Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery

Power rarely announces itself as a plan. Here, it does. We dive into the Seven Mountains mandate with Matthew Boedy, tracing how Turning Point USA evolved from a campus brand into a nationwide movement designed to seize cultural institutions—education, government, religion, family, business, media, and entertainment. Instead of winning hearts one by one, the strategy aims to install a committed minority atop the systems that shape everyday life.

We unpack the tactics: a tight messaging playbook that turns complex theology into viral lines, prosperity narratives that double as fundraising engines, and a pipeline that starts in high school chapters and extends into church networks. Bodie breaks down the budgets, donor ecosystems, and conference circuits that blend worship with political training, alongside the professor watch lists and school board campaigns that frame universities and the humanities as corrupting forces rather than civic goods.

From our perspective, the doctrine of discovery offers a crucial lens: centuries ago, Christian power targeted Indigenous identity, family, and land to rewire society from the top down. The same drive to control institutions resurfaces now under a new banner. We connect these threads to the UK’s Revolution 250 project and the overlooked influence of Haudenosaunee governance on democratic thought, arguing that honest history isn’t a luxury—it’s a civic defense.

Where does this leave us? With a long game. Defending democracy means building majority movements grounded in free speech, pluralism, and resilient institutions. It means teaching democracy across disciplines, protecting spaces of inquiry, and telling fuller stories that expand our shared civic imagination. If you care about universities, local school boards, independent media, or the simple right to disagree in public without fear, this conversation offers tools and urgency in equal measure.

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View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.

A celebrated waterway can also be a wound. We open the Erie Canal’s familiar legend and find the story most of us never learned: how a triumph of engineering cut a dam through Haudenosaunee homelands, accelerated dispossession, and rewrote law, faith, and landscape in its wake. With Haudenosaunee leaders and scholars, we move from a condensed Thanksgiving Address into original instructions about water, winds, and the seven generations ethic, then confront the doctrine of Christian discovery—from papal bulls to Johnson v. M’Intosh—still echoing through U.S. property law.

Along the towpath, we trace the canal’s hidden cargo: land speculation, conflicts of interest, alcohol and other “mind changers,” and the quiet burial of treaty promises like Canandaigua’s “forever.” We connect those ruptures to the burned-over district, where new American religions—Latter-day Saints, Millerites, spiritualists, Shakers—flared as migrants grappled with dislocation and meaning. The canal didn’t just move grain; it moved imaginations, laws, and borders, often at the expense of communities who had long practiced diplomacy through the Great Law of Peace and the Two Row Wampum’s commitment to travel side by side without interference.

We also spotlight the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center’s work to flip the narrative on unceded Onondaga Nation territory, centering Indigenous values and living governance rather than artifacts. This is not nostalgia; it’s a practical invitation to measure progress by future faces, to see water as kin, and to treat treaties as living commitments. Press play to rethink what the Erie Canal made—and unmade—and to imagine a path from commemoration to repair. If this conversation moved you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find these stories.
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View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.

We trace the Erie Canal’s celebrated corridor through one farm in Oneida, New York, revealing how innovation rode alongside broken treaties, pressured sales and the erasure of Oneida lives. Through the intertwined stories of Polly Denny and Angel De Ferrier and the Brewer family, we face the costs of progress and the weight of paperwork.

• why the Mohawk Valley corridor made the land strategically vital
• Fort Stanwix line splitting Oneida towns and futures
• Oneida alliance with the Americans and postwar betrayal
• Angel De Ferrier and Polly Denny as cultural go-betweens
• New York’s illegal “treaties of purchase” and legal sleight of hand
• Skenandoa’s warning and the vanishing myth in print
• paperwork dispossession through surveys, mortgages and courts
• canal, railroad and thruway turning Wampsville into a boomtown
• erasure of Polly in local memory and records
• tenant to owner: Brewer family path on the best land
• land claims, sovereignty and a modern economic reversal

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View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.

We trace how the Sullivan–Clinton campaign was conceived and executed as a land seizure against the Haudenosaunee, not a simple response to raids. We follow letters, orders, and deals that moved from neutrality to burning villages, then to surveys, the military tract, and the canal.

• rewriting the Sullivan–Clinton narrative as a campaign for land
• Dunmore’s War as a template for destroying food and homes
• Schuyler’s ultimatum ending neutrality at German Flats
• propaganda around the Cedars, Wyoming and Cherry Valley
• Onondaga targeted despite seeking neutrality
• Washington’s confirmed orders to destroy corn and orchards
• starvation at Niagara during the record winter of 1779–1780
• surveyors following troops and the creation of the military tract
• Schuyler’s role in backroom claims and early canal planning
• how the Erie Canal overlays dispossessed Haudenosaunee lands

Please check our website at podcast.doctrine of discovery.org for more information
If you like this episode, review it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts

Support the show
View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.

A campfire changes the kind of conversation you can have. With scholar and wilderness guide Kimberly Carfore, we lean into that flame to ask why so much of Western faith and culture treats the earth—and women—as subordinate, and how we can reorient toward relationship in a century of fires, floods, and frayed trust. Kim’s journey from Catholic roots to ecofeminist theology and back into the woods becomes a map for courage: teaching friction fire as a spiritual discipline, founding Wild Women to empower outdoor connection, and wrestling honestly with appropriation, reverence, and responsibility.

We trace how dominionist readings of Genesis 1:28 fueled the Doctrine of Discovery, witch burnings, and modern domination systems, then pull forward correctives from multiple wells. Haudenosaunee wisdom reframes peace as right relationship with the natural world; cultural burning and Indigenous fire stewardship model care that prevents catastrophe. Ecofeminist thinkers like Val Plumwood expose the human superiority reflex, while theologians such as Sally McFague invite us to imagine the earth as the Body of God—and perhaps, as Kim suggests, as Mother—so power becomes care, not control.

Along the way, we get practical and personal: breath as a plant-human exchange, ancestry as orientation rather than shame, climate impacts on marathon times as a tangible signal, and the way a simple fire-making practice can restore agency without conquest. If we’re serious about climate solutions, we need more than technology; we need new theologies, renewed kinship, and places to gather, listen, and act together.

Join us to rethink dominion, recover relationship, and tend the ember that connects us. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves big ideas by a warm fire, and leave a review to help others find the conversation. What image of the sacred would help you live differently tomorrow?
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View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.