Philip Arnold utilizes a collaborative method, derived from the “Two-Row Wampum” (1613) and his 40-year relationship with the Haudenosaunee, to address the urgent need to support Indigenous Peoples, understand their values and offer a way toward humanity’s survival in the face of environmental catastrophe. Arnold outlines Indigenous traditions of habitation and gift economies in contrast with settler-colonial values of commodification where land and all aspects of material life are reduced to monetary use-value.

Fifteenth century Doctrines of Discovery used Christian theology to subjugate and annihilate Indigenous Peoples through environmental devastation, land theft and forced assimilation. Designed to initiate conversations in the classroom, the academy, and other communities, this book pairs concepts of Indigeneity and religion around their competing values systems, thus transforming our understanding of both categories.

Philip P. Arnold is Associate Professor of the Religion Department; core faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Syracuse University; and Founding Director of the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center. His books are Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (1999); Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (edited with Ann Gold, 2001); The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love (2012); Urgency of Indigenous Values  (2023), in the Syracuse University Press series “Haudenosaunee and Indigenous Worlds,” for which he is co-editor. He established the Doctrine of Discovery Study Group and Indigenous Values Initiative. With his wife Sandra Bigtree he co-hosts the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast and is the PI for “200 Years of Johnson v. McIntosh: Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism,” a 3-year (2022-24) grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.