Editor’s note: The 1493 Doctrine of Discovery has formed the basis of Western expansion and oppression of original peoples globally for more than 500 years. In March 2023, Pope Francis repudiated the Doctrine. This is the second in a series of interviews with Indigenous leaders about the Doctrine of Discovery and the implications of the Pope’s announcement.
Regina Lopez Whiteskunk is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc and lives on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. She has served as a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal council. She is former co-chair of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition and past education director for the Ute Indian Museum in Montrose. She is pursuing a Master’s of Environmental Management at Western Colorado University and strongly believes that the inner core of healing comes from knowledge of the land and elders.
She spoke to The Sopris Sun in May. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does the Pope’s repudiation mean to you?
It’s a little difficult to process. Within the last few years, with the upheaval in Canada, they finally acknowledged residential schools. It’s very similar here in the United States. A lot of those schools were run by the church.That’s the part that makes it difficult to process, because there’s so much that’s unsettled. And, I don’t mean just in apologies. A part of us has lost something that will never be made whole, you know? For generations upon generations, our people have prayed for those individuals that never made it back, people who might have suffered at the hands of church-led inquisitions.
How can one individual come to that point, and think about the generations and hundreds of years of atrocities in one fell swoop? You can’t say ‘I’m sorry’, and it’ll all be erased and everything be undone. It’s not that easy. There’s many of us who still feel that pain.
There’s unresolved grief that our people have gone through. I think we’ve normalized grief. We don’t even realize that a part of the symptoms of the state of unhealthiness goes back to those moments in time that we can never amend.
It’s above anybody to be able to say that they have that authority to do that in one breath because in our beliefs, there’s only one being [who can do that]. That’s the Creator. It’s through him that we learn to forgive.
When thinking about all the historical traumas and atrocities and how we got to where we are today, living in the systems that we live in, we have a lot of anger and animosity. A lot of it comes from not quite reconciling those hundreds and hundreds of years of someone reaching above and beyond a people to “save them from themselves,” identifying them as nothing more than animals because they don’t live the way the church or people in that space have lived.
We have a hard time thinking about how we can forgive in one breath like that when we’re still coming upon these identified remains, like in the boarding schools. We’re still resolving those. I often sit with myself and think, oh my god, what heartbreak and loss and pain it had to have been for young people to be separated from their family, from their homes, from the land that they grew up in. And, find themselves in a place where they were so heartbroken, where there are language barriers, where there’s a lifestyle that’s different. The people taking care of them found great power in disciplining them. To them, it was discipline to help them into the process of assimilation, beating one’s lifestyle into another person and sometimes individuals being literally beaten to death. That’s the part that is hard to come to terms with.
I say this time and time again in my own community, when we think about suicides, when we think about alcoholism, drug addiction, the rate of domestic violence, even the missing and murdered Indigenous women, these are all symptoms that come from that point in time when somebody changed us, or attempted to change us, or assimilate us or bring us into a more “civilized” space. We’ve always been viewed as not being “civilized,” not being educated.
But all the years and generations of traditional knowledge, which have held steadfast within our people, that keeps us grounded and keeps us in places that are important to us, you know, the natural life. Coming back to some of that and coming into those spaces again, that’s where we’re finding reconciliation to life itself.
So, it’s a hard thing to discuss that someone can hold themselves in the same space as the Creator. It’s interesting that someone in the same life form that we all live in can say, “Okay, we’re sorry for thousands of years of atrocity and turmoil.” Is it really that simple? Look at the ripples in the pond that it caused over centuries and centuries.
At the 2023 Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, you were on a panel to talk about the Colorado River. You started to talk about the Doctrine of Discovery, but you shifted into a timeline of Ute and Indigenous displacement and assimilation into White society in the U.S. What is the connection between the Doctrine of Discovery and what you talked about on that panel?
The Doctrine of Discovery started the ripples. Each one of those items that I listed were all ripples that led us to a point where finally, we as Indigenous people, tribal governments, in a system that was not ours to begin with but what has been given to us to operate under, have collectively gotten together.
This is how we are going to stand for things like water rights. Even the coalition, the five tribes, standing for Bears Ears, see collectively braiding our sovereign voices together as one of our biggest ways that we as people are going to bring forth basic human rights. Even in this country, our government hasn’t adopted the U.N. Resolution on Indigenous Rights. So how do we reconcile the beginning of a ripple that ends up in all kinds of policies, all kinds of ways that have left us where we are, decisions that have been made in our best interests, indoctrinating us into systems that were naturally never ours? These are the realities of today.
It’s interesting to see how the systems of oppression live in my own tribal communities. We’re an IRA tribe. We’re a part of the [1934] Indian Reorganization Act, where we were given a constitution that we adopted. Hence, we now elect seven members to our tribal elected body that govern the tribe. They administer departments within the tribe, natural resources, education, things like that.
We employ largely tribal community members. Sometimes, we have non-members at the leadership levels, like department heads and supervisors, because of educational standards or equivalencies that are set. Our people get hired for the lower positions. Our tribal employees don’t feel empowered to be able to work within departments to bring forth our tribal life ways, our culture and customs.
I don’t think people understand that our traditional governing ways were impacted by seasons, by the availability of natural resources. That is what dictated our movement through the land. Now that we’re on reservations, we don’t have the movement. We have almost over-harvested several places within our reservation boundaries. So, when you think about the Doctrine of Discovery, all of that has impacted us down to the lowest levels of our existence as Indigenous people.
The Doctrine of Discovery is so ingrained in so-called U.S. Indian Law and Policy that some people don’t know it’s there. It’s like systemic oppression that has gone on for 500 years and it’s almost invisible now.
Exactly. Even as Indigenous people, and especially for tribal leaders who have held positions for numerous terms, I don’t think they realize that they’re a part of it too;that they’ve internalized it, learned it so well, that it’s almost being practiced as though it became a part of tradition and culture.
We’re identifying that maybe we don’t really know who we are sometimes because we’ve learned these ways. Because of so many years of education and trying to cope and become part of larger communities, we’ve just learned to accept this and live this way.
Something that I’m watching is the reintroduction of the gray wolf. It’s pretty sad when you think about that species being reintroduced and all the controversy and conversations. I flip it around and I say, how about the reintroduction of the Utes back to this land? We’re not a species, we’re human. We’re like everybody else, but we’ve also been taken away from these places. It’s a huge honor for me to put my feet down where my ancestors once were. I really want people to understand that while you’re having these thoughtful discussions about reintroduction of the gray wolf and other species, remember there were people that were dispossessed from these same places, too, and we want to be back out there and feel the same familial locations of our people.