Settler society has been guilty of trespassing

“Forgive us our trespasses,” says the most familiar prayer in Christianity, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

If those words are so important, why, in 80-odd years of attending worship services all over the world, have I never heard a sermon connecting them with colonial peoples’ treatment of Indigenous inhabitants?

Indeed, I doubt if any preachers focussed on those words from the Lord’s Prayer even this week, which marked National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada.

Because there can be no doubt that we are trespassing on lands that did not originally belong to us.

When I refer to “we” and “us,” I mean all who trace their ancestry to some other place than North America. I mean anyone who, despite having several generations of ancestors living in Canada, still says with pride, “I’m Irish.” Or Dutch. Or Italian.

“We” came here from somewhere else. And “we” set up camp on the land of the people who were already here.

Except that, officially, they weren’t here at all.

When Jacques Cartier landed on the Gaspé Peninsula, he planted the French flag on the shore, claiming the land for the King of France. As if it were empty. Uninhabited.

Even though Cartier had specifically brought the local tribes and their leaders to that shore, so that they could witness a foreign king assuming ownership of their homeland.

The notion of terra nullius — loosely translated from Latin as “No one’s land” — goes all the way back to the Crusades. Pope

Urban II used the term in 1095. Effectively, it and later documents nullified the humanity of anyone who was neither Christian nor a farmer, thus giving crusaders the right to plunder and seize most of the Middle East.

Remember that there was no International Court in those days, no United Nations, no European Union. Europe was a patchwork quilt of competing kingdoms, fiefdoms, and principalities.

Imagine, if you can, a jigsaw puzzle composed of many mini-Monacos and Lichtensteins.

In that context, the only law that transcended petty rivalries belonged to the Roman Catholic Church.

And so the Popes obliged, setting up what scholars now refer to as the Doctrine of Discovery.

When Columbus sailed west to “discover” the Caribbean islands, he assumed he had the right to take possession of them. They were terra nullius. No one there.

The next year, 1493, Pope Alexander VI made that assumption explicit. He issued another ruling, known as inter caetera. It authorized Spain to conquer and subdue any newly discovered lands. The inhabitants, if any, were to be “subjugated and brought to the faith.”

No one asked the people if they wanted to be subjugated. They weren’t “us.” Therefore they didn’t exist.

That mindset persisted for centuries. Indigenous peoples helped the Mayflower pilgrims survive their first bitter winter in Plymouth Rock. But they weren’t really there.

Indigenous people showed the first settlers along the St. Lawrence River how to build and use birch-bark canoes. But they didn’t count.

Indigenous people led European “explorers” along along lakes and rivers in a land lacking Roman roads and highways. But they were nobody.

The Hudson’s Bay Company and its rival North West Company relied on more of those nobodies to bring furs to their network of trading posts all across western Canada.

The province of B.C. has only a few treaties with Indigenous peoples, because its first Lt.-Gov. after joining confederation applied a new twist to the notion of terra nullius. Joseph Trutch refused to negotiate with Indigenous nations. He argued that they could not legally own the land, because they had not bought it from anyone.

Trutch’s devious legalism smothers the obvious truth: They…were…here…first!

This was their land, whether or not they had title papers to prove it. And we have been trespassing on it for the last 488 years, ever since Cartier’s landing in Gaspé.

Our attitudes to Canada’s original peoples remind me of a short poem (which I thought was in public domain, but discover was written by an American professor named

Hughes Mearns):

The other day, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there!

He wasn't there again today,

Oh how I wish he'd go away!

Ever since Pope Urban coined the principle of terra nullius, Indigenous peoples have been “the man who wasn’t there.”

And we settlers have done our utmost to make them “go away.”

It is time for us to acknowledge that we have trespassed and need forgiveness.