by A reader sent me a video clip. In it, Winona LaDuke opens a talk on colonization by reaching for the dictionary, and the first thing she says is wrong. LaDuke is Anishinaabe, from White Earth in northern Minnesota. She trained as an economist, ran twice for vice president on the Green Party ticket, wrote All Our Relations, and has spent four decades on wild rice, pipelines, and land recovery. Rooms fill when she speaks. So when she tells an audience that colonization “has the same root as the word colon” and that the root “means to digest,” that line travels. It is vivid, it is anatomical, it is easy to repeat, and it is the sentence people carry home. It is also folklore. This is a claim about the history of a word; no lexicon supports it, and it collapses the moment anyone opens a Greek dictionary. The rest of her argument is largely sound and in places understated. That is exactly why the false root matters. An argument this strong should not be walking around with a demolition charge strapped to its opening line.
Three words, one spelling
English gives three unrelated things one spelling, and the confusion runs on that coincidence.
The first is colony, and with it colonial, colonist, colonization. These come through Latin colonia, a settled estate or farm, from colonus, a tenant farmer or settler, from the verb colere. And colere is a rich word. It means to till, to cultivate, to inhabit, to frequent a place, to tend, to guard, and by extension to revere or to worship. The standard etymological dictionaries of Latin trace it to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as *kʷel-, carrying the sense of turning, moving around, dwelling. That root is generous. It throws off cultivate, cult, culture, agriculture, and, through Greek kyklos, our cycle and wheel. Latin incola is an inhabitant. Inquilinus is a lodger, a resident alien, a word Catiline threw at Cicero as an insult.
The second is colon, the large intestine, from Latin colon, from Greek κόλον with a short omicron. Its origin is unknown. The Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon, the standard reference for ancient Greek, records no convincing explanation and offers only a hesitant, unadopted suggestion linking it to words for bent or crooked things. Whatever κόλον came from, it did not come from colere, and Greek and Latin are separate branches of the family. Saying the two words share a root because both languages are Indo-European is like saying five and cinco are the same word. They are cousins at a great remove, and the resemblance in English is an accident of transliteration.
The third is colon, the punctuation mark, from Greek κῶλον with a long omega, meaning a limb or member, then a clause of a sentence, then the mark that divides one clause from the next. Different word, different vowel, different meaning, and one English spelling shared with the gut.
There is one more correction inside the correction. Neither Greek word means “to digest.” Neither is a verb at all. To digest is Latin digerere, from dis- and gerere, to carry apart, to separate out, to distribute. Nothing in that family touches farms, settlements, or intestines. And the one scrap that might look like a lifeline sinks the claim further: Athenaeus glosses κόλον as nourishment, and a papyrus attests it as food kept in a pot. Follow that thread and the word sits on the plate, well upstream of the gut.
Why the false root spreads
LaDuke is honest about where she got it. In a 2022 conversation with the South African organizer Kumi Naidoo, she says she heard someone say that colonialism shares a root with colon, meaning to digest, and that she believes it. That is a fair account of transmission. She is repeating something she was told, and repeating it because it fits what she knows to be true about the world. A reporter in Suquamish, Washington heard her say it in 2008. The line has been in her repertoire for something like two decades.
The homophone probably helped it along. Christopher Columbus is Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, from the Italian Colombo, which comes from Latin columbus, a dove. Any English speaker who has heard the phrase “the age of Colón” has a ready-made bridge to colon, and a bridge is all a folk etymology needs. The irony sitting there for free is better than the invented one. The man whose name means dove opened four centuries of slaughter, and his name is stamped on a country, a river, a district, a currency, and a university.
There is a deeper problem with the method, and it should be named. The belief that the origin of a word governs its true meaning is a specific intellectual habit with a specific pedigree. Isidore of Seville built an encyclopedia on it in the seventh century, working from the premise that if you find a word’s first form you find the nature of the thing. That premise is theological. It assumes a first naming, in Eden, correct and binding. Reaching for a root to settle an argument about conquest borrows the epistemology of the conquerors, which is a strange thing to do while indicting them.
The anatomy she declined
Push on the metaphor and it gets worse for her, which is to say better.
The colon does not digest. Digestion happens in the stomach and the small intestine, where enzymes break food apart and the nutrients cross into the blood. By the time material reaches the colon, the valuable part is gone. What the colon does is recover water and electrolytes from the remainder and compact what is left for expulsion. Gut bacteria ferment some of the surviving fiber there and the body absorbs what that yields, which only sharpens the figure. The organ takes the last usable thing out of what is already spent, then shapes the residue for disposal.
That is a far more accurate figure for what happened at White Earth, and LaDuke knows the history better than I do. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke communal reservation land into individual allotments. The Nelson Act of 1889, titled without irony “An act for the relief and civilization of the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota,” applied the machinery to Minnesota and aimed to consolidate the state’s Ojibwe at White Earth so the vacated reservations could be sold. In 1904 the Steenerson Act and the first Clapp Rider opened the pine to buyers. A second Clapp Rider in 1906 let mixed-blood allottees sell outright. Melissa Meyer’s history of the period is called The White Earth Tragedy, and the arithmetic of the tragedy is that the timber and the arable ground moved to speculators while the people stayed put on the cutover. Extract what is usable, compact the rest, expel it, and call the residue waste. If you want an anatomical metaphor for the reservation system, that is the one, and it is crueler than digestion.
The instrument she already owns
Here is what frustrates me most about the false Latin. In the same 2022 conversation, LaDuke describes what she calls a wendigo economy, the economy of a cannibal, a thing that consumes its own life force and turns everything around it into product. The wendigo is Anishinaabe. It is a figure of insatiable, self-destroying hunger that grows larger the more it eats and can never be filled. It carries a moral charge that a Latin verb cannot, it belongs to her by inheritance, and it does the exact work she is trying to make colon do.
She has the better instrument in her own house and she is borrowing a broken one from the neighbor.
The bulls, corrected
The second half of her claim concerns the papal bulls. She dates the licensing of conquest to the 1490s and describes those documents as saying that non-Christians had no title to their land and should be vanquished and destroyed.
The direction is right. The details are off by about forty years, and the correction sharpens the indictment.
The bulls of 1493, chiefly Alexander VI’s Inter caetera, are partition instruments. They draw a line in the Atlantic and divide the unclaimed world between two Catholic crowns, with a carve-out for lands already held by a Christian prince. The Treaty of Tordesillas moved the line the following year. Those documents assume a right of conquest more than they argue for one.
The arguing was done earlier. On 18 June 1452, Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, authorizing Afonso V of Portugal, in the standard English rendering, “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ wherever found, to seize their kingdoms and goods, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. Romanus Pontifex followed in January 1455 and extended the grant along the African coast. LaDuke’s word “vanquished” is in the text. She has simply attached it to the wrong document, in the wrong decade, aimed at the wrong continent. The license to enslave Africans predates the license to divide America, and the Atlantic slave trade has a papal paper trail older than Columbus’s first voyage.
The harsher of two doctrines
The correction that matters most is one almost nobody makes, and it makes the church look worse rather than better.
The proposition that a non-Christian forfeits all right to his land entered the record as one side of a live dispute among canon lawyers, and it never became settled Catholic teaching. Around 1250, Pope Innocent IV, himself a formidable jurist, addressed the question directly in his commentary on the decretal Quod super his: is it lawful to invade a land that infidels possess? His answer was that non-Christians hold legitimate dominion and property under natural law and may choose their own rulers, though he reserved a papal right to intervene against violations of natural law and to send armed force where missionaries were barred. He was no liberal, and he still held that unbelief by itself forfeits nothing. His student Hostiensis took the opposite line, holding that with the coming of Christ all honor, rule, and jurisdiction passed to the faithful, and that infidels retained nothing.
The Spanish crown chose Hostiensis. The Requerimiento of 1513, read aloud in Spanish to people who could not understand it and sometimes to empty beaches, is the operational form of that choice. Bartolomé de las Casas spent his life attacking it, and Francisco de Vitoria at Salamanca rejected the papal donation as a valid title altogether, arguing in 1539 that the peoples of the Americas held true dominion. Paul III had already declared in Sublimis Deus in 1537 that they were rational men who must not be deprived of liberty or property. In 1550 and 1551 the crown convened a formal debate at Valladolid between Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over whether conquest was just.
There is one more turn of the knife. The proposition that dominion requires a state of grace, so that a sinner or an unbeliever forfeits all lawful ownership, was John Wyclif’s, and the Council of Constance condemned it as error in 1415. Some scholars trace the theory behind the Requerimiento to that condemned doctrine as much as to Hostiensis. A hundred years after Rome anathematized the principle, Christian kings were using a version of it to take a hemisphere.
This makes the case against them stronger. A monolith cannot be blamed for having no alternative. A menu can. The harshest available reading was selected, over documented objection, by people who had heard the counterargument and preferred the profit. That is choice, and choice is where culpability lives.
The part that is happening now
LaDuke says the process is not historical, that it continues. She is right, and the evidence is stronger and more checkable than anything in her etymology.
In 1823, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the doctrine of discovery into American law. Native nations were rightful occupants of the soil with a just claim to possession, he held, but discovery gave exclusive title to the discovering European power, and that title passed to Great Britain and then to the United States. Tribes retained a right of occupancy; the fee belonged to the sovereign. It is standard first-year reading in American property courses.
In 1955, in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, the Supreme Court held that aboriginal title not specifically recognized by Congress may be extinguished by the government without compensation, because it is not property within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. The Justice Department’s own litigation guidance still cites it. That is 1955, and it is operative law.
In 2005, in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority that the Oneida could not reassert sovereignty over land they had bought back on the open market. The first footnote of the opinion states plainly that under the doctrine of discovery, fee title to lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived vested in the sovereign.
In 2020, McGirt v. Oklahoma held that the Creek reservation had never been disestablished, which meant a large share of eastern Oklahoma, Tulsa included, remained Indian country. Two years later, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the Court held five to four that states share jurisdiction with the federal government over crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians in Indian country. Justice Gorsuch, who had written McGirt, dissented and said the Court had wilted.
That is the argument LaDuke wants, and it has docket numbers. Anyone who hears “the papal bulls of the 1490s” can reply that 1493 was a long time ago. Nobody can say that about a footnote from 2005.
What the Vatican did and did not do
On 30 March 2023, the Vatican’s dicasteries for culture and education and for promoting integral human development issued a joint statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery. It acknowledged that the fifteenth-century bulls failed to reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples, said they had been manipulated by competing colonial powers to justify immoral acts, and stated that they had never been expressions of Catholic faith.
Indigenous organizations noted immediately that repudiating a concept is not rescinding a document, and that shifting blame toward the colonial powers reads as an attempt to limit liability. Whatever one makes of that, the practical point is simple: the statement has no effect whatsoever on Johnson v. M’Intosh. Rome cannot vacate a Supreme Court opinion. The doctrine left the church five centuries ago and has been living in American property law ever since, where it pays no rent and cannot be evicted by anyone but Congress or the Court.
Recovery is not return
LaDuke closes by saying that people have recovered from the Christian colonial process and returned to the people they originally were.
The first half is documented and remarkable. The second half is a romance, and it undersells the achievement.
Consider the Myaamia, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The last speakers of Myaamiaataweenki died in the mid-twentieth century, and the language went silent. Daryl Baldwin, a tribal citizen born into that silence, went and got a linguistics degree so he could read David Costa’s work, and the two of them spent decades pulling the language out of archives: missionary notebooks, wordlists, mission records, roughly two hundred and fifty years of documents scattered across North American collections. Baldwin and his wife raised four children in the language at their kitchen table starting in 1991. The Miami Tribe and Miami University built what became the Myaamia Center in 2001. The database now holds more than a hundred thousand words and phrases. Baldwin has grandchildren who have never known a time when nobody spoke it.
Now listen to how the people who did it describe it. Costa says he does not know whether what they speak now is the same language spoken two hundred years ago, only that it is a language. Baldwin says people are not fluent, they are using it, and that the community has come out of a vacuum into a period of revitalization. That is a builder’s account, careful and unsentimental, and it is stronger than a claim of return. Nobody went back. People made something, out of documents produced largely by the institutions that had tried to erase the thing being documented, which is the sharpest reversal in this whole story.
“Returned to the people they originally were” also inverts into a trap. It is the settler fantasy of the frozen native turned inside out, the notion that authenticity lies in an unchanged past and that anything altered is diminished. Living traditions do not work that way. The religious half of the claim runs into a similar difficulty. Large numbers of Native people in the United States are Christian, and Native Christianity has its own long institutional history. The Native American Church, chartered in 1918, is openly and deliberately both. Framing recovery as a departure from Christianity writes those people out of their own communities.
The word that actually indicts
The true root does work the invented one never could.
Colere puts the settler’s own vocabulary on the record. The word he chose for himself was farmer. A verb of husbandry, of tending and guarding and revering, went without embarrassment onto the act of seizure. That verb also throws off culture, so the quality colonizers insisted the dispossessed lacked shares a syllable with the name colonizers gave themselves. There is a third turn, quieter and sharper. By the fourth century the colonus had become a tenant registered to an estate for tax purposes and forbidden to leave it; the constitution of Constantine preserved at Codex Theodosianus 5.17.1, dated 332, orders fugitive coloni returned to their origin and their back tax paid. How far that status ran toward serfdom is contested, and Boudewijn Sirks has spent a career warning against reading the later codes backward into the earlier ones. The bare fact holds regardless: the word for settler also named a man who could not walk away. The arrangement deforms the people holding the deed. That is a harder claim than digestion and a truer one, and it is available to anyone with a Latin dictionary.
Even so, the word-origins are the weakest instrument on the table, and I would put them last.
Dates in the fifteenth century invite a reply that costs nothing to make: 1493 was a long time ago. Docket numbers refuse that reply. Tee-Hit-Ton is 1955, and the Justice Department still cites it in its own litigation guidance. Sherrill is 2005, and the doctrine sits in the opinion’s first footnote. Castro-Huerta is 2022, and every justice in that five-vote majority still sits on the Court. A grievance about Alexander VI can be filed under history. A citation from four years ago cannot.
Read in that order the evidence answers three objections in sequence. Dum Diversas in its own language answers the charge of exaggeration, since no paraphrase is uglier than a pope authorizing perpetual servitude in writing. The choice of Hostiensis over Innocent IV answers the excuse that nobody knew better at the time, because someone did, in print, and lost. Ginsburg’s footnote answers the objection that all of this is finished. Brutality, intent, continuity.
What the wendigo does, no Latin can. LaDuke reached for a foreign root when the figure she needed was already hers, and the cannibal that grows hungrier the more it eats is the right shape for an extraction economy in a way that a farmer’s verb never will be. Keep it for that argument, where it belongs.
The correction costs a piece of body horror, and vividness is real currency. What it buys is a floor that holds when a hostile reader steps on it.
The reading room
In 2015 a man sat in the archive of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, copying words out of paper written down by people who wanted his language gone.
What he was building had never existed before. He assembled it out of the enemy’s paperwork, taught it to his children, then to his grandchildren, who will grow up assuming it was always there. Call that whatever you like. It is more interesting than digestion, and it is true.
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