The Rights of New World Natives in the Abbé Paulmier’s <i>Mémoires</i>

ABSTRACT In his 1664 work, Mémoires touchant l’etablissement d’une mission chrestienne dans le troisième monde, the Abbé Jean Paulmier petitioned Pope Alexander VII for the privilege of establishing a mission in the unexplored territory known on maps of the time as Terra australis, the Southern Land. Unusual for the time, Paulmier was concerned for the rights of native inhabitants of this land and invoked the customary law of ius Gentium to make the case that, as original inhabitants of their land, natives have the right to ownership of it and to the individual exercise of their own free will. Ius gentium specifies this package of individual rights, but natives claim them through their unique relationship with the land they inhabit.