studies’, Political Theology, 2023

01Nov23

Excerpt: In March 2023, the Vatican issued a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery. The repudiation is a result of dialogue with Indigenous Catholics: ‘In our own day, a renewed dialogue with indigenous peoples, especially with those who profess the Catholic Faith, has helped the Church to understand better their values and cultures. With their help, the Church has acquired a greater awareness of their sufferings, past and present, due to the expropriation of their lands, which they consider a sacred gift from God and their ancestors, as well as the policies of forced assimilation, promoted by the governmental authorities of the time, intended to eliminate their indigenous cultures’. There is a lot to unpack in this statement: for example, the acknowledgement of present suffering, not only past suffering (historian Patrick Wolfe would say that settler colonialism is a structure rather than a discrete event), that lands that were stolen from Indigenous peoples were – are – sacred to them, and the Catholic Church’s active (even if only tacitly admitted) role in executing policies of forced assimilation. There is a throughline that runs from the papal bulls that applied the doctrine of discovery in the Americas in the fifteenth century to the mass graves of Indigenous children unearthed at sites of Native American and First Nations residential schools in the United States and Canada. Investigating this throughline is one of our goals in gathering scholars to think at the intersection of political theology and settler colonialism.

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