Did Pope Alexander VI Authorize England’s Colonization of North America?

Abstract

Shortly before Thanksgiving 2016, Episcopalian priest John Floberg held up a copy of Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 papal bull, Inter caetera, before a crowd of hundreds of protesters and clerics at North Dakota’s Oceti Sakowin Camp. He asked a committee of Indigenous elders to authorize its burning. They did, the paper went up in flames, and the crowd erupted in applause.

Why torch the text? Those present believed, as do many activists today, that Inter caetera was the basis for the English colonization of North America and later U.S. claims to the land formerly held by Indigenous peoples. Early American legal precedent took this view. But it is wrong as a matter of history. Inter caetera’s only function in English colonization was as a foil—a symbol of the narrow-minded, theocratic, Catholic Spanish foe. It’s time to set the record straight.

Keywords: doctrine of discovery, Catholic, Indigenous, colonialism, colonization, legal history, international law, imperialism, canon law, Protestantism, North America, English colonies, Christianity, pope, papacy