During the past weeks, there has been a surge of support for the removal of colonizer and confederate statues across the US as part of Black-led movements to combat police brutality and systemic anti-Blackness.

Alliance for a Green Economy joins the calls for the removal of statues that glorify and celebrate theft of land, genocide, enslavement of Indigenous Peoples and African Peoples.  Columbus, in particular, is intrinsically tied to the Doctrine of Discovery, which in the late 1400s laid the basis for the dispossession of Black and Indigenous Peoples from their lands by European colonizers, and is still recognized legally to this day.  It is the root of environmental racism.  

In the heart of Syracuse, NY, a Columbus statue stands on top of four Indigenous heads. There is widespread support in the community for the removal of this atrocious statue from the center of the city, even before the current national trend of statue removals.  There is a growing Black and Indigenous led movement to remove the statue. AGREE has joined an organization sign-on letter to help demonstrate community support for their cause to Syracuse elected officials. Will your organization sign too? 

AGREE also encourages our members and members of their networks to sign the petition asking that Syracuse's Columbus statue be removed. The petition has surpassed 12,500 signatures. Please consider signing and sharing it throughout your networks! The petition is open to everyone.

And, if you are near Syracuse this Saturday, please join us at a rally in Columbus Circle, Syracuse. Organized by the Resilient Indigenous Action Collective, the purpose of the gathering is to call on the City of Syracuse to have the statue removed. The Collective states: "We have sent in petitions, submitted letters, dialogued, pleaded, asked, protested, and demanded this statue come down - and many times [have been] left out of conversations about this statue that negatively impacts us most as Indigenous people. It is long past time for this statue to go." We agree.

Where: 259 E Onondaga St. (Columbus Circle) Syracuse

When: Saturday, June 27   5pm

How: Wearing masks and observing distancing

The imagery of Columbus standing on top of disembodied Indigenous heads and the images portrayed in the bronze plaques below are atrocious and should not be celebrated in the center of our community. Of any community.

Further, Columbus's legacy is at the root of environmental racism. We encourage you to learn about the "Doctrine of Discovery" - a legal doctrine used to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land and is still used to this day in the U.S. and around the world to “legally” justify the seizure of land and environmental decision-making from Indigenous peoples, often with the intent of resource extraction.

Doctrine of Discovery in a nutshell:

• Originates in a series of Papal Bulls in the 1400s which allowed explorers to claim lands in the name of their Christian god and sovereign, so long as no other Christian King had done so already. This Eurocentric take on law denied any recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands. These were applied to Africa first, and then the Americas in 1493. These bulls also divided up the known Western Hemisphere between sovereigns at a certain point which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and most of the other countries speak Spanish. The Protestant English, not to be outdone by the Pope, incorporated essentially the same language into the Cabot Charter and started their own efforts to claim lands.

• In the case Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) - which is among the first cases studied in both Property and Federal Indian Law classes - the Doctrine of Discovery was enshrined as the basis for all title to the land in the United States. It determined that in the act of "discovery", the underlying title to the land vested with the Christian nation that did the "discovery." Settlers could not legally buy land directly from Indigenous Peoples because according to the Doctrine of Discovery the Native Nations didn’t actually have title to the land; the US Government did. Seriously. THIS is where the myth that “Indians don’t believe in land ownership” and “occupancy rights only” comes from. From European desire to claim the land as their own, take its resources, and impose their own laws on it, not even seeing the millions of people who were here as being human beings with their own laws and cultures. How harmful this was, and still is!

• Those pictures of Columbus with a cross in one hand and a flag in another? Those are key elements to the essential real estate transaction that dispossessed the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine is also why the US planted a flag on the Moon and why Russia put a flag on the sea floor in the Arctic Circle. It is still used today.

• The Doctrine of Discovery was referenced as recently as 2005 in the dismissal of the Oneida Nation’s land claim, and subsequent dismissal of the Cayuga and Onondaga Nation Land Rights Action. You can find it in the first footnote. In the Onondaga Nation's Land Rights Action, they were asking for more say over environmental decisions throughout their aboriginal territory, to carry out their responsibility given to them by the Creator to be stewards of the land. Even though the court case was dismissed, the Onondaga Nation has continued to advocate and partner with environmental groups throughout the area on energy and water quality and other environmental justice issues, and for that we are deeply grateful.

• In short, the Doctrine of Discovery is the basis of property and land use law in the U.S. - which of course hugely impacts our environmental laws as well. The U.S. Government's underlying claim to the land through this doctrine is what allows mining and oil and gas extraction throughout most of the country. This is all connected.

• There is a growing international movement calling for the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery. Learn more at doctrineofdiscovery.org.