Protesting The Racist Name Of The Knights Of Columbus

I recently contacted Tony Castanha, the internationally renowned leader of the movement to influence the Roman Catholic hierarchy to revoke the Papal bull, Inter Caetera. Mr. Castanha is also on the forefront of the movement to put an end to the glorification of Columbus. When I contacted him, I presented the link to my “Protesting The Racist Name Of The Knights Of Columbus” video on youtube. In response he wrote: “It’s time to go after these ‘Knights’ guys…”.

Because of the instructions Columbus and his knights received from two 15th century Papal bulls they stole the land of the native people they “discovered” in the Caribbean Islands. And, likewise, because of these same two 15th century Papal bulls white Christians stole the Dakota people’s Wakan/”Rum” River watershed traditional/ancestral homeland territory, which includes the land where the Anoka K.C.’s building is located.
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Here on the front of Anoka, Minnesota’s Knights of Columbus building, a building located on the south bank of the badly named “Rum River”, there is the K.C.’s logo, it’s a logo that glorifies the organization’s racist name.

The Catholic Church of Saint Stephen in Anoka, Minnesota has a long-established chapter of the Knights of Columbus, an organization with an extremely racist name. However, because of a local, national, and international movement to replace the profane name of the river that finds its confluence with the Mississippi River in Anoka, the “Rum River” back to it sacred Dakota Indian name, Wakan, some of the Dakota people are beginning to return to this very sacred area of their traditional and ancestral homeland,(which was stolen from them) and doing so, to appreciate and protect this sacred site of theirs. Because of their return to this sacred site they are now having to deal with the racist Knights of Columbus logo which is radically desecrating this sacred site of theirs.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, in search of new lands, gold and wealth. He ‘discovered’ and ‘claimed’ many islands throughout the Caribbean. But, what right did he have to ‘claim’ these lands, when the native people had been living there for thousands of years?

According to a recent United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism document – in Pope Alexander VI’s papal bull of 1493 (Inter Caetera), he stated his desire that the “discovered” people be “subjugated and brought to the faith itself.” By this means, said the pope, the “Christian Empire” would be propagated. This Papal bull, or “doctrine of discovery”, sanctioned Christian nations to claim “unoccupied lands”, or lands belonging to “heathens” or “pagans”.

Because of this Papal bull – and an earlier fifteenth century Papal bull, Romanus Pontifiex, a bull that sanctioned and promoted the slavery of indigenous peoples and the thrift of their lands and natural resources, Columbus felt justified and righteous to write in his journal that the native people he discovered were “very friendly”, “an inoffensive people”, “they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force”, “weapons they have none”, and that “with weapons and 50 men I could enslave the entire population”. He later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

A Dominican Priest was the first European historian in the Americas. He wrote, when referring to Columbus and his knights’ genocidal behavior in the Americas: “….for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.”

This is why the Dakota people who are returning to this sacred site of theirs are opposed to, both, the racist name of the Knights of Columbus – and also to the K. C.s desecrating racist logo, which I am now protesting.

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