The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance

In a secular society deeply rooted in Protestantism, such as the twenty-first-century United States, the idea of religious law often conjures up two images: (1) the Protestant Reformation and the successive Puritan flight to the New World to avoid the Church of England’s domination as the official religion of the state; or (2) the much more recent fears of Islamic Sharia law in the popular culture which led the voters of Oklahoma to pass a ban on “Sharia law” in 2010. However, the formal religious law of the two Apostolic Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches also played an influential role in shaping the U.S. and the Americas into what they are today.It is particularly crucial to consider the impact of religious law on Indigenous people, who were and remain some of the last significant populations of unevangelized pagans and other non-Christian religious practitioners today. 

The earliest interactions between American Indians and Alaska Natives in the Americas and the laws of colonialist powers often came not in the secular courts of Spain, England, France, and Russia, but through the religious laws of the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches. These churches first interacted with American Indians and Alaska Natives during the churches’ missions when the settlers, such as the Spanish conquistadors and Russian fur traders, also arrived in the Americas. The Catholic Church weighed in on the legal status of American Indians through papal bulls such as Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 and Sublimis Deus by Pope Paul III in 1537.These papal bulls, along with centuries-old ecclesiastical writings from the Holy See concerning pagans, dictated the churches’ relationships with American Indians in the New World until the Second Vatican Council and recent Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region.

The other Apostolic Church in the New World—the Eastern Orthodox Church under the autocephalous Russian Orthodox Church—also applied the unwritten church law of the Orthodox Church for the legal status of the Alaskan Natives its adherents encountered in the 18th century. Despite both churches sharing the first seven ecumenical councils from before the Great Schism of 1054, the legal status of people from the Americas had meaningful differences that reflected not only the dogmatic development in the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages but also the relatively recent pagan history of the Russian Empire originating in the predecessor state of Kievan Rus. The Russian OrthodoxChurch and Tsar inherited their legacy from the entwined religious and secular law of the Eastern Roman Empire. The latter approach of cultural harmonization under the Orthodox canon law allowed for the Orthodoxy of the Alaska Natives to become something truly their own. This approach won over assimilation in the canon law of the Catholic Church, as can be seen by the recent Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region, who suggested a major change for the canon law status of South American Indian Catholic practices along with other church reforms originating in the aftermath of Vatican II.