The Paradigm of Domination

Tour Group in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C., June 2021

When the Christian Europeans first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, they carried with them their language and mental world of domination. Evidence of this is found in numerous Vatican decrees issued by various popes of the Catholic Church. Those documents presumed the right to establish Christian domination wherever it did not yet exist.

Christian European voyagers set sail with the intention of invading non-Christian nations and peoples wherever they could be located.

As hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of invading colonizing people spread out across this continent, and throughout this hemisphere, across the ocean west of Christendom, it gradually became impossible for our nations and peoples to continue living free and independent of the invaders’ language (their metaphors, ideas, and arguments).

Some of us who were born a decade or so after WWII ended in 1945, began to seek out information to make sense of what had happened to our lands and peoples during the centuries that had passed since Columbus’s (aka Cristobal Colon) first historic voyage. 

What we didn’t seem to notice, however, is that we were making these efforts primarily by reading historical accounts written by non-Native scholars and writers. We were attempting to make sense of our past by means of the colonizers’ written accounts of their past. Those historical accounts were created by means of the colonizers’ language and mental world. 

Landing of Columbus, John Vanderlyn (1775-1852)

Christopher Columbus is depicted landing in the West Indies, on an island that the natives called Guanahani and he named San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. He raises the royal banner, claiming the land for his Spanish patrons, and stands bareheaded, with his hat at his feet, in honor of the sacredness of the event. The captains of the Niña and Pinta follow, carrying the banner of Ferdinand and Isabella. The crew displays a range of emotions, some searching for gold in the sand. Natives watch from behind a tree.John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) had studied with Gilbert Stuart and was the first American painter to be trained in Paris, where he worked on this canvas for ten years with the help of assistants.

Those of us who were raised in an English language environment were limited to books and other materials written in English. Those sources were, for the most part, written from the perspective of the colonizers’ mental world within which most of us as Native people had been raised and educated.

Some of us, when we were still teenagers, were fortunate enough to meet and learn from traditional Native Elders who spoke their own Native language. Most of them were raised by or had learned from their grandparents and other Elders who were fluent in their own traditional language.

We began to experience the discipline and physical challenges of ceremonies, along with the profound teachings, meanings, and interpretations the Elders and their ceremonies were able to reveal to us.

We became connected to the language and mental world of these ceremonial experiences. This included experiences the dominating society would consider to be either “supernatural” (visions and hearing voices), or “psychotic” (visions and hearing voices), and we were able to bring our ceremonial insights and learning experiences to our extensive readings and writings.

In some ways, it felt like trying to find and fit together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but without the benefit of a box cover to see what image ought to be emerging.

Then again, what I am calling “pieces” were not physical objects. They were words and phrases with specific meanings. Those meanings create certain images that are part of an entire reality or world of domination.

At first, I didn’t know this. I was still focused on words such as “subjugation,” and “dominion.” I had not yet detected the overall framework of domination.

Gradually I understood that I needed to go deeper into the colonizers’ language by studying the origins of words. By looking at the etymology of words, I happened upon two important pieces of the puzzle.

The first was a book by William Brandon, New Worlds for Old. Brandon provides a detailed examination of the word dominion, which he traces to its Latin origins. He sums up his examination by stating, “political power, grown from property—dominium—was, in effect, domination.” In other words, the words dominion and dominium both translate as domination.

Another important piece of the puzzle was a Latin-English dictionary I came across at the public library in Eugene, Oregon. I looked up the word “dominion” and came across the entry “domo,” which has seven main meanings: “subjugate,” “subdue,” “force into subservience,” “tame,” “domesticate,” “cultivate,” and “till,” which are seven aspects of domination.

Further study revealed that colere, meaning, “to colonize and to design,” is another Latin word for the terms “to cultivate” and “to till.” To plan is “to design.” And when we add the letters “a-t-e” to “design” we get “designate,” one meaning of which is, “to state [say] something has a particular character or purpose.”

A paradigm serves as a pattern or model. And, a paradigm is also defined as “assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitute a way of life for the community that shares them.” (emphasis added) The Paradigm of Domination is made up of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices of domination that establish and maintain a Way of Life of Domination, sometimes euphemistically called “modern society.”

Once we have learned how to see the Paradigm of Domination, we are more likely to see evidence of that paradigm everywhere we look. We begin to see the destructive effects of the Domination Way of Life and the Global System of Domination.

The goal of business, for example, is domination. The one with the right of domination—the dominator—is euphemistically called “the owner,” with a resulting right of property, which is also the right to profit.

Property, and the right to profit from it, has been defined as, “the first establishment of socially approved physical domination over some part of the natural world,” or, over some part of the artificial world created through intellectual activity.

This is also called intellectual property. A massive amount of intellectual property is produced by the planetary war machine and the global security surveillance state of domination.

The business of war results in the profitability of producing warfare systems (including bioweapons, such as Covid-19, and countermeasures). Such systems are now being augmented with AI and Robotics. And it’s all being done for fun and profit, the endorphin rush of multi-million-dollar contracts and 800-plus billion dollar annual U.S. military budgets.

And the result? Think of the radioactive fallout all over the planet and in the oceans from the detonation of nuclear weapons. Think of the destruction of the Earth’s precious waters, which were pristine when our Ancestors were still living in keeping with Natural Law.

Think of how the waters are now poisoned by “forever chemicals,” and the after-effects of massive mining projects. And think of what is going on in the bloodstreams of those afflicted with the massive mRNA production of spike proteins.

Think of how the traditional ecosystems within the territories of original nations are being destroyed by projects such as the Tar Sands on the lands of original nations “in” “Canada” and “the United States.” And think of the resulting cancers and other health afflictions.

Think of the uranium mill tailings, all the toxicity from thousands of abandoned mines, as well as the massive number of toxic chemical spills, and the “Superfund Sites” which never get cleaned up, and very possibly never will be.

All these effects from the Global System of Domination have resulted in a massive increase in debilitating afflictions. And, strangely, the so-called “health care system” is not really focused on our health.

Indeed, the medical industrial complex does not profit from healthy people who don’t need to see a doctor and don’t need pharmaceutical drugs. Rather than maintaining our health, a state-of-domination “health care” system is mostly focused on making money from all the people who have compromised and damaged immune systems from a lack of exercise, poor nutrition, obesity, and chronic inflammation, which lead to the main deadly diseases. “It’s called economics Baby!”

Formulaic “Indigenous land acknowledgments,” and catchy memes such as “Land Back,” as well as calls for “Reparations” and “Reconciliation,” fail to focus our attention on the ongoing Global System of Domination. Accordingly, our rallying cry ought to be, “End the Domination System.” We need to continuously challenge the claim of a right of domination.