S06E09: The Legacy of Charles H. Long Part 2: How & Why White Supremacy Persists

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Show Notes

The conversation opens with an invitation to take the long view: not only the scholarship of Charles H. Long, but the wide arc of colonialism that became the scaffolding of a white supremacist, Christian nation-state. The host grounds that claim in a living project, the Scano Great Law of Peace Center, co-created with the Onondaga Nation to replace museum logics with a relational space rooted in values and right relation to land. That frame matters because it refuses the extractive gaze that stripped Haudenosaunee influence from the American narrative, even as founders met with the Confederacy and learned practices of democracy. The “Two Row Wampum” enters here not as backdrop, but as method: two vessels traveling the same river without interference, bound by a covenant chain and shared values. Against that ethic, the show places a stark counter-history: Jesuit land deeds claiming territory before arrival, the Sullivan–Clinton scorched-earth campaign, and a Columbus statue that functions as public catechism for the Doctrine of Discovery.

From there the episode translates the abstract into policy and law. Listeners follow a clean line from 15th-century papal bulls authorizing conquest and “perpetual slavery,” to the Cabot Charter, to Johnson v. McIntosh embedding Christian discovery into U.S. property law, and on to modern cases like City of Sherrill v. Oneida. This isn’t a partisan critique; it’s structural. A retranslation project of the bulls underscores how church Latin became the grammar of dispossession, and how that grammar migrated into Protestant nation-building. The host then personalizes complicity through genealogy: Mayflower ancestors, the Pequot War, and the Erie Canal carving through Haudenosaunee homelands. That move models an ethic of accountable scholarship: truth-telling about inherited benefits and embodied trauma, without collapsing history into confession alone.

A decolonial and Indigenous studies lens widens the aperture. The episode names coloniality as a living order, not a closed period, where whiteness operates as an ontology of possession. Listeners hear how the elimination of commons in England prepared the way for racial capitalism, how manufactured scarcity and the pathologizing of subsistence justified conquest, and how the Dawes Act translated “civilization” into allotment and land theft. The show tracks the federal ban on Indigenous ceremonies, but pivots toward resurgence: landback, language revivals, and urban ceremonial life that rebuilds kin, restores relational personhood, and treats land and more-than-human beings as agents. This metaphysical repair challenges the epistemic authority of the settler state and fuels global Indigenous solidarities, from Standing Rock to transnational networks.

The womanist segment converts theory into moral urgency. Through Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak” and the lynching of Eliza Woods, the episode interrogates signification, symbol, and sacred violence. It asks what justice means when law failed and newspapers celebrated murder, and how semiotics helps unmask the religious imagination that sanctifies terror. Drawing on Linda Thomas and conjure traditions, the host argues for polyvalent readings that expose how Christian nationalism weaponizes the sacred while communities reforge meaning through ritual, art, and memory. The result is a direct challenge to the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” that normalizes domination and disguises it as divine order.

The final movement returns to Long, Sylvia Wynter, and Black Studies to reframe critique as creation. If 1492 inaugurated a planetary myth of the human, the task now is to think beyond either-or binaries and beyond the nation-state as our horizon of analysis. Myths of creation are not relics; they are operating systems. The episode calls for thinking blackness as method, a condition of possibility for new knowledge and new forms of life. That means resisting categories that “have us by the throat,” attending to the boundary where new humans are imagined, and building institutions that embody shared values rather than reenact extraction. Listeners leave with a demanding clarity: decolonization is material, epistemic, and metaphysical—and the path forward is covenantal, accountable, and creative.

About Our Guests

• Philip P. Arnold, Professor in the Department of Religion, and a core faculty member of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University. He is the Founding Director of the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center, (2012-15).
  • Arnold, Philip P. The Urgency of Indigenous Values. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023.
  • Arnold, Philip P. The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love. San Diego, CA: Cognella, 2012.
  • Arnold, Philip P., Sandra Bigtree, and Adam D. J. Brett. “Preface and Introduction.” Journal of the Council for Research on Religion 5, no. 2 (2024). https://creor-ejournal.library.mcgill.ca/issue/view/12
• Natalie Avalos, Assistant Professor in the of Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado Boulder.
  • Avalos, Natalie. “Indigenous Stewardship as a Lifeway.” Journal of Environmental Media 1, no. 2 (2020): 185–204. https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jem_00011_1
  • Avalos, Natalie. “What Does It Mean to Heal from Historical Trauma?” AMA Journal of Ethics 23, no. 6 (2021): E484–90. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/what-does-it-mean-heal-historical-trauma/2021-06
  • Avalos, Natalie. “A Veterans Talking Circle: Urban Indian Peoplehood and Re-Indigenizing Places.” Material Religion 18, no. 1 (2022): 98–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2021.2015927
  • Avalos, Natalie. “The Metaphysics of Decolonization: Healing Historical Trauma and Indigenous Liberation.” The CLR James Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (2022): 75–102. https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2021_0027_0001_0081_0099
  • Avalos, Natalie. “Indigenous Stewardship: Religious Praxis and ‘Unsettling’ Settler Ecologies.” Political Theology 24, no. 6 (2023): 503–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2023.2212473
  • Avalos, Natalie. “Becoming Human: ‘Urban Indian’ Decolonisation and Regeneration in the Land of Enchantment.” In The Brill Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), edited volume. Leiden: Brill, 2017. https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004346710/B9789004346710-s011.xml?language=en&srsltid=AfmBOopwazEIadwI_rEv1CNCYdBVCMhPNIyANZHaE8jnO15gaudx1uUN
  • Avalos, Natalie, and Molly H. Bassett, eds. Indigenous Religious Traditions in 5 Minutes. Sheffield: Equinox, 2022.
• Teresa L. Smallwood, Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs and The James Franklin Kelly and Hope Eyster Kelly Associate Professor of Public Theology, United Lutheran Seminary.
  • Smallwood, Teresa L. Public Theology and Violent Rhetoric Examined in a Queer Womanist Critical Ethnography. T&T Clark Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography, and Theology. T&T Clark, 2025.
  • Ringer, Christophe D., Teresa L. Smallwood, and Emilie M. Townes, eds. Moved by the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives. New York: Lexington Press, 2023.
• Emilie M. Townes, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion & Black Studies at Boston University.
  • Cannon, Katie Geneva, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims, eds. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011.
  • Townes, Emilie M. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
  • Townes, Emilie M. “On Making Silence Loud.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 42, no. 1 (2025).
  • Townes, Emilie M., ed. A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.
  • Townes, Emilie M., and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. Walking Through the Valley: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2022.
  • Townes, Emilie M., Christophe D. Ringer, and Teresa L. Smallwood, eds. Moved by the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023.
• Corey D.B. Walker, Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Program in African American Studies.
  • Barnes, Melody C., Corey D. B. Walker, and Thad Williamson, eds. Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy: Can We Make American Democracy Work? Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2020. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook/edcoll/9781839108129/9781839108129.xml
  • Walker, Corey D. B., ed. African American Religion. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
  • Walker, Corey D. B., ed. “To Stand With and For Humanity”: Essays from the Wake Forest University Slavery, Race and Memory Project. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 2020. https://srmp.wfu.edu/to-stand-with-and-for-humanity/
  • Walker, Corey D. B., and Sabrina E. Dent, eds. African Americans and Religious Freedom: New Perspectives for Congregations and Communities. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

References

• Long, Charles H. (1980). *The Study of Religion: Its Nature and Its Discourse. *University of Colorado.
• Long, Charles H. (1982). Forward Year by Year: The Story of the Forward Movement. Forward Movement Publications.
• Long, Charles H. (1985). Significations: Experiences and Images in Black American Religion. Seabury Press. ISBN 9780866839563.
• Long, Charles H. (1993).* The Gift of Speech and the Travail of Language.* University of Cape Town. ISBN 9780799215359.
• Long, Charles H. (1983). Alpha: The Myths of Creation. Scholars Press. ISBN 9780891306047.
• Long, Charles H. (1999). Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Davies Group. ISBN 9781888570519.
• Reid, Jennifer. (2003). Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long. Lexington, 2003.
• Long, Charles H. (2018). Charles H. Long (ed.).* Ellipsis: The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long*. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350032651.
• Reid, Jennifer, and David Carrasco. (2020) With This Root about My Person: Charles H. Long and New Directions in the Study of Religion. Religions of the Americas Series. University of New Mexico Press,9780826361622

Citation

Philip P. Arnold and Sandra Bigtree, "S06E09: The Legacy of Charles H. Long Part 2: How & Why White Supremacy Persists A conversation between Philip P. Arnold, Natalie Avalos, Teresa Smallwood, Emilie Townes, & Corey D.B. Walker" Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery (Podcast), 2026-03-17. https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/season6/episode-09/.

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