Earth Interbeing Food Commons Workbook

Exceptionalism is the belief that you or your group is so fundamentally superior that you live by a different moral standard than others. Particularly within certain groups—religious groups, groups based on skin color, the wealthy and powerful elites, there is a tendency to think that our superiority makes us only accountable to our own group.

Exceptionalism derives from a particular civilizational or spiritual heritage, political history, and/or geographical location. From the exceptional point of view, the impossibility of replicating the exceptional state makes the realization of these values (like salvation, democracy, self-determination, rights) contingent upon the other becoming like them.

Because the other will never be as exceptional as the exceptionalists, they feel justified to impose their values and understanding of what is good upon others, by force if necessary. Moreover, the exceptionalists do not feel bound by those standards as they claim exclusive insights into a universally valid morality.

White American eceptionalism evolved out of the European Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination. The belief that European civilization and culture are superior to any other culture is an example of exceptionalism: no other culture can approach what Europeans (and White Americans) have contributed to the world in terms of religion, music, art, philosophy, economy, laws, and governance. European cultural exceptionalism was expressed during the Age of Discovery and colonialism. White American exceptionalism continues to evolve out of this cognitive and ethical flaw.

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination was developed by 15^th Century European monarchies and the Christian Church as a means of legitimizing the claiming and colonizing of lands outside of Europe, a doctrine that continues to impact Native People around the world. The Church framed the enslavement, genocide, theft of land, and other abuses inflicted upon non-Christians as acts that glorified God because Christian Europe made it possible for Native People to know the love of Christ and salvation.

The Doctrine, one of the very first international law principles, established the ritual of discovery for European sovereigns to automatically acquire property rights in native lands and gain governmental, political, and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants without their knowledge or consent. This legal principle was created and justified by the belief in Christian and European superiority over non-Christians and non-European civilizations. The Doctrine continues to define the relationship between Native People and settler governments.

The American states and the United States applied these Discovery and Domination elements to Native People. The U.S. governments actively engaged in genocide of Native People and forced their removal to reservations. The governments actively attempted to destroy Native Peoples’ cultures, legal systems, and governments to erase them. Over the centuries, the United States worked to assimilate Native People into American culture and society, and as one Residential Indian boarding school superintendent stated: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

The Doctrine is not just a relic of the discovery and settling of land by Europeans in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This white exceptionalism frame of perceiving Indigenous people, their culture, and land claims is still alive and evident in the current laws and policies of the United States and other settler nations. It still restricts Indigenous peoples’ property, governmental, and self-determination rights. These white assumptions of exceptionalism remain dangerous legal and historical fictions within the United States.

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Thank you for this opportunity to present four scoping issues.

1.  Spiritual impacts

• • • The Bay Mills Community believes that the Great Turtle emerged from the flood in the Straits of Mackinac to create Turtle Island, what we call North America. The Great Lakes are the heart of Turtle Island.
    • The U.S. Government and White American have made every effort to destroy the spiritual ways of the Indigenous Peoples.The ACE needs to consult with the Tribes to learn the cumulative historic spiritual harms, both visible and invisible, inflicted by United States upon them, including the potential visible and invisible spiritual impacts of the Line 5 project.

2. Impacts of Line 5 on the U.S. Government’s treaty obligations
The Bay Mills Community and other tribes rely on their treaty rights for subsistence, spiritual, and cultural practice of their members, and to further their economic well-being. The U.S. government needs to preserve and enhance the resources and habitats that support healthy and abundant natural resources to meet our treaty obligations.

• • • In this instance, the ACE needs to apply the precautionary principle, which requires taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty. Further, the principle shifts the burden of proof to the accident-prone Enbridge Corporation to prove that its Line 5 project would never compromise the United States’ treaty obligations.
    • The ACE needs to consult with the affected tribes to learn the cumulative historic harms inflicted upon the natural resources and habitats in violation of our treaty obligations.

3. Impacts of loss of Indigenous knowledge

• • • Traditional Ecological Knowledge is the living knowledge acquired by Indigenous peoples over thousands of years. ACE needs to consider the costs to the United States of this knowledge loss should Line 5 destroy the natural resource base of the Tribes.
    • A Line 5 alternative is for the U.S. government to give the Indigenous nations a larger role in healing and managing the natural resources they and we depend upon for survival.

4. Impacts of White Exceptionalism

White people for a millennium have justified conquering, enslaving, and killing Indigenous people and destroying their non-Christian civilizations because of the imagined superiority of European civilization and religion, twinned with our scriptured God-given dominion over the Earth and all creatures, which gives us the holy right to plunder them for profit.

1. 1. • ACE needs to explore and understand how this frame of White Exceptionalism has driven our willingness to harm others and the Earth for self-benefit, and how, in the case of Line 5, impacts our willingness to further desecrate a Native American sacred place and to even consider another fossil-fuel project amid climate change.

Thank you.

Louise Gorenflo
Habitat for All