Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We turn to the legendary Indigenous musician and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, who was born on the Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in Saskatchewan. She has also written and sung about the struggles of Native Americans and First Nations for decades. She worked with the American Indian Movement and began a foundation for American Indian education. Her political activism would lead her to be largely blacklisted from commercial radio in the ’70s. On Sunday, Democracy Now! reached Buffy Sainte-Marie in Hawaii, where she lives, and asked her for her message on this Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day, you know, it’s a huge, huge concept. The way I think of it, I think of it in two ways. One is: How do we handle the hard information that we must know about? And the other is: What can we provide to offset that information as we try and fix things?
The most important thing — the most important missing element, I think, in world understanding of Indigenous people has to do with the fact that Indigenous people in this world suffer from a handicap that others don’t have to face. And it has to do with the Doctrine of Discovery, which is a 15th century papal bull. Think of it as a bulletin from the pope saying what God really wants. And what this thing says, the Doctrine of Discovery, it says that explorers coming from inhabited lands were instructed by the pope to invade, capture and subdue the inhabitants and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to appropriate to himself and his successors all of their lands,
— source democracynow.org | Oct 10, 2022