In 1988, I realized that I had never actually read the original language from the papal bulls of the fifteenth century. I had only read a few sentences quoted in various sources such as Vine Deloria, Jr.’s God is Red and Wilcomb Washburn’s Red Man’s Land White Man’s Law. I remember wondering at a certain
TagRed Man
Are We As Native People Living Inside and Subject to the Mental World of the White Man?
In Red Man’s Land—White Man’s Law (1971), Wilcomb Washburn says he “hopes to describe” what he calls “the process by which the Indian moved from sovereign to ward to citizen.” (emphasis added) It would have been more accurate for him to have said it was the Christian Europeans thoughts and ideas that had “moved” “the