The Daily Decolonizer

the doctrine that made us subhuman.

before the flyers. before the newspapers. before the indian act. there was a papal bull.

in 1452, pope nicholas V issued a document called dum diversas. it authorized the king of portugal to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all saracens and pagans" and to "reduce their persons to perpetual slavery." in 1493, pope alexander VI issued inter caetera, which extended this authority to the "new world" and instructed that indigenous peoples be brought to the catholic faith.

this was the doctrine of discovery. it said, in the official legal and spiritual language of the church, that any land not inhabited by christians could be "discovered" and claimed by christian monarchs. it said that non-christian peoples did not have full legal standing as human beings. it said that we were not people in the way that matters to the law.

this is terra nullius. "empty land." the legal fiction that this continent was legally empty before europeans arrived, not because there were no people here, but because the people here were not christian, and therefore did not count.

a man came to this land and struck his sword in the ground. that act was not just symbolic. it was a legal claim, backed by the full authority of the catholic church, that said: this land is now ours because you are not fully human.

that is where the dehumanization started. not in the newspapers. the newspapers came later. the doctrine of discovery came first. it was the legal architecture that made everything else possible. the residential schools were built on it. the indian act was built on it. the reserve system was built on it.

my aunty, sylvia mcadam (saysewahum), nehiyaw legal scholar, language keeper, and co-founder of idle no more, taught me this. she writes about it in her book nationhood interrupted: revitalizing nêhiyaw legal systems. she is the one who showed me where the root was. that knowledge passed from her to me, and now i'm passing it to you. that's how our knowledge has always moved. not through institutions. through relationship.

in 2023, the vatican formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery. but repudiation is not the same as dismantling the systems built on it. those systems are still standing. the indian act is still law. the land has not been returned.

the machinery.

once you have established in print that a people are savage, everything that follows becomes justifiable.

canadian newspapers did not invent this. they inherited it and ran with it for over a century. scholar emma larocque identified what she called the "civilized vs. savage" binary at the heart of canadian media coverage of indigenous people. you were one or the other. and the press decided which you were.

when we were dangerous, we were: hostile. bloodthirsty savages. lawless bands. this language ran especially during moments of indigenous resistance. the 1885 northwest resistance, led by louis riel and the métis and cree people defending their land, was covered as rebellion. as savagery. not as what it actually was: people defending their homes, their territories, their sovereign rights.

researcher duncan mccue named what this looked like in practice. he called it the 4Ds. for over a century, canadian journalists covered indigenous people in only four contexts: drumming, dancing, drunk, or dead. that was the entire range of our humanity as far as the press was concerned.

the 1996 royal commission on aboriginal peoples and the truth and reconciliation commission both found the same thing: media coverage directly manufactured the public consent that made colonial atrocities possible. people read the papers. they believed what they read. they nodded along.

that is what psychological warfare does. it makes the violence feel like common sense.

the thing they copied and then called primitive.

here is what they don't teach in school.

the haudenosaunee confederacy had a governing document called the great law of peace. it united six distinct, sovereign nations under one great council while allowing each nation to maintain its own internal sovereignty. it had been operating for centuries before european contact.

the great law of peace established federalism. it created a bicameral legislature. it mandated separation of powers. it established impeachment protocols. it created a veto process through three-stage consensus.

in 1744, the onondaga leader canassatego used a metaphor at a treaty conference. he held up a single arrow and snapped it. then he held up a bundle of arrows and showed it could not be broken. benjamin franklin was in the room. he took that metaphor and it became the bundle of thirteen arrows held by the eagle on the great seal of the united states of america.

in 1988, the united states senate passed a formal resolution officially acknowledging that the haudenosaunee confederacy directly influenced the formation of the u.s. constitution and american democracy.

read that again.

the people called merciless indian savages in the declaration of independence had already built the governing system that declaration was borrowing from. they called us primitive in the same documents where they were quietly copying our laws.

that's how colonial media has always worked: take what you need, erase where it came from, print a new story over the top.

what dehumanization actually does.

there's a difference between being called savage in a headline and being called savage to your face.

when one person calls you something, you can see their face. you understand their smallness. you can walk away.

when a headline calls you something, it enters the minds of everyone who reads it before they've ever met you. it determines how doctors treat you in emergency rooms. how judges sentence you. how social workers decide which children to remove from which homes. the headline doesn't just hurt you. it builds the systems that hurt you every day for generations.

the trc found that these media depictions created systemic biases inside the justice system, the healthcare system, and the child welfare system that persist today. you can draw a direct line from the words printed in nineteenth century newspapers to the overrepresentation of indigenous people in canadian prisons right now. to the murdered and missing indigenous women and girls. to the children still being taken.

and then something even more insidious happens. you start to believe it yourself.

the colonized mind.

this is what colonization of the mind looks like from the inside. it doesn't announce itself. it arrives as a feeling.

not worthy.

it shows up as shame. deep, cellular shame about who you are, where you come from, what your people have survived. shame that was installed in you before you were old enough to question where it came from.

and shame, when it has nowhere to go, turns inward. it becomes addiction. mental health crises. the ways we disconnect from everything that was supposed to hold us. it turns outward too, into lateral violence, because when a people have been told long enough that they are worth nothing, that belief doesn't disappear. it gets redirected.

this is not weakness. this is the intended outcome of two hundred years of psychological warfare running alongside biological warfare. they attacked the body with smallpox and starvation and violence. they attacked the mind with newspapers and textbooks and laws that said our ways of being were illegal.

everyone has been colonized. indigenous and non-indigenous alike. the western worldview has been installed in all of us. decolonizing your mind means becoming aware of the installation. it means asking: where did this belief come from? who benefits from me holding it? is it actually true?

and yet. we are still here.

every single resistance movement in the history of this continent has been an act of refusing the story that was printed about us.

people got on trains and rode all the way to ottawa. the aim movement put us on the international stage not as victims but as people defending land, territory, and the right to exist on our own terms. generations of artists, writers, elders, youth, and community builders have been telling our own story in their own formats for as long as there has been a story to tell.

our work is an extension of theirs. we didn't start this. we are continuing it.

and now we have tools they never had. digital spaces. direct access to the people who want to listen. the ability to build our own archives, our own platforms, our own media, without asking anyone's permission.

we don't need a newspaper to print our story. we are the newspaper now.

what you can do today.

one. the next time you read a headline about indigenous people, ask: who wrote this? who benefits from this framing? whose voice is missing?

two. learn the actual history of the haudenosaunee confederacy and its influence on north american democracy. then ask why it wasn't in your textbook. then tell someone.

three. look up the specific language canadian newspapers used during the 1885 northwest resistance. read the actual words. don't look away.

four. notice the 4Ds in media today. drumming. dancing. drunk. dead. the frame is still running.

five. sit with your own internalized beliefs about indigenous people. where did they come from? what did you absorb without knowing? this is uncomfortable work. do it anyway.

six. show up tomorrow. and the day after. that's what this is for.

we may never be fully decolonized. but we are continuing to make meaningful steps toward a decolonial future, one where we have a deeper understanding of each other, one where we show up as ourselves fully, one where we question what has been normalized for so long. we are doing this together.

edition no. 1. july 2026. — dakota & casey