Hi, I’m John Green, welcome  to Crash Course Religions.

So, in 2021, the unmarked graves of over two hundred Indigenous children were found at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada.

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were sent to schools like this  one across Canada and the U.S.

There, they suffered physical,  sexual, and spiritual abuse – often at the hands of the priests and nuns who ran many of these institutions.

To understand how this tragedy occurred, we need to dig deep – deep enough to uncover the tangled, knotted  roots of religion and race.

[THEME MUSIC] So let’s start with a simple, but profound, truth: race is not, like, inherently “real.” It’s what we call a social construct, a category that came about as the result of humans doing that human thing we’re so  fond of – creating categories.

Race is often defined by a person’s skin color, behaviors, attitudes, geographies, demeanors, languages, and yes – even their religion.

Throughout history, we’ve often assumed that race was a natural category – that it existed on a biological level, even.

And that it was also natural for societies to order themselves around race.

People in power have found all kinds of ways to reinforce – and often redefine – what race is for the benefit  of those power structures.

But today scientists agree that there’s no biological evidence of race, which you can learn more about  over at Crash Course Biology.

So in that sense, race isn't "real", but of course race is also very real, in the sense that it has real-world impacts on people's everyday lives.

It affects our mental and physical health, plays a major role in economic inequality, and can influence everything from a person’s job opportunities to the way their communities are policed and governed.

To be clear, race as a category isn’t good or bad; it’s just one more framework for understanding the world around us.

The harm comes, of course, from racism.

Which is much more than just individual prejudice — it can also take structural or systemic forms.

Like, the nuns and priests at the Kamloops School may have held racist ideas, but it wasn’t their individual acts of racism that led to the deaths of over four thousand Indigenous children across Canada’s  residential school systems.

It was a racist power structure that removed those children from their homes and forced them into awful living  conditions with very little oversight.

These schools were often run by churches, most notably the Catholic Church – with the backing of the government.

Children were forced to adopt “Christian” names, give up their traditional clothing and lifestyles, speak only English or French,  and convert to Christianity.

And if they didn’t, they were  often met with severe punishment.

The idea was that Indigenous  peoples in Canada needed  to be rescued from their  “uncivilized” lives and culture.

That was institutionalized racism at work, supported by existing power structures that saw the, quote, “Indian race” as inherently inferior to the quote, “white race”.

Which, of course, just to say the obvious, was ridiculous  for a number of reasons,  not least of which was that  there was no “Indian” race before white Europeans colonized the Americas.

The people who lived in  Canada and the United States  belonged to numerous tribes,  and nations, and belief systems.

But white settlers racialized Indigenous peoples  into a single, collective group,  essentially creating a race by acting as if these hugely diverse  groups were all the same  because they had similar skin tones  and, like, shared a continent.

Throughout history, people have also wrongly  racialized others with different skin tones.

American Muslims, for example, are often perceived  to be part of a single  hereditary unit — a single race — despite hailing from all over the world, identifying with every race, and speaking languages from  every corner of the globe.

I mean, the country with the largest Muslim  population is Indonesia; the  fifth largest is Nigeria; the nineteenth largest is China.

And this logically incoherent  blending of religion,  skin tone, and other traits to make sense of— and often subjugate— people  has been at play for centuries.

The scholar Geraldine Heng argues that going back to medieval times, the concept of race and religion  were inextricably linked.

European Christians sought to define themselves in opposition to Jewish and Muslim people.

The medieval Church even demanded that these groups wear special identifying badges.

And this contributed not only to the racialization  of Jews and Muslims, but to the  concept of whiteness itself.

Then, in the late 15th century, this link between race and religion was formalized in a way that would reverberate for centuries to come.

I’m talking about “The Doctrine of Discovery.” Pope Alexander the Sixth, widely known as one  of the worst popes with his  four illegitimate children.

A man who truly could not follow rules despite his making of rules.

Anyway, that fella laid out  this doctrine in a public decree that essentially gifted the entire “uncivilized” world to Spain and Portugal.

By the way, the definition of “uncivilized” in this case is “not Europe”.

The decree declared that any,  quote, “barbarous nation”  not already inhabited by Christians should be “overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” I mean, a bold call to give half  the world to your own country?

And the rest to… Portugal?

The country that never won a World  Cup even with Cristiano Ronaldo?

So this Doctrine of Discovery  would become the legal  basis not only for Spanish  and Portuguese colonialism, but for all European colonization.

And not only that: This  same decree was returned to  decades and centuries later as a legal precedent to justify the removal of Native  Americans from their lands  and further the transatlantic slave trade.

So yeah, not a great record  for the Doctrine of Discovery.

It was even enshrined into  American legal precedent in 1823, when then-Chief Justice John Marshall declared in a Supreme Court ruling that the “principle of  discovery” gave white settlers  the right to land once  occupied by Native Americans.

So, one of the reasons it’s so difficult to untangle race from religion is because the two have rarely  – if ever – been separate.

In fact, quite the opposite—they’ve sort of co-evolved.

Throughout history, power  structures have often reinforced  and redefined both ideas  together to further their goals.

And we can see this play out in  more modern U.S. history, too.

For example, in 1942, a Yemeni Muslim immigrant named Ahmed Hassan, who had been a resident of Detroit for some time, petitioned the US for naturalization.

But the court denied him,  claiming that his skin color  and country of origin didn’t, quote,  “fit” with the American lifestyle, ultimately declaring: “Arabs  as a class are not white  and therefore not eligible for citizenship.” The court also cited his  religion, and claimed that “a wide gulf separates [Islamic] culture from that of the predominantly Christian peoples of Europe.” And to paraphrase Faulkner, the past ain’t dead, it ain’t even really past.

We continue to see the law  treating race and religion  as overlapping concepts,  leading to ongoing inequality.

This has been especially clear in the decades following 9/11 when in countless instances, any number of visual cues, from  skin tone to head coverings,  have been taken as indicators not only of a person’s religion but of their potential status as a threat.

In fact, in 2011, the Associated  Press published a series  of investigative reports that revealed the NYPD had been secretly surveilling Muslim communities in New York and nearby states for nearly a decade in the name of national security.

A secret group inside the department, called the Demographics Unit, had been collecting information on what it called “ancestries of interest,” which included people from nearly  every Muslim-majority country,  as well as Black American Muslims.

The NYPD worked closely with the CIA to map and monitor Muslim Americans in what many saw as acts of  religious and racial profiling.

Because again, even though we're talking about people with a huge variety of skin tones, cultures, backgrounds,  languages and everything else, Muslims as a class in the United States have long been treated as a race.

This goes all the way back  to, like, Thomas Jefferson  writing about Muhammadists as a  class or group or race of people.

So, over the centuries, we’ve created these ideas about race and religion and  laced them together in knots tighter than a tangled string of Christmas lights.

But here’s the thing about humans: despite all the terrible things  we’ve done to each other,  we’re also incredibly and remarkably, resilient.

In 2015, the National Center  for Truth and Reconciliation  in Canada took up the task of gathering stories and historical documents related to the country’s  residential school system and its  treatment of Indigenous people.

The U.S. followed in 2021 with the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, citing the discovery of Kamloops’s unmarked graves as the spark for creating it.

The goals of both groups are  to not only bring awareness  to an often forgotten piece of history, but also to heal intergenerational trauma and help restore the dignity that was taken from Indigenous  peoples in Canada and the US.

Many of the children who survived  these schools are still alive today, and as adults, they’re  speaking out about the horrors  they witnessed and finding  communities amongst themselves.

Some scholars argue that the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, which sought to revitalize Native culture, can be traced back to intertribal communities and bonds that were built in the boarding schools.

And in 2022, a year after the  graves were discovered at Kamloops,  Pope Francis visited the site of a  former residential school in Canada.

According to the National Center  for Truth and Reconciliation, at least fifteen children are known to have died  at the school between 1895  and 1975 when it finally closed.

Survivors told the committee  they were beaten and abused for speaking their Native languages and practicing traditional ceremonies.

One survivor, Florence Sparvier, of  the Cowessess First Nation, said: “We had our own way of honoring ourselves and Mother Earth in our own homes when we were little, but we had to leave all that.” The pope issued an apology during his visit, asking forgiveness for the acts carried  out in the name of Christianity.

And while some saw it as a turning point, they also acknowledged that there was still plenty of pain and hurt in the community – and that the road to recovery would be long.

A year later, in March of  2023, nearly five hundred years  after the original Doctrine of Discovery decree, Pope Francis officially renounced the doctrine.

Race and religion are complex,  overlapping systems of identity.

And while neither are truly  natural categories, both matter.

They matter because they can do  real harm, but also because they can do real good.

Plenty of people have found meaning and joy in their racial identity and culture, just as they have in their  religious beliefs and practices.

But to address the injustices  of racial inequality,  we need to understand where they came from.

After all, the past really ain’t the past.

In our next episode, we’re gonna  take a look at the end of the world.

I’ll see you there, unless  the world ends next week,