Poll Of The Month: Do statist regimes built on the Doctrine Of Discovery have the legitimate authority to declare who is a "legal" and "illegal" immigrant?

October, 2025's poll in the Mirrors For The Mind, Heart and Soul series

(If Turtle Islanders would have behaved like MAGA enthusiasts do today)..

There are a bunch of people here in the region most call “Canada” and south of us in the “United States” that have strong opinions about so called “immigrants” (these are usually people with a low melanin content in their skin that have European heritage referring to non-English speaking and/or darker skinned people in my experience).

My question for this month is based around this conundrum I have been thinking about for a few months now (given that nationstates such as “Canada” and the “United States of America” were built on imperialistic invasions from outsiders, mass murder, land theft, broken treaties and a campaign that depended upon a generally malicious, duplicitous and nefarious dehumanization of the original inhabitants of this land) by what authority do the Canadian and United States federal governments claim to be able to declare who is an “illegal” immigrant and who is “legal”?

In order to answer this poll in an informed capacity, I will first offer some historical context to my question before opening up the poll for voting below.

For those not aware, Canada and the US were built on the bones of genocided cultures that were comprised of humans deemed as sub-human and not worthy of compassion, respect or kindness as per an edict put out by the Catholic Church called the Doctrine Of Discovery.

(For those unfamiliar with the term “Statist Regime” read this, this, and this).

If you are not familiar with the details of the Romanus Pontifex and The Doctrine Of Discovery, here are some of the basics:

The “Romanus Pontifex” was a Papal Bull dictated by Pope Nicolas V on January 8th, 1455 stated:

“Invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue. All Saracens and pagans whatsoever, And other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed... And reduce their persons to perpetual slavery…”

These nefarious Eurocentric edicts and fallacious concepts were used as a framework to “legally” describe the “discovery” of new and unknown lands, assigning the right to European Christians to assume ownership of “discovered” lands (regardless of who was already living there and tending that land).
These declarations (known as “papal bulls”) provided religious authority for Christian empires to invade and subjugate non‐Christian lands, peoples and sovereign nations, impose Christianity on these populations, and claim their resources.

The framework was weaponized by Spain, Portugal, and England and used for the colonization of many lands, (including my Gaelic ancestors of Éire and Alba) as well as Turtle Island (aka North America).

The Doctrine of Discovery was the international law that gave license to explorers to claim vacant land (terra nullius) in the name of their sovereign. Vacant land was that which was not populated by Christians. If the lands were not occupied by Christians they were vacant and therefore could be defined as “discovered” and sovereignty, dominion, title and jurisdiction claimed. It advanced the idea that Christian peoples claiming fealty to hegemonic statist regimes, as well as their culture and religion were superior to all others.

“Indigenous knowledge represents thousands of generations of observation, experimentation, and innovation: agriculture, permaculture, preservation, language, astronomy, medicine, crafting, and science. Yet it’s dismissed as “primitive” until Western academics rebrand it as a “discovery.” Schools still teach that history began with Columbus and that Western civilization saved us all—without acknowledging the genocide, slavery, land theft, and systemic racism that continue to shape our world today.”

- Sean Sherman (from his post titled “F*ck Columbus”)

However, North America was far from vacant when European explorers began arriving. When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, the lands were indeed occupied by over 100 million Indigenous Peoples or one-fifth of the world’s population at the time. But, as they were not Christians, they were not deemed as humans.

“When they wrote the line in the Declaration of Independence that says “merciless Indian savages,” they meant people like my ancestors, Lakota, Cherokee, Shawnee, Muscogee, and countless more, who dared to defend their homes and cultures from violent settler immigrants and their relentless encroachments.

..11 years after writing the Declaration of Independence, in 1787, the newly formed U.S. government passed the Northwest Ordinance, a sterile-sounding name for one of the largest land-grab legislations in history. It opened up massive territories like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, all for white settlement. And spoiler alert, those lands were already full of Indigenous nations who had been stewarding those spaces for countless generations..

..it laid the groundwork for displacement, removal, broken treaties, and outright warfare against Indigenous communities because of greed. It’s the legal ancestor of the Trail of Tears, Indian boarding schools, and today’s pipeline projects and selling off of National park lands to the fossil fuel and lumber industries (aka the billionaires).”

- Sean Sherman (from his post titled “This Land Was Never F*cking Yours: The Fallacy of Freedom and the true White Supremacy Agenda from 1776 to Project 2025”

The Doctrine of Discovery is still an important legal concept in Canada today even though it was written hundreds of years ago. Both French and English colonial powers in what would later be known as Canada used the Doctrine of Discovery to claim Indigenous lands and force their cultural and religious beliefs on Indigenous peoples. Once Canada was created, the Doctrine of Discovery influenced the imposition of national, colonial laws on Indigenous peoples. This is because it denies the validity of longstanding systems of Indigenous governance and sovereignty.

It has never been renounced. It remains the basis for Canadian law and as such continues to impact Indigenous Peoples. It gave sovereignty or title of Indigenous traditional lands and territories to the Crown. It remains today “the legal justification for the colonial occupation of our lands and our nations. As long as Canada bases its existence on that Doctrine, it is hard to characterize it as anything other than a racist state where one race has been given the right to subjugate and confiscate the lands of another.”

It made possible the Indian Act and all of its genocidal laws and policies including the residential school system, removal of Indigenous Peoples from traditional lands to reserves, criminalization of languages and cultural ceremonies, and the creation, recognition and later denial of Treaty and Indigenous rights.

That edict from the Church later morphed into laws passed by the supreme court in the United States of America in the 1800-s which made it law that some were seen as real humans with rights, and others (that stood in the way of the established oligarchy and their minions) were seen as “savages”, property and primitives.

I know quite a few people that talk about how glorious, civilized, advanced and just “The Canadian Constitution” (aka Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) or The United States Constitution is for protecting “freedoms such as the freedom of speech and religion” and protecting “personal wealth and property”.

My question to these people that put the edicts (and “constitutions” etc) of involuntary statist government regimes such as Canada and the US) on a pedestal is as follows:

Were these wonderful distillations of civility called “constitutions” not in place when the Doctrine Of Discovery and Manifest Destiny was being used (in the supreme court) to “legally” dispossess and forcibly relocate indigenous people from their land in the 1800s (in the US) and later in different forms in so called “Canada”?

and, Why were those humans not included in these “protections” and “freedom from tyranny”?

Wounded knee, Trail of Tears, Boarding schools? Where was their freedom?

Here in Canada we have a “bill of rights” and “human rights” etc , but if some indigenous people got in the way of industrial development those supposed rights got thrown right out the window.

It seems to me that many of these statist laws and “constitutions” have lofty aspirations, but where the rubber meets the road, the oligarchy, corporations and established hegemonic family lines get traction, throwing many others under the bus.

I think our human family can do better than these flimsy preferential “constitutions” proffered by involuntary governance structures.

Therefore, I do not recognize the legitimacy nor authority of the Canadian Government, United States government, British government (nor any other statist regime which based the formation of its nationstate on nefarious and fallacious edicts such as The Doctrine Of Discovery). I personally reject the edicts of these organized criminal syndicates (exploitative nationstates) as holding any legitimate authority whatsoever.

That said, I am open to the possibility of changing my mind and I want to hear what all of you think on this.

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Select pages from Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah:

https://archive.org/details/pagesfromunsettlingtruths

Doctrine of Discovery - “Invade, Enslave and Massacre Non-Christians.” - The Pope

For more information on the Doctrine Of Discovery and the various modern laws that are based upon it in the United States and Canada read:

- https://www.firstpeopleslaw.com/public-education/blog/200-years-of-denial-johnson-v-mintosh-and-the-doctrine-of-discovery

- https://www.afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/18-01-22-Dismantling-the-Doctrine-of-Discovery-EN.pdf

- https://upstanderproject.org/learn/guides-and-resources/first-light/doctrine-of-discovery

- https://researchguides.library.syr.edu/theLand/episode2

- https://humanrights.ca/story/doctrine-discovery

- https://indigenousvalues.org/decolonization/doctrine-discovery/

I feel compelled to ask this question especially in this time when political happenings in the United States (and increasingly here in Canada as well) are resulting in a lot of people shifting to isolationist views in relation to their views of so-called “immigrants” and other peoples that looks and sound different than them.

I have interacted with some people expressing views that fit into that category in the comment threads on the Corbett Report and i`ll share some screenshots below.

If you want to read the full conversation which I took a screen shot of above and engage in the discussion (assuming you are a Corbett Report member, here is a link to the thread.

If you want to read the full conversation which I took screenshots of above (and below) and engage in the discussion (assuming you are a Corbett Report member, here is a link to the thread.

(note linked in screenshot comment image above:

Okay, so we have taken a look at what made the nation states of Canada and the US what they are today, and now I would like to ask you all about who has the legitimate authority to declare who an “illegal” Immigrant is in the present.

If the people that run the government now arrived here as invaders, broke treaties, stole land and colonized territories against the wishes, customs and laws of the people that originally tended and inhabited this land, what exactly gives them the right to tell people who is “illegal” and who is “legal” with regards to immigration or citizenship?

Was it the fact that they effectively used violence to snuff out and assimilate most of the local population and take their land without their consent?

If that is what makes the authority of statist regimes legitimate, then what is the difference between those regimes and the Netanyahu regime, the regime of the fourth Reich or a gang of murderous thugs on the streets of New York city holding a gun to your gut and telling you that you need to get off their turf ?

Would you regard the authority of such individuals and regimes as legitimate as well (simply because they can dominate others with violence)?

Now that we have explored pertinent historical and philosophical realities pertaining to this question of Do statist regimes built on the Doctrine Of Discovery have the legitimate authority to declare who is a “legal” and “illegal” immigrant? I will open up the poll for voting below and I look forward to reading your comments.

I would appreciate it if you could elaborate on your reason for voting for what ever option you chose in the comments section to promote constructive discussion.

Thank you in advance to those who are taking the time to vote and comment to promote constructive discussion and hold up a candle to the mirror.

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In closing I would like to emphasize that I do not have blood indigenous to Turtle Island, and that by sharing the info on the Doctrine Of Discovery and memes/cartoons above, I am in no way saying that I think all people with genetics not indigenous to Turtle Island should be deported. That is both logistically impossible and it feeds into the thinking of a fractured and divided human family that keeps us from achieving our true potential.

No, this question is to invite reflection in a time when multi-generational implanted sociocultural identity psyops have conditioned many to turn on their fellow man based on superficial external differences.

I believe in indigenizing to what ever land one was born on and taking the steps our own indigenous ancestors did (in what ever land they hail from) to develop a reciprocal relationship with the land and respect for the beings we share that land with (human and non-human).

As I explained in my post on “Truth and Reconciliation”, what I have come to observe in many people (both those that have blood that is linked to those that called Turtle Island home long before Europeans arrived and those that have blood linked to the European settlers, or a mix of both is that government sponsored events such as “Truth and Reconciliation Day” tend to illicit strong feelings of guilt, anger and/or resentment and create a divisive sort of thinking.

Divisiveness and putting ourselves into “us vs them” subgroupings based on genetics is a state of being that benefits the established Oligarchy. Do not fall for their game.

Regardless of what skin color you have, or what flag you swear allegiance to, or what religion you subscribe to, deep in your ancient past, you had ancestors that lived in close relationship with the land, reciprocating her gifts, honoring all beings as animate and having a keen understanding of what plants and other beings they shared their homeland with. Those people are your indigenous ancestors. They had a relationship to place, one that involved sacred agreements to give back in reciprocity for the many gifts we receive from the more than human world. We too can begin to develop, nourish and cultivate our own relationship to the place where we live, to the land and the many learned beings we share the land with.

That path is the path to becoming indigenous ourselves.

I invite you to a step back from the statist conditioning and contemplate the fact that We are all indigenous to this beautiful, wise and learned Earth my friends. All born of the same stardust, soil and spiritual source. We will all return to the earth, stardust and Creator one day too… but in the meantime, we co-author this story called the human experience together, so lets write a story worthy of this gift of life we have each received and choose actions in the here and now that allow us to become ancestors worth descending from.

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Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now.
To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.

By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.”

(from: The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive)

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