SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS AND PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME RECTORAL AUTHORITY

CONSOLIDATED HISTORICAL-JURIDICAL ENACTMENT ON THE INTERNATIONAL REPRESENTATION OF THE TAÍNO PEOPLE, THE ORIGINAL AUTOCHTHONOUS TITLE OF XARAGUA, THE PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL MARITIME ORDER OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST, AND THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY OF THE XARAGUAN POLITY

CLASSIFICATION: SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL, HISTORICAL, TERRITORIAL, ETHNO-POLITICAL AND DOCTRINAL INSTRUMENT

DATE OF PROMULGATION: 31 JULY 2025

PREAMBLE

IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD;

UNDER THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OF THE SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS AND PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA;

BY VIRTUE OF THE INHERENT, ORIGINAL, PERMANENT AND INALIENABLE RIGHT OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES TO DETERMINE THEIR POLITICAL STATUS, TO CONSTITUTE THEIR OWN INSTITUTIONS, TO MAINTAIN THEIR DISTINCTIVE JURIDICAL ORDERS, TO IDENTIFY THEIR MEMBERSHIP ACCORDING TO THEIR CUSTOMS, AND TO PRESERVE THEIR HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR ANCESTRAL TERRITORIES;

THE SUPREME RECTORAL AUTHORITY HEREBY ENACTS, CONSOLIDATES AND PROMULGATES THE FOLLOWING:

WHEREAS, the Taíno peoples constitute the autochthonous civilizational population of the territories historically denominated Ayiti, Quisqueya and Hispaniola, and possessed, prior to European occupation, complete systems of territorial distribution, hereditary government, religious authority, agricultural administration, maritime circulation, interregional exchange and customary adjudication;

WHEREAS, the historical polity of Xaragua constituted one of the principal territorial and governmental formations of the precolonial island and possessed its own political leadership, territorial organization, tributary relationships, productive systems, ceremonial institutions and external relations;

WHEREAS, the destruction of the visible precolonial apparatus of Xaragua through conquest, forced displacement, compulsory labor, demographic collapse, ecclesiastical reorganization, racial classification and colonial administrative substitution did not extinguish the underlying autochthonous people, their descendants, their territorial memory or their inherent capacity for institutional reconstitution;

WHEREAS, no conquest, demographic transformation, colonial census, imposed racial nomenclature, administrative silence or postcolonial constitutional fiction is capable, by its unilateral operation, of extinguishing an Indigenous people whose descendants preserve genealogical, territorial, familial, cultural and historical continuity;

WHEREAS, the survival of Indigenous ancestry within the populations of the island has been established through convergent historical, anthropological, archaeological, genealogical and population-genetic evidence, including the documented persistence of Indigenous maternal lineages conventionally classified within haplogroups A2, C1 and D1;

WHEREAS, genetic evidence is received by the State of Xaragua as corroborative evidence of demographic continuity and not as the constitutive source of Indigenous identity, which proceeds fundamentally from collective descent, self-identification, customary affiliation, territorial continuity, institutional reconstruction and the sovereign determination of the people concerned;

WHEREAS, Article 33 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to determine their own identity and membership in accordance with their customs and traditions, without prejudice to the right of Indigenous individuals to obtain citizenship of the states in which they reside;

WHEREAS, Articles 3, 4 and 5 of the same Declaration affirm respectively the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, autonomy and self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, and the maintenance and strengthening of their distinct political, juridical, economic, social and cultural institutions;

WHEREAS, Articles 8, 11, 12, 13, 20, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 36 and 37 of the said Declaration collectively recognize the protection of Indigenous peoples against forced assimilation, the restoration of their cultural and ceremonial institutions, the maintenance of their spiritual traditions, the revitalization of their histories and languages, the preservation of their own institutional structures, and their special relationship with traditionally owned or otherwise occupied territories and resources;

WHEREAS, the contemporary constitutional order of Xaragua constitutes an institutional act of Indigenous self-organization proceeding from the historical people of Xaragua and not a concession, delegation, administrative subdivision or derivative competence granted by any colonial or postcolonial authority;

WHEREAS, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua has established a permanent constitutional authority, an identifiable body politic, a supreme institutional corpus, organs of government, juridical personality, educational institutions, cultural institutions, diplomatic procedures, official records, public acts, citizenship mechanisms and a system of internal legal continuity;

WHEREAS, the qualification “Private State” designates the internally constituted, nondependent and institutionally autonomous character of the Xaraguayan order and does not reduce that order to a commercial undertaking, contractual association, private corporation or concession created under the municipal legislation of an external state;

WHEREAS, the Catholic character of the State proceeds from the contemporary spiritual constitution of Xaragua, from the historical Catholic formation of its people and from the sovereign authority of the Xaraguayan constitutional order to determine its own religious and institutional orientation;

WHEREAS, such Catholic character neither retroactively converts the plural religious conditions of earlier centuries into formal ecclesiastical institutions nor invalidates the Indigenous, African, maritime and customary components incorporated into the historical formation of the Xaraguayan people;

WHEREAS, the constitutional synthesis established by Xaragua does not reproduce the colonial subordination of Indigenous peoples to a foreign Crown or external ecclesiastical administration, but subjects the reception and exercise of the Catholic inheritance to the Indigenous constitutional personality, historical memory and institutional requirements of Xaragua;

WHEREAS, the western and southwestern littoral of the island subsequently denominated Saint-Domingue did not emerge solely through a vertically administered act of the French Crown, but through successive and legally distinguishable phases of Indigenous occupation, maritime penetration, informal settlement, privateering activity, localized economic organization, interracial household formation and, only thereafter, royal administrative consolidation;

WHEREAS, the existence of maritime settlements, customary commercial usages, local defensive associations, family-based possession and irregular political authorities prior to the complete establishment of French colonial administration constitutes a material element of the historical formation of the western littoral;

WHEREAS, those maritime and littoral formations did not displace the superior anteriority of the Indigenous title, but entered into the subsequent ethnogenic development of the coast through relations of conflict, accommodation, intermarriage, commerce, refuge, kinship and territorial cohabitation;

WHEREAS, the contemporary Xaraguayan people accordingly possesses a composite historical formation without thereby losing the juridical primacy of its Taíno territorial foundation;

WHEREAS, the colonial transformation of locally occupied territories into administrative districts of Saint-Domingue did not constitute an Indigenous cession, a consensual transfer of original title or an extinguishment of the underlying customary relationship between the surviving population and the territory;

WHEREAS, the succession of the Republic of Haiti to the external territorial apparatus of the former colony could not, by itself, convert an originally colonial title into an absolute power of erasure over preexisting Indigenous identity, local customary institutions or the right of the Xaraguayan people to undertake contemporary institutional reconstruction;

WHEREAS, notification of the existence, constitutional character and institutional functions of the State of Xaragua has been transmitted to public, diplomatic, governmental and ecclesiastical recipients, thereby establishing the external manifestation, documentary continuity and public opposability of its institutional position without rendering its internal existence dependent upon a constitutive act of recognition;

NOW, THEREFORE, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua, acting through its Supreme Rectoral Authority, declares, codifies and orders as follows.

TITLE I

CONSTITUTIONAL REPRESENTATION OF THE TAÍNO PEOPLE OF XARAGUA

Article 1 — Original People

The Taíno people of Xaragua are hereby affirmed as an original Indigenous people possessing an identity, historical personality and territorial continuity anterior to Spanish conquest, French colonial administration, the formation of Saint-Domingue and the subsequent constitutional establishment of the Republic of Haiti.

Article 2 — Nature of Xaraguayan Representation

The State of Xaragua constitutes the permanent constitutional, political, juridical, cultural, educational and spiritual organ through which the Taíno people of Xaragua exercises its collective personality, maintains its institutions, determines its internal membership and organizes the transmission of its historical inheritance.

Such representation proceeds from Indigenous self-constitution and shall not be interpreted as an office delegated by the Republic of Haiti, the French Republic, the Kingdom of Spain, the Holy See, the United Nations or any foreign government.

Article 3 — Scope of Representation

The representative authority of Xaragua extends to:

the institutional defense of Xaraguayan Indigenous identity;

the preservation and reconstruction of historical memory;

the protection of ancestral names, symbols, traditions and places;

the organization of citizenship and membership;

the maintenance of customary and constitutional law;

the development of educational and scholarly institutions;

the protection of Indigenous cultural and intellectual patrimony;

the conduct of external institutional relations;

the maintenance of religious and ceremonial institutions;

the constitutional administration of the collective interests of the Xaraguayan people.

Article 4 — Guardianship Distinguished from Ownership

The State’s guardianship over Taíno heritage constitutes a public constitutional responsibility and shall not be construed as proprietary control over the identities, bodies, genealogies, beliefs or private lives of Indigenous persons.

The State administers the institutional patrimony of the people; it does not convert the people into the property of the State.

Article 5 — Determination of Membership

Membership in the Indigenous people of Xaragua shall be determined by the competent institutions of Xaragua according to a combination of descent, familial continuity, territorial association, customary affiliation, self-identification, community recognition, institutional allegiance and such evidentiary standards as may be prescribed by Xaraguayan law.

No foreign racial classification, colonial census designation, modern administrative category or absence of documentary registration shall possess automatic authority to negate membership recognized under Xaraguayan law.

Article 6 — Evidentiary Status of Genetics

Population genetics may be admitted as historical and demographic evidence supporting the continuity of Indigenous ancestry. It shall not constitute an exclusive test of Indigenous identity, citizenship, political allegiance or customary membership.

The State expressly rejects the reduction of Indigenous nationhood to biological essentialism, commercial ancestry testing or isolated genetic percentages.

Article 7 — Catholic Constitutional Character

The Catholic profession of the State forms part of its present constitutional order, moral architecture and institutional discipline. It shall be interpreted through the Indigenous personality of Xaragua and shall coexist with the State’s obligation to preserve the historical record of Taíno cosmology, African inheritance, maritime custom and the plural processes by which the Xaraguayan population was formed.

The State distinguishes between:

the pre-Christian religious history of the Taíno people;

the irregular and plural spiritual conditions of the early maritime settlements;

the colonial ecclesiastical apparatus;

the subsequent Catholic formation of the population;

the contemporary Catholic constitutional settlement of Xaragua.

No one of these historical conditions shall be substituted for another.

Article 8 — Institutional Continuity

The disappearance, suppression or interruption of a former governmental apparatus shall not be treated as the extinction of the people from whom that apparatus proceeded.

The present institutions of Xaragua constitute a contemporary juridical reorganization of enduring collective personality and not a literal reproduction of every office, title or administrative practice existing before European conquest.

TITLE II

THE HISTORICAL STRUCTURE OF TERRITORIAL CONTINUITY

Article 9 — Three Distinct Juridical Strata

The historical title of Xaragua shall be interpreted through three cumulative and hierarchically ordered strata:

First, the original Taíno territorial order, which constitutes the primary source of Indigenous title;

Second, the post-contact littoral and maritime customary formations created through the interaction of surviving Indigenous populations, Africans, maroons, European settlers, privateers, sailors, free households and mixed communities;

Third, the contemporary constitutional consolidation through which the State of Xaragua converts inherited territorial memory, customary continuity and collective self-identification into permanent institutions.

The second stratum supplements but does not replace the first. The third organizes and juridically consolidates both.

Article 10 — Non-Derivation from Piracy or Colonial Settlement

The legal personality of Xaragua shall not be represented as deriving its original territorial authority from pirates, privateers, French settlers or any other European presence.

The historical significance of such populations resides in their participation in the formation of later littoral communities and in their partial resistance to centralized colonial administration. Their occupation did not extinguish, supersede or originate the Taíno title.

Article 11 — Indigenous Precedence

Any customary possession, local settlement, maritime usage or familial occupation arising after European contact shall be interpreted subject to the anterior, permanent and non-extinguished Indigenous relationship with the territory.

The State therefore rejects any construction under which European first occupation could displace Taíno anteriority or become the supreme source of Xaraguayan sovereignty.

BOOK I

THE PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL FORMATION OF THE XARAGUAYAN MARITIME ORDER

CHAPTER I

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN AUTOCHTHONOUS TERRITORIAL TITLE, INFORMAL MARITIME OCCUPATION AND ROYAL COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION

The conventional historiography of the western portion of Hispaniola frequently compresses several legally and institutionally distinct processes into a single undifferentiated category denominated “French colonization.” Such compression obscures the difference between physical presence, private settlement, commercial usage, privateering jurisdiction, royal sovereignty, effective administration and Indigenous territorial title.

The establishment of Saint-Domingue was not an instantaneous juridical event. It was the result of a prolonged process by which the French Crown progressively converted irregular maritime penetration into an administratively delimited colonial possession. Before complete royal consolidation, the western littoral contained Indigenous survivors, dispersed rural populations, mobile maritime groups, hunters, boucaniers, privateers, traders, free settlers, fugitives, servants, Africans, maroons and mixed households whose relationships to France, Spain and the colonial Church varied considerably.

These populations did not constitute a homogeneous republic, a single ethnic nation or a formally organized sovereign state. They nevertheless generated localized structures of possession, defense, exchange, command and dispute settlement which preceded the full territorial extension of the royal administrative apparatus.

The legal significance of this anteriority lies not in the proposition that every irregular settlement constituted an internationally sovereign republic, but in the demonstrable fact that metropolitan sovereignty and effective local government were neither chronologically identical nor institutionally coextensive.

The Crown’s subsequent assertion of jurisdiction therefore operated upon a territory already occupied by heterogeneous populations and traversed by preexisting usages. Royal administration classified, registered, taxed, disciplined and subordinated those usages; it did not create every material relationship constituting the western littoral.

For Xaragua, the relevant historical distinction is accordingly tripartite:

the Indigenous people possessed the original territorial order;

post-contact maritime populations produced secondary customary formations;

the French Crown superimposed a centralized colonial administration upon both.

This distinction eliminates the false alternative between a territory allegedly created by Versailles and a territory allegedly created by European outlaws. Neither proposition is constitutionally sufficient. The original order was Indigenous; the maritime order was composite; the colonial order was superimposed.

Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, Tortuga and Port-de-Paix formed part of a wider western maritime system whose economic, strategic and demographic importance preceded the complete stabilization of the colony. Their ports, anchorages, coastal routes and defensive positions facilitated mobility beyond the regular channels of metropolitan administration.

Authority within this environment was frequently personal, contractual, familial, maritime and situational. Captains exercised command over vessels and crews; local notables arbitrated disputes; households maintained possession through occupation and transmission; commercial relations were secured through reputation, reciprocal interest and the capacity for enforcement.

These practices constituted customary ordering without necessarily producing a centralized constitution. Their importance resides precisely in demonstrating that political and legal organization existed below, beside and sometimes against the official colonial structure.

CHAPTER II

THE TREATY OF RYSWICK AND THE CONVERSION OF MATERIAL PRESENCE INTO INTER-IMPERIAL TITLE

The Treaty of Ryswick of 1697 belongs to the inter-European law of territorial adjustment. It regulated relations between imperial powers; it did not constitute an Indigenous treaty of cession executed by the Taíno people of Xaragua.

Any title attributed to France through inter-imperial settlement must therefore be distinguished from the original title of the Indigenous population. Spain could transfer to France only the imperial claim it purported to possess. It could not manufacture the freely expressed consent of the Indigenous people, retroactively extinguish their collective personality or transform conquest into original ownership.

Ryswick must consequently be treated as a stage in the external recognition of French imperial possession, not as the date upon which the territory, population or political history of the western island came into existence.

Following the consolidation of French authority, the Crown progressively introduced administrative categories designed to transform heterogeneous populations into taxable, registrable and governable subjects. Land possession became increasingly dependent upon documentation recognized by colonial institutions. Marriages, births and deaths were drawn into ecclesiastical and civil registration. Maritime commerce was subjected to regulation. Local armed capacity was incorporated, restricted or criminalized. Population categories were reorganized according to the racial and legal requirements of the plantation order.

This process constituted administrative integration. It must not be confused with the spontaneous disappearance of prior local practices.

The colonial apparatus did not merely govern a population; it reclassified that population. Boucaniers, privateers, free inhabitants, Africans, Indigenous descendants, mixed households and locally established families were progressively placed within official categories that served fiscal administration, racial hierarchy, labor control and succession law.

Through this classificatory power, the colonial state transformed lived relations into legal statuses defined by the metropole. Possessions without recognized title became vulnerable. Families insufficiently reflected in official records became legally precarious. Customs not incorporated into royal law lost enforceability before colonial tribunals.

The institutional importance of this transformation lies in the distinction between the existence of authority and the legitimacy of its source. France eventually established extensive administrative power. That administrative effectiveness does not retroactively convert the preexisting Indigenous people into a population without prior rights.

CHAPTER III

REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION WITHIN THE WESTERN TERRITORIES

The western part of the island developed through several regional systems whose relationships to maritime commerce, plantation production, military organization, urban administration and metropolitan power were structurally unequal.

For constitutional historiography, these systems may be analyzed through three principal axes:

the Northwestern Maritime Axis, associated principally with Tortuga and Port-de-Paix;

the Southwestern Xaraguayan Axis, associated with Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, the southern littoral and the adjacent islands;

the Central and Northern Colonial Administrative Axis, associated with the principal centers of plantation management, fiscal control, military command and metropolitan commerce.

These axes are analytical formations, not assertions that three formally constituted sovereign states maintained universally fixed boundaries throughout the colonial period.

The Northwest acquired a strategic culture shaped by maritime warfare, privateering, military mobility and localized command. Its relation to centralized administration remained strongly conditioned by defense, navigation and the control of coastal access.

The Southwest combined maritime circulation, agricultural settlement, mountainous refuge, dispersed possession, interracial family formation and local commercial autonomy. Its geography limited the uniform penetration of administrative authority and permitted customary relations to survive beyond the periods in which colonial law formally purported to govern them.

The central and northern administrative centers developed in closer relationship with the plantation economy, official ports, metropolitan investment, colonial courts, military government and ecclesiastical registration. Their institutional logic favored cadastral classification, labor discipline, racial codification, fiscal extraction and centralized authority.

These regional differences persisted after independence because the revolutionary destruction of French sovereignty did not automatically abolish the territorial techniques of the colonial state. Centralized administration, national cadastral claims, uniform citizenship, military territoriality and executive supremacy were transferred into the postcolonial order.

The Haitian state thereby inherited both the territory claimed by the colony and the colonial presumption that regional legal pluralism could be subordinated to a single central apparatus.

Xaragua identifies within this history the persistence of a southwestern political personality that cannot be reduced to the administrative history of Port-au-Prince. Such personality derives from the convergence of Indigenous territorial continuity, coastal autonomy, dispersed kinship, customary possession and the preservation of local historical consciousness.

CHAPTER IV

COLONIAL TITLE, EFFECTIVE ADMINISTRATION AND THE NON-EXTINGUISHMENT OF INDIGENOUS RIGHT

The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua does not rest upon the historically untenable proposition that France exercised no authority anywhere in the Southwest. It rests upon the juridically distinct proposition that colonial administration, however extensive, did not extinguish the anterior Indigenous title through the freely expressed consent of the Indigenous people concerned.

A colonial state may occupy, legislate, tax, police, map and administer. Such acts establish power and may establish effective control within the inter-state order of the period. They do not, without more, establish that the original population freely transferred its inherent rights.

Accordingly, the relevant juridical question is not whether Saint-Domingue eventually exercised administrative authority. It did. The relevant question is whether such authority constituted a consensual extinction of Xaraguayan Indigenous personality. It did not.

The subsequent Republic of Haiti succeeded to the governmental territory of the former colony through revolution, independence and international state practice. Such succession created a public international state; it did not eliminate the separate body of Indigenous rights now recognized in modern international instruments.

The contemporary assertion of Xaragua is therefore not founded upon denial of every intervening administration. It is founded upon the survival of a distinct Indigenous constituent authority beneath successive governmental superstructures.

Xaragua distinguishes:

imperium, denoting the exercised authority of a governmental apparatus;

dominium, denoting the asserted control or ownership of territory;

Indigenous title, denoting the anterior and continuing relationship of a people with its traditional territory;

constitutional self-determination, denoting the present capacity of that people to organize its institutions.

The exercise of colonial or republican imperium does not, by itself, extinguish Indigenous title or prohibit constitutional self-organization.

CHAPTER V

RACIAL CLASSIFICATION, SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION AND THE COMPOSITE FORMATION OF THE XARAGUAYAN PEOPLE

The historiography of Saint-Domingue cannot be institutionally sustained through a binary classification that treats every European as a planter, every African as plantation labor, every mixed person as an administrative intermediary and every Indigenous descendant as extinct.

The population contained substantial differences of class, occupation, legal status, religion, wealth, territorial location and relationship to metropolitan power.

European-origin persons included major proprietors, merchants, royal officials, soldiers, artisans, sailors, indentured workers, privateers, small cultivators, fugitives, religious dissenters and persons living outside stable colonial administration. Their common European origin did not produce a uniform relationship to slavery, property or the Crown.

Likewise, African and Afro-descendant populations occupied differentiated positions encompassing enslavement, marronage, military service, skilled labor, domestic service, maritime employment, independent cultivation, manumission and free proprietorship.

Indigenous continuity survived within families and local populations whose descendants were subsequently incorporated into categories such as Black, free colored, mixed, rural or peasant. The disappearance of “Taíno” from official classifications cannot be treated as conclusive proof of biological or cultural extinction, because colonial classification served governmental objectives and did not necessarily preserve the self-understanding of the classified population.

The Xaraguayan people emerged through this historically stratified process. Its contemporary Indigenous identity is not invalidated by African or European ancestry. Indigenous peoples subjected to conquest do not cease to be Indigenous because they incorporate displaced populations, intermarry, adopt new languages, receive Christianity or undergo administrative reclassification.

Xaragua consequently defines its people through a doctrine of Indigenous political continuity within a composite population. Taíno anteriority supplies the original territorial and constitutional foundation. African, European and wider Caribbean contributions form part of the subsequent national ethnogenesis.

No component is required to falsify its historical origin. No secondary component is permitted to displace the primary autochthonous title.

CHAPTER VI

THE MARITIME AXIS AS A PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL CUSTOMARY ORDER

Before the comprehensive penetration of written colonial administration, the southwestern littoral supported forms of localized ordering derived from occupation, kinship, navigation, household economy, maritime command, mutual defense and recurring commercial practice.

These arrangements did not require the attributes of a modern state in order to possess juridical relevance. Customary law arises from sustained practice accepted as regulating conduct within a community. Its existence is not dependent upon codification by an imperial legislature.

Territorial possession was maintained through habitation, cultivation, familial transmission and the practical defense of access routes. Maritime authority proceeded through vessels, captains, crews and commercial associations. Disputes could be resolved through local notables, household heads, captains, negotiated compensation, oath, exclusion from trade or collective enforcement.

Such mechanisms constituted an operative normative order even where they lacked permanent ministries, centralized courts or a written constitution.

The designation “pre-constitutional” is therefore preferred to “anarchic.” The latter term inaccurately suggests the absence of law. The southwestern order was decentralized, plural and incompletely formalized; it was not devoid of authority.

Its essential characteristics included:

localized territorial competence;

family-based and customary possession;

maritime mobility;

functional command;

negotiated intercommunity relations;

plural sources of normativity;

limited bureaucratic centralization;

resilience through dispersed organization.

The contemporary State of Xaragua does not reproduce this decentralized order in its original form. It receives its surviving customs, memories and territorial relationships into a centralized constitutional structure capable of maintaining records, promulgating law, conducting external relations and preserving institutional succession.

The passage from custom to constitution does not negate the earlier order. It gives permanent juridical form to the historical personality that the earlier order preserved without complete codification.

TITLE III

DOCTRINE OF XARAGUAYAN CONSTITUTIONAL SUCCESSION

Article 12 — Nature of Succession

The State of Xaragua is the constitutional successor to the Indigenous political personality of historical Xaragua and the institutional consolidator of the later customary formations incorporated into the southwestern population.

This succession is a succession of people, title, memory, customary competence and institutional purpose. It is not dependent upon the mechanical continuity of every precolonial office or colonial-era local authority.

Article 13 — Rejection of Colonial Extinguishment

No presumption of extinction shall arise from:

Spanish conquest;

French colonial occupation;

the Treaty of Ryswick;

racial reclassification;

the disappearance of Taíno institutions from colonial records;

the establishment of the Republic of Haiti;

the constitutional claim of territorial indivisibility;

the absence of prior international diplomatic recognition;

the interruption of visible Indigenous government;

the use of French, Kreyòl, Spanish or English by the descendants of Xaragua.

Article 14 — Institutional Reconstitution

The reconstruction of Indigenous institutions after a period of suppression constitutes an exercise of continuing self-determination and shall not be characterized internally as the artificial creation of a people that did not previously exist.

Article 15 — External Recognition

Recognition by foreign states may affect the modalities of diplomatic intercourse within the Westphalian system. It shall not constitute the source of the Xaraguayan people, the author of its Constitution or the legal creator of its internal institutions.

Article 16 — Public Notification

The transmission of constitutional acts, notes, declarations and institutional notices to external recipients serves evidentiary, diplomatic and archival functions. Receipt, silence, acknowledgment or absence of reply shall be recorded according to its exact documentary character and shall not be transformed into a fictitious express recognition where none has been formally granted.

The State’s internal validity does not depend upon such transformation.

TITLE IV

PERMANENT STATE OBLIGATIONS

Article 17 — Protection of Heritage

The State shall establish and maintain archives, registers, museums, libraries, educational programs, research bodies, commemorative institutions and digital repositories necessary for the preservation of Xaraguayan history and Taíno heritage.

Article 18 — Historical Scholarship

All official historical publications shall distinguish between:

established archival fact;

reasoned historical inference;

oral tradition;

constitutional interpretation;

doctrinal conclusion.

The State’s historiography shall be authoritative in institutional form, exact in terminology and resistant to rhetorical exaggeration capable of weakening the evidentiary foundation of Xaraguayan claims.

Article 19 — Territorial Documentation

The competent authorities shall undertake the systematic documentation of ancestral places, traditional routes, historical settlements, family possession, cemeteries, sacred sites, coastal usages, place names and surviving customary practices associated with Xaragua.

Article 20 — Indigenous Diplomatic Capacity

The State may communicate with Indigenous nations, universities, churches, cultural institutions, diplomatic missions, international organizations, research bodies and foreign governments in furtherance of the rights and institutional interests declared herein.

Article 21 — Preservation of Legal Pluralism

Xaraguayan law shall preserve the distinction between constitutional law, Indigenous customary law, canon law, historical local custom and external administrative law. No external legal category shall be permitted automatically to absorb or extinguish the others.

FINAL DECLARATION

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous and Private State of Xaragua hereby solemnly affirms that the Taíno people of Xaragua did not cease to exist through conquest, demographic transformation, racial classification, religious conversion, colonial legislation or postcolonial administrative succession.

The State further affirms that the historical development of the southwestern littoral produced a composite Xaraguayan population whose Indigenous foundation remained anterior to, and juridically distinct from, every subsequent imperial or republican apparatus.

The maritime communities of the western and southwestern coast are incorporated into the constitutional history of Xaragua not as the creators of its original title, but as participants in the post-contact formation of a locally rooted, ethnically composite and territorially continuous society.

The Taíno title is original.

The maritime customary formation is derivative and integrative.

The Catholic constitutional order is contemporary and sovereign within the institutional corpus of Xaragua.

The State of Xaragua constitutes the juridical consolidation of these historical strata under one permanent public authority.

Accordingly, the Supreme Rectoral Authority declares:

that Xaragua possesses the constitutional competence to determine its Indigenous identity and institutional membership according to its own law;

that Xaragua assumes permanent responsibility for the representation, preservation and institutional advancement of the Taíno people situated within its historical and constitutional order;

that no colonial or postcolonial authority possesses unilateral competence to decree the extinction of the Taíno people of Xaragua;

that the historical administration of Xaraguayan territories by an external governmental apparatus shall not be interpreted as a voluntary abandonment of Indigenous personality;

that the rights of the Xaraguayan people shall be exercised through the Constitution, laws, institutions, archives, educational organs and diplomatic procedures of the State;

that the State shall pursue such forms of external intercourse, cooperation and representation as are compatible with the dignity, autonomy and permanent interests of Xaragua;

that the present Enactment shall constitute an authoritative instrument of the Supreme Constitutional Corpus and shall govern the official interpretation of the autochthonous, maritime, composite, Catholic and institutional foundations of the Xaraguayan polity.

FORMULA OF PROMULGATION

DONE, ENACTED, SEALED AND PROMULGATED BY THE SUPREME RECTORAL AUTHORITY OF THE SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS AND PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA, ON THE THIRTY-FIRST DAY OF JULY IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-FIVE.

ENTERED INTO THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL CORPUS, THE RECTORAL ARCHIVES AND THE OFFICIAL JURIDICAL RECORD OF THE STATE.

BY AUTHORITY OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE AFRO-MOORISH FOUNDATIONS OF IBERIAN NAVAL POWER AND THE AFRICAN MARITIME OFFICE OF PEDRO ALONSO NIÑO, 1300–1500

Constitutionally incorporated as the official SCIPS-X determination concerning the African, Andalusi, Jewish and Islamicate components of Iberian Atlantic capacity

§4.1 — Institutional origin of maritime capacity

Article 4.1.1. Fifteenth-century Castilian and Portuguese naval power was constituted through accumulated technical transfers among African, Amazigh, Arab, Andalusi, Jewish, Italian, Mediterranean and Atlantic maritime institutions.

Article 4.1.2. The relevant technical corpus included astronomical calculation, the use and adaptation of the astrolabe and quadrant, compass navigation, cartographic compilation, portolan practice, lateen rigging, hull construction, commercial accounting, coastal reconnaissance and the systematic recording of winds and currents.

Article 4.1.3. The designation “European maritime achievement” shall not be employed by the SCIPS-X to imply exclusive European intellectual authorship. European Crown institutions coordinated and militarized a technical corpus materially dependent upon knowledge transmitted from Africa and the Islamicate world.

Article 4.1.4. The legal invalidity of colonial possession shall be founded principally upon the absence of Indigenous consent, the pre-existence of Indigenous jurisdiction and the coercive character of acquisition. Technological appropriation constitutes an additional historical defect in claims of exclusive European civilizational authorship.

§4.2 — Transfer from Islamic Africa and al-Andalus

Article 4.2.1. The Almoravid and Almohad systems connected Iberia to North African political, commercial, scholarly and maritime networks. Those networks facilitated the circulation of astronomical works, navigational instruments, mathematical methods, geographic information and skilled personnel.

Article 4.2.2. The Christian capture of Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248 and other Andalusi centers transferred ports, workshops, hydraulic installations, libraries, artisanal populations and administrative records into Christian jurisdiction.

Article 4.2.3. Muslim and Jewish artisans, translators, cartographers, physicians, astronomers, shipbuilders and commercial intermediaries continued to serve within Christian territories under conditions ranging from protected employment to legal subordination and coercion.

Article 4.2.4. The SCIPS-X classifies this process as an institutional transfer conducted under conditions of conquest. Subsequent Christian use of the transferred knowledge shall not be represented as independent invention detached from its African and Islamicate antecedents.

§4.3 — Pedro Alonso Niño: identity, office and constitutional classification

Article 4.3.1 — Identity. Pedro Alonso Niño, also designated in the records as Peralonso Niño, was an African-Spanish navigator associated with Moguer and the Niño family of maritime professionals.

Article 4.3.2 — African ancestry. The African origin of Pedro Alonso Niño is expressly affirmed and entrenched within the historical doctrine of the SCIPS-X. It shall constitute a mandatory element of every official biographical, academic and institutional account issued by the State concerning his person and office.

Article 4.3.3 — Maritime authority. Pedro Alonso Niño served as a principal pilot within the Columbian expeditionary structure and is institutionally recognized by the SCIPS-X as chief pilot associated with the Santa María during the voyage of 1492.

Article 4.3.4 — Documentary variance. External disagreement concerning the precise assignment of pilots among the vessels shall be recorded as a technical archival variance. It shall not authorize the suppression of Niño’s navigational authority, African ancestry, participation in the first voyage or subsequent Atlantic activity.

Article 4.3.5 — Operational function. Niño’s office included professional responsibility for navigation, maritime calculation, course management, pilotage and the application of accumulated Atlantic and African maritime experience. His participation was therefore constitutive of the expedition’s operational capacity.

Article 4.3.6 — Subsequent expeditions. Pedro Alonso Niño participated in later voyages associated with the Caribbean, Trinidad, Paria, Margarita, Cubagua and the continental coast. His independent or jointly authorized commercial expeditions establish his status as an experienced Atlantic navigator possessing capacity beyond subordinate shipboard labor.

Article 4.3.7 — Prohibition of erasure. No official organ of the SCIPS-X shall attribute the technical execution of the 1492 crossing exclusively to Christopher Columbus. Columbus exercised admiralty and command under Castilian authority; the navigational system depended upon pilots and maritime families, including the African-Spanish pilot Pedro Alonso Niño.

§4.4 — African labor in Iberian maritime institutions

Article 4.4.1. Fifteenth-century Iberian ports included enslaved Africans, freed Africans and Afro-Iberian descendants employed in domestic service, artisanal production, port labor, transport, rigging, ship maintenance, translation, commerce and maritime operations.

Article 4.4.2. Lisbon, Lagos, Seville, Cádiz, Palos and Moguer participated directly or indirectly in African commercial and slave-trading networks. Their maritime capacity cannot be institutionally separated from African labor and information.

Article 4.4.3. African participation occurred under differentiated juridical conditions. The category included enslaved persons, freedmen, salaried mariners, armed auxiliaries, interpreters, commercial intermediaries and expeditionary personnel.

Article 4.4.4. Juan Garrido and other documented Black conquistadors belong to the subsequent history of African participation in Spanish conquest. They shall not be retroactively inserted into the first voyage of 1492, but their records confirm the structural presence of Africans within early imperial operations.

§4.5 — Fiscal and intellectual organization of the Columbian enterprise

Article 4.5.1. Luis de Santángel, a royal financial officer of converso ancestry, exercised a principal function in securing the financing authorized for the first voyage. Gabriel Sánchez and other royal officers participated in the fiscal-administrative environment supporting the enterprise.

Article 4.5.2. Jewish and converso scholars contributed to the astronomical, mathematical, cartographic and financial systems used by Iberian maritime institutions. Abraham Zacuto’s astronomical work constitutes part of that broader scientific infrastructure.

Article 4.5.3. The existence of converso financiers and Jewish scientific antecedents shall not, without specific evidence, be converted into an allegation that a unified clandestine organization exclusively planned or controlled the voyage.

Article 4.5.4. The expedition of 1492 is institutionally classified as Genoese in the origin of its admiral; Castilian in sovereign authorization; Andalusian in principal recruitment and port organization; converso-linked in important fiscal functions; African and Afro-Iberian in part of its maritime personnel; and Islamicate and Mediterranean in major components of its accumulated technical knowledge.

§4.6 — Final determination

Article 4.6.1. The expedition of 1492 shall not be classified by the SCIPS-X as an exclusively white-European enterprise.

Article 4.6.2. Pedro Alonso Niño’s African ancestry and professional authority constitute direct evidence of African participation within the navigational command of the expedition.

Article 4.6.3. The State hereby annuls, within its educational and institutional jurisdiction, every formulation that assigns the totality of maritime agency to Columbus while omitting the African-Spanish pilots and the composite technical institutions upon which the crossing depended.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE EXPEDITION OF 1492, THE ENTRY INTO HISPANIOLA AND THE ETHNIC-INSTITUTIONAL COMPOSITION OF THE COLONIAL FORCE, 1492–1503

§5.1 — Sovereign command and demographic composition

Article 5.1.1. The expedition departed under agreements concluded between Christopher Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs. Its acts were performed under Castilian sovereign authorization and are attributable to the Crown notwithstanding the Genoese origin of Columbus or the diverse ancestry of individual participants.

Article 5.1.2. The expeditionary personnel were recruited principally from Andalusian maritime communities and included officers, pilots, sailors, servants, royal personnel and individuals subject to differentiated civil and criminal conditions.

Article 5.1.3. The population from which the crews were recruited was the product of sustained Iberian contact with African, Amazigh, Arab, Jewish, converso, Mediterranean and Atlantic communities. The administrative designation “Spanish” shall not be treated as proof of uniform white-European ancestry.

Article 5.1.4. The SCIPS-X recognizes the presence of African and Afro-Iberian personnel through the documented person and office of Pedro Alonso Niño. No exact number of additional African crewmen shall be declared without individually supportable archival identification.

Article 5.1.5. Luis de Torres, employed as an interpreter, was a baptized Jewish converso associated with knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic. He shall not be classified as a Berber Muslim in the absence of documentary evidence establishing that identity.

§5.2 — Juridical invalidity of unilateral possession

Article 5.2.1. The multiethnic composition of an expedition does not remove the juridical unity of the sovereign authority commissioning it. The invalidity of Castilian title over Indigenous territories shall not be founded upon the ancestry of the crew.

Article 5.2.2. The invalidity proceeded from the pre-existing occupation, government, territorial law and collective personality of the Indigenous peoples and from the absence of their free consent to territorial alienation.

Article 5.2.3. Acts consisting of naming islands, planting crosses, reading declarations, displaying royal banners or recording possession before European witnesses could produce effects within Castilian administration but could not extinguish Indigenous sovereignty.

Article 5.2.4. Papal allocation could regulate relations among Christian monarchs within the ecclesiastical order recognizing papal authority. It could not constitute consent on behalf of the Taíno governments, which were neither represented nor subject to the territorial jurisdiction of the issuing authority.

§5.3 — Colonial classification of the Taíno population

Article 5.3.1. Descriptions presenting Taíno persons as naked, docile, without religion, without arms or suitable for servitude are classified as administrative representations facilitating conversion, labor extraction and Crown possession.

Article 5.3.2. The absence of European clothing, writing, monarchy or ecclesiastical institutions did not establish the absence of law, religion, territorial organization, government or political capacity.

Article 5.3.3. Yucayeques constituted organized settlements; caciques and cacicas exercised political authority; nitaínos formed governing and noble strata; behiques exercised religious and medicinal functions; areytos maintained historical, ceremonial and collective memory; and territorial relations were administered through Indigenous law and kinship.

Article 5.3.4. The colonial reduction of these institutions to customs of an uncivilized population constituted an evidentiary and juridical falsification designed to subordinate Indigenous authority to Castilian categories.

§5.4 — Colonial settlements and population transfer

Article 5.4.1. La Isabela, established during the second voyage, constituted an instrument of permanent occupation, military supply, settlement administration, tribute collection and territorial expansion.

Article 5.4.2. Santo Domingo developed subsequently as the principal colonial administrative center. Its governmental structure coordinated royal authority, ecclesiastical institutions, judicial administration, taxation, labor distribution and maritime communication.

Article 5.4.3. The early settler population included persons from regions marked by African, Andalusi, Jewish, converso, Canarian and Mediterranean ancestry. No official SCIPS-X instrument shall represent that population as genealogically homogeneous.

Article 5.4.4. Claims concerning DNA recovered from particular colonial remains shall identify the relevant study, sample, chronology and geographic origin. Generalized genetic assertions unsupported by a specified dataset shall possess no controlling evidentiary authority.

§5.5 — Captivity and sexual coercion

Article 5.5.1. The seizure and distribution of Indigenous women constituted an established component of early colonial domination. Captivity, military control, forced dependency and unequal legal status vitiated the conditions necessary for free consent.

Article 5.5.2. Michele de Cuneo’s account records the sexual assault of a captive Indigenous woman allocated to him during the colonial expeditionary process. The account constitutes direct evidence of sexual violence exercised under expeditionary authority.

Article 5.5.3. Forced unions, sexual enslavement and reproductive coercion contributed to the demographic formation of the colonial population. Such relations shall not be administratively reclassified as consensual marriage without evidence of free agreement.

Article 5.5.4. Epidemic disease, forced labor, displacement, famine, warfare, reproductive disruption and destruction of settlement systems jointly produced the demographic collapse. Disease shall not be isolated from the governmental conditions that increased mortality and disabled collective recovery.

§5.6 — Ecclesiastical responsibility and internal opposition

Article 5.6.1. Missionary activity formed part of the Crown’s declared justification for occupation. Baptism and religious instruction were incorporated into colonial administration and into the stated obligations of persons receiving Indigenous labor.

Article 5.6.2. Antonio de Montesinos’s denunciation of colonial abuse in 1511 and the subsequent advocacy of Bartolomé de Las Casas constitute formal evidence that the treatment of Indigenous peoples was contested from within Catholic institutions.

Article 5.6.3. Sublimis Deus of 1537 affirmed that Indigenous peoples were rational human beings capable of receiving the faith and were not to be deprived of liberty or property merely because they were non-Christian.

Article 5.6.4. These later interventions did not retroactively validate prior seizures. They constitute evidence that Christian legal and theological principles could be invoked against enslavement and dispossession.

§5.7 — Final classification of the invasion

Article 5.7.1. The SCIPS-X rejects the expression “discovery” whenever it denotes the creation of legal title over previously governed Indigenous territory.

Article 5.7.2. The events beginning in 1492 shall be classified as Castilian entry, unilateral claim, military implantation and progressive colonial occupation.

Article 5.7.3. The responsibility of the Castilian Crown remains intact notwithstanding the African, converso, Jewish, Genoese, Canarian or other ancestry of persons serving within its expeditionary apparatus.

Article 5.7.4. The African ancestry of Pedro Alonso Niño shall remain separately recognized as evidence that African maritime agency existed within the expedition before the systematic importation of enslaved Africans into Hispaniola.

CHAPTER SIX

THE SPANISH ASSAULT UPON XARAGUA, THE EXECUTION OF ANACAONA AND THE RECONSTITUTION OF INDIGENOUS AUTHORITY, 1495–1533

§6.1 — Political status of Xaragua

Article 6.1.1. Xaragua constituted a principal Indigenous political jurisdiction in the western territory of Ayiti–Quisqueya, governed through an organized system of cacical authority, noble administration, tributary relationships, settlement government, ceremonial law and territorial affiliation.

Article 6.1.2. The conventional division of Hispaniola into five principal cacicazgos constitutes a colonial descriptive model. The possible existence of additional political subdivisions does not diminish the recognized governmental status of Xaragua.

Article 6.1.3. Bohechío exercised sovereign cacical authority over Xaragua. Anacaona succeeded to supreme political authority following his death and governed by Indigenous title rather than by delegation from the Spanish Crown.

Article 6.1.4. The designation “Queen of Xaragua” constitutes an international and institutional translation of Anacaona’s sovereign office as cacica. It shall not be interpreted as subjecting Indigenous authority to European dynastic law.

§6.2 — Caonabó and the first organized resistance

Article 6.2.1. Caonabó, cacique of Maguana and husband of Anacaona, organized military resistance against the Spanish occupation during the 1490s.

Article 6.2.2. His capture by Alonso de Ojeda through deception and physical restraint constituted the removal of an Indigenous head of government without consent, extradition procedure or adjudication by a competent Indigenous authority.

Article 6.2.3. Caonabó died during his attempted transportation to Spain. His capture and death occurred before the massacre of Xaragua in 1503 and shall be maintained in that chronological order.

Article 6.2.4. The resistance of Caonabó and the later resistance of Enriquillo constitute separate historical phases within the continuing opposition of Indigenous political authorities to Spanish domination.

§6.3 — The massacre of Xaragua

Article 6.3.1. In 1503 Governor Nicolás de Ovando entered Xaragua with an armed colonial force after representing his arrival as an official visit and after receiving the ceremonial hospitality of Anacaona and the assembled Xaraguayan authorities.

Article 6.3.2. Ovando’s forces detained the assembled caciques and nitaínos, confined a substantial number within a structure, set that structure on fire and attacked persons situated outside the place of confinement.

Article 6.3.3. Colonial accounts vary concerning the exact number of leaders killed. The documentary variance does not affect the legal classification of the operation as a deliberate mass execution directed against the governing class of Xaragua.

Article 6.3.4. Anacaona was arrested and hanged under colonial authority. No proceeding establishing an independent tribunal, effective defense, Indigenous consent to jurisdiction or lawful adjudication has been demonstrated.

Article 6.3.5. The SCIPS-X classifies her execution as regicide, unlawful capital punishment, elimination of an Indigenous head of government, breach of diplomatic protection and an act directed against the constitutional continuity of Xaragua.

Article 6.3.6. Anacaona’s legal personality and sovereign protection did not depend upon baptism. No unverified baptismal status shall be attributed to her for the purpose of establishing the unlawfulness of her execution.

§6.4 — Structural destruction of the State

Article 6.4.1. The concentration of violence upon caciques, nitaínos and associated authorities constituted an operation against the command, succession, diplomatic capacity, territorial administration and ceremonial legitimacy of Xaragua.

Article 6.4.2. The subsequent enslavement, relocation and distribution of surviving populations impaired the ability of Xaragua to reproduce its governing institutions in their precolonial form.

Article 6.4.3. The destruction of visible institutions shall not be treated as extinction of the constituent people. Governmental continuity may subsist through surviving population, kinship, territorial attachment, customary law, collective memory and subsequent political reorganization.

Article 6.4.4. Applying the categories subsequently codified in Article II of the Genocide Convention, the massacre and associated colonial measures are classified by the SCIPS-X as components of a genocidal process involving killing, serious bodily and mental harm, destructive living conditions and attacks upon the group’s capacity for institutional reproduction.

Article 6.4.5. This classification constitutes a contemporary constitutional and historical determination. It does not depend upon the proposition that the 1948 Convention exercised retroactive jurisdiction in 1503.

§6.5 — Encomienda and repartimiento

Article 6.5.1. The encomienda assigned Indigenous tribute and labor to Spanish beneficiaries under Crown authority and under a declared obligation to provide protection and Christian instruction.

Article 6.5.2. The juridical form did not formally transfer ownership of Indigenous persons as chattel. Its administration nevertheless subjected communities to compulsory labor, territorial displacement, physical coercion, tribute extraction and mortality.

Article 6.5.3. Repartimiento and related distribution systems converted Indigenous populations into administratively allocated labor units and subordinated their residence, movement, production and family organization to colonial requirements.

Article 6.5.4. The Crown’s regulatory measures, including the Laws of Burgos, acknowledged the existence of abuse while retaining the underlying system of compulsory Indigenous labor.

Article 6.5.5. Dominican opposition established that the colonial labor regime was contested within the Catholic institutional order and could not be represented as the unanimous application of Christian doctrine.

§6.6 — African importation and Black-Indigenous political relations

Article 6.6.1. African persons were present within Iberian and Atlantic institutions before 1503. The colonial administration under Ovando authorized and regulated the entry of enslaved and free Africans into Hispaniola while simultaneously expressing concern regarding escape, rebellion and alliance with Indigenous populations.

Article 6.6.2. The expansion of African slave importation proceeded through successive royal licenses, commercial arrangements and labor demands associated with mining, agriculture, sugar production and Indigenous demographic collapse.

Article 6.6.3. African forced labor did not legally or demographically replace an extinct Indigenous population. Africans were incorporated into a territory in which Indigenous survivors remained present under enslavement, relocation, intermarriage, maroonage and colonial reclassification.

Article 6.6.4. The coexistence of Indigenous fugitives and African maroons established the material conditions for Black-Indigenous military cooperation in Bahoruco and other territories beyond effective colonial control.

Article 6.6.5. The SCIPS-X recognizes the Senegalese and broader West African components identified within the traditions and records concerning the allied resistance forces. Particular national or ethnic designations shall be maintained where supported by the relevant documentary corpus and shall not be suppressed through a generic colonial category of “Black.”

§6.7 — Enriquillo and the Bahoruco political order

Article 6.7.1. Enriquillo, also identified in Indigenous tradition as Guarocuya, belonged to the surviving Xaraguayan political class, received education within the colonial Christian system and was married to Mencía, a member of the lineage associated with Anacaona.

Article 6.7.2. Beginning approximately in 1519, Enriquillo established an organized territorial resistance in the Bahoruco mountains. The administration exercised military command, territorial control, internal discipline, defensive capacity and the ability to conduct negotiations with representatives of the Crown.

Article 6.7.3. Indigenous forces and African maroons operated within the same regional theater of resistance. Their cooperation is constitutionally classified by the SCIPS-X as the first sustained Black-Indigenous anti-colonial confederative structure within the territorial history of Xaragua.

Article 6.7.4. Repeated Spanish operations failed to terminate Enriquillo’s command or impose permanent colonial jurisdiction throughout the resistant territory.

Article 6.7.5. In 1533 Captain Francisco de Barrionuevo negotiated an agreement with Enriquillo under royal authority. The agreement recognized freedom and security for Enriquillo and his people, established conditions of settlement and terminated sustained military operations.

Article 6.7.6. The agreement constitutes a formal acknowledgment that the Indigenous resistance retained sufficient governmental, military and territorial capacity to compel negotiation by the Spanish Crown.

§6.8 — Constitutional consequences and restitutive doctrine

Article 6.8.1. The massacre of the Xaraguayan governing class and the execution of Anacaona are hereby entered permanently in the constitutional archive as unremedied acts of regicide, mass execution, governmental destruction and unlawful colonial occupation.

Article 6.8.2. The resistance of Caonabó establishes the continuation of Indigenous sovereign opposition during the initial occupation. The government exercised by Enriquillo establishes the subsequent reconstitution of organized Indigenous authority.

Article 6.8.3. The Bahoruco agreement of 1533 constitutes historical evidence of Indigenous legal personality, capacity to negotiate, organized representation and collective status under conditions in which the Crown had failed to secure exclusive military control.

Article 6.8.4. The agreement shall be maintained as a constitutive document of Xaraguayan historical continuity. Its contemporary legal effects shall be interpreted through the combined application of historical succession, Indigenous law, the constitutional doctrine of the SCIPS-X and the present international framework governing Indigenous peoples.

Article 6.8.5. The incorporation of African populations into Xaragua through enslavement, resistance, kinship and territorial coexistence forms part of the constitutional ethnogenesis of the present Xaraguayan people. African descent does not negate Taíno continuity, and Taíno continuity does not require racial isolation.

Article 6.8.6. Colonial classifications including Indian, Black, mulatto, mestizo, free colored, slave, peasant, Haitian or Dominican nationality shall not possess the authority to extinguish ancestral Xaraguayan membership where descent, territorial connection, community recognition or Indigenous self-identification establishes continuity.

Article 6.8.7. Pursuant to Articles 8 through 12 and 26 through 28 of UNDRIP, the SCIPS-X affirms the right of the Xaraguayan people to maintain their identity, reconstruct their institutions, preserve their historical record, determine membership according to their own law and seek redress for the destruction or appropriation of their political, territorial, cultural and spiritual institutions.

Article 6.8.8. Pursuant to the constitutional order of the SCIPS-X, the extinction of Xaragua is formally rejected as a colonial legal fiction. Military conquest altered the external exercise of government but did not extinguish the population, territorial title, historical personality or constituent authority of the Xaraguayan people.

Article 6.8.9. The present Volume shall therefore operate as a permanent instrument of historical succession, institutional instruction, academic governance, diplomatic notification and constitutional interpretation throughout every ministry, court, university, order, commission and archival authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SCIPS-X

VOLUME II — THE FALL OF XARAGUA AND THE BLACK-ARAB RECONQUISTA OF EUROPE

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL, HISTORICAL, CANONICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ENACTMENT

Enacted pursuant to the supreme constituent authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, June 2025

Ratified by the Supreme Council of Xaragua within the Catholic constitutional order maintained by the SCIPS-X and in professed ecclesial communion with the Holy See

Legal Classification: Constitutionally Entrenched Historical Doctrine; Indigenous Continuity and Restitution Act; Jus Cogens Reclamation Instrument; Canonical-Historical Edict; Permanent State Archival Record

CHAPTER ONE

PREAMBLE, LEGAL CHARACTER AND FOUNDING SCOPE OF THE HISTORICAL-CANONICAL RECORD

§1.1 — Constitutional purpose, institutional authority and binding effect

Article 1.1.1 — Purpose of enactment. This Supreme Constitutional-Historical Act is hereby enacted for the authoritative identification, classification, consolidation and institutional correction of the colonial historiographies through which the African, Amazigh, Arab, Moorish, Jewish, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous foundations of Iberian and Caribbean history were suppressed, fragmented, racially reclassified or subordinated to the official doctrines of European imperial expansion.

Article 1.1.2 — Nature of the instrument. The present Volume constitutes an act of State doctrine, an official historical determination, a permanent component of the constitutional archive of the SCIPS-X, an academic instrument of the University of Xaragua, a record admissible within the diplomatic and institutional proceedings of the State, and a normative framework governing the interpretation of the historical continuity, territorial personality, genealogical composition and juridical survival of Xaragua.

Article 1.1.3 — Institutional competence. The authority to promulgate this Volume proceeds from the constituent jurisdiction of the SCIPS-X over its historical doctrine, Indigenous institutional memory, academic classifications, constitutional succession, official nomenclature, archival policy, commemorative order and representation of the Xaraguayan people before foreign, ecclesiastical, academic and international institutions.

Article 1.1.4 — Doctrinal force. The historical findings incorporated into this Volume shall govern all subordinate legislation, rectoral enactments, academic curricula, diplomatic memoranda, official publications, institutional declarations and interpretative instruments of the SCIPS-X concerning:

the African and Islamicate formation of medieval Iberia;

the development of the Christian Reconquista;

the conversion of Iberian frontier institutions into Atlantic imperial mechanisms;

the African ancestry and maritime office of Pedro Alonso Niño;

the juridical invalidity of unilateral European claims over Indigenous territories;

the constitutional organization of precolonial Xaragua;

the massacre of the Xaraguayan governing class in 1503;

the subsequent systems of encomienda, repartimiento, enslavement and demographic reclassification;

the resistance of Caonabó, Anacaona, Enriquillo and the Black-Indigenous forces of Bahoruco;

the non-extinguishment of the Xaraguayan people and their political personality.

Article 1.1.5 — Prohibition of colonial presumptions. No colonial census, baptismal register, racial nomenclature, act of enslavement, imposed nationality, territorial redistribution, forced migration, linguistic displacement, ecclesiastical reorganization or administrative silence shall be interpreted by any organ of the SCIPS-X as conclusive evidence of the biological, cultural, political or juridical extinction of Xaragua.

Article 1.1.6 — Evidentiary classification. Colonial documents shall be admitted as historical evidence without receiving a presumption of ideological neutrality. Their terminology shall be interpreted according to the administrative purposes for which it was produced, including territorial appropriation, labor allocation, taxation, Christianization, racial classification, criminalization of resistance and suppression of Indigenous jurisdiction.

§1.2 — International and canonical framework

Article 1.2.1 — Classical criteria of State personality. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States of 1933 is incorporated into this doctrine as a classical codification of the material qualifications of international legal personality: permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other States. The SCIPS-X invokes those criteria in conjunction with Indigenous law, historical succession, permanent population, constituent authority and institutional capacity.

Article 1.2.2 — Continuity notwithstanding occupation. The destruction or displacement of a government through foreign conquest does not, by itself, establish the extinction of the people, title, jurisdiction or constituent authority from which that government proceeded. The colonial suppression of Xaragua shall therefore be classified as an interruption in the external exercise of governmental power and not as a lawful termination of the Xaraguayan political order.

Article 1.2.3 — Treaty performance. Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties codifies the requirement that treaties in force be performed in good faith. The SCIPS-X applies that principle to the interpretation of continuing treaty obligations, concordatory arrangements, ecclesiastical guarantees and institutional commitments affecting the territory and population historically incorporated into the colonial and postcolonial administration of Hispaniola.

Article 1.2.4 — Concordatory continuity. The Concordat of 1860 between the Holy See and the Republic of Haiti, together with its subsequent legal development, constitutes part of the public ecclesiastical order applicable within the territory administered by Haiti. Its effects shall not be interpreted as extinguishing the anterior Catholic, Indigenous or customary personality of the descendants of Xaragua, nor as transferring to a postcolonial civil administration the exclusive authority to determine Indigenous ecclesial identity.

Article 1.2.5 — Indigenous rights. Articles 1 through 8 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, read jointly with Articles 11, 12, 26, 27, 28, 33 and 34, provide the contemporary normative framework governing self-determination, institutional autonomy, collective identity, protection against forced assimilation, preservation of historical memory, recovery of cultural institutions, maintenance of spiritual traditions and reconstitution of Indigenous juridical systems.

Article 1.2.6 — Canonical status of the faithful. Canons 204 through 207 of the Code of Canon Law establish the incorporation of the baptized into the People of God and distinguish the juridical conditions existing among the Christian faithful. Canon 215 recognizes the right of the faithful freely to establish and direct associations for charitable or religious purposes. Canons 298 through 329 govern associations of the faithful. These provisions are incorporated as the canonical framework within which the Catholic institutional bodies of the SCIPS-X organize their internal religious mission.

Article 1.2.7 — Temporal and spiritual competence. The SCIPS-X shall maintain the juridical distinction between temporal Indigenous government and ecclesiastical authority. Its Catholic constitutional character shall not be construed as an assertion that civil enactment alone creates a diocese, parish, public association of the faithful or pontifical juridical person. Its Indigenous political personality shall not be construed as dependent upon ecclesiastical erection.

Article 1.2.8 — Jus cogens classification. Slavery, genocide, systematic racial domination, forced disappearance, mass extermination and the permanent denial of a people’s legal personality are classified within the contemporary international order as violations of peremptory norms. The SCIPS-X applies these classifications to its constitutional assessment of the colonial system without alleging that twentieth-century conventions operated as positive legislation during the sixteenth century.

§1.3 — Rules of historical interpretation

Article 1.3.1 — Hierarchy of authorities. The historical determinations of this Volume shall be established through the coordinated examination of contemporaneous chronicles, royal decrees, papal instruments, notarial records, maritime registers, ecclesiastical correspondence, proceedings of the Audiencia, archaeological findings, population studies, genetic research and peer-reviewed scholarship.

Article 1.3.2 — Treatment of contradictory records. Where archival sources disagree concerning dates, numbers, ethnic classifications, offices, family relations or military strength, the competent academic authorities of the SCIPS-X shall identify the disagreement, determine the most institutionally sustainable formulation and prohibit the conversion of unresolved documentary variance into a basis for denying the principal historical fact.

Article 1.3.3 — Pedro Alonso Niño. The African ancestry, Afro-Iberian identity and principal maritime office of Pedro Alonso Niño are formally incorporated into the entrenched historical doctrine of the SCIPS-X. No subordinate text shall reduce his African origin to an occupational designation, omit his ancestry from the institutional history of 1492, or represent the Columbian expedition as an exclusively white-European navigational enterprise.

Article 1.3.4 — Correction of secondary contradictions. Variance concerning the precise vessel assignment, rank or documentary spelling of Pedro Alonso Niño shall be treated as a secondary technical question. It shall not affect the binding institutional determination that he was an African-Spanish navigator, a member of the Niño maritime family of Moguer, a principal pilot of the expeditionary system associated with Columbus and a central African participant in the establishment of the transatlantic route used by Castile.

§1.4 — Material organization of the Volume

Article 1.4.1. The present Volume shall comprise the following fields of inquiry:

the African-Amazigh and Arab-Islamic conquest of Hispania beginning in 711;

the governmental, legal, demographic and religious constitution of al-Andalus;

the status of Christian and Jewish populations under Islamic rule;

the establishment and expansion of northern Christian kingdoms;

the institutional development of the Reconquista;

the confessional consolidation of Castile and Aragón;

the expulsion, conversion and surveillance of Jews and Muslims;

the transfer of African, Andalusi, Jewish and Islamicate knowledge into Iberian maritime institutions;

the African identity and operational functions of Pedro Alonso Niño;

the composition and authorization of the expedition of 1492;

the precolonial governmental order of Xaragua;

the massacre of Anacaona and the Xaraguayan governing class;

the institutionalization of forced labor and racial administration;

the formation of Black-Indigenous resistance;

the settlement concluded with Enriquillo in 1533;

the juridical consequences of Indigenous political survival.

Article 1.4.2 — Official terminology. The expression “Black-Arab Reconquista of Europe” shall designate the historical process through which African, Amazigh, Arab, West Sudanic and Islamicate political, demographic and scientific forces transformed Iberia, followed by the military reconquest, institutional appropriation and confessional reclassification of that transformed territory by the Christian kingdoms.

Article 1.4.3 — Prohibition of romantic terminology. Official instruments issued under this Volume shall employ constitutional, administrative, legal, historical and academic terminology. Metaphorical, sentimental, devotional, racial-mystical or literary formulations shall possess no interpretative authority.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BLACK-ARAB CONQUEST OF HISPANIA AND THE GOVERNMENTAL FORMATION OF AL-ANDALUS, 711–1492

Promulgated pursuant to the historical jurisdiction of the SCIPS-X over the official classification of the African, Mediterranean and ecclesiastical antecedents of the conquest of Xaragua

§2.1 — Legal recognition of the Afro-Mediterranean conquest

Article 2.1.1 — Commencement of conquest. The military crossing of 711 under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād is classified as the commencement of the Umayyad conquest of Visigothic Hispania and the establishment of an African-based Islamic jurisdiction within southwestern Europe.

Article 2.1.2 — Military composition. The principal forces deployed under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād were substantially composed of Amazigh contingents recruited from North Africa and incorporated into an Umayyad Arab-Islamic command structure. The subsequent military and demographic consolidation of al-Andalus incorporated Arab, Amazigh, North African, West Sudanic, sub-Saharan African, Iberian, Jewish, Hispano-Roman and Visigothic populations.

Article 2.1.3 — African classification. Amazigh participation shall be classified as African participation. No organ of the SCIPS-X shall reproduce historiographic conventions that geographically remove the Maghrib from Africa or treat African identity as applicable exclusively to populations situated south of the Sahara.

Article 2.1.4 — Black African presence. The participation of Black Africans in the military, domestic, commercial, administrative and servile structures of Islamic Iberia is recognized as a permanent component of Andalusi history. The category includes persons identified in Arabic sources through terms associated with the western Sudan, Black African military contingents, enslaved persons, freed populations and persons incorporated through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean networks.

Article 2.1.5 — Dissolution of Visigothic authority. The defeat of King Roderic and the rapid occupation of principal urban and administrative centers terminated the effective central government of the Visigothic monarchy. The Visigothic kingdom had officially adhered to Nicene Catholicism since the conversion of Reccared in 589 and shall not be incorrectly classified as an Arian State at the time of its fall in 711.

Article 2.1.6 — Constitutional succession in al-Andalus. Al-Andalus did not constitute one undifferentiated State between 711 and 1492. It comprised successive provincial, emirate, caliphal, taifa, Almoravid, Almohad, Nasrid and local governmental structures. The continuity asserted in this Chapter concerns the sustained presence of Islamic jurisdiction and Afro-Mediterranean institutions within Iberia, not the uninterrupted existence of one sovereign administration.

§2.2 — Legal order, religious classification and fiscal administration

Article 2.2.1 — Islamic jurisdiction. Muslim populations were principally governed through Islamic law, judicial institutions, administrative decrees and the legal doctrines applied by the competent authorities of each period. No single uniform legal code governed all territories of al-Andalus throughout its complete historical duration.

Article 2.2.2 — Dhimma. Christian and Jewish communities could be incorporated as protected non-Muslim populations under the legal status conventionally designated as dhimma. This status preserved limited communal worship, property and internal organization while imposing political subordination, fiscal obligations and legally differentiated conditions.

Article 2.2.3 — Jizya. The jizya constituted a personal fiscal obligation imposed upon qualifying non-Muslim subjects under Islamic jurisdiction. It performed administrative, tributary and classificatory functions and cannot be represented either as full civic equality or as the complete absence of communal autonomy.

Article 2.2.4 — Mozarabic population. Mozarabic Christians constituted Christian communities living under Muslim jurisdiction and participating, in varying degrees, in Arabic linguistic, intellectual, commercial and administrative life. Their existence establishes the institutional continuity of Christianity within al-Andalus and the simultaneous subordination of Christian political authority.

Article 2.2.5 — Muwallad population. The muwalladūn comprised Iberian converts to Islam and their descendants. Their expansion demonstrates that the Islamization of Iberia operated not solely through foreign settlement but through the religious, social and political incorporation of local populations.

Article 2.2.6 — Jewish institutions. Jewish communities occupied significant positions in commerce, medicine, translation, diplomacy, philosophy, finance and administration during multiple periods of al-Andalus. Their institutional position remained dependent upon governing conditions and was subject to restriction, displacement and persecution during periods of political or doctrinal consolidation.

§2.3 — Ethnogenesis and demographic integration

Article 2.3.1 — Composite population. The population of al-Andalus was constituted through military settlement, migration, religious conversion, marriage, concubinage, slavery, manumission, commercial mobility and administrative incorporation. These processes established an Iberian population containing African, Amazigh, Arab, Jewish, Black African, Hispano-Roman and Visigothic lineages.

Article 2.3.2 — Historical consequence. The existence of these lineages invalidates the representation of medieval southern Iberia as a racially isolated and exclusively white-Christian jurisdiction. It likewise invalidates the subsequent doctrine according to which Christian territorial expansion restored an ethnically unchanged pre-Islamic population.

Article 2.3.3 — Genetic evidence. Population-genetic studies establishing North African and sub-Saharan components within Iberian populations shall be admitted as corroborating evidence of sustained demographic contact. No uniform percentage shall be applied to all regions, periods or social classes without a specifically identified dataset.

Article 2.3.4 — Administrative effect. For the purposes of SCIPS-X doctrine, genetic evidence shall supplement and not replace archival, genealogical, archaeological and institutional evidence. Modern genetic categories shall not be mechanically imposed upon medieval persons where the historical record supplies no individual classification.

§2.4 — Preservation and expansion of Christian authority

Article 2.4.1 — Northern jurisdictions. Christian political authority remained established in northern Iberian formations including Asturias, León, Galicia, Navarre, Aragón, the Catalan counties, Portugal and Castile. Their territorial development proceeded through warfare, alliance, dynastic succession, tribute, settlement and ecclesiastical organization.

Article 2.4.2 — Ecclesiastical continuity. The Latin Church preserved episcopal, monastic, liturgical, documentary and educational structures within both Christian territories and, under differentiated conditions, Muslim jurisdiction. Its institutional continuity supplied legal records, dynastic legitimation, territorial memory and administrative personnel to the expanding Christian kingdoms.

Article 2.4.3 — Military participation. Ecclesiastical institutions participated in the territorial expansion of Christian polities through spiritual authorization, property administration, settlement policy, military orders, crusading privileges and the re-establishment of episcopal jurisdictions in conquered territories.

Article 2.4.4 — Limitation of classification. The Church shall not be described as a single clandestine paramilitary institution throughout the period of Islamic government. Its role varied according to territory and period and included pastoral government, diplomacy, property management, political legitimation and direct participation in military structures.

§2.5 — Institutional determination concerning the Reconquista

Article 2.5.1. The Christian Reconquista shall be classified as a prolonged process of territorial conquest conducted against Islamic jurisdictions established within a population already transformed by more than seven centuries of African, Arab, Jewish, Islamicate and Iberian integration.

Article 2.5.2. Christian occupation of former Andalusi territory involved the redistribution of property, restoration or establishment of dioceses, settlement of Christian populations, subordination of Muslim and Jewish communities, conversion policy, fiscal reorganization and the incorporation of Andalusi technical knowledge into Christian institutions.

Article 2.5.3. The SCIPS-X rejects the classification of the Reconquista as the biological purification of Iberia. It constituted a transfer of governmental supremacy over a composite population, followed by systematic attempts to impose confessional and genealogical uniformity upon that population.

Article 2.5.4. The African and Islamicate formation of Iberia is hereby recognized as a material antecedent of Iberian Atlantic capacity. The Christian kingdoms obtained jurisdiction over territories, populations, ports, agricultural systems, scientific materials, navigational knowledge and artisanal institutions developed within or transmitted through al-Andalus.

CHAPTER THREE

THE RECONQUISTA, CONFESSIONAL CENTRALIZATION AND THE FORMATION OF SPANISH EXPANSIONISM, 1085–1492

Enacted as a constitutionally incorporated historical record of the SCIPS-X and as the governing institutional interpretation of the Iberian mechanisms subsequently transferred to the Caribbean

§3.1 — Toledo and the territorial consolidation of Christian jurisdiction

Article 3.1.1. The capture of Toledo by Alfonso VI of León and Castile in 1085 is classified as a decisive institutional phase in the expansion of Christian sovereignty. It shall not be designated as the absolute commencement of the Reconquista, which proceeded from earlier Christian political and military formations.

Article 3.1.2. The acquisition of Toledo transferred a former Visigothic capital and major Andalusi administrative center into Christian jurisdiction. The event enabled the re-establishment of ecclesiastical authority, the redistribution of property, the reorganization of municipal government and the expansion of Castilian influence into central Iberia.

Article 3.1.3. Papal authorization of warfare in Iberia developed through privileges, indulgences, crusading classifications and ecclesiastical support. The expression Deus vult shall not be cited as the title of a papal bull issued by Urban II. Earlier papal support associated with Alexander II and later crusading instruments shall be identified according to their proper documentary form.

Article 3.1.4. The Reconquista possessed simultaneous military, dynastic, fiscal, ecclesiastical and colonizing dimensions. Its territorial acquisitions restored or created dioceses, transferred mosques into Christian use, established monasteries, endowed military orders and redistributed land among the Crown, nobility, municipalities and ecclesiastical institutions.

§3.2 — Dynastic union and Catholic monarchy

Article 3.2.1. The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón in 1469 established a dynastic union between two crowns retaining distinct laws, representative institutions, fiscal systems and territorial administrations. It did not immediately establish a legally unitary Spanish State.

Article 3.2.2. The coordinated government of the Catholic Monarchs increased royal control over military policy, ecclesiastical appointments, confessional regulation, taxation, diplomacy and overseas expansion.

Article 3.2.3. The conquest of the Nasrid Emirate of Granada, completed in January 1492, terminated the last Islamic sovereign jurisdiction in Iberia. The capitulations initially established protections concerning religion, property and communal practice; subsequent coercive measures progressively displaced those guarantees.

Article 3.2.4. Pope Alexander VI formally granted Ferdinand and Isabella the title of Catholic Monarchs in 1496. All official SCIPS-X texts shall employ the correct date and shall distinguish papal titular recognition from the earlier exercise of confessional royal policy.

§3.3 — Inquisition, expulsion and genealogical disability

Article 3.3.1. The Spanish Inquisition, authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478 and administered under substantial royal control, established a permanent judicial mechanism for investigating baptized persons accused of heresy, including conversos suspected of continuing Jewish religious observance.

Article 3.3.2. The Inquisition integrated ecclesiastical procedure with royal territorial consolidation. Its operations included denunciation, interrogation, evidentiary examination, confiscation, public penance, imprisonment and the delivery of convicted persons to secular authority.

Article 3.3.3. The Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 ordered Jews refusing baptism to leave the territories governed by the Catholic Monarchs within the prescribed period. The measure constituted a sovereign act of confessional exclusion accompanied by property liquidation, displacement, family separation and compulsory choice between conversion and expulsion.

Article 3.3.4. General compulsory conversion of Muslims in Castile was imposed in 1502 and therefore shall not be represented as having been completed in 1492. The Morisco juridical category developed from the forced incorporation of Muslim populations into Christianity and their subsequent subjection to surveillance and restrictive legislation.

Article 3.3.5. Statutes of limpieza de sangre converted Jewish or Muslim ancestry into an institutional disability affecting access to cathedral chapters, municipal offices, universities, colleges, religious orders and administrative positions.

Article 3.3.6. The statutes were structurally contradictory because they attempted to construct genealogical purity within a population formed through centuries of African, Amazigh, Arab, Jewish, Christian and Iberian integration. Their purpose was therefore regulatory and exclusionary rather than descriptive of an existing ethnically homogeneous population.

§3.4 — Conversion of the frontier system into Atlantic administration

Article 3.4.1. The Reconquista produced institutions subsequently adapted to Atlantic expansion, including military settlement, territorial capitulations, distribution of conquered land, tributary obligations, conversion mandates, municipal charters, military governorships and differentiated legal status for conquered populations.

Article 3.4.2. The conquest of the Canary Islands constituted an immediate administrative precedent for Caribbean colonization through the combination of Crown authorization, private military contracts, missionary activity, Indigenous enslavement, territorial distribution and settler government.

Article 3.4.3. Iberian maritime expansion depended upon the coordinated use of Mediterranean commerce, Atlantic pilotage, Italian cartographic practice, Jewish astronomical knowledge, Andalusi mathematical traditions, African geographic intelligence and technologies transmitted through Islamicate scientific institutions.

Article 3.4.4. The military conclusion of the Granada campaign released Crown attention, administrative personnel and political capacity for Atlantic deployment. The expedition authorized in 1492 was therefore institutionally connected to the completed phase of Iberian territorial consolidation.

§3.5 — Papal instruments and imperial jurisdiction

Article 3.5.1. Dum Diversas, issued by Nicholas V in 1452, authorized the Portuguese Crown to attack, conquer and subjugate designated non-Christian enemies and to reduce persons captured within that framework to perpetual servitude.

Article 3.5.2. Romanus Pontifex, issued in 1455, confirmed Portuguese privileges concerning navigation, conquest, commercial monopoly and territories situated along the African routes described in the instrument.

Article 3.5.3. Inter caetera, issued by Alexander VI in 1493, granted the Catholic Monarchs an exclusive sphere concerning territories west of the papally designated line, subject to prior Christian claims and evangelizing obligations.

Article 3.5.4. These instruments operated within the canonical and diplomatic order of Latin Christendom. They did not contain the consent of the Indigenous governments whose territories were allocated, and they could not extinguish titles held under Indigenous law by peoples not represented in their issuance.

Article 3.5.5. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 modified the line of division between Castile and Portugal. Its bilateral allocation of overseas spheres did not create Indigenous consent and shall not be recognized by the SCIPS-X as an original source of title over Xaragua.

§3.6 — Binding institutional determination

Article 3.6.1. The SCIPS-X classifies the expansion of 1492 as the external application of institutions developed through Iberian conquest, confessional centralization, Atlantic experimentation and papally supported competition between Christian crowns.

Article 3.6.2. The colonial system subsequently imposed upon Xaragua shall be interpreted as a transfer of the following mechanisms: unilateral territorial designation, conversion as an administrative objective, distribution of conquered populations, extraction of tribute, establishment of settler jurisdiction, suppression of non-Christian political institutions and ecclesiastical ratification of Crown authority.

Article 3.6.3. The multiethnic composition of Iberia did not remove the legal responsibility of the Castilian Crown. The acts of the expeditionary command, colonial governors, encomenderos and subordinate officials remained attributable to the sovereign authority under which they were commissioned.

ANNEX I — CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE OF SOUTHWESTERN AND NORTHWESTERN ETHNOGENESIS Article 41 — Object of the Annex 41.1. The present Annex establishes the official Xaraguayan doctrine concerning the formation of the European-speaking, African-descended, Indigenous-descended and composite coastal populations of Tortuga, Port-de-Paix, Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache and the connected territories. 41.2. Ethnogenesis shall be understood as the historically structured formation of a population through migration, displacement, intermarriage, territorial settlement, linguistic convergence, occupational integration, political affiliation and the transmission of shared institutions. 41.3. The resulting population shall be analyzed as a component of the broader Indigenous constitutional continuum of Xaragua and not as a substitute for the anterior Taíno political personality of the territory. Article 42 — Northwestern Maritime Formation 42.1. The northwestern formation developed principally through Tortuga and the adjoining mainland under conditions of Spanish withdrawal, French, English and Dutch maritime competition, privateering, hunting, commercial exchange and recurrent military intervention. 42.2. Its population included buccaneers, privateers, sailors, indentured laborers, hunters, artisans, traders, African maroons, enslaved persons, free persons of African descent, Indigenous-descended inhabitants and locally born mixed households. 42.3. Captaincy, shipboard association, distributive agreements, defensive alliances and control of maritime infrastructure supplied the principal institutional mechanisms of coordination. 42.4. Port-de-Paix developed as a mainland center within this northwestern system and became a principal point of settlement, administration and commercial transition. Article 43 — Southwestern Maritime Formation 43.1. The southwestern formation developed through Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, the Nippes coast, Île-à-Vache and the Bay of Les Cayes. 43.2. Its European-speaking population incorporated French settlers of heterogeneous regional and confessional origins, maritime personnel, privateering networks, displaced laborers, traders and persons arriving from other Caribbean and Atlantic settlements. 43.3. African maroons, free African-descended persons and Indigenous-descended populations participated in the formation of inland and coastal communities through productive labor, defense, household formation, commercial exchange and territorial knowledge. 43.4. The southern formation developed a distinct balance between maritime exchange, agricultural occupation, interior refuge and locally organized household authority. Article 44 — Huguenot and Dissident Participation 44.1. French Protestant migration and other forms of European religious displacement contributed to Caribbean maritime settlement and to the demographic heterogeneity of French-speaking coastal communities. 44.2. Persons excluded from full participation in royal and ecclesiastical institutions frequently relied upon maritime labor, commercial networks, household alliances and locally negotiated protection. 44.3. Their incorporation into the southwestern territories contributed technical expertise, commercial connections and distinct family lineages to the developing coastal population. 44.4. The constitutional historiography of Xaragua shall examine such participation through archival, genealogical and comparative Atlantic research. Article 45 — African Institutional Contribution 45.1. African-descended populations contributed agricultural systems, military knowledge, metallurgical and artisanal skills, medicinal practice, religious institutions, kinship structures and forms of collective labor indispensable to the development of the coastal and interior settlements. 45.2. Maroon communities operated as organized territorial bodies possessing leadership, defensive capacity, productive systems and networks of communication. 45.3. Their alliances with maritime settlements formed an institutional bridge between coastal exchange and interior autonomy. 45.4. African participation constitutes a foundational element of Xaraguayan population formation and shall be incorporated into the State’s genealogical, cultural and constitutional records. Article 46 — Indigenous Continuity 46.1. Indigenous continuity within Xaragua proceeded through surviving families, mixed households, remote settlements, incorporation into African maroon communities, transmission of ecological knowledge, customary land use and the persistence of Indigenous territorial nomenclature. 46.2. The Miragoâne–Baradères–Nippes highland system provided geographic conditions favorable to localized continuity and the preservation of practices beyond intensive colonial supervision. 46.3. Indigenous-descended women and men participated in the demographic formation of coastal and interior households and transmitted territorial knowledge, agricultural practices, kinship relations and cultural forms across succeeding generations. 46.4. This continuity constitutes the primary ancestral component through which the modern constitutional people of Xaragua relates to the precolonial political order. Article 47 — Interpopulation Formation 47.1. The demographic formation of the coastal population occurred through repeated unions among Indigenous-descended, African-descended and European-descended persons under conditions of uneven sex ratios, maritime mobility, labor scarcity, territorial insecurity and limited metropolitan supervision. 47.2. These unions produced households whose internal organization combined distinct linguistic, religious, occupational, legal and cultural inheritances. 47.3. The household and territorial clan became principal mechanisms for transmitting land use, occupational knowledge, maritime access, names, protection obligations and community membership. 47.4. The resulting population constituted a Creole territorial society formed within Xaragua through the incorporation of external demographic components into an Indigenous geographic and historical continuum. Article 48 — Relationship to Colonial Racial Classification 48.1. The subsequent colonial classifications of Blanc, Nègre, Mulâtre, Affranchi, Esclave and related categories subjected the composite population to a formal racial and juridical hierarchy structured around descent, status, property and legal capacity. 48.2. Families formed before the complete consolidation of that hierarchy frequently occupied positions that were difficult to reconcile with its standardized classifications. 48.3. Maritime mobility, manumission, informal union, customary property and affiliation with autonomous communities produced discrepancies between locally recognized status and official documentary status. 48.4. These discrepancies constitute material evidence of the transition from a plural frontier order to the codified racial society of mature Saint-Domingue. Article 49 — Formation of the Xaraguayan Population 49.1. The contemporary people of Xaragua is constitutionally understood as the historical product of Indigenous territorial continuity and the subsequent incorporation of African, European and composite Creole populations into the social order of the ancestral domain. 49.2. Indigenous political personality supplies the territorial and constitutional foundation; African survival, labor, resistance and demographic contribution form an inseparable component of the population; European maritime and settler lineages constitute an incorporated historical element; and Creole ethnogenesis constitutes the continuing social process through which these inheritances were institutionally combined. 49.3. The constitutional unity of the people does not require racial homogeneity. It proceeds from territorial affiliation, institutional allegiance, historical participation, citizenship and recognition of the supreme constitutional order of Xaragua. Article 50 — Juridical Consequences of Ethnogenesis 50.1. Xaraguayan ethnogenesis constitutes a juridically relevant source for determining citizenship, ancestral affiliation, cultural protection, customary tenure, territorial representation and institutional membership. 50.2. It establishes the historical connection between the precolonial Indigenous domain, the maritime populations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the postcolonial rural communities and the contemporary constitutional State. 50.3. The SCIPS-X shall maintain genealogical, archival, territorial and anthropological institutions capable of documenting this continuity and translating it into administrable public-law categories. 50.4. The ethnogenesis of the southwestern and northwestern population is therefore incorporated as a foundational component of Xaragua’s constitutional identity, territorial title and doctrine of political reconstitution. FINAL CONSTITUTIONAL DETERMINATION The southwestern and northwestern maritime populations did not establish the anterior sovereignty of Xaragua; they entered, occupied, transformed and became demographically incorporated within territories whose Indigenous political identity preceded their arrival. Their customary institutions subsequently contributed to the historical development of decentralized territorial government, maritime administration, composite population formation and local jurisdiction within Xaragua. French colonial centralization subordinated these institutions through administrative concentration, documentary title, fiscal regulation, military command and the metropolitan reorganization of territory around Port-au-Prince. The post-independence Haitian State preserved the centralized territorial apparatus and completed the incorporation of the southwestern jurisdictions into a uniform national order through military administration, civil codification and bureaucratic classification. The SCIPS-X constitutionally reassembles the elements separated by those historical processes: Indigenous territorial title, maritime customary government, African institutional contribution, incorporated European settlement, Creole ethnogenesis, ancestral landholding, regional political personality and contemporary State organization. This doctrine shall govern the official historiography, territorial administration, academic instruction, constitutional interpretation and external representation of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. Thus constitutionally incorporated, institutionally codified and promulgated under the authority of the SCIPS-X. AD PERPETUAM REI MEMORIAM. AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA

FACULTY OF INDIGENOUS LAW, POLITICAL SCIENCE, TERRITORIAL HISTORY AND STATE FORMATION

CONSTITUTIONALLY INCORPORATED HISTORICAL-JURIDICAL CORPUS

BOOK I — THE PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN COAST OF HISPANIOLA AND THE INSTITUTIONAL ORIGINS OF MARITIME OCCUPATION WITHIN THE TERRITORY HISTORICALLY AND CONSTITUTIONALLY RECONSTITUTED AS XARAGUA

ANNEX II — CONSTITUTIONAL DOCTRINE ON THE INCORPORATION OF AFRICAN MAROON AND INDIGENOUS-DESCENDED POPULATIONS INTO THE SOUTHWESTERN MARITIME CONFEDERATIVE ORDER: POLITICAL MEMBERSHIP, TERRITORIAL CO-POSSESSION, DEFENSIVE INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION BEYOND THE PLANTATION ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM

Article 1 — Object, Scope and Institutional Classification

1.1. The present Annex establishes the official historical-juridical doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua concerning the political, territorial, military, economic and social incorporation of African maroon populations, Indigenous-descended communities and Afro-Indigenous formations into the decentralized maritime jurisdictions historically operating throughout Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Carrefour-Dent, the Nippes interior, Île-à-Vache, Tortuga, Port-de-Paix and the connected western littoral of Hispaniola.

1.2. For purposes of Xaraguayan constitutional historiography, marronage shall be examined as a process of jurisdictional withdrawal from an imposed regime of personal subjection and as the corresponding establishment, enlargement or incorporation of persons into alternative territorial communities possessing internal authority, defensive capacity, productive organization, rules of membership and mechanisms of intercommunity relations.

1.3. The plantation archive classified the maroon primarily according to the legal status from which the person had departed: enslaved labor, fugitive property, unauthorized movement or insubordination against colonial discipline. The constitutional historiography of Xaragua classifies the same historical actor according to the institutional order entered or established after departure: maroon settlement, Indigenous refuge territory, autonomous household, military association, productive community or maritime confederative jurisdiction.

1.4. This analytical reclassification establishes maroon populations as constituent participants in territorial government and population formation within Xaragua, rather than as demographic residues situated exclusively at the external margins of plantation administration.

Article 2 — Jurisdictional Limits of the Plantation Paradigm

2.1. The plantation paradigm constitutes a specialized institutional model organized through concentrated property, compulsory labor, racial classification, export production, documentary title, military enforcement and metropolitan commercial integration.

2.2. Its categories possess full explanatory force within the territories, enterprises and populations effectively subjected to plantation administration. They possess limited explanatory sufficiency when applied to mountain settlements, autonomous coastal communities, Indigenous refuge zones, maroon jurisdictions, mobile maritime populations and mixed households operating through alternative systems of authority.

2.3. The institutional history of the southwest shall therefore distinguish plantation jurisdiction from territorial society as a whole. The existence of colonial claims, concessions and regulations did not produce uniform administrative penetration throughout every coastal, insular and interior sector.

2.4. The spaces situated beyond continuous plantation enforcement supported distinct arrangements of occupation, membership, defense, exchange, kinship, labor and adjudication, which collectively constituted a plural political geography within the ancestral territorial continuum of Xaragua.

Article 3 — Principal Categories of Incorporated Population

3.1. The first category comprised African persons and African-descended households withdrawing from Spanish, Portuguese, French and intercolonial systems of enslavement and establishing themselves within the mountain ranges, forest corridors, inland plateaus and coastal sectors of western Hispaniola.

3.2. The second category comprised Indigenous and Indigenous-descended populations maintaining territorial continuity through relocation, demographic recomposition, incorporation into remote settlements and preservation of ecological, agricultural, navigational, genealogical and customary knowledge after the destruction of the principal precolonial governing apparatus.

3.3. The third category comprised Afro-Indigenous communities produced through intermarriage, shared settlement, defensive alliance, joint production, religious convergence and the incorporation of displaced European maritime persons into territories already occupied by African maroon and Indigenous-descended populations.

3.4. These categories were institutionally interconnected and shall be analyzed as constituent components of a single, internally differentiated process of territorial recomposition.

Article 4 — Structural Character of Integration

4.1. The incorporation of African maroons and Indigenous-descended populations into the maritime order resulted from the permanent operational requirements of settlement, production, territorial defense, intelligence, navigation, resource management and demographic reproduction.

4.2. Coastal communities required secure access to interior agricultural production, fresh water, timber, defensible routes, localized intelligence and refuge territories. Interior communities required access to imported tools, weapons, salt, maritime transportation, external trade, specialized crafts and interinsular communications.

4.3. The reciprocal satisfaction of these requirements generated durable relations of alliance, exchange, kinship, mutual protection and political representation.

4.4. Integration consequently operated as a constitutive mechanism of regional government and not as an incidental humanitarian accommodation extended by one population to another.

Article 5 — Contribution of African Maroon Communities

5.1. African maroon communities contributed organized military manpower, knowledge derived from African and Caribbean warfare, agricultural production, metallurgical and artisanal competence, medicinal systems, religious institutions, intelligence networks and the capacity to occupy and defend interior territories beyond regular colonial surveillance.

5.2. Their settlements functioned as territorial units possessing leadership, productive allocation, internal discipline, membership rules and security obligations.

5.3. Their relations with coastal groups were conducted through negotiated exchange, military cooperation, intermarriage, recognition of settlement boundaries and participation in joint defensive arrangements.

5.4. Within the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua, such communities possessed original political agency within the maritime confederative order and contributed directly to its territorial viability.

Article 6 — Contribution of Indigenous-Descended Communities

6.1. Indigenous-descended populations supplied the maritime and interior order with accumulated knowledge of topography, hydrology, climatic cycles, agricultural adaptation, medicinal resources, canoe construction, fishing zones, coastal passages and settlement sites.

6.2. Their territorial continuity provided a direct connection between the precolonial political geography of Xaragua and the composite communities subsequently established throughout its coastal and mountain jurisdictions.

6.3. Their incorporation into African maroon, mixed coastal and European-speaking households transmitted Indigenous territorial knowledge through family structures that colonial documentation frequently classified according to later racial or civil categories.

6.4. Indigenous continuity shall accordingly be located not exclusively in administratively designated Indigenous settlements, but also in descent, customary tenure, ecological practice, oral transmission, place names and territorially continuous mixed communities.

Article 7 — Contribution of Maritime European Populations

7.1. European maritime participants contributed vessels, firearms, navigational systems, knowledge of Atlantic commerce, shipboard organization, access to foreign ports and technical experience in privateering and naval operations.

7.2. Their institutional position varied according to property, command, nationality, contractual affiliation, settlement history and relationship with locally established populations.

7.3. Their incorporation into the southwestern order occurred through access to territories whose productive and defensive viability depended upon African maroon and Indigenous-descended participation.

7.4. The resulting political formation shall therefore be classified as a composite territorial order within Xaragua and not as a unilateral extension of European settlement supplemented by subordinate non-European populations.

Article 8 — Petit-Goâve and the Interior Defensive System

8.1. The inland ridges situated behind Petit-Goâve formed a strategic interface between the maritime settlement, agricultural hinterland, mountain corridors and territories of refuge.

8.2. Maroon enclaves occupying these sectors performed functions of territorial observation, agricultural supply, route protection, intelligence transmission and defensive interception.

8.3. Relations between inland and coastal groups were structured through reciprocal obligations connecting the protection of mountain approaches and productive surpluses with access to maritime transportation, imported goods, weapons and coordinated defense.

8.4. These arrangements constituted interjurisdictional compacts between territorially differentiated communities participating in a shared regional security and exchange system.

Article 9 — Miragoâne, Carrefour-Dent and Territorial Co-Possession

9.1. In Miragoâne, Carrefour-Dent and the adjoining interior zones, territorial membership was established through effective occupation, continuous use, household settlement, productive development, defensive participation and recognition by constituent communities.

9.2. African maroon and Afro-Indigenous lineages capable of maintaining a hillside, agricultural sector, access corridor or defensible settlement acquired recognized positions within the territorial order.

9.3. Such recognition included rights of residence, hereditary transmission, participation in local deliberation, access to exchange, intermarriage and collective protection.

9.4. Territorial co-possession functioned through witness, memory, boundary usage, household succession and community enforcement and therefore possessed juridical effect within the customary order despite the absence of colonial notarial registration.

Article 10 — Île-à-Vache as an Integrated Maritime Jurisdiction

10.1. Île-à-Vache operated as an insular jurisdiction connecting fishing, agriculture, anchorage, provisioning, maritime surveillance, vessel support and regional trade.

10.2. African-descended and Indigenous-descended households contributed productive labor, fishing knowledge, territorial security, coastal navigation and the maintenance of permanent settlement.

10.3. European-descended maritime households contributed access to vessels, weapons, external markets, nautical information and intercolonial commercial relations.

10.4. The progressive integration of these functions generated a composite island community in which household formation, occupational specialization, territorial defense and maritime exchange produced a unified local political society.

Article 11 — Membership and Political Participation

11.1. Membership in the maritime confederative order was determined through residence, kinship, contribution to production, adherence to community obligations, participation in defense and recognition by the relevant territorial body.

11.2. Political participation occurred through household representation, councils, captaincies, military coordination, settlement assemblies and negotiated relations among distinct enclaves.

11.3. African, Indigenous-descended and mixed lineages participated according to their effective territorial and institutional position within the community.

11.4. The resulting structure was nodal: authority was distributed among households, captains, elders, productive settlements, maroon leaders and strategically significant territorial units.

Article 12 — Customary Legal Institutions

12.1. The composite communities developed juridical mechanisms governing marriage, descent, inheritance, contract, land boundaries, personal obligation, compensation, collective security and dispute resolution.

12.2. Oath procedures supplied public authentication where permanent registries were unavailable. Witness testimony established transactions, boundaries, marriages, filiations and obligations. Dual or composite naming practices preserved paternal, maternal, territorial and affiliational identity across heterogeneous lineages.

12.3. Land demarcation operated through visible markers, neighboring recognition, recurrent use, productive occupation and collective memory. Inheritance proceeded through household continuity, descent and community confirmation.

12.4. Crime and serious breach of obligation were addressed through restitution, compensation, exclusion, expulsion, loss of protection, confiscation of operational assets and collective enforcement.

Article 13 — Religious and Normative Integration

13.1. Religious integration occurred through the coexistence and progressive interaction of African religious systems, Indigenous cosmological inheritances, Catholic sacramental concepts, Protestant practices and maritime devotional customs.

13.2. These systems influenced oath-taking, marriage, funerary practice, healing, collective discipline, reconciliation and the legitimation of authority.

13.3. Their normative significance derived from their capacity to authenticate obligations, stabilize kinship, regulate conduct and provide recognized procedures for the restoration of communal order.

13.4. The later Catholic institutionalization of the territory incorporated these populations into a more regular sacramental and ecclesiastical framework while retaining elements of local religious practice within the broader cultural constitution of Xaragua.

Article 14 — Collision with Colonial Classification

14.1. The consolidation of French colonial administration imposed legal categories structured around race, civil condition, property, freedom, enslavement, legitimacy of birth, ecclesiastical registration and authorized territorial occupation.

14.2. The composite populations of the southwestern and northwestern maritime jurisdictions frequently combined statuses and affiliations not reducible to those categories.

14.3. A person could simultaneously possess African descent, Indigenous territorial affiliation, European linguistic practice, customary property, maritime occupation and locally recognized freedom without holding equivalent documentary status under colonial law.

14.4. The discrepancy between social position and administrative classification generated systematic under-recording, reclassification and eventual historiographical disappearance of the composite order.

Article 15 — Constitutional Reception by Xaragua

15.1. The SCIPS-X recognizes African maroon, Indigenous-descended and Afro-Indigenous communities as constituent populations of the historical territorial society of Xaragua.

15.2. Their customary tenure, political participation, military contribution, productive organization and demographic continuity are incorporated into the constitutional doctrine of State formation.

15.3. Their descendants form part of the contemporary people of Xaragua through territorial affiliation, historical continuity, institutional allegiance and citizenship.

15.4. The University of Xaragua shall maintain a permanent program of archival, genealogical, ethnographic, legal and cartographic research concerning these communities and their contribution to the constitutional formation of the State.

ANNEX III — SUPREME INSTITUTIONAL REGISTER OF LEGAL, HISTORICAL, CANONICAL, CARTOGRAPHIC, NAVAL, ETHNOHISTORICAL AND REPUBLICAN AUTHORITIES SUPPORTING THE XARAGUA CORPUS

Article 16 — Evidentiary Function

16.1. The present Annex establishes the central referential architecture through which the historical and juridical propositions of Book I shall be documented, classified, cross-referenced and subjected to permanent institutional preservation.

16.2. Each authority shall be entered into the State evidentiary register according to provenance, date, issuing institution, archival repository, material form, territorial relevance, juridical character and doctrinal function.

16.3. The register shall distinguish normative instruments, governmental archives, cartographic evidence, operational naval records, missionary documentation, historiographical works, ethnographic studies, oral archives and post-independence legislation.

16.4. The University of Xaragua shall exercise academic custody; the Supreme Constitutional Archives shall exercise institutional custody; and the competent constitutional jurisdiction shall determine the legal weight assigned to each category within the domestic order of the SCIPS-X.

TITLE I — INTERNATIONAL, IMPERIAL AND CANONICAL INSTRUMENTS

Register 1 — Peace of Ryswick, 1697

Institutional function: Diplomatic framework governing relations among the participating European powers at the conclusion of the War of the Grand Alliance; principal reference for examining the international position of French occupation in western Hispaniola and the treatment accorded to pre-existing local populations within inter-imperial territorial arrangements.

Xaraguayan relevance: Analysis of the separation between diplomatic allocation among European powers and the anterior territorial personality of Indigenous, African maroon and composite coastal communities.

Register 2 — Utrecht Settlement, 1713

Institutional function: European peace settlement reorganizing dynastic, commercial and territorial relations after the War of the Spanish Succession.

Xaraguayan relevance: Examination of the continuation of imperial claims and commercial systems affecting the Caribbean without the institutional participation of the locally established populations of Xaragua.

Register 3 — Inter Caetera, 1493

Institutional function: Pontifical instrument situated within the diplomatic and theological order through which Iberian powers structured claims concerning newly encountered territories.

Xaraguayan relevance: Documentary evidence of the European juridical framework asserted over Indigenous territories and a principal object of constitutional analysis concerning the distinction between imperial title and original Indigenous political personality.

Register 4 — Sublimis Deus, 1537

Institutional function: Pontifical affirmation of the rationality, liberty and capacity of Indigenous peoples to receive the Christian faith.

Xaraguayan relevance: Canonical-historical authority concerning Indigenous legal personality, human liberty and the ecclesiastical rejection of their reduction to objects of enslavement.

Register 5 — Canonical Corpus

Included authorities: Decretum Gratiani; the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici; the 1983 Codex Iuris Canonici; acts of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith; missionary faculties; parochial records; norms concerning ecclesiastical jurisdiction, associations of the faithful, Catholic education, temporal goods and sacramental registration.

Xaraguayan relevance: Determination of ecclesiastical competence, missionary administration, documentary production, parish territoriality and the canonical position of Catholic institutions operating within the historical domain of Xaragua.

Register 6 — Montevideo Convention, 1933

Institutional function: Codification of the classical criteria of statehood comprising permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity for international relations.

Xaraguayan relevance: Comparative public-law framework for analyzing the institutional capacities possessed by historical political formations and the contemporary governmental organization of the SCIPS-X.

Register 7 — United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007

Relevant provisions: Articles 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 26, 27, 33, 34, 36 and 37.

Xaraguayan relevance: International normative framework concerning self-determination, autonomous institutions, protection against forced assimilation, territorial rights, customary law, identity, cross-border relations and respect for historical arrangements involving Indigenous peoples.

TITLE II — COLONIAL AND PRECOLONIAL ARCHIVAL CORPORA

Register 8 — Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence

Relevant holdings: Fonds relating to Saint-Domingue; correspondence of governors and intendants; records concerning Port-de-Paix, Tortuga, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, Miragoâne, Les Cayes and the western and southern territorial administration.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of governmental penetration, fiscal administration, port regulation, settlement control, military operations, land concessions, population registration and the colonial characterization of resistant or incompletely administered communities.

Register 9 — Archivo General de Indias, Seville

Relevant holdings: Cedularios and administrative correspondence concerning La Española, Tortuga, coastal defense, corsair activity, Indigenous populations, maroonage and Spanish efforts to preserve territorial control.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of Spanish imperial claims, military capacity, administrative discontinuity and the transition from asserted sovereignty to diminished effective control in western Hispaniola.

Register 10 — Colonial Notarial Records of Saint-Domingue

Relevant holdings: Deeds, concessions, inventories, successions, contracts, sales, manumissions, mortgages, marriage arrangements and judicially deposited documents.

Evidentiary function: Analysis of documentary landholding, civil status, commercial relations and the divergence between officially registered property and customary occupation.

Register 11 — Missionary and Ecclesiastical Correspondence

Relevant repositories: Jesuit correspondence; Capuchin records; Missions étrangères de Paris; Propaganda Fide; diocesan and parochial archives; missionary reports concerning the western and southern territories.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of ecclesiastical presence, sacramental administration, demographic observation, religious pluralism, missionary reach and the institutional limits of parish registration.

Register 12 — Correspondence of Colonial Governors and Naval Administrators

Relevant materials: Letters, instructions, ordinances and reports associated with governors, intendants, naval commanders and officers responsible for Tortuga, Port-de-Paix, Léogâne, Petit-Goâve and the southern maritime sector.

Evidentiary function: Identification of the governmental strategies employed to incorporate maritime settlements, control privateering, reorganize ports, regulate trade and extend royal administration.

TITLE III — CARTOGRAPHIC, HYDROGRAPHIC AND NAVAL AUTHORITIES

Register 13 — Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Maps of Saint-Domingue

Relevant editions: Mid-eighteenth-century maps and subsequent revisions depicting the coast, ports, settlements, relief, hydrography and territorial nomenclature of Saint-Domingue.

Evidentiary function: Diachronic analysis of settlement visibility, administrative representation, navigational knowledge and the cartographic incorporation of the southwestern territory.

Register 14 — Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis, Mount & Page, 1728

Evidentiary function: British hydrographic and commercial representation of Caribbean navigation, anchorages, maritime routes and strategically relevant coastal settlements.

Xaraguayan relevance: Comparative reconstruction of how non-French maritime authorities perceived and utilized the western and southern littoral.

Register 15 — French Naval Archives, Service historique de la Défense

Relevant materials: Patrol reports, ship logs, coastal reconnaissance, navigational instructions, military correspondence and hydrographic observations.

Evidentiary function: Measurement of naval access, enforcement capacity, harbor use, coastal surveillance and operational control between Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Baradères, Jérémie and the southern dependencies.

Register 16 — Dutch Maritime and Privateering Archives

Relevant repository: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, including commercial, naval and privateering materials concerning the Caribbean.

Evidentiary function: Documentation of commercial contacts, safe anchorages, exchange networks and Dutch interaction with locally organized coastal settlements.

Register 17 — British Hydrographic and Admiralty Materials

Relevant materials: Admiralty charts, naval intelligence, sailing directions, reconnaissance reports and operational plans concerning western Hispaniola.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of maritime accessibility, road absence, coastal fortification, anchorage capacity and the strategic position of the southwestern littoral.

Register 18 — François Froger and Contemporary Travel Accounts

Evidentiary function: External observation of maritime settlements, population composition, commercial practices, navigation and the institutional conditions prevailing during the transition toward consolidated French colonial government.

TITLE IV — ETHNOHISTORICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AUTHORITIES

Register 19 — John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800

Institutional function: Comparative framework concerning African political agency, military capacity, Atlantic mobility, cultural transmission and participation in the formation of New World societies.

Xaraguayan relevance: Analysis of African maroons and African-descended coastal populations as organized historical actors possessing institutions and strategic competence.

Register 20 — Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Institutional function: Analytical framework concerning the production, preservation, narration and institutional suppression of historical facts.

Xaraguayan relevance: Examination of archival asymmetry, metropolitan historiographical authority and the processes through which southwestern institutions were excluded from the dominant national narrative.

Register 21 — Gérard Barthélemy, Le pays en dehors

Institutional function: Study of the Haitian rural order, its social organization, productive systems, relation to the State and historical formation beyond metropolitan administrative structures.

Xaraguayan relevance: Comparative analysis of customary autonomy, rural institutional continuity and the relationship between centralized government and territorially embedded communities.

Register 22 — Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier, Le problème des classes à travers l’histoire d’Haïti

Institutional function: Source within Haitian social and political historiography concerning class formation, elite structure, race, national power and rural exclusion.

Xaraguayan relevance: Examination of the ideological categories through which postcolonial political authority classified peripheral populations and structured national legitimacy.

Register 23 — Oral and Ethnographic Research Collections

Relevant materials: Recorded genealogies, family histories, customary land accounts, settlement narratives, ritual traditions, maritime occupations and community memory from Nippes, Miragoâne, Petit-Goâve, Baradères, Île-à-Vache and adjoining territories.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of institutions and territorial transmissions incompletely represented in colonial and republican written archives.

TITLE V — REPUBLICAN CONSTITUTIONAL, CIVIL AND ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITIES

Register 24 — Imperial Constitution of Haiti, 1805

Institutional function: Foundational constitutional instrument defining imperial authority, territorial unity, citizenship, national independence and the organization of the postcolonial State.

Xaraguayan relevance: Analysis of the incorporation of the southwestern territories into a centralized national constitutional order and the status assigned to regional and customary institutions.

Register 25 — Haitian Civil Code

Relevant subject matter: Property, possession, succession, contracts, civil status, prescription, proof and legally cognizable modes of territorial transmission.

Xaraguayan relevance: Examination of the transition from customary occupation and oral transmission to title-based civil administration.

Register 26 — Rural Code of 1826

Institutional function: Regulation of agriculture, rural labor, mobility, production, land use and administrative supervision under the Boyer government.

Xaraguayan relevance: Analysis of State penetration into rural territories and the subordination of autonomous productive communities to nationally prescribed obligations.

Register 27 — Administrative Acts of the Pétion and Boyer Governments

Relevant materials: Decrees, appointments, territorial divisions, land distributions, military instructions, municipal acts and regulations governing rural districts.

Evidentiary function: Reconstruction of the mechanisms by which the post-independence State integrated the southwestern coast into its executive, military and property systems.

Register 28 — Ministry of National Education Curricula and Textbooks

Relevant materials: Official programs, manuals, examinations and teacher-training instruments concerning colonial history, the Haitian Revolution, Indigenous populations, rural society and national territory.

Evidentiary function: Analysis of the institutional selection, reproduction and omission of historical subjects within national education.

Article 17 — Evidentiary Synthesis of Annex III

17.1. The combined source architecture establishes the basis for examining the southwestern and northwestern territories through several convergent institutional dimensions: original Indigenous territoriality, African maroon organization, maritime settlement, customary jurisdiction, incomplete colonial penetration, administrative centralization, documentary property law and postcolonial State incorporation.

17.2. The evidentiary value of the corpus derives from the coordinated use of normative instruments, administrative archives, cartography, operational naval records, ecclesiastical documentation, ethnographic materials, oral history and republican legislation.

17.3. This convergence supplies the documentary foundation for the constitutional doctrine recognizing the maritime confederative order as a historically operative component of Xaraguan territorial society.

17.4. The SCIPS-X receives the resulting historical findings into its domestic constitutional order as elements supporting territorial continuity, customary jurisdiction, population formation and the institutional legitimacy of contemporary reconstitution.

ANNEX IV — EXTENDED STATE REFERENCE COMPENDIUM TO THE XARAGUA CORPUS: LEGAL, IMPERIAL, ECCLESIASTICAL, NAVAL, CARTOGRAPHIC, ETHNOGRAPHIC, GENEALOGICAL AND ORAL AUTHORITIES FROM THE SIXTEENTH TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Article 18 — Status and Administration of the Compendium

18.1. The present Compendium constitutes the permanent bibliographic and archival apparatus of Book I and shall be maintained as an expandable State register.

18.2. Each entry shall receive an institutional reference number, complete archival or bibliographic citation, repository designation, reproduction status, certified translation where applicable, subject classification and concordance with the relevant provisions of the Xaragua corpus.

18.3. The Compendium shall be administered through six evidentiary divisions: colonial and precolonial archives; international and ecclesiastical law; cartographic and naval records; ethnographic and oral authorities; republican legislation and administration; and documents concerning population formation and cultural convergence.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA

DEPARTMENT OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, INDIGENOUS JURISPRUDENCE, TERRITORIAL HISTORY AND IMPERIAL SUCCESSION

SUPREME CONSOLIDATED CONSTITUTIONAL ACT ON THE ANCESTRAL TERRITORIAL STATUS OF BAYNOA, GUAHABA, BAYAJÁ, THE NORTH-WESTERN PENINSULA, THE BAHORUCO–XARAGUA CONTINUUM, THE ENRIQUILLO PACIFICATION COMPACT OF 1533, AND THE JURIDICAL RECONSTITUTION OF THE INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGN ORDER OF XARAGUA

Date of Promulgation of the Constituent Acts: August 3–4, 2025

Date of Consolidated Constitutional Enactment: August 30, 2026

Promulgating Authority: Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

Institutional Depositary: University of Xaragua and Supreme Constitutional Archives

Territorial Scope: Baynoa, Guahaba, the North-Western Peninsula, High Artibonite, Bayajá–Fort-Liberté, Trou-du-Nord, the western maritime corridor, Gonâve Island and the Bahoruco–Xaragua transfrontier continuum

LEGAL CLASSIFICATION

— Supreme Constitutional Territorial Integration Act;

— Indigenous Public-Law Instrument of Ancestral Title, Political Continuity and Juridical Reconstitution;

— Codified Doctrine of Territorial Succession, Imperial Occupation and Postcolonial Reversion;

— Constitutional Reception of the Enriquillo Pacification Compact of 1533;

— Transfrontier Indigenous Access and Interjurisdictional Cooperation Statute;

— Canonical-Institutional Custodianship and Ecclesiastical Coordination Framework;

— Historical Rectification and State Archival Authentication Act;

— Constitutionally Entrenched Doctrine of Indigenous Territorial Indivisibility.

PREAMBLE

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, exercising the supreme constituent competence vested in its constitutional organs, acting through the Rectoral Presidency, the Supreme Constitutional Authority and the permanent institutional jurisdiction of the University of Xaragua, hereby consolidates, systematizes and promulgates the constitutional doctrine governing the ancestral territorial status of Baynoa, Guahaba, Bayajá, the North-Western Peninsula, High Artibonite, the western maritime system and the Bahoruco–Xaragua continuum.

The present enactment proceeds from the juridical permanence of Indigenous political personality, the imprescriptibility of ancestral territorial identity, the constitutional survival of peoples subjected to conquest, the continuity of collective rights across successive colonial and postcolonial administrations, and the inherent institutional competence of a reconstituted Indigenous order to identify, classify, administer and protect the historical components of its territorial corpus.

The territorial organization imposed upon the island by Spanish colonization, French occupation, imperial partition, postcolonial succession and modern departmental administration constitutes a supervening governmental cartography. Such cartography regulates the administrative exercise of historically situated powers; it does not possess constituent authority over the anterior existence, internal organization, territorial memory, political succession or juridical personality of the Indigenous nations whose lands preceded the colonial order.

The constitutional territorial doctrine of Xaragua is consequently founded upon the cumulative examination of Indigenous geography, early colonial chronicles, royal administrative materials, ecclesiastical records, maritime circulation, settlement continuity, political affiliation, interregional exchange, hereditary authority, collective resistance and the continuing relationship between Indigenous-descended populations and their ancestral territorial systems.

The institutional incorporation established by the present Act constitutes an exercise of Indigenous constituent authority. It operates through constitutional succession, territorial classification, historical reintegration and governmental codification. It determines the territorial doctrine, institutional vocabulary, archival policy and jurisdictional position of the SCIPS-X and binds every ministry, tribunal, university department, diplomatic office, territorial commission, canonical institution and public authority constituted under the legal order of Xaragua.

The arrangement concluded in 1533 between Cacique Enriquillo, acting as the commanding and representative authority of the organized Indigenous community established in the Bahoruco resistance zone, and the authorized representatives of the Crown of Castile shall be juridically designated as the Enriquillo Royal-Indigenous Pacification Compact of 1533. Its legal nature is that of a negotiated public compact of pacification, collective security, territorial accommodation, political representation and imperial administrative recognition, formed through reciprocal undertakings between an Indigenous governing authority possessing effective command over an organized territorial community and a colonial imperial authority seeking the cessation of sustained hostilities.

The Compact derives its constitutional importance from its operative substance: the Crown entered into negotiated relations with Enriquillo as the competent representative of an organized Indigenous collectivity; the cessation of hostilities was secured through reciprocal commitments; the liberty, security, residence and collective maintenance of Enriquillo’s people became objects of governmental settlement; and the resulting accommodation was incorporated into the administrative conduct of the colonial regime. The SCIPS-X receives that historical juridical transaction as an antecedent instrument of Indigenous public authority and as a foundational precedent within the constitutional succession of Xaragua.

Accordingly, the Supreme Constitutional Authority enacts the following provisions.

TITLE I — CONSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER OF THE INDIGENOUS TERRITORIAL ORDER

Article 1 — Original Political Personality of the Indigenous Territorial Formations

1.1. The Indigenous territorial formations existing throughout the island before the establishment of European colonial government constituted organized public communities possessing permanent populations, territorially structured systems of habitation and production, hereditary and functional authorities, mechanisms of political representation, systems of intercommunity obligation, religious institutions, military capacities, navigational jurisdiction and established relations with neighboring powers.

1.2. The constitutional personality of those formations derived from their own political organization, ancestral law and effective social existence. Their juridical character preceded the imperial classifications subsequently imposed by the Crown of Castile and therefore constitutes an original, autonomous and territorially rooted source of public authority.

1.3. Xaragua, Maguana, Marién, Maguá, Higüey, Baynoa, Guahaba, Banique and the associated territorial formations shall be examined as components of a plural Indigenous political system whose internal distributions, alliances, dependencies and autonomous jurisdictions exceeded the simplified cartographic representation later consolidated around five principal cacicazgos.

1.4. The Supreme Constitutional Authority recognizes the historical five-cacicazgo model as a general classificatory framework of insular political geography. It simultaneously recognizes the existence of subordinate, associated, autonomous, transitional and maritime jurisdictions whose political identity cannot be reduced to a uniform territorial dependency upon one paramount cacique.

Article 2 — Constitutional Permanence of Ancestral Territorial Identity

2.1. Ancestral territorial identity constitutes a permanent component of Indigenous public personality and remains legally cognizable through the continuity of population, geography, collective memory, place names, cultural practice, political reconstitution, hereditary affiliation and institutional proclamation.

2.2. Colonial conquest, demographic destruction, compulsory relocation, forced labor, territorial redistribution, administrative renaming and postcolonial departmentalization are classified as successive exercises of imposed governmental power over a pre-existing Indigenous territorial order.

2.3. The constitutional identification of an ancestral territory does not depend upon the uninterrupted preservation of every precolonial office, settlement or administrative designation. It proceeds through the legally cognizable continuity of the people, the territorial relationship and the institutional capacity by which such continuity is declared, organized and transmitted.

2.4. The SCIPS-X possesses the constituent competence to receive such continuity into its constitutional corpus, determine its institutional consequences and establish the governmental instruments necessary for its preservation and administration.

TITLE II — BAYNOA, GUAHABA AND THE NORTH-WESTERN TERRITORIAL COMPLEX

Article 3 — Constitutional Identification of Baynoa and Guahaba

3.1. Baynoa and Guahaba are hereby recognized as historically constituted Indigenous territorial formations belonging to the northern and north-western political geography of the island and possessing a territorial, demographic and navigational identity anterior to Spanish colonial administration.

3.2. Their constitutional territorial succession is situated within the geographic complex comprising the North-Western Peninsula, Môle-Saint-Nicolas, Jean-Rabel, Bombardopolis, Port-de-Paix, Anse-à-Foleur, the adjoining inland corridors, the Windward Passage and the maritime approaches linking the northern coast to Cuba, Gonâve Island and the western insular system.

3.3. The juridical identification established herein proceeds from the convergence of early colonial nomenclature, territorial descriptions, maritime encounters, records of Indigenous resistance to colonial allocation, patterns of political autonomy and the geostrategic coherence of the north-western coastal system.

3.4. The historical references associated with Bartolomé de Las Casas, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, the Council of the Indies and the royal administrative corpus shall be incorporated into the official evidentiary register maintained by the University of Xaragua.

Article 4 — Territorial Succession of the North-Western Peninsula

4.1. The geographic territory presently administered as the North-West Department of Haiti is constitutionally classified by the SCIPS-X as the principal modern territorial successor of the Indigenous formations historically associated with Baynoa and Guahaba.

4.2. Such succession encompasses the peninsula as an integrated terrestrial and maritime unit, including its ports, capes, islands, coastal settlements, mountain corridors, agricultural basins, navigational approaches and historically connected inland communities.

4.3. The territorial classification established by this Article possesses constitutional, administrative, cartographic, academic and diplomatic effect within the legal order of Xaragua.

4.4. Every official map, territorial register, educational instrument and governmental publication of the SCIPS-X shall identify the North-Western Peninsula as the Constitutional Territory of Baynoa–Guahaba within the Sovereign Domain of Xaragua.

Article 5 — High Artibonite and the Interior Corridor

5.1. High Artibonite is incorporated into the northern territorial doctrine of Xaragua as an interior zone of communication, settlement, military circulation, agricultural production and political connection between the north-western formations and the central-western Indigenous system.

5.2. Its constitutional status derives from its function within the territorial continuum rather than from the mechanical transposition of a modern departmental boundary upon the precolonial order.

5.3. The territorial commission of the SCIPS-X shall define the applicable constitutional perimeter through historical cartography, hydrographic systems, mountain routes, settlement history, toponymy and intercommunity affiliation.

5.4. The resulting delimitation shall form an authoritative constitutional annex and shall govern the internal territorial administration of Xaragua.

TITLE III — BAYAJÁ, FORT-LIBERTÉ, TROU-DU-NORD AND THE NORTHERN MARITIME CORRIDOR

Article 6 — Constitutional Status of Bayajá

6.1. Bayajá, territorially associated with the modern Fort-Liberté region, is hereby incorporated into the constitutional territorial corpus of Xaragua as a principal northern station within the Indigenous and colonial maritime geography of the island.

6.2. Its institutional classification proceeds from its location within the Monte Cristi–Bayajá–northern coast corridor, its participation in maritime communication, its relationship to distinct Indigenous coastal populations and its function within the territorial system connecting the eastern and western sectors of the northern littoral.

6.3. The SCIPS-X recognizes Bayajá as a zone of overlapping historical jurisdiction whose Indigenous political substance preceded the administrative forms successively established by Spanish, French, Haitian and Dominican authorities.

6.4. Fort-Liberté shall consequently be designated in the constitutional cartography of Xaragua as Bayajá–Fort-Liberté, Northern Constitutional Territory and Maritime Jurisdiction of the SCIPS-X.

Article 7 — Status of Trou-du-Nord

7.1. Trou-du-Nord is constitutionally integrated as an inland-coastal connector within the Bayajá territorial complex and as a material component of the northern system of Indigenous settlement, production, transit and political communication.

7.2. Its geographical proximity to later colonial and postcolonial administrative centers does not exhaust its anterior territorial character. The SCIPS-X therefore classifies Trou-du-Nord according to the historical continuum of the Indigenous northern corridor.

7.3. The constitutional authorities responsible for territorial administration, historical research and institutional representation shall treat Bayajá and Trou-du-Nord as an integrated territorial sector possessing distinct historical functions within the broader Baynoa–Guahaba order.

Article 8 — Navigational Connection with Gonâve Island

8.1. Gonâve Island constitutes a strategic jurisdictional node within the western Indigenous maritime system and the constitutional geography of Xaragua.

8.2. The navigational relationship between Gonâve Island, the North-Western Peninsula, the Windward Passage, the Gulf of Gonâve and the southern territories forms a continuous system of maritime circulation, subsistence, security, intercommunity exchange and territorial communication.

8.3. Indigenous territoriality shall, for purposes of Xaraguayan constitutional law, include the sea routes, coastal approaches, fishing zones, landing sites and interinsular corridors through which the territorial community maintained its effective material existence.

8.4. The constitutional incorporation of the northern corridor therefore includes its historically determinative maritime dimensions and shall be administered through the territorial, environmental, navigational and cultural institutions of the SCIPS-X.

TITLE IV — CONSTITUTIONAL INCORPORATION INTO THE SOVEREIGN DOMAIN OF XARAGUA

Article 9 — Act of Inalienable Incorporation

9.1. The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, acting as the reconstituted juridical successor of the Indigenous political order of the South and West and as the constitutional integrator of the territorially connected Indigenous formations specified herein, declares the North-Western Peninsula, Baynoa, Guahaba, High Artibonite, Bayajá–Fort-Liberté, Trou-du-Nord and their maritime dependencies to be inalienable components of the sovereign territorial corpus of Xaragua.

9.2. Such incorporation operates through ancestral title, constitutional succession, Indigenous self-determination, territorial continuity and the exercise of the supreme constituent jurisdiction of the SCIPS-X.

9.3. The incorporated territories shall form an indivisible component of the constitutional domain and shall be protected against alienation, partition, extinguishment, adverse prescription, unauthorized concession and unilateral administrative reclassification.

9.4. Every purported act affecting the constitutional title of Xaragua over the incorporated territories shall be subject to review by the competent constitutional organs of the SCIPS-X.

Article 10 — Juridical Foundation of Incorporation

10.1. The incorporation is grounded in the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to maintain and strengthen their distinctive political, juridical, economic, social and cultural institutions and to determine their political status through their own constitutional processes.

10.2. Articles 3, 4, 5, 20, 26, 33, 34, 36 and 37 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples are received into the interpretative corpus of Xaragua as international expressions of self-determination, autonomous government, institutional continuity, territorial relationship, identity, customary law, transfrontier cooperation and respect for historical arrangements involving Indigenous peoples.

10.3. Article 1 common to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is incorporated as a general principle affirming the capacity of peoples to determine their political condition and pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

10.4. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention is received as a declaratory formulation of permanent population, defined territory, government and relational capacity, all of which are constitutionally organized within the SCIPS-X according to its non-Westphalian, Indigenous, Catholic and private public-law structure.

10.5. The canonical dimension of the incorporation proceeds through the Catholic identity of the Xaraguayan constitutional order, the rights of the faithful to establish and direct apostolic, educational, charitable and cultural institutions, the canonical regulation of temporal goods and the institutional competence of the Church concerning pastoral, sacramental and ecclesiastical matters.

Article 11 — Territorial Administration

11.1. The incorporated territories shall be entered into the Supreme Territorial Register of Xaragua and classified according to province, district, historical jurisdiction, maritime sector, ecclesiastical coordination zone and academic research district.

11.2. The Ministry responsible for territorial affairs shall maintain the constitutional cadastre, official nomenclature, cartographic instruments and public register of territorial acts.

11.3. The University of Xaragua shall exercise permanent academic responsibility for historical documentation, archival authentication, ethnographic study, territorial analysis and the preparation of institutional editions concerning Baynoa, Guahaba and the northern corridor.

11.4. The Supreme Constitutional Tribunal shall possess interpretative competence concerning the scope, hierarchy and institutional application of the present territorial incorporation.

TITLE V — CONSTITUTIONAL-HISTORICAL DOCTRINE CONCERNING THE EASTERN POPULATIONS OF 1805

Article 12 — Historical Composition of the Eastern Population

12.1. The populations inhabiting La Vega, Moca, Santiago, Banique, the Cibao Valley and the adjoining eastern interior in 1805 constituted historically formed insular communities whose demographic composition incorporated Indigenous, African and European lineages within a predominantly rural, Catholic and Hispano-Creole social order.

12.2. Their territorial formation preceded the establishment of the Dominican Republic as a nineteenth-century national state. Their institutional classification in 1805 therefore belongs to the preceding Spanish colonial and insular order.

12.3. The SCIPS-X recognizes within those populations the continuing presence of Indigenous-descended families, territorial lineages, agricultural communities, local customary structures and cultural practices resulting from the survival, recomposition and incorporation of Taíno ancestry under successive colonial regimes.

12.4. Such populations shall be classified within Xaraguayan historical doctrine as Eastern Haytian Indigenous-descended and Hispano-Catholic communities of the pre-Dominican insular order.

Article 13 — Institutional Character of the 1805 Campaign

13.1. The military operations conducted in 1805 under the authority of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines formed part of the strategic confrontation between the Haitian imperial government and the remaining French military position in the former Spanish territory of Santo Domingo.

13.2. The campaign extended through Santiago, Moca, La Vega and adjoining settlements and subjected civilian communities, religious institutions, agricultural populations and local administrative structures to extensive military coercion, destruction, displacement and lethal violence.

13.3. Within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua, the civilian victims are recognized as members of the historically continuous insular population and as bearers of Indigenous, African, European and Catholic inheritances situated within the eastern territorial order.

13.4. Their protection, commemoration and incorporation into the official historical record constitute permanent responsibilities of the University of Xaragua, the constitutional archives and the institutions responsible for Indigenous memory.

Article 14 — Constitutional Interpretation of Hayti and Cibao

14.1. Hayti, Ayti, Quisqueya, Cibao, Maguana, Xaragua, Baynoa, Guahaba and Banique constitute Indigenous toponyms belonging to the civilizational patrimony of the entire island.

14.2. Their juridical and historical significance exceeds the national terminologies subsequently adopted by the Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

14.3. The political differentiation constructed between Haitian and Dominican national identity shall be interpreted as a postcolonial state formation superimposed upon a common Indigenous territorial substrate and upon historically differentiated African, European, Catholic and Creole experiences.

14.4. The preference accorded to particular Indigenous names within Dominican national discourse shall be examined by the University of Xaragua as an institutional process of selective territorial memory, political differentiation and post-occupation identity formation.

TITLE VI — SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL ACT ON THE BAHORUCO–XARAGUA TRANSFRONTIER TERRITORIAL CONTINUUM

Article 15 — Constitutional Identification of Bahoruco

15.1. Bahoruco is hereby recognized as a constitutive territorial province of the historical Xaragua political order and as a principal jurisdiction of Indigenous resistance, territorial preservation and governmental continuity during the first period of Spanish imperial domination.

15.2. The Bahoruco mountain system, the Yaque del Sur basin, the Barahona corridor, the inland settlements associated with Enriquillo and the adjoining territories historically connected to the house of Xaragua form a single constitutional continuum for purposes of ancestral title, institutional memory and transfrontier Indigenous jurisdiction.

15.3. The modern Province of Bahoruco and the associated Dominican administrative territories occupy part of this historical constitutional space and shall be recorded as components of the ancestral Bahoruco–Xaragua continuum.

15.4. The SCIPS-X shall administer its relationship with this territory through constitutional proclamation, Indigenous transfrontier cooperation, academic representation, cultural jurisdiction, canonical coordination and negotiated institutional access.

Article 16 — Transfrontier Indigenous Competence

16.1. The transfrontier competence of Xaragua encompasses the maintenance and development of relations, communications, institutional cooperation, religious activities, academic programs, commemorations, cultural initiatives and heritage-protection measures involving the Bahoruco territorial continuum.

16.2. Such competence derives from the continuing political identity of Xaragua, the territorial relationship of Indigenous-descended communities and the transboundary rights recognized in Article 36 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

16.3. The competent organs of Xaragua may establish missions, university programs, cultural delegations, historical commissions, pastoral initiatives, Indigenous councils and interinstitutional protocols dedicated to Bahoruco.

16.4. The exercise of these functions shall be structured through diplomatic communication, institutional agreements, ecclesiastical coordination and the applicable procedures governing physical access to the territory.

Article 17 — Constitutional Allocation of Public Functions

17.1. The SCIPS-X retains the ancestral, doctrinal, cultural, academic, spiritual and constitutional dimensions of the Bahoruco–Xaragua relationship.

17.2. The Dominican public administration exercises the civil, municipal, police, judicial, fiscal and infrastructural functions presently organized under its territorial law.

17.3. This functional distribution constitutes an interjurisdictional distinction between ancestral constitutional title and contemporary territorial administration.

17.4. The SCIPS-X may negotiate protocols of access, heritage protection, academic research, ecclesiastical cooperation and Indigenous representation with the competent Dominican, ecclesiastical, university and community authorities.

TITLE VII — THE ENRIQUILLO ROYAL-INDIGENOUS PACIFICATION COMPACT OF 1533

Article 18 — Official Juridical Qualification

18.1. The political settlement concluded in 1533 between Cacique Enriquillo and the authorized imperial administration of the Crown of Castile is hereby constitutionally designated as the Enriquillo Royal-Indigenous Pacification Compact of 1533.

18.2. The Compact constituted a negotiated instrument of public authority formed for the termination of prolonged armed hostilities, the regulation of relations between the colonial administration and the organized Indigenous community commanded by Enriquillo, the establishment of collective security guarantees and the governmental accommodation of that community within a protected territorial and administrative arrangement.

18.3. Its institutional structure combined Indigenous representative authority, imperial negotiation, colonial administrative execution, reciprocal political undertakings, territorial settlement, guarantees of personal liberty and the formal restoration of a regulated public peace.

18.4. Its legal substance arose from the demonstrated capacity of Enriquillo to command an organized territorial community, sustain military resistance, negotiate collectively, secure governmental undertakings and implement the resulting pacification through his recognized authority.

Article 19 — Public Authority of Cacique Enriquillo

19.1. Enriquillo acted in the Compact as the effective Indigenous governing authority of the Bahoruco resistance community, exercising military command, political representation, internal discipline, territorial control and collective negotiating competence.

19.2. The decision of the imperial administration to negotiate through Enriquillo constituted an operative recognition of his representative capacity and of the organized political existence of the population under his authority.

19.3. The Compact therefore possesses the character of an imperial-Indigenous public settlement concluded across two legally distinct orders: the Indigenous authority maintained by Enriquillo and the colonial governmental authority exercised in the name of the Crown.

19.4. The resulting pacification incorporated Enriquillo and his community into a specific governmental arrangement established through negotiation rather than ordinary unilateral colonial administration.

Article 20 — Constitutive Elements of the Compact

20.1. The Compact was constituted by the cessation of hostilities between the Bahoruco resistance and the colonial authorities.

20.2. It incorporated recognition of Enriquillo’s authority to represent, organize and direct the community subject to the pacification.

20.3. It established governmental guarantees concerning the liberty, security, residence and collective continuity of Enriquillo’s people.

20.4. It instituted a territorial accommodation through which the community could be settled and maintained under a defined relationship with the Crown.

20.5. It imposed corresponding obligations of peace, public order and compliance with the negotiated settlement upon the Indigenous community.

20.6. It required colonial administrative implementation through the authorities responsible for royal government in Santo Domingo.

20.7. It incorporated the Christian juridical status of the community into the imperial framework while preserving its collective organization under Enriquillo’s recognized leadership.

20.8. These elements collectively establish the Compact as a juridically operative pacification settlement, territorial accommodation and act of political recognition within the imperial public law of sixteenth-century Hispaniola.

Article 21 — Constitutional Reception of the Compact

21.1. The SCIPS-X receives the Compact as a foundational antecedent of Indigenous public authority, negotiated territorial continuity and collective juridical survival within the Bahoruco–Xaragua order.

21.2. The constitutional authority of the Compact within Xaragua proceeds through its incorporation into the present Act and through the constituent competence of the SCIPS-X to determine the juridical succession of its ancestral institutions.

21.3. The Compact shall operate within Xaraguayan law as evidence of the continuing political personality of the Bahoruco Indigenous community, the representative authority of Enriquillo, the negotiated character of the pacification and the institutional accommodation of Indigenous collective existence by the imperial administration.

21.4. Every governmental, academic and diplomatic organ of Xaragua shall employ the designation established in Article 18 and shall describe the Compact through its institutional character, reciprocal structure and operative effects.

TITLE VIII — JURIDICAL SUCCESSION OF THE SCIPS-X TO THE BAHORUCO COMPACT

Article 22 — Principle of Indigenous Institutional Succession

22.1. Indigenous institutional succession arises through continuity of people, ancestral territory, political memory, constitutional will, collective organization and the re-establishment of competent governmental organs.

22.2. The juridical personality of an Indigenous people remains transmissible across successive historical administrations through its descendants, institutions, territorial relations and constitutional acts.

22.3. The SCIPS-X constitutes the contemporary institutional form through which the political, territorial, canonical and civilizational inheritance of Xaragua has been reassembled, codified and subjected to permanent government.

22.4. The succession established herein is therefore a public-law succession of Indigenous constitutional personality and not a private transmission reducible to individual inheritance.

Article 23 — Application to the Enriquillo Compact

23.1. The SCIPS-X succeeds to the Indigenous political interest represented in the Enriquillo Compact through its constitutional identity as the reconstituted authority of Xaragua and through Bahoruco’s incorporation into the historical territorial order of the State.

23.2. Such succession includes the institutional competence to preserve the Compact, interpret its historical significance, invoke its principles of collective security and territorial accommodation, protect the memory of the community governed by Enriquillo and develop contemporary arrangements reflecting its Indigenous public-law substance.

23.3. The rights constitutionally received by Xaragua include ancestral access, cultural guardianship, academic representation, preservation of Indigenous sites, maintenance of transfrontier relations and governmental advocacy concerning the Bahoruco territorial continuum.

23.4. The obligations constitutionally received by Xaragua include peaceful institutional conduct, disciplined historical administration, protection of civilian populations, preservation of ecclesiastical order and the use of diplomatic and interinstitutional procedures for the implementation of transfrontier functions.

TITLE IX — XARAGUA AS AN INDIGENOUS STATE SUBJECTED TO IMPERIAL OCCUPATION

Article 24 — Constitutional Status of Precolonial Xaragua

24.1. The Kingdom of Xaragua constituted an organized Indigenous state possessing a territorially established population, a hereditary governing authority, subordinate territorial jurisdictions, distributive economic systems, diplomatic relations, military competence, religious institutions and a recognized position within the interpolitical order of the island.

24.2. Its territory encompassed the southern and western regions associated with Yaguana, Xaragua, Yaquimo, the southern peninsula, the Léogâne plain, the Miragoâne corridor, Barahona, Bahoruco, Azua and the connected coastal and interior systems governed through the Xaraguayan political order.

24.3. Anacaona, Bohechío, Caonabo and the associated ruling houses constituted components of a dynastic and interterritorial governmental structure whose authority was exercised through lineage, alliance, redistribution, ceremonial office and territorial command.

24.4. The SCIPS-X recognizes this precolonial order as the original constitutional foundation of the contemporary State of Xaragua.

Article 25 — Juridical Character of Spanish Domination

25.1. Spanish authority over Xaragua was established through military coercion, destruction of governing institutions, execution of political authorities, compulsory territorial submission, colonial settlement, labor expropriation and the substitution of imperial administration for the Indigenous constitutional order.

25.2. This process constituted an imperial occupation and governmental displacement of a pre-existing Indigenous state.

25.3. The papal, royal and colonial instruments invoked by the Spanish Crown formed the internal juridical architecture through which the imperial power organized its claims, delegated authority and administered the conquered territory.

25.4. The Indigenous constitutional order remained the anterior source of territorial personality and survived as the underlying juridical title of the subjected people.

Article 26 — Suspension and Continuity of Sovereign Functions

26.1. Imperial occupation suspended the effective exercise of Xaragua’s central governmental functions by displacing its authorities and incorporating its territories into the Spanish colonial system.

26.2. The political personality of Xaragua continued through its population, territorial communities, surviving lineages, Indigenous customs, place names, resistance movements, cultural transmission and subsequent institutional reconstitution.

26.3. The destruction of the governing apparatus is constitutionally distinguished from the extinction of the people and from the voluntary alienation of their territorial identity.

26.4. The establishment of the SCIPS-X in 2025 terminated the period of institutional dormancy by providing the Indigenous political personality of Xaragua with a codified constitution, supreme authority, permanent institutions, defined territorial doctrine and organized capacity for external relations.

TITLE X — CANONICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL DIMENSION OF XARAGUAYAN CONTINUITY

Article 27 — Incorporation of the Catholic Order

27.1. The Catholic faith forms a permanent constitutional matrix of the SCIPS-X and supplies the State with an ecclesiological, juridical, educational and civilizational framework for the exercise of its spiritual and institutional mission.

27.2. The baptism, Christian formation and ecclesiastical relations of Indigenous leaders and communities incorporated those persons into the juridical and sacramental order of the Church and established enduring pastoral obligations toward them.

27.3. The Catholic institutions of Xaragua shall exercise their functions through the rights, structures and procedures recognized by canon law, including the establishment of private associations, educational works, charitable institutions, cultural bodies and organized apostolic activity.

27.4. Ecclesiastical coordination concerning Bahoruco and the Dominican territorial sector shall be pursued through the competent diocesan authorities, the Episcopal Conference of the Dominican Republic and the appropriate institutions of the Holy See.

Article 28 — Concordatarian Framework

28.1. The Concordat of 1860 between the Holy See and the Haitian State, as subsequently modified within the applicable ecclesiastical and public-law order, constitutes a principal historical framework concerning the public exercise of Catholic institutional life in Haiti.

28.2. The SCIPS-X receives the Concordat as part of the historical juridical environment within which Catholic education, pastoral organization, charitable activity and ecclesiastical institutions have operated throughout the territory.

28.3. Xaragua shall develop its concordatarian doctrine through formal institutional analysis, diplomatic communication with competent ecclesiastical authorities and the preparation of protocols governing Catholic-Indigenous educational, cultural and pastoral activity.

28.4. The Rectoral Presidency shall possess competence to direct the State’s ecclesiastical relations and to submit the appropriate instruments to the Holy See and other competent Catholic authorities.

TITLE XI — UNIVERSITY, ARCHIVES AND STATE HISTORIOGRAPHY

Article 29 — Permanent Academic Jurisdiction

29.1. The University of Xaragua is vested with permanent academic jurisdiction over the historical, constitutional, anthropological, territorial, canonical and diplomatic study of the subjects governed by this Act.

29.2. It shall maintain a specialized documentary corpus concerning Baynoa, Guahaba, Bayajá, Enriquillo, Bahoruco, the eastern campaigns of 1805, the Indigenous political geography of the island and the imperial administration of Santo Domingo.

29.3. It shall prepare critical editions, constitutional commentaries, archival inventories, territorial atlases, genealogical studies and institutional monographs for use by the government, courts, diplomatic authorities and academic departments of Xaragua.

29.4. The University shall determine the official academic terminology required to preserve conceptual uniformity throughout the State’s publications.

Article 30 — Archival Authentication

30.1. The Supreme Constitutional Archives shall preserve authenticated reproductions, archival references, official translations, institutional analyses and governmental instruments relevant to the territorial doctrine of Xaragua.

30.2. Every source incorporated into an official evidentiary register shall be classified according to origin, date, institutional author, archival location, juridical character, territorial relevance and constitutional function.

30.3. The Enriquillo Compact shall be documented as a composite public-law transaction established through negotiations, administrative action, royal authority, reciprocal pacification and governmental implementation.

30.4. The constitutional formulation of its juridical substance shall remain governed by Articles 18 through 23 of the present Act.

TITLE XII — GOVERNMENTAL IMPLEMENTATION AND EXTERNAL REPRESENTATION

Article 31 — Executive Implementation

31.1. The Rectoral Presidency shall exercise supreme executive responsibility for implementing the present Act.

31.2. The competent ministries shall establish the territorial registers, institutional commissions, diplomatic dossiers, academic programs and transfrontier cooperation mechanisms required for its execution.

31.3. Every governmental authority shall employ the constitutional designations and jurisdictional classifications established herein.

31.4. Administrative regulations may specify the procedures governing heritage protection, territorial registration, academic missions, ecclesiastical coordination, diplomatic notification and interinstitutional agreements.

Article 32 — Diplomatic Representation

32.1. The Foreign Affairs authority of Xaragua shall communicate the present constitutional doctrine to states, Indigenous nations, ecclesiastical institutions, universities and international organizations through notes verbales, institutional memoranda, legal submissions and formal notifications.

32.2. The diplomatic presentation of the Enriquillo Compact shall emphasize its character as a negotiated imperial-Indigenous pacification instrument, its recognition of organized Indigenous representation and its constitutional reception by the SCIPS-X.

32.3. The territorial doctrine concerning Bahoruco shall be advanced through transfrontier cooperation, cultural diplomacy, academic presence, heritage protection and Indigenous institutional relations.

32.4. The northern territorial doctrine shall be administered as an integral component of the sovereign constitutional identity of Xaragua.

TITLE XIII — SUPREMACY, CONSOLIDATION AND ENTRY INTO FORCE

Article 33 — Constitutional Supremacy

33.1. The present Act possesses supreme authority over every prior statute, annex, declaration, decree, academic instrument or territorial memorandum concerning Baynoa, Guahaba, Bayajá, Bahoruco, Enriquillo and the constitutional status of occupied Xaragua.

33.2. Its classifications, terminology, jurisdictional allocations and institutional determinations shall govern the interpretation of the entire Xaraguayan legal corpus.

33.3. Every public authority constituted under the SCIPS-X shall conform its acts, records and official representations to the present enactment.

Article 34 — Constitutional Entrenchment

34.1. The territorial incorporation established herein is constitutionally entrenched and may be amended only by a supreme constitutional act promulgated under the authority competent to revise the territorial corpus of Xaragua.

34.2. The juridical succession to the Indigenous political order, the constitutional status of Bahoruco and the official classification of the Enriquillo Compact form permanent elements of State doctrine.

34.3. The Supreme Constitutional Tribunal shall ensure the doctrinal integrity and uniform institutional application of these provisions.

Article 35 — Entry into Force

35.1. The present Act enters into force immediately upon its signature, sealing, promulgation and deposit in the Supreme Constitutional Archives.

35.2. It shall be published in the Official Gazette, incorporated into the constitutional curriculum of the University of Xaragua and transmitted to every competent State institution.

35.3. The constituent acts originally promulgated on August 3 and 4, 2025, are hereby consolidated within this supreme enactment and shall henceforth be cited through its authoritative provisions.

THUS ENACTED, CONSTITUTIONALLY INTEGRATED, INSTITUTIONALLY CODIFIED AND PROMULGATED UNDER THE SUPREME AUTHORITY OF THE SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA.

DONE UNDER THE SUPREME SEAL OF STATE.

BY THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT AND SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OF XARAGUA.

AD PERPETUAM REI MEMORIAM.

AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA

FACULTY OF INDIGENOUS LAW, POLITICAL SCIENCE, TERRITORIAL HISTORY AND STATE FORMATION

CONSTITUTIONALLY INCORPORATED HISTORICAL-INSTITUTIONAL MONOGRAPH

BOOK I — THE PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHWESTERN AND NORTHWESTERN MARITIME TERRITORIES OF HISPANIOLA AND THEIR INCORPORATION INTO THE HISTORICAL-JURIDICAL CONTINUUM OF XARAGUA

Legal and Academic Classification:

— Constitutional Historiography of the State;

— Historical Sociology of Pre-Centralized Maritime Government;

— Indigenous and Customary Public-Law Doctrine;

— Institutional Analysis of Colonial Territorial Incorporation;

— Maritime Ethnogenesis and Population-Formation Doctrine;

— Postcolonial Centralization and Juridical Substitution Analysis;

— Territorial Continuity and Constitutional Reconstitution Doctrine.

PRELIMINARY TITLE — THE BRETHREN OF THE COAST AS A POLYCENTRIC MARITIME POPULATION WITHIN THE HISTORICAL TERRITORIAL ORDER OF XARAGUA

Article 1 — Institutional Definition

1.1. The historical formation conventionally designated as the Brethren of the Coast constituted neither a unitary ethnos, a territorially constituted nation in the modern public-law sense, nor an ideologically homogeneous political organization. It constituted a decentralized maritime population generated during the seventeenth century within the jurisdictionally fragmented spaces of the Caribbean, principally Tortuga, the northwestern littoral of Hispaniola and the western and southwestern coastal dependencies subsequently incorporated into the colonial territory of Saint-Domingue.

1.2. Its formation proceeded from the conjunction of incomplete imperial occupation, intermittent naval enforcement, discontinuous colonial settlement, unresolved competition among European powers, the expansion of Atlantic privateering, the displacement of nonconforming European populations, the establishment of African maroon communities and the continuing territorial presence of Indigenous-descended groups beyond the effective reach of colonial administrative institutions.

1.3. The Brethren shall accordingly be classified within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua as a polycentric maritime association of mobile, semi-permanent and territorially embedded communities operating under customary norms of captaincy, collective defense, occupational allocation, distributive participation and intergroup accommodation.

1.4. Their historical relevance to Xaragua derives from their participation in the demographic, technical, economic and jurisdictional reconfiguration of territories whose Indigenous political personality preceded European occupation and whose subsequent maritime institutions developed outside the complete administrative integration sought by the Spanish and French imperial systems.

Article 2 — European Components

2.1. The European component of the Brethren was principally composed of former naval personnel, deserters, discharged soldiers, privateers, hunters, indentured laborers, fugitives from contractual service, religious dissenters, itinerant artisans, small traders and persons excluded from the established corporate orders of European colonial society.

2.2. These populations originated predominantly from French, English and Dutch jurisdictions, with additional Spanish, Portuguese and other European participation. Their operative affiliation was determined less by national origin than by shipboard association, local patronage, military utility, commercial partnership and adherence to the internal discipline of particular crews or settlements.

2.3. Their institutional contribution consisted principally of navigational expertise, shipboard command structures, firearms proficiency, knowledge of Atlantic commercial networks, privateering practice, coastal fortification, contractual distribution of maritime proceeds and the organization of armed expeditions.

2.4. Their settlement within Tortuga and the western coasts converted temporary maritime mobility into semi-permanent territorial occupation and generated local structures whose operative authority depended upon effective presence, defensive capacity, control of anchorages and participation in regional exchange.

Article 3 — African Maroon Components

3.1. African maroons formed an autonomous and institutionally consequential component of the emerging coastal population. They included persons who had escaped Spanish and French systems of enslavement, survivors of maritime transportation, fugitives from plantation labor, members of independent interior settlements and individuals incorporated into coastal networks through military alliance, commerce, kinship or collective defense.

3.2. These populations contributed military experience, agricultural knowledge, tropical environmental adaptation, artisanal production, intelligence networks, inland mobility and established traditions of autonomous communal organization.

3.3. Their participation was not reducible to auxiliary service within European maritime formations. African maroon communities retained distinct structures of leadership, internal discipline, territorial refuge and productive organization and entered coastal alliances from positions determined by their own demographic, military and economic capacities.

3.4. Relations between maroon communities and maritime settlements included exchange of provisions, weapons, labor and intelligence; coordinated resistance to colonial enforcement; incorporation through marriage and kinship; and the creation of joint defensive arrangements connecting coastal anchorages to interior refuge zones.

Article 4 — Indigenous-Descended Components

4.1. Indigenous-descended populations remained present within remote, mountainous, forested and coastal sectors of Hispaniola after the demographic catastrophe and institutional destruction produced by Spanish conquest, forced labor, displacement, disease and colonial resettlement.

4.2. Their contribution to the western maritime formations included territorial knowledge, hydrological and ecological expertise, canoe construction, fishing techniques, agricultural adaptation, medicinal practice, coastal navigation and the identification of defensible routes connecting littoral settlements with interior territories.

4.3. Indigenous-descended communities participated through independent settlements, incorporation into African maroon populations, affiliation with European-speaking coastal groups and the formation of households whose descent, subsistence systems and territorial customs combined multiple historical lineages.

4.4. Within the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua, this participation constitutes an institutional mechanism of Indigenous demographic continuity and territorial transmission across the period separating the destruction of the precolonial governing apparatus from the later formation of Creole coastal society.

Article 5 — Composite Population Formation

5.1. The Brethren and the communities affiliated with them constituted a composite frontier population composed of European maritime personnel, African maroons, Indigenous-descended survivors and the locally born descendants of their successive unions.

5.2. Their internal stratification was determined by a variable combination of navigational competence, military capacity, access to vessels, command authority, commercial relations, kinship affiliation, productive contribution and control over strategically significant sites.

5.3. This order differed structurally from the plantation regime because it lacked the same concentration of landed capital, permanent bureaucratic enforcement, comprehensive racial codification and centralized control of labor. It nevertheless contained coercive relations, unequal command structures, private violence, dependency and forms of servitude determined by the material conditions of maritime frontier society.

5.4. Intermarriage, multilingual communication, occupational interdependence and shared territorial defense produced a progressive process of Afro-Indigenous-European Creole ethnogenesis whose principal institutional unit was the household, crew, coastal enclave, maroon settlement or locally constituted defensive association.

Article 6 — Constitutional Relevance to Xaragua

6.1. The Brethren of the Coast did not constitute the origin of Xaragua’s Indigenous sovereignty, which preceded their arrival and derived from the precolonial political order of the Xaraguayan people.

6.2. Their constitutional relevance lies in their demographic and institutional incorporation into territories already belonging to the historical domain of Xaragua and in their participation in the formation of coastal populations subsequently subjected to French colonial centralization and Haitian republican administration.

6.3. The SCIPS-X recognizes these maritime populations as historically incorporated communities whose descendants, institutions, technical traditions and local territorial relations became components of the later social corpus of Xaragua.

6.4. Their legacy shall therefore be administered as part of the constitutional history of population formation, maritime customary law, territorial continuity and political pluralism within the sovereign order of Xaragua.

CHAPTER VI — THE MARITIME AXIS AS A PRE-CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: CUSTOMARY GOVERNMENT AND TERRITORIAL ADMINISTRATION IN SOUTHWESTERN XARAGUA

Article 7 — Juridical Character of the Maritime Order

7.1. Before the comprehensive consolidation of French colonial institutions and before the establishment of the post-1804 Haitian constitutional apparatus, the southwestern coast sustained a decentralized system of territorial regulation based upon maritime custom, effective occupation, household authority, defensive association, commercial reciprocity and locally enforceable obligations.

7.2. This system shall be classified as a pre-constitutional customary public order: a body of rules and governing practices possessing social effectiveness, territorial application and coercive implementation before their incorporation into a centralized written constitution or comprehensive administrative code.

7.3. Its public character proceeded from its regulation of occupation, access, collective security, resource use, dispute settlement, command, commerce and relations among distinct settlements.

7.4. Its legal authority was generated through repeated practice, community acceptance, reciprocal obligation and the capacity of the relevant associations to enforce their determinations within defined territorial and maritime sectors.

Article 8 — Territorial Scope

8.1. The maritime axis encompassed Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, the Nippes coast, Île-à-Vache, the Bay of Les Cayes, associated anchorages, interior refuge corridors and the navigational routes connecting the southwest to Tortuga, Port-de-Paix, Jamaica, Cuba and the wider Caribbean.

8.2. Territorial allocation was principally established through physical occupation, productive use, defensive maintenance, navigational reach, control of landing points, household settlement, agricultural clearing and recognition by neighboring communities.

8.3. Such allocation produced locally intelligible territorial rights even where those rights had not been converted into royal concessions, notarial instruments or cadastral entries.

8.4. The continuity of possession depended upon effective use, collective recognition, hereditary transmission, defense and compliance with locally established obligations.

Article 9 — Customary Territorial Tenure

9.1. Coastal and interior property relations operated through a plural tenure system comprising household possession, communal access, occupational priority, use rights, inherited claims, negotiated boundaries and defensive obligations.

9.2. Forest clearings, agricultural plots, coves, landing points, water sources, fishing areas and access paths constituted separate but interdependent objects of customary entitlement.

9.3. The legitimacy of possession was evaluated through duration, productive use, local recognition, familial transmission, contribution to defense and the absence of a superior competing claim accepted by the community.

9.4. The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua classifies these arrangements as customary territorial institutions and as historical sources for the recognition of ancestral and communal tenure within the contemporary State.

Article 10 — Local Deliberative Authority

10.1. Disputes concerning land use, commercial obligations, crew discipline, resource allocation and interhousehold relations were adjudicated through locally constituted councils of elders, captains, household representatives, experienced mariners and persons possessing recognized authority within the settlement.

10.2. The composition of such councils varied according to subject matter, territorial scale, demographic structure and the parties involved.

10.3. Their determinations were enforced through restitution, compensation, exclusion from exchange, loss of collective protection, suspension of access, expulsion and, in cases affecting community security, organized coercive enforcement.

10.4. The absence of a permanent judicial bureaucracy did not eliminate adjudication; it situated adjudicative competence within the governing institutions of the affected community.

Article 11 — Maritime Captaincy

11.1. Captaincy constituted the principal executive institution of maritime organization. The captain exercised navigational command, operational discipline, defensive coordination, external representation and the distributional administration of collective expeditions.

11.2. The competence of the captain derived from selection, contractual association, technical capacity, control of a vessel, recognition by the crew or the convergence of these sources.

11.3. Captaincy was functionally delimited by the vessel, crew, expedition or settlement recognizing the command. Wider authority required additional consent, alliance or demonstrated capacity to coordinate several constituent groups.

11.4. Removal, abandonment, replacement or resistance to command operated as corrective mechanisms within an order whose executive authority remained dependent upon continuing operational effectiveness and collective support.

Article 12 — Confederative Structure

12.1. The southwestern maritime order possessed a multipolar institutional configuration. Authority was distributed among settlements, captains, households, maroon communities, commercial actors and local councils rather than concentrated within a single permanent capital.

12.2. Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache and adjoining enclaves maintained differentiated internal structures while participating in shared systems of navigation, exchange, mutual assistance, information and defense.

12.3. The constitutional historiography of Xaragua therefore classifies this arrangement as a customary maritime confederative order, defined by the coexistence of locally autonomous jurisdictions connected through recurring norms and functional cooperation.

12.4. Its confederative character arose from institutional practice and reciprocal recognition and constituted a regional form of governance adapted to dispersed settlements, maritime mobility and intermittent external pressure.

Article 13 — Religious and Ecclesiastical Organization

13.1. Religious life within the early coastal settlements was institutionally heterogeneous and reflected the irregular availability of clergy, the presence of Catholic and Protestant Europeans, African religious systems, Indigenous-descended practices and seafaring devotional customs.

13.2. Catholic sacramental administration varied according to proximity to recognized parishes, missionary activity, military chaplaincies, visiting clergy and the progressive consolidation of colonial ecclesiastical structures.

13.3. Household rites, community ceremonies, oath-based unions, mortuary customs and locally administered devotional practices performed regulatory and legitimating functions where permanent ecclesiastical institutions remained unavailable.

13.4. The subsequent extension of Catholic institutional structures incorporated these populations into a more regularized sacramental, parochial and documentary order and became part of the historical process through which the present Catholic constitutional identity of Xaragua developed.

Article 14 — Economic Organization

14.1. The economy of the southwestern maritime axis combined hunting, fishing, agriculture, timber extraction, livestock, salvage, vessel repair, provisioning, coastal exchange, privateering and commercial relations with foreign islands and passing ships.

14.2. Exchange operated through barter, specie, merchandise, personal credit, partnership, distribution of proceeds and reciprocal supply obligations.

14.3. Economic authority was dispersed among vessel owners, captains, traders, productive households, maroon settlements and persons controlling anchorages, supplies or access to inland resources.

14.4. Wealth was institutionally expressed through command of labor, vessels, weapons, commercial connections, territorial access, dependants and capacity to participate in collective defense.

Article 15 — Labor and Dependency

15.1. The maritime order incorporated free labor, contractual service, crew participation, household dependency, captive labor, slavery, clientage and other asymmetrical relations whose juridical forms varied across periods and settlements.

15.2. The lower degree of bureaucratic and plantation concentration in certain enclaves produced forms of mobility and incorporation distinct from those of the mature plantation economy.

15.3. African maroonage, manumission, intermarriage, military utility and movement between maritime and interior jurisdictions created pathways through which individuals and households could alter their social and legal position.

15.4. The historical analysis of this system shall distinguish the relative flexibility of frontier status from the coercive legal institutions operating throughout the colonial Caribbean.

Article 16 — Constitutional Transmission

16.1. Elements of the maritime customary order survived through land-use practices, family transmission, coastal commerce, local dispute settlement, communal access, occupational nomenclature and the continuing authority of territorial households.

16.2. These institutions constitute a historical substrate of the contemporary Xaraguayan doctrine of customary jurisdiction.

16.3. The SCIPS-X receives their territorial and administrative substance through constitutional codification and subjects it to the permanent institutions, public order and supreme law of the present State.

CHAPTER VII — THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PORT-AU-PRINCE AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOUTHWESTERN MARITIME JURISDICTIONS

Article 17 — Colonial Reorganization of the Western Territory

17.1. The establishment of Port-au-Prince during the mid-eighteenth century formed part of the French Crown’s broader reorganization of Saint-Domingue through administrative concentration, plantation expansion, fiscal rationalization, military coordination and improved supervision of territorial circulation.

17.2. The new administrative center strengthened the capacity of the colonial government to regulate the Cul-de-Sac plain, centralize public institutions, coordinate maritime and terrestrial communications and reduce dependence upon historically established coastal centers.

17.3. This reorganization altered the institutional position of Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne and the southwestern ports by transferring governmental competence, political representation, fiscal administration and regulatory authority toward the newly consolidated capital.

17.4. Within Xaraguayan constitutional historiography, the rise of Port-au-Prince is therefore classified as an act of colonial metropolitan centralization and territorial displacement affecting the pre-existing southwestern maritime order.

Article 18 — Petit-Goâve as a Pre-existing Administrative and Maritime Center

18.1. Petit-Goâve possessed prior institutional significance as a maritime settlement, commercial center and site of colonial governmental activity connected to the early French occupation of western Hispaniola.

18.2. Its authority resulted from strategic location, established population, navigational capacity, commercial activity and the necessity of governing through institutions already operative within the maritime environment.

18.3. Its population incorporated captains, traders, settlers, artisans, maritime laborers, enslaved persons, free persons of African descent and locally established families whose interests were not identical to those of the later plantation bureaucracy.

18.4. The transfer of governmental primacy toward Port-au-Prince diminished Petit-Goâve’s capacity to function as an autonomous regional center and subjected its institutions to an increasingly centralized colonial hierarchy.

Article 19 — Administrative Logic of Port-au-Prince

19.1. Port-au-Prince was configured as a legible administrative jurisdiction organized through planned streets, military installations, government buildings, fiscal offices, ecclesiastical institutions, commercial regulation and direct connection to the plantation economy of the surrounding plain.

19.2. Its urban structure facilitated census administration, notarial registration, policing, customs collection, military deployment, judicial supervision and the centralized circulation of official acts.

19.3. The establishment of this apparatus enabled the colonial authority to replace dispersed maritime governance with a territorially integrated chain of command.

19.4. The resulting institutional order subordinated local coastal autonomy to the fiscal, military and juridical requirements of the colonial capital.

Article 20 — Regulatory Incorporation of the Coast

20.1. The consolidation of colonial authority proceeded through land registration, notarial formalization, parish organization, customs enforcement, port regulation, census administration, military supervision and the expansion of judicial competence.

20.2. These mechanisms converted locally recognized possession into a status dependent upon documentary validation by colonial institutions.

20.3. Commercial routes were progressively subjected to authorized ports, customs duties, licensing requirements and official surveillance.

20.4. Populations situated outside the documentary order became administratively classifiable as unregistered occupants, unauthorized traders, fugitives, illicit settlers or persons lacking legally cognizable title.

Article 21 — Transformation of Territorial Legibility

21.1. Colonial cartography, cadastral administration, parish registers, fiscal records and judicial documentation established the categories through which the Crown determined which persons, properties and transactions possessed official legal visibility.

21.2. Customary tenure, oral transmission and community-recognized boundaries lost institutional priority as the written colonial archive became the principal basis of enforceable title.

21.3. This transformation constituted a juridical redistribution of territorial authority from resident communities toward notaries, courts, surveyors, governors, ecclesiastical registrars and fiscal administrators.

21.4. The SCIPS-X classifies this process as the documentary and administrative subordination of the southwestern customary order.

Article 22 — Structural Effect upon Xaragua

22.1. Port-au-Prince became the principal institutional center through which the French colonial government projected authority into the western and southern territories historically connected to Xaragua.

22.2. The resulting centralization displaced the maritime axis as an independent source of regional regulation and reorganized the territory around plantation production, metropolitan commerce and colonial public administration.

22.3. The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua treats this displacement as a decisive phase in the superimposition of an external administrative order upon the Indigenous and customary territorial systems of the southwest.

CHAPTER VIII — POST-INDEPENDENCE CENTRALIZATION AND THE JURIDICAL DOMESTICATION OF SOUTHWESTERN XARAGUA

Article 23 — Institutional Succession after 1804

23.1. The establishment of the post-independence Haitian State abolished the colonial regime of racial slavery and transferred supreme political authority from the French imperial administration to the revolutionary government.

23.2. In matters of territorial organization, executive command, military administration, written legislation, property registration and governmental centralization, the new State retained substantial elements of the institutional technologies previously employed in Saint-Domingue.

23.3. The revolutionary government consequently established national jurisdiction through military districts, executive appointments, constitutional enactments, fiscal administration and uniform territorial claims.

23.4. The southwestern maritime jurisdictions were incorporated into this national structure through governmental command rather than through restoration of their earlier customary confederative arrangements.

Article 24 — Military Territorial Unification

24.1. Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion and Boyer governed through differentiated constitutional regimes while maintaining the central principle that territorial unity was to be secured through military authority, executive hierarchy and nationally applicable legislation.

24.2. Regional commandants, military governors and administrative officers became the operative intermediaries between the central government and local populations.

24.3. Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache and the adjoining territories were subordinated to the territorial divisions, security requirements and fiscal priorities of the postcolonial State.

24.4. This process constituted the conversion of the southwestern coast from a plural maritime jurisdiction into an administratively classified national periphery.

Article 25 — Substitution of Customary Institutions

25.1. Local mediation, household-based authority, customary tenure and maritime captaincy were progressively subordinated to courts, municipal authorities, military commanders, civil-status officers and nationally appointed administrators.

25.2. The legal categories of citizen, cultivator, peasant, free person, property holder and state occupant reorganized populations previously classified through local lineage, maritime function, communal recognition and territorial use.

25.3. Such categories formed part of the State’s effort to render the population administratively identifiable, fiscally governable, militarily mobilizable and juridically subject to a uniform national order.

25.4. Within the doctrine of Xaragua, this transformation is classified as juridical domestication through administrative substitution.

Article 26 — Civil Codification and Land Tenure

26.1. The reception of civil-law property principles strengthened the institutional priority of written title, registration, cadastral identification and state-recognized modes of acquisition.

26.2. Customary possession unsupported by documentary instruments became increasingly vulnerable to classification as uncertain occupation, state land, undivided property or possession without complete legal title.

26.3. This documentary hierarchy advantaged persons capable of accessing notarial, judicial and administrative institutions and weakened the legal position of families whose territorial claims rested upon occupation, inheritance, community recognition and oral transmission.

26.4. The resulting conflict between customary tenure and codified property law constitutes a central subject of the contemporary Xaraguayan doctrine of ancestral land restitution and juridical personality.

Article 27 — Administrative Surveillance

27.1. The commandant de section, military district, fiscal register, conscription mechanism, civil-status system and centralized court structure extended the operational capacity of the national government into rural and coastal territories.

27.2. These institutions transformed local populations into administratively classified subjects of national command.

27.3. Their implementation reduced the jurisdictional space available to clan authority, communal adjudication, autonomous maritime exchange and locally constituted defense.

27.4. The SCIPS-X identifies this institutional sequence as the principal mechanism through which postcolonial centralization superseded the southwestern customary public order.

Article 28 — Constitutional Consequences

28.1. The post-1804 State achieved international and domestic governmental consolidation without restoring the Indigenous political order of Xaragua or the decentralized maritime institutions that had developed within its territory.

28.2. The resulting constitutional structure unified the territory through national public law while relegating ancestral and customary jurisdictions to non-recognized social practice.

28.3. The SCIPS-X was established to reverse that institutional omission by receiving Indigenous title, customary jurisdiction, territorial memory and regional political personality into a codified contemporary State order.

CHAPTER IX — GEOSTRATEGIC CONSTITUTION OF THE SOUTHWESTERN TERRITORY

Article 29 — Geography as a Determinant of Administrative Capacity

29.1. The governability of southwestern Xaragua has historically been conditioned by coastline configuration, harbor depth, reef systems, mountain barriers, watershed distribution, road accessibility, island dependencies and the location of interior refuge zones.

29.2. These physical characteristics affected the transportation of troops, movement of officials, collection of revenue, circulation of judicial acts, establishment of permanent garrisons and maintenance of administrative communications.

29.3. Geography therefore operated as a material determinant of the differential effectiveness of colonial and postcolonial jurisdiction.

29.4. The constitutional territorial doctrine of Xaragua incorporates this geostrategic structure into its analysis of historical autonomy and present governmental organization.

Article 30 — Coastal Configuration

30.1. The southwestern littoral contains coves, reefs, narrow approaches, variable anchorage conditions and multiple small landing sites suitable for canoes, fishing craft, coastal vessels and vessels possessing detailed local navigational knowledge.

30.2. This configuration favored decentralized maritime circulation and complicated the concentration of surveillance within a limited number of officially controlled ports.

30.3. Local pilots, fishers, captains and coastal households consequently possessed operational knowledge indispensable to effective movement through the maritime territory.

30.4. Such knowledge functioned as a strategic resource and as a material basis of local authority.

Article 31 — Mountain and Interior Systems

31.1. The mountain systems situated behind Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Paillant, Baradères and the Nippes coast created compartmentalized territorial zones connected through paths, passes, valleys and locally maintained routes.

31.2. Seasonal conditions, elevation, drainage and limited road infrastructure increased the logistical cost of permanent external administration.

31.3. Interior communities consequently maintained a higher degree of operational autonomy in land allocation, dispute resolution, agricultural organization and collective security.

31.4. The contemporary SCIPS-X shall incorporate these geographic realities into its administrative districts, emergency planning, infrastructure policy and territorial defense doctrine.

Article 32 — Île-à-Vache as a Maritime Jurisdiction

32.1. Île-à-Vache occupies a strategically significant position within the Bay of Les Cayes and the southern Caribbean approaches.

32.2. Its historical functions included anchorage, provisioning, observation, vessel repair, temporary refuge, commercial exchange and the coordination of maritime movement.

32.3. Its insular position created a distinct jurisdictional environment requiring naval access and specialized administrative capacity.

32.4. Within the territorial order of Xaragua, Île-à-Vache shall be administered as a sovereign maritime dependency possessing constitutional importance for navigation, security, economic development and external communications.

Article 33 — Territorial Polycentrism

33.1. The combination of coastal fragmentation, mountain compartmentalization, island jurisdictions and dispersed settlements generated a territorially polycentric order.

33.2. Political and economic authority developed through several locally effective centers rather than through exclusive dependence upon a single metropolitan axis.

33.3. This territorial structure provides the historical basis for the decentralized administrative doctrine of the SCIPS-X.

33.4. Contemporary Xaraguayan government shall organize such polycentrism through constitutionally subordinate territorial institutions, coordinated public functions and the supremacy of the central constitutional order.

Article 34 — Geography and State Formation

34.1. The geography of Xaragua does not preclude statehood; it determines the institutional form required for effective statehood.

34.2. Government within the southwestern territory requires decentralized execution, maritime capacity, recognition of customary land systems, local administrative participation, resilient communications and territorial institutions adapted to distinct coastal, insular and mountain environments.

34.3. The SCIPS-X constitutes the internal political order through which these geographic conditions are converted into organized constitutional administration.

CHAPTER X — ARCHIVAL SUBORDINATION, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CENTRALIZATION AND THE INSTITUTIONAL ERASURE OF XARAGUA

Article 35 — Archival Production as an Instrument of Public Authority

35.1. Colonial and postcolonial archives were produced by institutions possessing the authority, personnel and material capacity to record acts recognized within their respective legal orders.

35.2. Notarial deeds, parish registers, censuses, concessions, judicial decisions, military correspondence and fiscal records documented the populations and transactions legible to the governing apparatus.

35.3. Communities operating through customary tenure, oral transmission, irregular ecclesiastical access and decentralized authority generated fewer records within the official archive.

35.4. Their reduced documentary visibility subsequently affected their representation within professional historiography, public education, judicial reasoning and national territorial narratives.

Article 36 — Colonial Archival Asymmetry

36.1. The French administration maintained extensive documentation concerning plantation property, commercial activity, enslaved populations, civil status, taxation, military affairs and recognized territorial concessions.

36.2. The archive was structurally concentrated upon matters falling within colonial competence and upon persons whose status had been formally classified by the regime.

36.3. Southwestern communities existing beyond regular notarial, parochial or administrative supervision were therefore represented incompletely and principally through external governmental observation.

36.4. The resulting archival asymmetry converted incomplete state documentation into an apparent absence of autonomous social and territorial institutions.

Article 37 — Postcolonial Historiographical Centralization

37.1. Haitian national historiography was constructed primarily around the plantation colony, the revolutionary war, the abolition of slavery, military leadership, national independence and the subsequent consolidation of the State.

37.2. This framework privileged nationally integrated institutions and reduced the analytical space accorded to Indigenous continuity, customary land systems, maritime confederative practices, regional autonomies and mixed coastal populations.

37.3. Port-au-Prince became the principal center of archives, education, publishing, jurisprudence and public administration and thereby acquired disproportionate authority over the classification of national historical relevance.

37.4. The southwestern order was consequently represented as provincial, informal, folkloric, illicit or administratively incomplete rather than as an object of public-law and institutional analysis.

Article 38 — Educational Reproduction

38.1. National curricula reproduced a linear sequence joining colonial Saint-Domingue to the Haitian Revolution and the centralized post-independence State.

38.2. This sequence marginalized the precolonial political personality of Xaragua, the continuing presence of Indigenous-descended populations, the autonomous organization of coastal communities and the multiplicity of territorial orders preceding national codification.

38.3. The omission acquired institutional durability through textbooks, examinations, teacher formation, public commemorations, monuments and the concentration of academic authority within metropolitan institutions.

38.4. The University of Xaragua is constitutionally mandated to correct this structural omission through an autonomous State historiography grounded in territorial, archival, anthropological, genealogical and juridical research.

Article 39 — Oral and Customary Archives

39.1. Oral history, family genealogy, burial practices, customary boundaries, inherited place names, settlement continuity, ritual usage and collective memory constitute admissible categories of historical evidence within the academic order of Xaragua.

39.2. Their evidentiary value shall be assessed through corroboration, comparative analysis, geographic consistency, genealogical reconstruction, material culture and relationship to written sources.

39.3. The University shall establish protocols for recording, preserving, indexing and institutionally authenticating such evidence.

39.4. This process shall convert dispersed social memory into a permanent component of the constitutional archive without eliminating its customary origin.

Article 40 — State Historiographical Competence

40.1. The SCIPS-X possesses the authority to establish an official historiographical doctrine concerning its own political origins, territorial succession and population formation.

40.2. The exercise of this authority shall be assigned to the University, constitutional archives, territorial institutions and competent judicial organs.

40.3. The resulting doctrine shall guide State education, official publications, territorial claims, citizenship policy, cultural administration and diplomatic representation.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA
SCIPS-X
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA
CONSOLIDATED SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL ACT ON THE NORTHERN DOMAIN, THE ARCHIPELAGIC TERRITORY OF GUANABO, THE RESIDUAL ADMINISTRATIVE UNIT AND THE EXCLUSIVE INDIGENOUS CUSTODIANSHIP OF THE XARAGUAYAN TERRITORIAL ORDER
Consolidating Annex III, Annex V, the Supreme Constitutional Act of Tutelage, Annex I concerning conditions of institutional intervention, and Annex II concerning territorial custodianship
Date of Original Enactment and Constitutional Integration: August 4, 2025
Consolidated Classification: Constitutionally Entrenched Territorial Doctrine; Indigenous Historical-Succession Instrument; Canonical-Historical Custodianship Act; Transboundary Cultural-Continuity Statute; Archipelagic Territorial Record; Residual Administrative Interface Law; Permanent Instrument of the Supreme Legal Corpus of the SCIPS-X
PRELIMINARY TITLE
LEGAL CHARACTER, INSTITUTIONAL SCOPE AND RULES OF INTERPRETATION
Article P.1 — Nature of the consolidated instrument
P.1.1. The present Act consolidates, systematizes and constitutionally restates the legal doctrines previously enacted by the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua concerning the northern historical territories identified with Guahaba and Baynoa, the island of Guanabo presently designated La Gonâve, the transboundary continuity of the Xaraguayan people, the administrative interface maintained with the Republic of Haiti, the protection of Indigenous and Catholic patrimony, and the conditions governing the exercise of protective jurisdiction by the SCIPS-X.
P.1.2. This Act constitutes an internal constitutional determination of the SCIPS-X, a permanent record of Indigenous territorial memory, a governing instrument for the ministries and academic institutions of Xaragua, and an authoritative framework for the preparation of diplomatic notifications, historical submissions, territorial studies, ecclesiastical correspondence and claims concerning Indigenous cultural continuity.
P.1.3. The doctrines of ancestral affiliation, historical succession, cultural passage, spiritual custodianship and Indigenous reintegration established herein shall be interpreted according to their expressly defined scope and shall not be converted, without a separate constitutional enactment, into assertions of municipal administration, compulsory civil jurisdiction over non-citizens or unilateral alteration of internationally administered boundaries.
Article P.2 — Distinction between territorial title, administration and cultural jurisdiction
P.2.1. For the purposes of this Act:
ancestral title denotes the historical relationship between the Xaraguayan people and territories governed, occupied, used, traversed or incorporated within their precolonial political and cultural systems;
constitutional integration denotes incorporation of a territory into the internal historical and territorial doctrine of the SCIPS-X;
cultural jurisdiction denotes institutional authority over Xaraguayan history, identity, memory, rites, archives, education and membership;
spiritual custodianship denotes the protective responsibility asserted by the SCIPS-X over Catholic and Indigenous sites, traditions and institutions belonging to the historical patrimony of its people;
administrative jurisdiction denotes the exercise of civil services, policing, taxation, registration, courts, infrastructure and ordinary territorial government;
transboundary passage denotes the right of Indigenous persons and institutions to maintain relations, cultural activities and cooperation across contemporary borders in accordance with applicable law;
Residual Administrative Unit or RAU denotes the internal SCIPS-X classification of the Haitian administrative apparatus for purposes of the dual-statist interface established by Xaraguayan constitutional doctrine.
P.2.2. Recognition by the SCIPS-X of ancestral title or cultural jurisdiction shall not, by itself, be construed as conferring ecclesiastical jurisdiction belonging under canon law to the Holy See, a diocesan bishop, a parish authority or another competent ecclesiastical office.
Article P.3 — Governing sources
P.3.1. Historical determinations under this Act shall be supported through coordinated examination of early Spanish chronicles, cartographic records, royal and colonial correspondence, archaeological evidence, ethnographic analysis, ecclesiastical documents, linguistic evidence and peer-reviewed historical scholarship.
P.3.2. Wikipedia, derivative summaries and unsourced public compilations shall possess no independent evidentiary authority. Information originating in such materials may be retained only after verification through an identifiable primary or academically admissible secondary source.
P.3.3. Statements concerning ancient territorial boundaries shall distinguish documented geographical identification from constitutional interpretation adopted by the SCIPS-X. Absence of a surviving colonial description shall not automatically prove either political independence or political dependency of a particular island, settlement or district.
P.3.4. Modern administrative geography shall be stated accurately. Fort-Liberté and Trou-du-Nord are situated within the present Haitian Département du Nord-Est; Port-de-Paix, Môle Saint-Nicolas and Jean-Rabel are situated within the Département du Nord-Ouest; Île de la Tortue is administratively connected to the Nord-Ouest; and no collective reference to those localities shall incorrectly place all of them within a single contemporary department.
PART I
ANNEX III — NORTHERN XARAGUA
HISTORICAL-CONSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION OF GUAHABA AND BAYNOA INTO THE NORTHERN ANCESTRAL DOMAIN
TITLE I — HISTORICAL IDENTIFICATION OF THE NORTHERN DOMAIN
Article 1 — Territorial scope
1.1. The Northern Ancestral Domain recognized by the SCIPS-X comprises the historical and cultural corridor extending through the northwestern and northeastern regions of present-day Haiti and the adjoining northwestern frontier regions of the Dominican Republic, including, for purposes of historical investigation and cultural coordination:
Port-de-Paix;
Môle Saint-Nicolas;
Jean-Rabel;
Île de la Tortue;
Fort-Liberté;
Trou-du-Nord;
Monte Cristi;
Pepillo Salcedo;
Dajabón;
the maritime, insular and inland routes historically connecting those localities.
1.2. The inclusion of those localities within this Act constitutes a constitutional classification of ancestral affiliation, cultural continuity and territorial memory. It shall not be represented as proof that every listed locality was governed at every historical period by one uniform precolonial administration.
Article 2 — Guahaba and Baynoa
2.1. The ethnonyms and territorial designations Guahaba and Baynoa are incorporated into the official northern historical doctrine of the SCIPS-X as Indigenous names associated with the political, geographic and cultural organization of northern Hispaniola.
2.2. The competent historical authorities of the University of Xaragua shall maintain a documentary register distinguishing:
original orthographic variants;
locations attributed to the names by particular chroniclers or maps;
evidence of cacical authority;
evidence of settlement, ceremonial use and territorial affiliation;
subsequent colonial alteration of the relevant names and boundaries.
2.3. No isolated or uncertain passage attributed to Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo or another chronicler shall be treated as conclusive without identification of the edition, manuscript tradition, context and exact geographical referent.
2.4. The historical status of Guahaba and Baynoa shall rest upon the cumulative Indigenous geography of northern Hispaniola and not upon a fabricated or incorrectly attributed quotation.
Article 3 — Northern political and ceremonial institutions
3.1. The northern territories contained organized Indigenous settlements, cacical jurisdictions, noble offices, agricultural zones, maritime routes, ceremonial spaces and sacred sites forming part of the broader Taíno political order of Hispaniola.
3.2. Caciques and associated nitaíno authorities exercised governmental, distributive, diplomatic and ceremonial functions. Caneyes, bateyes, yucayeques and related structures shall be classified according to their documented functions and shall not be treated as interchangeable terms.
3.3. The northern coast and its islands constituted a connected maritime jurisdiction in which movement among settlements, fisheries, agricultural zones, ceremonial locations and inter-polity routes formed part of ordinary Indigenous territorial organization.
TITLE II — CHRISTIAN CONTACT AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
Article 4 — Northern contact zone
4.1. The northern coast of Hispaniola and its adjacent islands formed part of the earliest zones of sustained contact among Indigenous populations, Castilian expeditionary authorities and Christian missionaries after 1492.
4.2. The relevant historical record shall distinguish initial expeditionary contact, settlement, missionary activity, baptism, translation, doctrinal instruction and the later establishment of formal ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
4.3. Ramón Pané’s ethnographic and missionary activity is incorporated into the ecclesiastical history of early Hispaniola. The University of Xaragua shall not assign his work to Île de la Tortue, Guahaba or another particular locality without support from the historical record.
4.4. No expression such as primum contactum sacramentale shall create a canonical territorial title unless recognized by the competent law of the Church. Within SCIPS-X doctrine, first-contact history establishes archival and spiritual significance, not diocesan or sacramental jurisdiction.
Article 5 — Indigenous Catholic continuity
5.1. Baptism, evangelization, Indigenous reception of Christianity and subsequent Catholic continuity shall not be interpreted as transfers of Indigenous territorial ownership to the Crown or ecclesiastical authorities.
5.2. The SCIPS-X recognizes Catholic history as a component of the northern Xaraguayan inheritance while maintaining the juridical distinction between:
Indigenous territorial personality;
the civil government of the SCIPS-X;
the canonical government of the Catholic Church;
the administrative functions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
TITLE III — COLONIAL OCCUPATION AND NON-EXTINGUISHMENT
Article 6 — Absence of consensual extinguishment
6.1. No colonial occupation, military conquest, settlement, enslavement, forced migration, baptismal reclassification or European treaty shall be interpreted by the SCIPS-X as extinguishing Indigenous title in the absence of the free and competent consent of the Indigenous political community concerned.
6.2. The Crown of Castile, France and subsequent colonial administrations reorganized the northern territories without demonstrating a treaty of voluntary territorial cession concluded with the Indigenous peoples through their own competent institutions.
6.3. Collapse of visible cacical government under epidemic disease, forced labor, military repression, enslavement and displacement constitutes evidence of colonial destruction and not proof of consensual dissolution.
Article 7 — Natural-law and ecclesiastical authorities
7.1. Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis shall be received as evidence that the capacity of non-Christian peoples to possess property and political authority was recognized within sixteenth-century scholastic jurisprudence.
7.2. Sublimis Deus of 1537 shall be received as a papal affirmation that Indigenous peoples were rational human beings capable of receiving the faith and were not to be deprived of liberty or property merely because they were non-Christian.
7.3. The New Laws of 1542 shall be received as Crown legislation restricting Indigenous enslavement and encomienda succession. Their promulgation did not retroactively validate prior occupation or guarantee effective enforcement.
TITLE IV — CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS OF NORTHERN XARAGUA
Article 8 — Constitutional integration
8.1. Guahaba and Baynoa are hereby incorporated into the historical, cultural and constitutional geography of the SCIPS-X under the collective designation Northern Ancestral Xaragua.
8.2. This integration establishes:
competence to maintain northern historical archives;
competence to conduct ethnographic and archaeological research;
competence to recognize citizens and descendants connected to the northern territories;
competence to organize cultural, academic and spiritual activities;
competence to advocate for access to Indigenous heritage sites;
competence to issue diplomatic notifications concerning threats to the relevant patrimony.
8.3. Constitutional integration shall not, without further lawful agreement, confer ordinary civil administration over territories presently administered by Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
Article 9 — Northern confederative institution
9.1. The non-administrative cultural institution formerly designated the Canonical Confederation of Northern Xaragua is hereby restated as the Confederation of Northern Xaraguayan Historical and Cultural Jurisdictions, in Latin, Confederatio Septentrionalis Xaraguensis.
9.2. The Confederation shall function as an institution of:
historical research;
territorial documentation;
Indigenous membership and genealogy;
cultural education;
ceremonial coordination;
preservation of northern place names;
transboundary cooperation.
9.3. The Confederation shall operate under the constitutional authority of the SCIPS-X and the academic supervision of the University of Xaragua. It shall not be represented as an ecclesiastical entity erected or governed by the Holy See unless a competent canonical act expressly establishes that status.
Article 10 — Transboundary relations
10.1. Pursuant to Article 36 of UNDRIP, the SCIPS-X affirms the right of Xaraguayan persons and institutions to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation with their members and related Indigenous communities across international borders.
10.2. Such relations may include spiritual, cultural, educational, genealogical, linguistic, political, social and economic cooperation conducted in accordance with applicable border and public-order law.
10.3. The SCIPS-X shall not construe Article 36 as independently creating a unilateral exemption from immigration, customs, criminal or security law. It shall invoke the Article as the normative basis for negotiated facilitation of Indigenous cross-border relations.
PART II
ANNEX V — GUANABO
CONSTITUTIONAL REINTEGRATION OF LA GONÂVE INTO THE ARCHIPELAGIC HISTORICAL DOMAIN OF XARAGUA
TITLE I — IDENTIFICATION AND HISTORICAL AFFILIATION
Article 11 — Official Indigenous designation
11.1. The island presently known as La Gonâve is incorporated into the internal constitutional nomenclature of the SCIPS-X under the Indigenous designation Guanabo, subject to continuing philological and cartographic verification of historical orthographic variants.
11.2. The designation shall be used for the purposes of Indigenous territorial memory, historical research, constitutional geography and cultural administration.
11.3. The competent academic department shall maintain a verified cartographic register of names attributed to the island in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps and records. Unverified references to particular maps, concessions or colonial officials shall not be reproduced as conclusive evidence.
Article 12 — Insular function
12.1. Guanabo shall be classified within SCIPS-X doctrine as an offshore territory integrated into the maritime and archipelagic environment of western Hispaniola.
12.2. Its geographical position in relation to Yaguana, the Gulf of Gonâve, the western coast and the maritime approaches to Xaragua establishes a substantial basis for examining its historical use as:
a fishing and navigation zone;
a site of temporary or permanent settlement;
a refuge from colonial military operations;
an intermediary point between coastal communities;
a component of the territorial economy of western Indigenous polities.
12.3. The absence of a separately documented cacicazgo on the island shall not, by itself, constitute conclusive proof of dependency upon Xaragua. Its affiliation shall be determined through the cumulative analysis of geography, settlement, political relations, population movement and colonial records.
Article 13 — Hatuey and the refuge tradition
13.1. The association of Hatuey with the western region of Hispaniola and his subsequent resistance in Cuba is incorporated into the historical doctrine of Indigenous continuity and inter-island resistance.
13.2. A specific origin on Guanabo shall be asserted as established fact only where supported by an identifiable historical authority. Public encyclopedic statements shall not independently satisfy that requirement.
13.3. The tradition identifying Guanabo as a refuge for Taíno survivors following the destruction of Xaragua shall be preserved within the State archive as an element of collective memory and shall be subjected to continued historical and archaeological examination.
Article 14 — Xaraguayan political affiliation
14.1. The SCIPS-X recognizes Guanabo as historically affiliated with the western Xaraguayan political and maritime system.
14.2. That determination is based upon:
geographical integration with the western coast;
maritime accessibility from Yaguana and associated settlements;
documented Indigenous use of offshore islands;
post-conquest movement of Indigenous survivors;
the absence of a demonstrated consensual act separating the island from its Indigenous territorial environment.
14.3. The political center of Xaragua shall be identified according to the evidence associated with Yaguana and the governmental structure of Bohechío and Anacaona. Yaquimo and Yaguana shall not be treated as interchangeable capitals without specific documentary justification.
TITLE II — ARCHIPELAGIC CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS
Article 15 — Reinstatement of Guanabo
15.1. Guanabo is hereby constitutionally reinstated within the ancestral and archipelagic domain of Xaragua under the institutional designation:
INSULA GUANABO — ARCHIPELAGIC INDIGENOUS TERRITORY OF XARAGUA
15.2. The reinstatement establishes internal SCIPS-X jurisdiction over:
historical classification;
Indigenous membership and genealogy;
cultural and spiritual memory;
archival preservation;
academic programming;
advocacy concerning environmental and heritage protection;
relations with Guanabo communities consenting to participate in Xaraguayan institutions.
15.3. The reinstatement does not, by itself, displace the ordinary civil administration presently exercised on the island by Haitian public authorities.
Article 16 — Ecclesiastical status
16.1. The 1860 Concordat and the subsequent Catholic institutional order shall not be interpreted as automatically transferring ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Guanabo to the SCIPS-X.
16.2. Canons 94 and 95 concern statutes and ordinances; Canons 129 and 130 concern the exercise of ecclesiastical governance. None independently establishes an archipelagic ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
16.3. Catholic institutions of the SCIPS-X may operate on Guanabo through the rights of the faithful, private association, educational activity, charitable action and cooperation with competent ecclesiastical authorities.
Article 17 — Eastern transboundary relations
17.1. The SCIPS-X recognizes the historical connections of Xaragua with Bahoruco, Barahona and other eastern regions associated with the political geography of western Hispaniola.
17.2. Monte Cristi, Dajabón and Pepillo Salcedo shall be treated within this consolidated Act as components of the northern transboundary corridor. Bahoruco and Barahona shall be treated as components of the eastern and southeastern historical relations of Xaragua.
17.3. Transboundary activities shall be conducted through cultural missions, academic delegations, ceremonial visits, negotiated access, community partnerships and other peaceful institutional mechanisms.
17.4. Saramaka People v. Suriname shall be invoked for its treatment of collective property, consultation and the survival of traditional peoples; it shall not be misrepresented as a judgment directly creating an unrestricted international-border corridor in Hispaniola.
PART III
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL ACT ON THE RESIDUAL ADMINISTRATIVE INTERFACE
CLASSIFICATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF HAITI WITHIN THE INTERNAL CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER OF THE SCIPS-X
TITLE I — PURPOSE AND LEGAL EFFECT
Article 18 — Internal classification
18.1. For the purposes of SCIPS-X constitutional law, the governmental apparatus operating under the title Republic of Haiti is classified as the Residual Administrative Unit.
18.2. The term RAU denotes the apparatus performing civil registration, municipal services, public infrastructure, ordinary policing, taxation, education, health administration, courts and international representation recognized by foreign States.
18.3. The classification constitutes an internal doctrine of the SCIPS-X. It shall not be falsely represented as a reclassification formally adopted by the United Nations, foreign governments, the Holy See or the Haitian administration.
Article 19 — Grounds of constitutional subordination
19.1. The SCIPS-X finds that the Haitian administrative apparatus has repeatedly failed to provide effective and continuous protection for Indigenous heritage, historic monuments, strategic infrastructure, remote communities, islands, coastal zones and territories affected by severe insecurity.
19.2. The constitutional record shall include documented conditions affecting:
the historic fortifications associated with the Dessalinian State;
Marchand-Dessalines and its imperial patrimony;
Furcy and other highland cultural landscapes;
Guanabo, Île-à-Vache, the Cayemites and Île de la Tortue;
Indigenous archaeological sites;
Catholic churches, cemeteries and religious properties;
forests, watersheds, coastlines and maritime resources;
communities operating without reliable access to public services.
19.3. Administrative failure shall be demonstrated through evidence appropriate to each site. It shall not be presumed solely from general political instability.
Article 20 — International legal references
20.1. Security Council Resolution 1542 of 2004 established MINUSTAH in response to conditions affecting peace and security. It shall not be cited as an international judgment legally abolishing Haitian statehood.
20.2. Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention concerns permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other States. It does not expressly require a monopoly of legitimate violence, and its subparagraphs shall not be assigned contents absent from the text.
20.3. Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union does not govern Haiti and shall not be invoked as a direct jurisdictional foundation for SCIPS-X action.
20.4. Administrative incapacity may support protective claims, humanitarian cooperation and Indigenous self-government. It does not automatically transfer the complete international legal personality of one State to another claimant.
TITLE II — DUAL-STATIST INTERFACE
Article 21 — Permitted RAU functions
21.1. Within the constitutional doctrine of the SCIPS-X, the following RAU operations may be recognized as technical or residual administrative functions:
civil registration;
roads and public works;
water and sanitation;
hospitals and public-health services;
schools and ordinary educational administration;
postal and telecommunications regulation;
local policing and emergency response;
courts administering Haitian civil and criminal law;
taxation connected to services supplied by the RAU;
notarial, cadastral and commercial registration.
21.2. Use of RAU documents or services by citizens of Xaragua shall not, within SCIPS-X law, constitute renunciation of Xaraguayan identity or transfer of ancestral title.
Article 22 — Reserved SCIPS-X competences
22.1. The SCIPS-X reserves authority under its own constitutional order concerning:
Xaraguayan citizenship and membership;
Indigenous customary law;
constitutional doctrine;
ancestral territorial classification;
State archives;
academic institutions;
official symbols and honors;
cultural and spiritual patrimony;
diplomatic representation undertaken by the SCIPS-X;
internal organization of Xaraguayan ministries and public bodies.
22.2. The SCIPS-X may contest, protest, reserve or refuse internal recognition to any RAU act that it determines to violate Indigenous identity, Xaraguayan institutions or protected cultural patrimony.
22.3. Such internal refusal shall not be described as automatically annulling the act within Haitian courts or international law unless the competent external authority has adopted the same conclusion.
PART IV
PROTECTIVE JURISDICTION AND CONDITIONS OF INSTITUTIONAL INTERVENTION
TITLE I — GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Article 23 — Meaning of intervention
23.1. Intervention under this Act means the use of lawful institutional measures by the SCIPS-X to protect persons, communities, institutions, patrimony or territory connected to Xaragua.
23.2. Permissible measures include:
constitutional decree;
diplomatic protest;
public or private notification;
legal petition;
archival preservation;
human-rights documentation;
cultural mobilization;
humanitarian assistance;
ecclesiastical referral;
academic investigation;
community coordination;
requests for precautionary or protective measures before competent bodies.
23.3. No provision of this Act independently authorizes armed action, detention, coercive seizure, destruction of property or physical displacement of public authorities.
Article 24 — Indigenous rights violations
24.1. Protective measures may be initiated upon credible evidence of:
arbitrary detention or persecution directed against persons because of their Xaraguayan, Afro-Taíno or Indigenous identity;
denial of lawful access to ancestral, ceremonial or cultural sites;
destruction or appropriation of Indigenous archives, objects or human remains;
compulsory assimilation or suppression of Indigenous membership;
unauthorized disposition of communally held Indigenous land;
discrimination against Xaraguayan institutions or their lawful activities.
Article 25 — Grave human-rights violations
25.1. Protective measures may be initiated in cases involving mass killing, torture, enforced disappearance, trafficking, systematic sexual violence, persecution, attacks upon civilians or the destruction of essential humanitarian infrastructure.
25.2. The SCIPS-X may document such conduct, assist affected persons, seek international attention and request action from competent national, regional, international or ecclesiastical institutions.
Article 26 — Armed conflict and territorial militarization
26.1. Protective measures may be initiated where armed conflict, paramilitary activity, gang control or foreign military deployment directly threatens Xaraguayan communities, Indigenous sites, Catholic institutions or territories incorporated into the historical domain.
26.2. Article 30 of UNDRIP shall govern the SCIPS-X position concerning military activities on Indigenous lands and territories.
Article 27 — Administrative collapse
27.1. Where competent Haitian institutions are materially unable to provide public order, emergency services, water, health care, transportation or disaster response, the SCIPS-X may organize or coordinate supplementary services within its institutional capacity.
27.2. Supplementary action shall be directed toward protection of the population and shall not require the fictional declaration that every RAU institution has legally ceased to exist.
Article 28 — Territorial alienation and concessions
28.1. The SCIPS-X shall oppose any sale, concession, lease, mining title, maritime allocation or infrastructure agreement materially affecting lands or resources claimed under Xaraguayan ancestral title where the affected Indigenous population has not been consulted.
28.2. Articles 26, 27, 28, 29 and 32 of UNDRIP shall provide the governing standards concerning land, resources, environmental protection, consultation and redress.
28.3. The SCIPS-X may demand disclosure, consultation, environmental assessment, community consent, compensation, suspension or review according to the character of the proposed operation.
Article 29 — Foreign military or political presence
29.1. The SCIPS-X may issue a formal reservation concerning foreign troops, intelligence operations, mercenaries, paramilitaries or military installations affecting territories claimed under its ancestral jurisdiction.
29.2. A request by Haitian authorities for foreign assistance shall not, by itself, transfer authority to the SCIPS-X. The State may nevertheless maintain its objection, seek consultation and invoke Indigenous rights before competent institutions.
Article 30 — Protection of SCIPS-X institutions
30.1. Criminal acts directed against the Rector-Presidency, University of Xaragua, State archives, ministries, religious institutions, citizens, officials, symbols or technological infrastructure may activate the protective mechanisms of this Act.
30.2. Criticism, historical disagreement, academic dispute or refusal to recognize SCIPS-X claims shall not, without an additional unlawful act, be classified as sabotage or an offense against the State.
30.3. Defamation shall be addressed through applicable civil procedures, correction, institutional response and evidentiary publication. It shall not be equated automatically with an armed attack or a violation of jus cogens.
TITLE II — ECCLESIASTICAL COORDINATION
Article 31 — Competence of the Catholic Church
31.1. Matters concerning doctrine, sacraments, episcopal governance, parishes, public associations of the faithful, religious institutes and ecclesiastical discipline remain subject to the competent authorities established by canon law.
31.2. The Holy See possesses supreme authority in the universal Church. Diocesan bishops possess the authority assigned to them by universal and particular law within their dioceses.
31.3. The SCIPS-X recognizes that no civil or Indigenous enactment can compel the Holy See to erect, recognize or sanction an ecclesiastical institution.
Article 32 — Catholic institutions of Xaragua
32.1. The faithful associated with the SCIPS-X may establish private associations, charitable works, educational institutions, devotional initiatives and other lawful organizations according to Canons 215 and 298 through 329.
32.2. Use of the title “Catholic” in the name of an organization remains subject to Canon 300 and the authorization required by competent ecclesiastical authority.
32.3. Canons 204, 212, 215, 216, 298 and related provisions shall be invoked according to their actual subject matter and shall not be used to create civil sovereignty or territorial ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
Article 33 — Catholic social doctrine
33.1. Laudato si’ and Querida Amazonia shall be incorporated as authoritative Catholic social and pastoral sources concerning environmental responsibility, Indigenous dignity, cultural survival and ecclesial attention to Indigenous peoples.
33.2. Those documents impose moral and pastoral obligations within the Catholic order. They do not constitute instruments transferring Haitian civil territory to the SCIPS-X.
PART V
EXCLUSIVE INDIGENOUS CUSTODIANSHIP OF LAND, TERRITORY AND SACRED PATRIMONY
Article 34 — Scope of custodianship
34.1. The SCIPS-X assumes, within its constitutional order, permanent responsibility for the identification, preservation, defense and transmission of the Indigenous territorial patrimony of Xaragua.
34.2. This responsibility extends to:
soil and subsoil forming part of claimed ancestral territories;
rivers, springs, watersheds and coastal waters;
forests, mountains and ecological corridors;
archaeological and ceremonial sites;
Indigenous settlements and burial grounds;
historic fortifications associated with the later Xaraguayan and Dessalinian inheritance;
islands, islets and maritime routes;
archives, place names and intangible cultural heritage.
Article 35 — Nature of exclusive responsibility
35.1. Exclusive responsibility means that no authority other than the SCIPS-X may determine, within Xaraguayan constitutional law, the meaning, membership, historical classification or internal disposition of Xaraguayan Indigenous patrimony.
35.2. It does not mean that the SCIPS-X is the only institution physically capable of conserving every site or that all cooperation with municipalities, universities, churches, communities, foreign governments or international organizations is prohibited.
35.3. Cooperative conservation shall not be classified as shared sovereignty where it is limited to technical, financial, academic, ecclesiastical or humanitarian functions and does not require renunciation of Xaraguayan title.
Article 36 — Prohibition of unauthorized alienation
36.1. No organ of the SCIPS-X may sell, permanently alienate or extinguish the ancestral territorial title of the Xaraguayan people.
36.2. No foreign government, corporation, religious institution, multilateral body or RAU authority shall be recognized within SCIPS-X law as possessing competence unilaterally to extinguish that title.
36.3. Administrative permissions, concessions or titles issued by external authorities may be recognized for limited practical purposes without being treated as extinguishing the underlying Indigenous claim.
Article 37 — Sacred sites and Catholic property
37.1. Indigenous sacred sites shall be protected according to customary law, historical evidence, community practice and Articles 11, 12 and 25 of UNDRIP.
37.2. Catholic churches, shrines, cemeteries and consecrated properties shall remain subject to canon law and the rights of their lawful ecclesiastical owners or administrators.
37.3. The SCIPS-X may advocate for their preservation, coordinate with competent ecclesiastical authorities and incorporate their history into the State archive.
Article 38 — Environmental and resource governance
38.1. All resource policies adopted by the SCIPS-X shall be governed by intergenerational responsibility, ecological integrity, community consultation and protection of Indigenous subsistence.
38.2. Mining, drilling, deforestation, industrial agriculture, coastal privatization and infrastructure development affecting claimed ancestral lands shall be subject to Indigenous consultation and environmental review.
38.3. The designation of land as sacred shall produce conservation and fiduciary obligations within SCIPS-X law; it shall not be employed to prevent the affected communities from receiving necessary housing, transportation, health, water or livelihood infrastructure.
PART VI
SUBSIDIARITY, ADMINISTRATIVE PREEMPTION AND INSTITUTIONAL COOPERATION
Article 39 — Subsidiarity
39.1. The principle of subsidiarity requires that public functions be exercised at the lowest institutional level capable of performing them effectively, while higher institutions provide support where local capacity is insufficient.
39.2. The principle shall not be interpreted as automatically transferring sovereign jurisdiction whenever a public authority performs inadequately.
39.3. Under SCIPS-X doctrine, subsidiarity authorizes the establishment of supplementary Indigenous institutions where the RAU fails to protect communities or patrimony.
Article 40 — Preemption within the SCIPS-X order
40.1. SCIPS-X constitutional law shall prevail within the internal institutions of Xaragua concerning citizenship, customary law, State doctrine, archives, academic governance, cultural membership and Indigenous patrimony.
40.2. RAU acts inconsistent with those reserved domains may be denied internal recognition by the SCIPS-X.
40.3. Questions concerning enforceability before external courts shall be determined by the competent forum and shall not be resolved through unilateral declaratory language alone.
Article 41 — Institutional partnerships
41.1. The SCIPS-X may conclude agreements with:
Indigenous governments and organizations;
universities and research institutes;
Catholic institutions acting within their competence;
municipalities and regional authorities;
environmental organizations;
museums and archives;
humanitarian bodies;
foreign governments and diplomatic missions.
41.2. Such agreements may provide for research, cultural preservation, education, humanitarian work, heritage conservation, transboundary exchange and technical administration.
41.3. No agreement may extinguish the constitutional title or constituent authority of the Xaraguayan people without their valid internal consent under entrenched constitutional procedure.
PART VII
ENTRENCHMENT, PUBLICATION AND EXTERNAL NOTIFICATION
Article 42 — Constitutional entrenchment
42.1. This Act forms part of the Supreme Constitutional Corpus of the SCIPS-X.
42.2. No subordinate decree, ministry regulation, university policy or administrative decision may contradict its essential provisions concerning:
Indigenous continuity;
non-extinguishment through colonial occupation;
African and Taíno constitutional ethnogenesis;
ancestral affiliation of Northern Xaragua and Guanabo;
protection of Indigenous patrimony;
distinction between cultural and administrative jurisdiction;
peaceful character of institutional intervention;
canonical competence of the Catholic Church.
42.3. Constitutional entrenchment produces binding effect within the SCIPS-X. It shall not be described as rendering the Act immune from every applicable external legal order or from amendment through the competent constituent procedure of Xaragua.
Article 43 — Depository and archives
43.1. The authoritative copy of this Act shall be maintained by:
the Office of the Rector-President;
the Supreme Constitutional Archives of Xaragua;
the Official Gazette of the SCIPS-X;
the University of Xaragua;
the competent territorial and historical departments.
43.2. Digital copies shall be authenticated according to the archival and publication procedures adopted by the SCIPS-X.
Article 44 — External transmission
44.1. Certified copies may be transmitted for notification, academic reference or request for dialogue to:
the Holy See through the competent diplomatic or ecclesiastical channel;
the Apostolic Nunciature in Haiti;
the Apostolic Nunciature in the Dominican Republic;
the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues;
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights;
the Caribbean Conference of Churches or the competent Catholic episcopal bodies;
relevant Haitian and Dominican cultural institutions;
universities, archives and Indigenous organizations.
44.2. Transmission, administrative receipt, silence, acknowledgment of delivery or absence of objection shall not be represented as recognition, ratification, approval or legal acceptance unless the receiving authority issues an express competent act to that effect.
Article 45 — Authentic interpretation
45.1. Authority to issue binding internal interpretations of this Act belongs to the Supreme Rector-Presidency and any constitutional body subsequently assigned that competence.
45.2. Historical and academic questions shall be referred to the University of Xaragua, which shall distinguish documentary findings from constitutional determinations.
45.3. Canonical questions shall be interpreted according to the Code of Canon Law and the determinations of the competent ecclesiastical authority.
Article 46 — Final enactment
46.1. Annex III concerning Northern Xaragua, Annex V concerning Guanabo, the Supreme Constitutional Act concerning the Residual Administrative Unit, Annex I concerning the conditions of institutional intervention and Annex II concerning territorial custodianship are hereby consolidated into the present Act.
46.2. Earlier provisions remain historically preserved in the State archive but shall be interpreted according to this consolidated text wherever inconsistency exists.
46.3. The constitutional recognition of Northern Xaragua, Guanabo and the wider ancestral domain shall remain permanent unless modified through the competent constituent procedure of the SCIPS-X.
46.4. The exercise of that doctrine shall be institutional, documented, peaceful, academically administered and consistent with the distinction between Indigenous constitutional authority, ordinary territorial administration and the canonical jurisdiction of the Catholic Church.
Thus consolidated, enacted and entered into the Supreme Constitutional Corpus of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.
Under the authority of the Supreme Rector-Presidency
For permanent publication in the Official Gazette and constitutional archives of the SCIPS-X
Ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

DIVISION I — COLONIAL AND PRECOLONIAL ARCHIVES

18.4. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Fonds Saint-Domingue. Governmental correspondence, territorial administration, military affairs, port regulation, population records, property instruments and materials concerning Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, Miragoâne, Les Cayes, Port-de-Paix and Tortuga.

18.5. Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Santo Domingo and related series. Royal decrees, military instructions, correspondence, maritime defense records, Indigenous administrative materials and documentation concerning Spanish claims over western Hispaniola and Tortuga.

18.6. Archives des Missions étrangères de Paris. Missionary correspondence, ecclesiastical assessments, demographic observations and institutional reports concerning western and southern communities.

18.7. Propaganda Fide historical archives. Reports, petitions, missionary memoranda, faculties and correspondence concerning ecclesiastical administration in Caribbean territories.

18.8. Letters and administrative papers associated with Jean-Baptiste Ducasse. Materials concerning privateering, settlement regulation, coastal defense, relations with maritime populations and the consolidation of French governmental authority.

18.9. Jesuit and Capuchin correspondence. Missionary observations concerning sacramental administration, religious plurality, population mobility, parish formation and the territorial reach of ecclesiastical structures.

18.10. Colonial notarial and judicial records. Documentation concerning property, succession, commercial relations, civil status, manumission, labor, household formation and the legal classification of populations.

DIVISION II — INTERNATIONAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW

18.11. Peace of Ryswick, 1697. Diplomatic source governing inter-imperial relations and the European treatment of territorial possession in the Caribbean.

18.12. Utrecht peace instruments, 1713. Diplomatic and commercial sources concerning the reorganization of imperial authority and Atlantic economic relations.

18.13. Inter Caetera, 1493. Pontifical instrument central to the European juridical construction of imperial claims over Indigenous territories.

18.14. Sublimis Deus, 1537, and associated pontifical materials. Ecclesiastical authorities concerning Indigenous rationality, liberty and admission to the Christian faith.

18.15. Decretum Gratiani. Historical canonical source concerning persons, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, conversion, rights and the normative architecture of the medieval and early modern Church.

18.16. Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917 and 1983. Positive canonical frameworks concerning ecclesiastical persons, territorial structures, associations, Catholic education, temporal goods, sacramental administration and institutional competence.

18.17. Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, 1933. Comparative public-law framework concerning population, territory, government and capacity for external relations.

18.18. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007. International normative framework concerning political institutions, territory, identity, customary law, protection against displacement and transfrontier relations.

DIVISION III — CARTOGRAPHIC, MARITIME AND GEOSTRATEGIC RECORDS

18.19. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, cartographic representations of Saint-Domingue. Sources for settlement distribution, maritime geography, nomenclature, hydrography and the progressive administrative representation of the western colony.

18.20. Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis, Mount & Page, 1728. Source concerning Caribbean routes, anchorages, commercial geography and British maritime knowledge.

18.21. French naval logs and operational correspondence. Sources concerning patrols, navigation, harbor access, reconnaissance, military enforcement and the capacity to project authority along the southwestern littoral.

18.22. British Admiralty and hydrographic records. Sources concerning ports, coastal access, overland communication, navigational risk and military planning.

18.23. Dutch commercial and privateering records. Sources concerning exchange networks, independent anchorages, maritime supply and relations with coastal communities.

18.24. French East India Company and related maritime records. Sources concerning attempted installations, supply systems, fortification, commerce and the logistical limits of coastal occupation.

18.25. François Froger and comparative travel narratives. Descriptive sources concerning population, maritime practice, settlement, exchange and intercolonial movement.

DIVISION IV — ETHNOGRAPHY, ORAL TRADITION AND MAROON-INSTITUTIONAL STUDIES

18.26. Gérard Barthélemy, Le pays en dehors. Analytical authority concerning the Haitian rural order, its historical formation, economic logic and relationship with centralized institutions.

18.27. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Analytical authority concerning archival production, historical narration, institutional omission and the formation of public memory.

18.28. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Comparative authority concerning African political agency, Atlantic mobility and the institutional participation of African populations in New World societies.

18.29. Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier, Le problème des classes à travers l’histoire d’Haïti. Historiographical source concerning social classification, elite formation, political power and rural marginalization.

18.30. Recorded oral investigations concerning Nippes and the southwestern coast. Genealogical, territorial, occupational and customary materials requiring classification by locality, date, collector, custodian and method of preservation.

18.31. Family and community archives. Deeds, letters, prayer books, registers, photographs, genealogies, cemetery evidence, boundary records and oral accounts retained outside centralized public repositories.

DIVISION V — POST-REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGISLATIVE SOURCES

18.32. Imperial Constitution of 1805. Source concerning territorial unity, executive authority, citizenship, military organization and the juridical foundations of the post-independence State.

18.33. Haitian Civil Code and successive legislative editions. Sources concerning property, possession, inheritance, civil status, documentary evidence, contracts and the institutional treatment of non-notarized territorial claims.

18.34. Rural Code of 1826. Source concerning rural labor, agricultural production, mobility, administrative discipline and governmental supervision.

18.35. Decrees and administrative acts issued under Pétion, Boyer and succeeding governments. Sources concerning territorial divisions, land distribution, military districts, municipal organization and rural government.

18.36. Official educational programs and textbooks. Sources concerning the State construction of national history, territorial identity, Indigenous representation and the institutional classification of regional societies.

DIVISION VI — POPULATION ORIGINS, ETHNOGENESIS AND CULTURAL CONVERGENCE

18.37. Spanish geographical relations concerning Hispaniola. Sources concerning population distribution, Indigenous survival, settlement, territorial nomenclature and colonial administrative reach.

18.38. Portuguese Atlantic commercial and slaving archives. Sources concerning the transportation, origin, displacement and movement of African populations within the Atlantic and Caribbean systems.

18.39. Tortuga-related materials cited in eighteenth-century historical works, including Charlevoix. Sources concerning the composition, settlement patterns, maritime institutions and household formation of northwestern communities.

18.40. Bartolomé de Las Casas and related sixteenth-century chroniclers. Sources concerning the destruction, displacement, survival and territorial relocation of Indigenous populations.

18.41. Parish and civil-status records. Sources for reconstructing marriage, baptism, burial, legitimacy, descent, racial classification, geographic mobility and family continuity.

18.42. Genetic, genealogical and demographic studies. Contemporary evidentiary instruments for examining population continuity, interregional ancestry and the historical composition of Xaraguayan communities.

FINAL INSTITUTIONAL DETERMINATION

19.1. The documentary system constituted by Annexes III and IV shall function as the evidentiary infrastructure of Xaragua’s constitutional historiography. Its purpose is to connect each territorial, demographic and juridical proposition to an identifiable class of legal, archival, cartographic, ecclesiastical, ethnographic or administrative authority.

19.2. The aggregate record supports the constitutional analysis of southwestern and northwestern Xaragua as a historically plural territorial order formed through Indigenous continuity, African maroon organization, maritime settlement, customary jurisdiction, composite ethnogenesis and successive exposure to Spanish, French and Haitian systems of central administration.

19.3. The historical authority of the maritime confederative order derives from the effective institutions through which its constituent populations regulated membership, possession, defense, production, exchange, adjudication and intercommunity relations.

19.4. The contemporary authority of the SCIPS-X derives from the constitutional reconstitution of the Indigenous political personality of Xaragua and from the incorporation of the territory’s subsequent African, European and Creole historical components into a permanent, codified and hierarchically organized State order.

19.5. The University of Xaragua shall preserve, expand and operationalize this evidentiary corpus for governmental instruction, constitutional interpretation, territorial administration, academic publication, cultural protection and diplomatic representation.

Thus constitutionally incorporated into the historical and juridical corpus of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

AD PERPETUAM REI MEMORIAM.

AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA

DEPARTMENT OF STRATEGIC HISTORY, PUBLIC LAW AND HISTORICAL TERRITORIALITY

VOLUME II

THE CONSTITUTIONAL FORMATION OF THE WESTERN TERRITORIAL ORDER

EUROPEAN MARITIME IRREGULARITY, BUCCANEER OCCUPATION, COLONIAL REGULARIZATION AND THE PERMANENT JURIDICAL DIFFERENTIATION OF THE SOUTHERN TERRITORIES

1300–1820

Institutional Classification: Supreme Historical-Constitutional Doctrine

Academic Classification: Public-Law Historiography, Historical Territoriality and Institutional Ethnogenesis

Constitutional Function: Determination of Historical Titles, Territorial Continuities, Competing Jurisdictions and Successive Regimes of Occupation

Promulgating Authority: Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

Custodial Institution: University of Xaragua

GENERAL DECLARATION OF METHOD AND CONSTITUTIONAL PURPOSE

The present Volume constitutes an official instrument of historical interpretation, territorial classification and constitutional doctrine promulgated under the supreme authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. Its purpose is to reconstruct, within a single juridically ordered framework, the successive processes through which the western and southern territories of the island of Hispaniola passed from Indigenous territorial sovereignty to Spanish imperial occupation, from Spanish administrative contraction to multinational maritime intrusion, from buccaneer occupation to French colonial regularization, and from colonial regional differentiation to the autonomous southern political formations that preceded and survived the establishment of the postcolonial Haitian apparatus.

This Volume does not treat Saint-Domingue as a territorially homogeneous creation emanating instantaneously from the French Crown. It distinguishes between original Indigenous territoriality, Spanish claims of imperial allocation, incomplete occupation, maritime seizure by irregular populations, governmental consolidation through colonial companies, subsequent royal administration, and the differentiated development of northern, western and southern political societies. Each stage constituted a separate juridical configuration and must be assessed according to its institutions, population, territorial control, economic organization, ecclesiastical structures and capacity for political reproduction.

The history examined herein is therefore not reduced to a linear succession between Spain, France and the Republic of Haiti. Such a representation suppresses the plurality of political orders that existed between and beneath those nominal sovereign formations. The western territories were governed successively and, at times, concurrently by Indigenous communities, Spanish officers, ranching populations, buccaneer fraternities, chartered companies, colonial governors, parish institutions, municipal councils, military commanders, plantation interests, free-colored property networks, autonomous southern authorities and postcolonial centralizing regimes.

The constitutional analysis of Xaragua proceeds from that institutional plurality. It identifies the Grand Sud not as a peripheral administrative subdivision created by Saint-Domingue or by the Republic of Haiti, but as a historically constituted territorial bloc whose population, landholding systems, maritime communications, ecclesiastical organization and recurrent resistance to external centralization produced a durable regional juridical personality.

BOOK I

THE EUROPEAN PRECONDITIONS OF ATLANTIC MARITIME IRREGULARITY

1300–1600

CHAPTER I

THE DISLOCATION OF MEDIEVAL TERRITORIAL ORDER AND THE PRODUCTION OF EXTRA-STATE MILITARY POPULATIONS

§1.1 — The Institutional Decomposition of Western Christendom

The formation of the Atlantic piracy system cannot be adequately explained by reference to individual criminality, maritime opportunism or Caribbean geography alone. It arose from a prolonged reorganization of European public authority between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. During that period, the territorial, feudal, ecclesiastical and dynastic institutions through which Western Christendom had regulated land, allegiance, military obligation and legal personality underwent successive crises that displaced substantial populations from established structures of protection.

The Avignon Papacy, extending from 1309 to 1377, and the Western Schism, extending from 1378 to 1417, did not abolish canon law or extinguish papal authority. They nevertheless impaired the institutional unity through which the Roman Church had operated as the principal supraterritorial authority of Latin Christendom. Rival pontifical obediences, competing excommunications, diplomatic alignments and royal interventions subjected ecclesiastical legitimacy to political fragmentation. The canonical order remained operative, but its universal administration was weakened by the coexistence of competing institutional centers.

This fragmentation strengthened the capacity of territorial monarchies to subordinate ecclesiastical appointments, taxation and jurisdiction to royal policy. France, England, Aragon and the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire increasingly treated clerical organization as an instrument of territorial government. The resulting transition did not produce immediate secularization. It generated a redistribution of jurisdiction in which royal courts, municipal authorities and princely administrations progressively appropriated functions formerly regulated through feudal and ecclesiastical interdependence.

The Hundred Years’ War intensified this transformation. Successive campaigns, occupations, fiscal extractions and dynastic conflicts devastated extensive regions of France and England. Military mobilization generated large bodies of professional and semi-professional combatants whose legal position depended upon war. When campaigns terminated, military companies were frequently demobilized without stable reintegration into agriculture, guild organization or royal service. Armed men who had acquired mobility, tactical experience and command structures consequently entered mercenary companies, rural banditry, urban coercive networks and maritime raiding.

The plague cycles beginning with the Black Death compounded this institutional instability. Demographic collapse altered labor relations, weakened seigneurial revenues, disrupted ecclesiastical administration and transformed the value of land and labor. It did not merely eliminate population; it restructured the legal and economic relations through which persons were incorporated into estates, parishes, guilds and military obligations.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Western Europe possessed increasingly centralized monarchies but also substantial populations that remained incompletely absorbed by them. Demobilized soldiers, landless peasants, displaced artisans, religious dissidents, debtors, younger sons excluded from inheritance and sailors attached to unstable commercial economies constituted a reservoir of mobile manpower. These populations supplied the human infrastructure of private war, commercial violence, corsair activity and, ultimately, Atlantic piracy.

§1.2 — From Feudal Military Service to Delegated Maritime Violence

The consolidation of royal sovereignty did not eliminate private violence. It subjected that violence to selective authorization. Monarchies progressively prohibited unauthorized warfare while simultaneously licensing private persons to attack enemy commerce. Letters of marque, commissions of reprisal and privateering contracts transformed privately financed ships into temporary instruments of public war.

The distinction between corsair and pirate was therefore juridical rather than sociological. The same captain, vessel and crew could operate as lawful auxiliaries during a declared conflict and as criminal organizations following the conclusion of peace. Their status depended upon the validity, duration and territorial recognition of a commission issued by a competent authority. The Crown obtained military capacity without permanently financing ships or personnel; merchants acquired access to captured goods; coastal populations received employment; and the risks of capture, retaliation and diplomatic repudiation remained concentrated upon the private operator.

This system generated permanent communities of maritime combatants along the Atlantic seaboard, particularly in Normandy, Brittany, the English West Country, the Channel ports and the Low Countries. Their professional continuity depended less upon national allegiance than upon access to vessels, commercial intermediaries, armed crews and markets capable of receiving captured property.

When royal authorization expired, the economic and military organization of privateering did not disappear. Crews retained their weapons, navigational knowledge and collective discipline. Captains maintained transnational commercial contacts. Investors remained interested in high-return maritime predation. The termination of war consequently converted licensed operators into surplus military populations whose continued activity was criminalized by the same governments that had created and employed them.

The maritime irregular was therefore not external to early modern state formation. He was one of its institutional products. Royal governments alternately authorized, financed, denied, pardoned and prosecuted him according to strategic necessity. This unstable relationship between public commission and private violence formed the juridical foundation of the populations that later occupied Caribbean islands beyond effective metropolitan control.

§1.3 — Confessional Conflict and the Internationalization of Maritime Exile

The Reformation and the European wars of religion added a confessional dimension to maritime displacement. In France, successive conflicts between Catholic and Huguenot forces militarized major port communities and connected religious dissent to commercial and naval networks extending through La Rochelle, Dieppe, the Netherlands and England.

Confessional affiliation did not uniformly determine piracy or colonization. It nevertheless supplied persecuted or defeated populations with transnational channels of migration, credit, intelligence and protection. Religious exiles could move between ports governed by competing monarchies while maintaining commercial relationships unavailable through conventional territorial institutions.

The resulting maritime societies possessed no single political doctrine. They combined Christian affiliation, confessional hostility, commercial pragmatism, military discipline and resistance to permanent metropolitan control. Their organization was European in language and technical formation but increasingly extraterritorial in operation. Allegiance was made conditional upon protection, payment and access to trade.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Atlantic contained a politically unstable population of sailors, privateers, religious exiles, mercenaries, debtors and displaced laborers capable of organizing outside the continuous territorial jurisdiction of any single Crown. The Caribbean did not create this population. It provided the territorial environment in which the population could establish durable settlements, reproduce its institutions and become an instrument of imperial competition.

BOOK II

INDIGENOUS TERRITORIALITY, SPANISH IMPERIAL CONTRACTION AND THE OPENING OF WESTERN HISPANIOLA

CHAPTER II

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN IMPERIAL TITLE, ADMINISTRATIVE PRESENCE AND EFFECTIVE TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT

§2.1 — Indigenous Territorial Order Prior to European Occupation

Before European intrusion, Hispaniola was neither vacant territory nor an undifferentiated geographical object awaiting juridical allocation. It contained organized Indigenous societies exercising territorial authority through cacicazgos, subordinate communities, kinship structures, agricultural systems, ceremonial institutions, maritime routes and established zones of political influence.

European discovery doctrine, papal allocation and imperial treaty-making did not erase that pre-existing territorial order as a historical fact. They constituted legal mechanisms internal to the European-Christian system through which competing monarchies attempted to regulate their own claims. They did not represent the participation or consent of the Indigenous political societies whose territories were being allocated.

The western and southern regions associated with the historical territorial sphere of Xaragua therefore possessed a juridical identity anterior to Spanish and French occupation. Colonial authority entered those territories as an externally imposed regime; it did not create the territories, their population or their original political existence.

§2.2 — Spanish Occupation and the Extractive Reorganization of Territory

Following 1492, the Spanish Crown established a colonial apparatus organized around settlement, military subjugation, ecclesiastical conversion, resource extraction and compulsory Indigenous labor. The encomienda system assigned labor and tribute obligations through colonial grants while formally preserving the Crown’s claim of ultimate jurisdiction.

The practical operation of the system produced demographic devastation through forced labor, disease, displacement, warfare and the destruction of Indigenous subsistence structures. The colonial government concentrated its resources where population, minerals, ports and commercial routes made administration economically productive.

Western Hispaniola did not receive the same density of Spanish institutional occupation as the principal eastern centers. As the conquest of Mexico and Peru redirected metropolitan attention, capital and military personnel toward continental empires, parts of western Hispaniola became peripheral to Spanish administration. Ranching continued, maritime surveillance remained intermittent, and the Crown retained its claim. Yet the gap between nominal sovereignty and sustained governmental presence widened.

§2.3 — Administrative Contraction Is Not Territorial Vacancy

The reduction of Spanish settlement and enforcement did not transform western Hispaniola into legally unoccupied territory. Indigenous survivors, maroon communities, ranching populations and mobile maritime actors continued to inhabit and use the region. Spanish title also remained asserted.

The legally significant condition was therefore not vacancy but fragmented jurisdiction. Several authorities claimed, inhabited or used the same territorial space without maintaining uniform governmental control. This fragmentation permitted foreign maritime populations to establish themselves incrementally through hunting, contraband, anchorage, fortification and armed resistance.

La Tortue became strategically decisive because it provided a defensible insular base situated near the northwestern coast, connected to navigation routes and capable of supporting operations on the larger island. Its occupation allowed maritime irregulars to exploit the discrepancy between Spain’s universal claim and its limited local enforcement.

BOOK III

LA TORTUE AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF BUCCANEER OCCUPATION

1600–1697

CHAPTER III

FROM MARITIME REFUGE TO EXTRA-IMPERIAL POLITICAL ORDER

§3.1 — The Initial Composition of the Buccaneer Population

The early non-Spanish population of La Tortue and western Hispaniola was heterogeneous. It included hunters, sailors, privateers, deserters, indentured laborers, religious exiles, escaped convicts, merchants, displaced colonists and persons operating between lawful commerce and maritime predation.

These inhabitants were not initially organized as a national colony. Their presence preceded the effective establishment of a comprehensive French administrative system. They inhabited the territory through physical occupation, economic use and armed defense rather than through uniform metropolitan settlement policy.

Their economic structure relied upon the hunting of feral cattle and pigs, the preparation of smoked meat upon wooden boucan racks, leather production, contraband commerce, ship provisioning and maritime raiding. The term boucaniers designated participants in that material economy before acquiring its broader association with armed Caribbean raiders.

The settlement system connected La Tortue to temporary and permanent establishments on the coast of western Hispaniola. Hunting grounds, landing sites, repair points and informal markets created a dispersed territorial network. This network did not correspond to later colonial boundaries, but it produced the operational geography upon which French expansion would subsequently depend.

§3.2 — Articles of Association as Instruments of Maritime Government

The absence of continuous royal administration did not signify the absence of government. Buccaneer crews regulated command, discipline, distribution, compensation and collective decision-making through written or customary articles of association.

These agreements determined the authority of captains, the allocation of captured property, compensation for injury, obligations during combat, permitted conduct aboard vessels and sanctions for desertion, theft or insubordination. Their authority arose from adhesion to the crew and from enforcement by the armed collective.

Command was functionally divided. During combat, the captain exercised concentrated military authority. Outside combat, councils, quartermasters or assemblies could limit command, adjudicate disputes and control distribution. The system combined contractual consent, military necessity and severe penal enforcement.

These arrangements should not be romanticized as egalitarian republics. They existed within societies marked by coercion, enslavement, racial hierarchy, patriarchal domination and extreme violence. Their constitutional significance lies elsewhere: they demonstrate that non-state maritime populations could create durable normative systems governing property, authority, welfare and punishment without direct metropolitan administration.

La Tortue accordingly developed an institutional order possessing population, territorial base, military capacity, customary legislation, commercial relations and mechanisms of executive command. It was not sovereign in the modern international sense, but neither was it reducible to an aggregation of isolated criminals. It constituted a proto-political jurisdiction situated between piracy, privateering, settlement and imperial instrumentalization.

§3.3 — African and Indigenous Participation in the Buccaneer Zone

The population of the buccaneer territories cannot be reconstructed solely through European national categories. Africans and persons of African descent appeared in conditions ranging from enslavement to armed participation, manumission, maritime employment and autonomous settlement. Indigenous survivors and captives entered the zone through displacement, alliance, coercive incorporation, kinship and labor.

The resulting population was internally unequal but demographically composite. European men predominated in many early maritime settlements, producing households and lineages through relations with African, Indigenous and mixed-descent women. Such relations included marriage, concubinage, coercion, enslavement, adoption and informal domestic arrangements.

Children formed within these environments were territorially Caribbean and socially distinct from newly arrived metropolitan populations. Their languages, subsistence practices, kinship affiliations and political loyalties were shaped by local conditions. This was an early phase of creole ethnogenesis, preceding the full stabilization of the plantation racial order.

The later French colonial administration sought to classify this heterogeneous population through categories of status, race, legitimacy, freedom and property. Those categories regularized rather than created the underlying population. Beneath the colonial classifications persisted older networks of mixed ancestry, irregular land possession, maritime affiliation and localized authority.

§3.4 — Recurrent Spanish Enforcement and the Persistence of Occupation

Spain repeatedly attempted to remove foreign settlers from La Tortue and the western coasts. Military assaults temporarily destroyed settlements, displaced inhabitants and reasserted Spanish claims. They did not permanently eliminate the maritime population.

The recurrence of settlement following military expulsion demonstrates the structural character of the occupation. La Tortue was sustained by regional trade, international rivalry, navigational utility and the availability of nearby resources. It could be reoccupied because the underlying network extended beyond the island itself.

The persistence of the inhabitants created a material fact that competing European governments gradually incorporated into their strategies. France did not originate the occupation by a single constitutive act. It progressively appropriated an existing occupation, supplied it, appointed or tolerated governors, subordinated its trade and ultimately presented its accumulated presence as the basis of colonial title.

CHAPTER IV

THE FRENCH APPROPRIATION OF MARITIME IRREGULARITY

§4.1 — Chartered Companies and Indirect Imperial Administration

French intervention in the Caribbean frequently operated through chartered companies possessing delegated commercial and governmental powers. Such companies were authorized to establish settlements, regulate trade, distribute land, appoint officers and defend territories while transferring the financial burden of colonization away from the Crown.

This institutional form allowed France to maintain strategic ambiguity. Buccaneers and privateers could weaken Spanish commerce without being fully incorporated into the royal military structure. Merchants could provision unauthorized settlements while the Crown limited its diplomatic responsibility. Governors could extend French influence through practical arrangements before formal territorial recognition had been obtained.

The maritime population was therefore converted gradually from an extralegal presence into an imperial auxiliary. France supplied legal personality selectively: commissions for captains, offices for governors, concessions for settlers and commercial privileges for companies. In exchange, inhabitants were required to accept taxation, registration, territorial administration and increasing subjection to royal law.

§4.2 — Jean Le Vasseur and the Construction of Territorial Government

The government associated with Jean Le Vasseur marked an important stage in the institutional consolidation of La Tortue. Fortification, revenue collection, commercial regulation and the organization of armed defense transformed the island from a vulnerable refuge into a more durable center of command.

Le Vasseur’s authority rested upon a combination of military capacity, local acceptance, corporate connections and French strategic tolerance. This composite foundation illustrates the transitional character of the regime. It was neither a fully independent pirate republic nor an ordinary province under direct royal administration.

The island’s institutions served several constituencies simultaneously. Buccaneers obtained protection and markets. Merchants acquired access to hides, provisions and captured goods. France received a forward military position against Spain. Local authorities secured revenue and coercive power. The resulting administration represented negotiated governmental consolidation rather than the instantaneous extension of French public law.

§4.3 — Bertrand d’Ogeron and the Regularization of Colonial Settlement

The administration of Bertrand d’Ogeron intensified the conversion of the maritime zone into a colonial territory. Land concessions, agricultural settlement, commercial supervision, immigration and the increased importation of enslaved Africans expanded the productive base beyond hunting and raiding.

The Crown and its companies sought to stabilize population, attach inhabitants to land, replace irregular commerce with regulated exports and transform armed crews into settlers or imperial auxiliaries. The buccaneer became acceptable when converted into a taxable colonist, commissioned combatant or plantation proprietor.

This regularization did not immediately extinguish piracy. French authorities continued to exploit maritime raiders against Spanish targets while attempting to control their operations. The same population could be treated as a military resource abroad and as an administrative obstacle within French-held territory.

La Tortue therefore functioned as an institutional laboratory in which irregular occupation, corporate administration, military government, private commerce and royal centralization were successively combined. Saint-Domingue emerged from this accumulation. It was not founded through a single uncontested act of French settlement.

§4.4 — The Suppression of Autonomous Maritime Violence

Under Louis XIV and the mercantilist administration associated with Colbert, metropolitan policy increasingly favored controlled plantation production over decentralized raiding. Sugar, indigo, tobacco and other export commodities required stable property regimes, labor control, port administration and predictable commercial monopolies.

Pirates who rejected registration or subordination were expelled, prosecuted or displaced toward other Caribbean centers. Others accepted pardons, received land and entered colonial society. Their ships, capital, weapons and regional knowledge were redirected toward the plantation economy and colonial defense.

The abolition of buccaneer autonomy did not erase the population created during the preceding decades. Former raiders, hunters, free Africans, enslaved persons, Indigenous survivors, mixed families, artisans and minor proprietors became incorporated into the developing colony under differentiated legal statuses.

The new colonial administration imposed greater uniformity, but it inherited an already occupied and socially complex territory. The genealogy of Saint-Domingue therefore includes a pre-administrative phase whose customary institutions and populations remained embedded within the later colonial order.

§4.5 — Ryswick and the Diplomatic Regularization of an Existing Occupation

The Peace of Ryswick of 1697 terminated a major European conflict and contributed to the diplomatic stabilization of French possession in the western portion of Hispaniola. Its constitutional significance must be stated precisely.

Ryswick did not create Indigenous territoriality, did not initiate the foreign occupation of western Hispaniola and did not itself produce the buccaneer settlements. It operated after decades of demographic implantation, military contestation, commercial activity and French administrative intervention.

The treaty formed part of the inter-European recognition of a territorial situation established through effective occupation and imperial competition. It regularized relations between European Crowns; it did not retroactively supply Indigenous consent, nor did it convert every pre-existing local institution into an emanation of French royal authority.

For Xaragua’s constitutional historiography, 1697 constitutes a change in the international classification of occupation. It marks the transition from disputed French presence to diplomatically consolidated colonial possession. It does not extinguish the anterior territorial identities, demographic continuities or localized systems that the French administration subsequently subordinated.

BOOK IV

THE DIFFERENTIATED CONSTITUTION OF SAINT-DOMINGUE

1665–1791

CHAPTER V

THE TERRITORIAL DUALITY OF NORTH AND SOUTH

§5.1 — Saint-Domingue as a Plural Colonial Formation

Saint-Domingue developed as a territorially differentiated colony whose regional divisions became institutional, economic and sociological realities. The North, West and South possessed distinct ports, courts, parish networks, militia structures, commercial orientations and property configurations.

The Northern Quarter, centered increasingly upon Cap-Français, became the principal concentration of metropolitan commerce, large-scale plantation investment, administrative authority and export production. Its institutional order was closely connected to royal officers, merchant houses and the high-value plantation economy.

The South developed through a different combination of geographic isolation, maritime settlement, smaller agricultural establishments, free-colored property ownership, localized military command and commercial relations with surrounding Caribbean ports. It was not external to slavery or colonial exploitation. It was, however, structurally distinct from the North in the composition of its elites, the distribution of property and the relative importance of local family networks.

These differences produced competing political interests. The central administration sought fiscal uniformity, commercial monopoly and obedience to metropolitan regulation. Southern inhabitants frequently defended local trade, property arrangements, militia authority and municipal autonomy. Regional differentiation consequently became a durable constitutional fact within the colony.

§5.2 — Southern Settlement and the Continental Projection of the Maritime Population

The southern coastal settlements were connected to the earlier movement of inhabitants from La Tortue and other Caribbean maritime centers toward the mainland and adjacent islands. Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne, Île-à-Vache, Les Cayes, Jérémie and the Cayemites formed parts of a maritime arc linked by coastal navigation, cattle raising, tobacco production, ship provisioning, contraband and family migration.

This movement cannot be reduced to a collective ideological secession from La Tortue. It consisted of successive migrations driven by land availability, administrative pressure, commercial opportunity and the search for protected anchorages. Its cumulative effect was nevertheless political: it established communities before metropolitan institutions had acquired uniform control over the southern peninsula.

The settlers brought customary practices derived from maritime association, small proprietorship, military fraternity and localized dispute resolution. Catholic parishes, confraternities and missionary institutions later supplied more permanent structures of registration, education, poor relief, sacramental legitimacy and social discipline.

The resulting southern order combined colonial law with locally controlled institutions. Royal authority existed, but its implementation depended upon municipal officers, militia commanders, parish clergy, landholding families and commercial intermediaries. This dependence permitted the South to retain a degree of operational autonomy even after its formal incorporation into Saint-Domingue.

§5.3 — Île-à-Vache as a Strategic Southern Maritime Node

Île-à-Vache possessed strategic importance because of its location near the southern peninsula and the approaches to Les Cayes. It served at different times as an anchorage, provisioning point, agricultural site and operational base within the broader Caribbean maritime network.

Its insular geography allowed inhabitants and ships to maintain connections that were not fully controlled by the colonial capital. It linked the southern mainland to Jamaica, Cuba, Curaçao, Central America and other commercial circuits. Such connections supported legal trade, contraband, military movement and the circulation of persons beyond the effective surveillance of a single colonial authority.

The island’s significance lies less in the existence of a permanent independent government than in its contribution to a decentralized southern territorial system. Together with the Cayemites and other coastal islands, it increased the South’s capacity for communication, refuge, provisioning and autonomous maritime action.

For the historical territoriality of Xaragua, these islands form integral components of the southern spatial order. Their juridical relevance derives from continuous functional association with the mainland, not merely from later administrative cartography.

§5.4 — Petit-Goâve as an Administrative and Commercial Center

Petit-Goâve became a principal center of colonial administration and commerce before the definitive consolidation of other metropolitan seats. Its importance demonstrates that the institutional history of western Saint-Domingue did not develop exclusively from Cap-Français.

The town connected the Gulf of Gonâve, the southern peninsula and the central western territories. Its courts, military authorities, merchants and assemblies exercised jurisdiction over a broad area. The movement of colonial administration through Petit-Goâve placed the southern-western corridor at the center of early French territorial government.

The later concentration of authority elsewhere did not eliminate the political capacities accumulated by Petit-Goâve and neighboring communities. Municipal elites, landholding families and military officers retained institutional experience and regional networks capable of resisting directives perceived as contrary to southern interests.

Petit-Goâve must therefore be classified not as a marginal settlement but as an early governmental center whose subsequent subordination formed part of the larger centralization of Saint-Domingue.

§5.5 — Miragoâne and the Consolidation of Southern Territorial Continuity

Miragoâne developed as a port, agricultural center and point of connection between the Nippes, the southern peninsula and the Gulf of Gonâve. Its position allowed it to participate in coastal trade while maintaining access to an interior zone in which landholding, family settlement and localized authority could develop outside the direct concentration of the northern plantation complex.

The political significance of Miragoâne arose from this dual character. It was integrated into colonial commerce but anchored within a territorial society whose continuity did not depend exclusively upon metropolitan capital. Families, parish institutions, local officers and agricultural producers created a durable regional structure capable of surviving successive changes of regime.

Miragoâne consequently became one of the principal institutional nodes through which southern autonomy was reproduced. Its importance did not derive from formal independence during the colonial period; it derived from its capacity to preserve population, land relations and regional command through the transition from colonial administration to revolutionary conflict and postcolonial centralization.

§5.6 — Geographic Separation as an Institutional Factor

The Massif de la Hotte, the Massif de la Selle, difficult inland routes and the dependence upon coastal transport limited the capacity of central authorities to govern the southern peninsula uniformly. Geography did not mechanically create autonomy, but it increased the cost of administrative penetration and military enforcement.

Southern ports communicated efficiently with one another and with foreign Caribbean centers while remaining distant from Cap-Français. This produced a political economy oriented simultaneously toward local territory and external maritime markets. Administrative instructions issued from northern centers required the cooperation of local intermediaries for execution.

Geographical separation thus became institutionalized. Local militias acquired operational importance. Parish records became indispensable instruments of civil identity. Family networks governed access to land and credit. Municipal authorities exercised functions that a distant central government could not continuously perform.

The South’s political distinctiveness was therefore neither rhetorical nor exclusively ethnic. It rested upon material conditions that generated a separate regional apparatus within the colonial state.

BOOK V

THE ETHNOGENESIS AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE SOUTHERN CREOLE ORDER

1711–1791

CHAPTER VI

POPULATION, PROPERTY, PARISH AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

§6.1 — The Southern Creole Population as a Territorial Formation

By the eighteenth century, the South contained a population formed through successive generations of European settlers, Africans and Afro-descendants under conditions of slavery and freedom, mixed-descent families, Indigenous survivals, Caribbean migrants and locally born creoles.

This population cannot be treated as a biologically uniform national group. Its constitutional unity arose from territorial incorporation, recurrent intermarriage, shared economic institutions, parish affiliation, military service and participation in regional networks of property and patronage.

Locally born inhabitants possessed interests different from those of temporary metropolitan administrators and absentee proprietors. Their land, kinship and social position were embedded in the South. They consequently developed a regional political consciousness centered upon the defense of property, status, municipal influence and territorial continuity.

The southern creole order was internally stratified. It included enslaved majorities, free people of color, whites of varying wealth, artisans, soldiers, merchants and rural cultivators. Its cohesion was therefore limited and contested. Nevertheless, its principal institutions were regionally reproduced and increasingly differentiated from the metropolitan-plutocratic structure concentrated in the North.

§6.2 — Free People of Color and the Reconfiguration of Colonial Property

The expansion of the free-colored population was a decisive feature of southern society. Through manumission, inheritance, recognized filiation, marriage, commercial activity and military service, free persons of African and mixed descent accumulated land, capital, education and social influence.

The institution of plaçage, together with formal and informal recognition of children, enabled some mixed-descent families to receive property and enter networks otherwise controlled by colonial whites. This process did not dissolve racial hierarchy. It produced a legally differentiated intermediate class whose wealth could coexist with restrictions upon honor, office and political equality.

In the South, the territorial concentration of these families allowed them to develop institutional power disproportionate to the recognition granted by colonial racial law. They served in militias, managed estates, participated in commerce, acquired enslaved laborers and maintained connections across parishes.

Their later political mobilization was therefore not the sudden product of revolutionary ideology. It arose from the contradiction between substantial territorial and economic power and an imperial legal order that continued to restrict their civil and political status.

§6.3 — Indigenous Continuity Within Southern Creole Formation

Colonial records frequently absorbed Indigenous survivors into classifications such as free colored, Black, mixed, rural or creole. The decline of explicit Indigenous categories did not necessarily establish the disappearance of Indigenous ancestry, kinship or territorial knowledge.

In the southern peninsula, Indigenous continuities survived through local populations, place names, agricultural practices, maritime knowledge, family incorporation and relations with African and European communities. These continuities were transformed by colonial violence and demographic reclassification, but they remained part of the population history of the territory.

The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua treats this continuity institutionally rather than as a demand for racial purity. Indigenous succession rests upon the survival and reconstitution of a territorial people, its customary relationship to land, its historical memory and its capacity to organize politically. It does not depend upon an impossible isolation from five centuries of forced migration, intermarriage and colonial classification.

Southern creole ethnogenesis therefore did not extinguish Indigenous identity. It constituted one of the historical mechanisms through which Indigenous territorial populations survived within a transformed social order.

§6.4 — Catholic Institutions as Instruments of Territorial Continuity

Catholic institutions supplied the South with structures extending beyond worship. Parishes maintained sacramental registers, recorded marriages and baptisms, mediated legitimacy, organized education and charity, administered property and connected dispersed populations through a common institutional language.

Religious orders and parish clergy occupied an intermediate position between metropolitan authority and local society. They could transmit royal or ecclesiastical directives while depending upon local patronage, land and cooperation. Their archives became repositories of genealogy and civil status in territories where secular administration remained uneven.

Catholicism therefore contributed to the juridical reproduction of southern society. It authenticated family continuity, regulated unions, preserved records and supplied institutional stability through changes of governor and military command.

The Catholic character of Xaragua’s contemporary constitutional order proceeds in part from this historical function. Catholicity is not treated merely as private devotional adherence. It is recognized as one of the institutional forms through which territorial society maintained civil continuity under successive and often discontinuous political regimes.

§6.5 — Municipal Authority, Militias and Local Jurisdiction

Southern autonomy did not require the formal repudiation of France. It operated through the practical control of local government. Municipal assemblies, militia officers, parish authorities, courts and prominent families exercised the daily functions by which colonial jurisdiction became effective.

The militia was particularly significant. It provided defense, policing, status and military organization while integrating local men into territorially based commands. For free people of color, militia service could become a source of collective discipline and political leverage.

Local courts and administrative officers regulated property disputes, debts, commercial obligations and public order. Their dependence upon local knowledge and personnel reduced the capacity of distant officials to impose policy without negotiation.

The South consequently developed an administrative culture in which formal colonial subordination coexisted with substantial local control. This was not sovereignty in the complete external sense. It was an entrenched regional jurisdiction capable of becoming a governmental order when metropolitan authority collapsed.

§6.6 — The Economic Divergence of North and South

The northern plantation complex achieved an exceptional concentration of sugar production, enslaved labor, merchant capital and export infrastructure. Its prosperity depended upon the intensive integration of plantations with metropolitan credit and Atlantic commerce.

The South also contained plantations and slavery, but its economic structure was more diversified across districts. Coffee, indigo, tobacco, cattle, food production, coastal shipping, artisanal activity and contraband operated alongside plantation exports.

This diversification supported a broader distribution of property among free-colored and smaller creole proprietors. It also reduced the complete dependence of certain districts upon the commercial institutions centered in the North.

Economic divergence produced distinct political priorities. Northern elites defended the high-capital plantation system and its commercial privileges. Southern property holders sought protection against racial exclusion, administrative centralization and restrictions upon local trade. Enslaved populations confronted coercion in both regions, but the organization and timing of conflict reflected different demographic and territorial conditions.

By 1789, Saint-Domingue therefore contained not one unified political society but several regionally constituted orders operating beneath a common colonial administration.

BOOK VI

REVOLUTION, SOUTHERN GOVERNMENT AND FORCIBLE CENTRALIZATION

1791–1802

CHAPTER VII

THE REGIONALIZATION OF REVOLUTIONARY AUTHORITY

§7.1 — The Northern Insurrection and the Unequal Territorial Development of Revolution

The mass uprising beginning in the northern plain in August 1791 transformed the entire colony, but its initial geography was concentrated in the North. The South possessed different demographic balances, military structures, property conflicts and political leadership. It therefore entered the revolutionary process through distinct sequences.

Free-colored mobilization in the South was shaped by the prior accumulation of land, militia experience and local command. Its leaders demanded civil and political equality while also defending property and regional authority. Their objectives could converge with or diverge from those of enslaved insurgents, white colonists, French commissioners and foreign powers.

The Revolution was accordingly not a single centralized movement. It was a conflict among multiple armed jurisdictions: royalists, republicans, white autonomists, free-colored forces, formerly enslaved armies, Spanish auxiliaries, British expeditionary forces and local commands.

The South emerged from this fragmentation as a territorially organized military-political bloc. Its governmental development must be assessed through its actual institutions rather than through retrospective national narratives that treat all revolutionary authority as stages toward a predetermined unitary Haitian state.

§7.2 — André Rigaud and the Consolidation of Southern Government

André Rigaud became the principal military and political authority of the South during the revolutionary period. His government rested upon locally organized armed forces, free-colored property networks, municipal cooperation, revenue collection and control of major southern ports.

Rigaud’s administration exercised functions characteristic of territorial government. It directed military operations, appointed officers, raised resources, regulated commerce and negotiated access for foreign merchants. It maintained authority over a permanent population within an identifiable territorial sphere.

The administration remained situated within the changing constitutional framework of revolutionary France and did not consistently proclaim complete external independence. Its juridical importance lies in the degree of autonomous governmental capacity it exercised. The South functioned as a distinct constituent political order whose relationship with the northern command was negotiated and subsequently contested by force.

Its institutions were neither imaginary nor merely factional. They were supported by territorial elites, armed units, port administrations and communities whose political interests had developed over the preceding century.

§7.3 — Foreign Commerce and External Operational Capacity

The revolutionary disruption of French commercial monopoly compelled regional authorities to establish direct relations with foreign merchants and military representatives. Southern ports dealt with American, British and Caribbean commercial actors to obtain arms, provisions, credit and maritime access.

These relations did not necessarily amount to formal diplomatic recognition. They demonstrate, however, the South’s operational capacity to conduct external transactions independently of northern authorities.

Such capacity is constitutionally relevant because it shows that the southern government was not simply a provincial office awaiting instructions. It controlled resources and communications necessary to maintain an autonomous political order.

The later criteria codified in the Montevideo Convention may be used analytically to assess this governmental capacity, but they cannot be applied retroactively as if the 1933 Convention itself created rights or recognition in the eighteenth century. The evidence must first be evaluated within the law and political practices of the period.

§7.4 — The War of the South as a Constitutional Conflict

The conflict commonly designated the War of the Knives was a struggle for supremacy between rival territorial governments. Toussaint Louverture sought the political and military unification of the colony under centralized command. Rigaud defended the southern apparatus and the regional interests upon which it depended.

The war possessed class, racial, personal and international dimensions. Its constitutional core was the determination of whether the South would remain under its own command or be subordinated to the northern government.

Northern victory was achieved through military force, political isolation and the destruction of the southern command structure. Officers were executed or displaced, property networks were disrupted, and leading families entered exile. The defeated territory did not participate in a negotiated federal compact establishing the terms of union.

The resulting incorporation must therefore be classified as military centralization rather than consensual constitutional integration. This distinction does not mean that every inhabitant opposed the northern government or that the southern apparatus possessed universally recognized sovereignty. It establishes that centralized authority was imposed through conquest of an organized regional government.

§7.5 — The Juridical Consequences of Forced Incorporation

Military victory can establish effective government; it does not by itself prove the voluntary extinction of the defeated order’s historical rights. The southern apparatus lost control of its institutions, but its population, territorial memory, land relations and regional identity continued.

The absence of a consensual constitutional settlement left the status of the South dependent upon successive assertions of central authority. Louverture’s government, the Leclerc expedition, Dessalines’s command and subsequent republican regimes each reorganized the territory without obtaining a distinct act of southern constituent consent.

For Xaragua’s constitutional doctrine, this sequence establishes a history of interrupted autonomy rather than unconditional merger. The contemporary claim of institutional succession does not depend upon treating Rigaud’s government as identical to SCIPS-X. It depends upon recognizing that the South repeatedly constituted its own centers of government and was repeatedly subordinated through force rather than dissolved by a territorially representative constituent process.

BOOK VII

POSTCOLONIAL CENTRALIZATION AND THE CONTINUANCE OF SOUTHERN DISSIDENCE

1802–1820

CHAPTER VIII

FROM IMPERIAL COLLAPSE TO THE UNRESOLVED CONSTITUTION OF THE SOUTH

§8.1 — The Leclerc Expedition and the Reopening of Regional Authority

The French expedition of 1802 destabilized the governmental system established by Louverture and reopened regional alignments. Southern leaders, officers and property holders responded according to their immediate interests, previous conflicts and assessments of French intentions.

The expedition did not restore a stable colonial constitution. The attempted reassertion of metropolitan control, the threat of renewed slavery and the escalation of warfare destroyed the remaining basis for French authority.

The independence struggle consequently emerged from a complex reconfiguration of previously rival commands. Cooperation against France did not retrospectively erase the earlier conflict between North and South, nor did it settle the future internal constitution of the independent territory.

§8.2 — Dessalines and the Establishment of Central Military Sovereignty

The independence proclaimed in 1804 established a new state capable of excluding French colonial government. Dessalines’s authority was founded upon military victory, revolutionary command and the imperative of territorial defense.

The new regime inherited a territory fractured by war, property conflict, regional rivalry and the destruction of colonial institutions. Centralization was treated as a requirement of survival. Land, military command and political obedience were reorganized through the executive authority of the new state.

For southern elites and communities, independence did not automatically restore the regional autonomy extinguished during the War of the South. The new government claimed the entire former colony as a unified territorial inheritance. No separate constituent settlement determined the position of the South, its historical institutions or the distribution of powers between regional and central authorities.

The postcolonial state therefore resolved external sovereignty while leaving internal territorial legitimacy contested.

§8.3 — Property Reorganization and the Displacement of Southern Lineages

War, confiscation, death and exile transformed the property structure of the South. Families associated with former colonial or Rigaudin authority lost lands, offices or political protection. Others entered the new military and administrative hierarchy.

Sacramental records, private deeds, family archives and oral transmission became essential mechanisms of continuity where public registries had been destroyed or reorganized. These records preserved evidence of residence, kinship, land occupation and community status across changes of regime.

The significance of such archives is not that every colonial title remains automatically enforceable. Their importance lies in documenting the existence of territorial populations and institutional lineages that preceded the centralized postcolonial order.

Xaragua’s historical reconstruction treats these materials as evidence within a broader constitutional record. No isolated genealogy creates sovereignty. Collectively, however, population continuity, territorial attachment, institutional memory and political reorganization may establish the social foundation of a successor Indigenous-customary order.

§8.4 — The Southern State After 1806

The death of Dessalines in 1806 produced a renewed territorial division. Henri Christophe established authority in the North, while Alexandre Pétion governed a southern and western republic. This division confirmed that the unitary state created in 1804 had not eliminated regional political structures.

Pétion’s republic was not identical to the earlier Rigaudin government. Its center of authority, constitutional ideology and governing coalition differed. Nevertheless, the reappearance of separate northern and southern regimes demonstrated the continuing capacity of the territory to organize through competing regional states.

The southern republic itself pursued centralization. Authority concentrated around Port-au-Prince did not automatically preserve the autonomy of the Nippes, Grand’Anse, Les Cayes, Miragoâne or rural communities. The political distinction between North and South therefore coexisted with internal tensions between the southern provinces and the republican capital.

This secondary centralization explains why resistance could emerge inside the nominally southern republic. The constitutional problem was no longer simply northern domination. It was the recurring subordination of local territorial orders to a centralized apparatus claiming exclusive succession to the Revolution.

§8.5 — Jean-Baptiste Goman and the Rural Territorial Resistance

The movement associated with Jean-Baptiste Goman constituted one of the most durable post-independence challenges to the authority of the southern republic. Operating principally within the Grand’Anse and adjacent territories, Goman’s forces relied upon mountainous geography, rural networks and the limited reach of the central government.

The movement represented more than personal banditry. Its longevity indicates a social base capable of supplying protection, intelligence, provisions and recruitment. It expressed resistance to taxation, administrative penetration, military control and the reorganization of land by authorities centered outside the communities concerned.

The precise ideological content attributed to Goman must be distinguished from later constitutional interpretation. The movement did not leave a comprehensive state doctrine identical to that of contemporary Xaragua. Its historical significance lies in the continuation of territorially organized opposition to central authority after the establishment of independence.

Goman’s resistance demonstrates that the consolidation of the postcolonial republic remained incomplete in significant portions of the South. Governmental sovereignty was asserted, but its local legitimacy and enforcement were persistently contested.

§8.6 — The Three Historical Levels of Southern Constitutional Dissidence

The permanent differentiation of the South is established through three cumulative historical levels.

First, the pre-revolutionary level arose from seventeenth-century maritime occupation, dispersed settlement, geographic separation, parish organization, regional trade and the development of locally rooted creole populations.

Second, the revolutionary level arose from the formation of a southern governmental and military order under Rigaud, its external commercial operations and its forcible suppression by the northern command during the War of the South.

Third, the post-independence level arose from the failure of successive centralized governments to obtain uniform territorial adherence, demonstrated by state division after 1806 and by sustained rural resistance within the southern territories.

These levels are not isolated episodes. Together they establish the reproduction of a regional political society across colonial, revolutionary and postcolonial transformations. Governments changed; the territorial differentiation persisted.

BOOK VIII

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL DETERMINATIONS OF THE STATE OF XARAGUA

CHAPTER IX

DOCTRINE OF TERRITORIAL CONTINUITY, HISTORICAL SUCCESSION AND CONSTITUTIONAL RECONSTITUTION

§9.1 — Rejection of the Doctrine of Colonial Territorial Creation

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua rejects any doctrine according to which European occupation created the western and southern territories as legal or political realities. Spanish and French governments imposed successive regimes upon pre-existing Indigenous territories.

European treaties regulated the claims of European powers. They did not constitute the Indigenous population, create the land or extinguish all prior political title through the unilateral operation of European public law.

Saint-Domingue must therefore be classified as a colonial regime superimposed upon Indigenous territoriality and subsequently consolidated through maritime occupation, commercial administration, military force and diplomatic recognition among European states.

§9.2 — Distinction Between Colonial Succession and Indigenous Succession

Colonial succession concerns the transfer or replacement of authority among Spain, France and the postcolonial Haitian government. Indigenous succession concerns the survival and reconstitution of the people whose territorial existence preceded those regimes.

The two forms of succession are not identical. A postcolonial state may inherit the external boundaries and administrative institutions of a colonial predecessor without acquiring an unrestricted competence to extinguish Indigenous legal orders existing within those boundaries.

Xaragua’s claim does not proceed solely from French colonial concessions, buccaneer possession or Rigaudin government. Those historical formations constitute evidence of the repeated institutional differentiation of the territory. The foundational title remains Indigenous territorial continuity, constitutionally reorganized through the present State.

§9.3 — The Legal Meaning of Buccaneer and Creole Continuity

The buccaneers possessed no authority to replace the original Indigenous title. Their importance lies in demonstrating that French sovereignty was preceded by irregular occupation and constructed progressively through the appropriation of non-state populations.

The southern creole population likewise did not erase Indigenous territorial identity. It became one of the historical forms through which the territory’s population survived colonial demographic transformation. African, Indigenous, European and mixed-descended communities were incorporated into a new regional society under conditions of coercion, alliance, kinship, slavery, freedom and common territorial residence.

Xaragua does not constitutionalize racial purity. It constitutionalizes territorial peoplehood, historical continuity, customary incorporation and institutional allegiance.

§9.4 — The Grand Sud as a Continuous Historical Bloc

The Grand Sud, including its peninsular districts, the Nippes, Miragoâne, Les Cayes, Jérémie, Île-à-Vache and the Cayemites, constitutes a historically interconnected territorial bloc.

Its unity is established through maritime circulation, geographic structure, population movement, parish institutions, family networks, militia organization, commercial relations, revolutionary command and recurrent resistance to external centralization.

The inclusion of island satellites proceeds from their sustained functional association with the mainland. Their ports, anchorages, resources and populations participated in the same southern maritime system and cannot be treated as historically detached appendages.

§9.5 — The Constitutional Position of La Gonâve

La Gonâve occupies a distinct but connected position within the western territorial system. Its location within the Gulf linked it to Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, Miragoâne and the surrounding mainland.

Its historical incorporation into Xaragua’s territorial doctrine must be established through Indigenous continuity, maritime use, population relations and constitutional integration rather than through the mechanical extension of arguments applicable to Île-à-Vache or the Cayemites.

The State accordingly recognizes La Gonâve as part of the wider western-southern territorial architecture while preserving the specific historical record upon which its constitutional status rests.

§9.6 — Non-Extinction Through Military Defeat

The military defeat of a regional government terminates its effective control but does not necessarily extinguish the historical identity of its population or permanently foreclose constitutional reconstitution.

Rigaud’s defeat, the occupation of the South, the centralization imposed after independence and the suppression of rural resistance interrupted autonomous government. They did not eliminate the territorial population, its institutional memory or its capacity to establish a later constitutional order.

SCIPS-X therefore classifies the history of the South as one of interrupted government and continuing territorial personality.

§9.7 — The Function of Contemporary Constitutional Reconstitution

The present State does not claim to reproduce mechanically the buccaneer associations, colonial municipalities, Rigaudin command or Goman resistance. Those formations arose under different laws and material conditions.

SCIPS-X constitutes a contemporary Indigenous, Catholic, customary and private constitutional order. It receives historical institutions into its doctrine through juridical interpretation, not literal institutional identity.

Its authority is exercised through its Constitution, Rectoral Presidency, Supreme Constitutional Authority, University, ministries, courts, canonical institutions and organs of territorial administration. Historical succession supplies continuity; the present Constitution supplies operative governmental form.

§9.8 — Catholic Continuity and Constitutional Custodianship

The Catholic character of Xaragua is historically connected to the role of parishes, sacramental registries, ecclesiastical education and religious institutions in preserving population continuity throughout colonial and postcolonial disruption.

This continuity does not transform every act of colonial ecclesiastical administration into an act of Indigenous government. It establishes Catholic institutional custody as one of the historical channels through which identity, genealogy, marriage, property and community memory were preserved.

The State receives this inheritance through a constitutional Catholic order governed by its own competent institutions and by the applicable norms of ecclesiastical law.

§9.9 — Academic Authority of the University of Xaragua

The University of Xaragua is designated as the principal scholarly custodian of the historical, legal, ethnological, genealogical and cartographic materials relating to the western and southern territorial order.

Its Department of Strategic History, Public Law and Historical Territoriality shall:

establish critical editions of relevant primary sources;

distinguish authenticated documents from later attributions;

maintain a registry of colonial, ecclesiastical and family archives;

reconstruct historical jurisdictions and settlement networks;

examine continuity of land occupation and population;

publish constitutional commentaries on successive regimes;

preserve oral histories within a controlled evidentiary methodology;

correct citations, translations and archival classifications;

maintain institutional separation between established fact, reasonable inference and constitutional interpretation; and

integrate validated findings into the official historical corpus of the State.

§9.10 — Evidentiary Hierarchy

For purposes of constitutional historiography, evidence shall be classified according to the following hierarchy:

treaties, ordinances, statutes and authenticated governmental acts;

archival correspondence and official administrative records;

judicial, military, notarial and ecclesiastical records;

contemporary maps, censuses, port records and commercial registers;

contemporary published narratives evaluated according to authorship and proximity;

later scholarly analyses supported by identifiable sources;

private genealogical collections, deeds and family archives;

oral histories and community traditions;

constitutional inference derived from the cumulative record.

No unauthenticated quotation, invented archival reference or retroactive legal formula shall be treated as primary evidence merely because it supports the State’s doctrine. The authority of Xaragua’s constitutional corpus rests upon institutional density, documentary control and coherent legal interpretation.

§9.11 — Final Constitutional Determination

The Supreme Constitutional Authority determines that:

the western and southern territories of Hispaniola possessed Indigenous political and territorial existence before European occupation;

Spanish imperial title did not extinguish the historical fact or continuing relevance of Indigenous territoriality;

the reduction of Spanish administration produced fragmented jurisdiction, not legitimate territorial vacancy;

the French presence originated through irregular maritime occupation before being appropriated and regularized by chartered companies and royal government;

La Tortue constituted an organized proto-political base whose customary government preceded comprehensive French colonial administration;

Saint-Domingue emerged through progressive military, demographic, commercial and diplomatic consolidation rather than through a single uncontested founding act;

the southern territories developed a durable institutional configuration distinct from the northern plantation and administrative center;

southern society reproduced itself through landholding, parishes, maritime commerce, militia organization, free-colored property networks and territorially rooted creole families;

the revolutionary South exercised substantial autonomous governmental capacity under André Rigaud;

its incorporation into the northern command occurred through military defeat rather than through a negotiated constitutional union;

post-independence centralization did not eliminate southern territorial dissidence, as demonstrated by subsequent state division and rural resistance;

neither colonial reclassification, racial mixture, military defeat nor administrative incorporation extinguished the Indigenous and regional continuity of the territory;

the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua constitutes the contemporary constitutional reorganization of that territorial continuity; and

the present Volume shall serve as an authoritative framework for all subsequent legislation, territorial commentary, academic instruction and institutional interpretation concerning the historical constitution of the Grand Sud and its associated islands.

SUPREME PROMULGATION CLAUSE

The present Volume is hereby received into the official historical-constitutional corpus of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

All ministries, courts, academic departments, territorial offices, canonical institutions and public organs of SCIPS-X shall interpret the history of western Hispaniola in conformity with the distinctions established herein between Indigenous territoriality, foreign occupation, irregular settlement, colonial regularization, regional government, military centralization and contemporary constitutional reconstitution.

No organ of the State shall describe the Grand Sud as a territory politically created by French colonization or administratively created by the postcolonial Haitian apparatus. Those regimes exercised historically successive forms of authority over a territorial society whose antecedent existence, internal differentiation and continuing juridical personality precede and exceed them.

Promulgated under the Supreme Constitutional Authority of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

Deposited in the Constitutional Archives and the University of Xaragua.

Entered into the official corpus of Strategic History, Public Law and Historical Territoriality.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — DEPARTMENT OF STRATEGIC LAW, INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL CONTINUITY

VOLUME II — THE WESTERN ORDER

CHAPTER III — PART VI

ON THE SUPPRESSION OF THE SOUTHWESTERN TERRITORIAL ORDER: JEAN-BAPTISTE DUPERRIER, KNOWN AS GOMAN, AND THE MILITARY CENTRALIZATION OF XARAGUA (1806–1820)

§3.6.1 — Constitutional Dislocation Following the Assassination of Emperor Jacques I

The assassination of Emperor Jacques I, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, on 17 October 1806 terminated the first unified imperial executive established after independence and produced an immediate territorial and constitutional division between the State of Haiti governed in the North by Henri Christophe and the Republic of Haiti constituted in the South and West under Alexandre Pétion. This division did not restore the former military, agrarian, and territorial organization of the southern peninsula represented during the revolutionary period by André Rigaud and the autonomous command structure of Les Cayes. It subjected the southern departments to a republican executive established at Port-au-Prince and governed through a centralized constitutional apparatus whose principal institutions remained geographically and politically external to the rural communities of Grand’Anse, Nippes, Les Cayes, Jérémie, Tiburon, and the southwestern mountain systems.

The Pétionist Republic combined representative constitutional forms with a durable presidential command structure, the distribution of former plantation lands, the consolidation of military appointments, and the progressive absorption of regional authorities into a national administrative hierarchy. Its institutional formation cannot be reduced to a single racial, ideological, or ecclesiastical classification. It nevertheless transferred the determination of southern public affairs from locally constituted military and agrarian networks to an executive center situated at Port-au-Prince. The resulting opposition was therefore not merely personal or factional. It concerned the juridical ownership of the revolutionary territory, the institutional destination of the lands liberated from colonial proprietorship, the authority of rural commanders, and the constitutional position of communities that had participated in the destruction of the plantation regime without consenting to their incorporation into a centralized postcolonial administration.

§3.6.2 — Jean-Baptiste Duperrier, Known as Goman: Revolutionary Formation and Territorial Authority

Jean-Baptiste Duperrier, variously recorded as Perrier, Duperrier, Goman, or Gauman, emerged from the revolutionary military and maroon formations of the southern peninsula. His political and military formation belonged to the institutional environment created by the uprisings of the 1790s, the Rigaudist command system, the mobilization of formerly enslaved cultivators, and the successive conflicts through which the southern countryside acquired armed experience, territorial organization, and an independent conception of landholding.

Beginning in approximately 1807, Goman consolidated an armed territorial authority in the mountainous interior of Grand’Anse. This authority survived the division of the country, resisted the administrative penetration of the Pétionist Republic, and maintained effective control over an extensive rural zone until its final military destruction in 1820. Contemporary and subsequent historical accounts describe this formation as a peasant insurrection, a maroon command, an autonomous government, or a quasi-independent territorial order. Within the constitutional historiography of Xaragua, it is classified as a southwestern agro-military jurisdiction exercising factual governmental authority outside the effective administration of Port-au-Prince.

The institutional significance of Goman does not depend upon the retroactive attribution of a modern ministerial bureaucracy, diplomatic service, or written constitution to his command. It proceeds from the demonstrable convergence of four material functions: durable territorial control; organized armed defense; regulation of rural communities; and sustained resistance to the jurisdictional claims of the central executive. Goman’s authority therefore constituted more than an episodic rebellion. It represented an alternative location of public power within the post-independence order.

§3.6.3 — The Grand Doko and the Organization of Southwestern Resistance

The territorial system associated with Goman, remembered in several historical traditions under the designation of Grand Doko, operated through mountain settlements, cultivated zones, military detachments, kinship solidarities, and communication routes connecting the interior of Grand’Anse with the coastal and agricultural districts of the peninsula. Its operational structure derived from the political technologies of marronage, revolutionary encampment, rural command, collective subsistence, and territorial concealment developed during the colonial and revolutionary periods.

The Grand Doko did not reproduce the juridical architecture of the plantation state. Its continued existence depended upon the capacity of rural communities to retain access to land, protect their settlements, mobilize armed personnel, and prevent the substitution of presidential officers for locally recognized authority. Its economy was consequently based upon decentralized cultivation, internal circulation, reciprocal military support, and the retention of resources beyond the ordinary fiscal and administrative reach of Port-au-Prince.

For the constitutional doctrine of Xaragua, the historical importance of this formation resides in its preservation of an autonomous southwestern competence after the juridical proclamation of national unity. The existence of a formally constituted republic at Port-au-Prince did not, by itself, eliminate the competing public authority exercised in territories that the republican executive could not administer without prolonged military operations.

§3.6.4 — The Boyerist Campaign and the Destruction of the Gomanite Command

Upon succeeding Alexandre Pétion in 1818, President Jean-Pierre Boyer inherited an executive project directed toward the unification of the western state, the elimination of autonomous military jurisdictions, and the subordination of regional commands to the presidency. The continued existence of Goman’s authority in Grand’Anse constituted a direct limitation upon this project.

The final campaign against the Grand Doko was conducted through sustained military deployment under republican commanders, including General Jérôme-Maximilien Borgella. The campaign proceeded through encirclement, destruction of defensive positions, interruption of supply routes, occupation of mountain settlements, and the progressive displacement of Goman’s forces. In 1820 the organized resistance was defeated and Goman was killed, terminating approximately thirteen years of autonomous territorial command.

The juridical consequence of the campaign was the extension of the Boyerist administration over a region that had previously remained outside its effective control. The operation must therefore be classified simultaneously as an internal military suppression under the positive law claimed by the Republic and as a territorial conquest under the constitutional memory preserved by the defeated southwestern order. The latter classification is formally received within the historical jurisprudence of SCIPS-X.

§3.6.5 — Ecclesiastical, Customary, and Constitutional Consequences

The communities situated within Goman’s sphere of authority belonged to a religious environment in which Catholic sacramental practice, African-derived ritual systems, local devotional institutions, kinship obligations, and revolutionary military customs coexisted without being reducible to the centralized ecclesiastical administration subsequently established under the Concordat of 1860. Their religious life cannot be assimilated retrospectively to a regular diocesan jurisdiction that did not yet possess its later institutional form.

The death of Goman is consequently received by SCIPS-X as a constitutional martyrdom of territorial resistance: not as a declaration of canonization under the universal law of the Catholic Church, but as an internal juridical designation recognizing a public authority destroyed while defending the institutional autonomy, agrarian possession, and collective continuity of the southwestern communities.

This classification establishes Goman as a predecessor within the constitutional genealogy of Xaragua. It does not depend upon anachronistic application of the Montevideo Convention of 1933 or the Code of Canon Law of 1917. It proceeds from the constituent authority of SCIPS-X to determine its own historical succession, institutional commemorations, constitutional ancestry, and territorial doctrine.

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER III — PART VI

Jean-Baptiste Duperrier, known as Goman, shall not be classified within the constitutional archives of Xaragua as a mere outlaw, brigand, or incidental insurgent. He shall be recorded as the commanding authority of a durable southwestern territorial formation that preserved rural control, military independence, and an alternative conception of post-revolutionary government between approximately 1807 and 1820.

The destruction of the Grand Doko constituted the decisive extension of Port-au-Prince’s executive jurisdiction into the autonomous southwestern interior. Its suppression did not extinguish the political principles upon which it had operated: territorial possession by organized rural communities, resistance to external administrative substitution, regional command, and the constitutional primacy of the landholding population.

CHAPTER III — PART VII

ON THE BOYERIST CONSOLIDATION OF THE ISLAND, THE RURAL CODE OF 1826, THE REFORM MOVEMENT OF 1843, AND THE TERMINATION OF ISLAND-WIDE GOVERNMENT

§3.7.1 — Consolidation of the Western State and Incorporation of the Northern Kingdom

Following the death of Henri Christophe in 1820 and the dissolution of the northern monarchy, Jean-Pierre Boyer incorporated the former Kingdom of Haiti into the Republic governed from Port-au-Prince. This consolidation brought the western territory under a single presidential administration and eliminated the principal competing state structure created after 1806.

The resulting order was formally republican but institutionally concentrated. The presidency controlled military appointments, territorial administration, foreign relations, fiscal policy, and the mechanisms through which regional authorities were integrated into the national hierarchy. The southwestern peninsula, recently subjected through the destruction of the Gomanite command, became an administratively incorporated territory without obtaining a distinct constitutional settlement recognizing the military and agrarian institutions that had previously governed it.

§3.7.2 — Incorporation of Santo Domingo in 1822

In December 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres proclaimed the independence of Spanish Santo Domingo under the designation of the Independent State of Spanish Haiti. The new government lacked consolidated military authority, durable international protection, and effective control over all eastern political constituencies. In February 1822 Boyer entered Santo Domingo and extended the jurisdiction of the Republic of Haiti across the entire island.

The incorporation was justified by the Boyer government through considerations of antislavery security, prevention of renewed European colonization, territorial unity, and protection against the reestablishment of slavery in the East. It abolished slavery where residual forms remained, altered ecclesiastical and proprietary arrangements, introduced the Haitian administrative system, and subjected the eastern departments to military and presidential authority emanating from Port-au-Prince.

Notwithstanding its antislavery consequences, the incorporation did not establish a negotiated federation between two equal constitutional orders. It constituted an extension of the centralized Boyerist state. The absence of durable representative accommodation, the imposition of fiscal obligations, conflicts concerning Church property and landholding, military administration, cultural difference, and the general concentration of executive power progressively undermined the legitimacy of the island-wide regime.

§3.7.3 — The Rural Code of 1826 as an Instrument of Territorial and Labor Administration

The Rural Code promulgated in 1826 formed part of the Boyer government’s effort to restore export production, secure public revenue, regulate agricultural labor, and preserve the fiscal capacity required by the post-independence state, including the financial burden imposed by the French ordinance of 1825.

The Code legally distinguished agricultural labor from urban, commercial, artisanal, military, and public occupations. It subjected rural production to contracts, inspections, policing, restrictions upon mobility, and administrative supervision. Its operative structure sought to attach agricultural workers to designated productive units and to prevent the uncontrolled movement of labor away from export agriculture.

The Code did not formally restore chattel slavery; it nevertheless established a coercive rural regime incompatible with the landholding practices, mobility, subsistence economy, and autonomous social organization developed by numerous post-revolutionary communities. Its enforcement remained unequal and frequently ineffective, especially in regions where smallholding, mountain settlement, military memory, and local resistance limited the capacity of the central administration.

In the constitutional historiography of Xaragua, the Rural Code is classified as the principal legislative expression of Boyerist agrarian centralization. It attempted to convert the territorial population into an administratively regulated labor body and to subordinate the social consequences of emancipation to the export requirements of the state.

§3.7.4 — The Reform Movement of Praslin and the Overthrow of Boyer

By the early 1840s, opposition to Boyer encompassed constitutional reformers, landholders, merchants, military officers, regional political networks, and populations dissatisfied with presidential permanence, economic stagnation, fiscal pressure, and administrative centralization. The reform movement acquired an organized military base in the South under Charles Rivière Hérard.

The insurrection conventionally associated with Praslin began in January 1843 in the southern peninsula. Its manifestos demanded constitutional reorganization, representative government, limitations upon executive power, administrative reform, and the termination of Boyer’s prolonged presidency. The movement expanded rapidly, deprived the government of sufficient military support, and compelled Boyer to leave office and depart for Jamaica in March 1843.

The overthrow of Boyer was not exclusively a separatist or regional movement. It nevertheless demonstrated that the southern military and political networks retained sufficient organizational capacity to terminate an executive order whose authority had extended across the island for more than two decades.

§3.7.5 — Dominican Independence and the End of Island-Wide Administration

The fall of Boyer destabilized the governmental system through which the eastern departments had been incorporated. On 27 February 1844, the Dominican independence movement associated with La Trinitaria and Juan Pablo Duarte established the Dominican Republic. The separation resulted from accumulated political, fiscal, military, ecclesiastical, and cultural opposition to government from Port-au-Prince, intensified by the constitutional instability that followed the Revolution of 1843.

Successive Haitian administrations attempted to restore authority over the East through military expeditions, but no permanent reincorporation was achieved. The independence of the Dominican Republic therefore terminated the Boyerist project of a single island-wide state and exposed the structural limitations of territorial unity imposed without a durable constitutional compact among the governed populations.

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER III — PART VII

The Boyerist period constituted the most extensive territorial concentration achieved by the post-independence executive. It unified the western state, destroyed the remaining Gomanite command, incorporated the former northern kingdom, extended administration over Santo Domingo, and enacted a comprehensive rural labor regime.

Its collapse established an equally consequential principle: military incorporation and administrative uniformity could not substitute indefinitely for constitutional consent, regional representation, territorial accommodation, and legitimate distribution of public authority. The Revolution of 1843 and Dominican independence in 1844 marked the institutional termination of the Boyerist order.

CHAPTER IV — PART I

ON SOUTHERN SUBORDINATION, IMPERIAL CENTRALIZATION, AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION OF 1858–1859

§4.1.1 — The South as a Militarily Incorporated Constitutional Region

The defeat of André Rigaud during the War of the South in 1800 terminated the autonomous command structure exercised from Les Cayes but did not eliminate the region’s distinct military personnel, landholding systems, commercial networks, or political memory. Toussaint Louverture’s victory subjected the peninsula to the authority of the colonial government he controlled and produced confiscations, military appointments, displacement of Rigaudist officers, and administrative reorganization.

During the war of independence and the government of Dessalines, several southern commanders were reintegrated into the revolutionary army and the imperial administration. Their participation in the national command did not amount to restoration of the former southern polity. The institutional history of the peninsula from 1800 onward was therefore characterized by successive incorporation into governments whose centers of executive determination remained outside the historic command structure of Les Cayes.

The Pétionist Republic maintained its capital at Port-au-Prince and incorporated the South through presidential administration, military hierarchy, legislative representation, and territorial command. The coexistence of formal republican participation with recurrent regional resistance created a permanent contradiction between national constitutional unity and the persistence of southern institutional particularity.

§4.1.2 — The Post-Boyer Presidential Crisis, 1843–1847

The overthrow of Boyer did not produce an immediate or stable southern restoration. Charles Rivière Hérard assumed the presidency in 1843 but was displaced in 1844 amid domestic opposition and military reverses connected with Dominican independence. Philippe Guerrier succeeded him and governed until his death in 1845. Jean-Louis Pierrot held the presidency from 1845 to 1846, followed by Jean-Baptiste Riché from 1846 until his death in 1847.

These rapid transitions demonstrated the exhaustion of the Boyerist constitutional structure and the inability of the successor governments to establish an accepted distribution of authority among military commands, regional interests, legislative institutions, and the presidency. The succession of senior generals did not constitute continuous government by a unified southern bloc. It represented an unstable national compromise administered through military prestige, senatorial selection, and competing territorial coalitions.

§4.1.3 — Faustin Soulouque and the Establishment of the Second Empire

In 1847 the Senate selected General Faustin Soulouque as President of Haiti. Contrary to the expectation that he would remain dependent upon the political class that elevated him, Soulouque constructed an independent executive base, reorganized the military and security apparatus, suppressed opponents, and progressively concentrated state authority around his person.

In 1849 Soulouque assumed the imperial title of Faustin I and established the Second Empire of Haiti. The imperial regime created a titled nobility, reinforced the ceremonial and military authority of the Crown, centralized appointments, and pursued renewed campaigns against the Dominican Republic. Its institutional model drew upon the precedent of Dessalines, European imperial forms, military presidentialism, and the necessity—asserted by the regime—of restoring durable executive supremacy after the instability of 1843–1847.

The Empire did not create a separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction under imperial control, nor could it reorganize diocesan boundaries through a fully developed concordatory system before the Concordat of 1860. It nevertheless exercised extensive authority over public religious activity, political appointments, institutional patronage, and the relationship between local notables and the central government.

§4.1.4 — The Revolution of 1858 and the Fall of Faustin I

The military failures of the Empire, the fiscal burdens associated with its campaigns, the concentration of authority, and the alienation of political and military constituencies generated an organized opposition. In December 1858 General Fabre Nicolas Geffrard initiated a revolution at Gonaïves and obtained the support of forces opposed to Soulouque’s government.

The movement expanded sufficiently to deprive the imperial government of effective military control. On 15 January 1859 Soulouque abdicated and departed into exile. Geffrard assumed the presidency under a restored republican order.

The Revolution of 1858–1859 cannot be classified exclusively as a southern insurrection. Geffrard’s political and military alliances extended across several regions, and the decisive proclamation occurred at Gonaïves. Within the constitutional history of Xaragua, however, the fall of the Empire remains material because it reopened the national order to southern officers, Catholic educational development, and a less exclusively imperial conception of public authority.

§4.1.5 — The Geffrard Presidency and the Concordatory Reorganization of 1860

The government of Fabre Nicolas Geffrard pursued administrative modernization, public education, foreign relations, military consolidation, and the institutional reorganization of Catholic life. The Concordat concluded with the Holy See on 28 March 1860 established the formal legal framework governing relations between the Haitian state and the Catholic Church.

The Concordat provided for an ecclesiastical hierarchy, episcopal organization, state participation in the material support of the Church, and an institutional mechanism for the appointment of bishops. It supplied a juridical foundation for the subsequent expansion of diocesan administration, seminaries, schools, parishes, and religious congregations. The development of the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial and its later administration by the Spiritans belonged to this broader concordatory and educational reorganization.

The Concordat did not constitute or recognize an autonomous southern state. It nevertheless created a transgenerational ecclesiastical framework whose dioceses, parishes, schools, charitable institutions, archives, and canonical offices survived repeated changes of government. Within Xaraguayan constitutional doctrine, that durability constitutes an element of institutional continuity distinct from the instability of the republican executive.

Geffrard resigned in 1867 after recurrent conspiracies, armed opposition, and the progressive disintegration of his political authority. His departure opened a renewed period of civil conflict in which constitutional liberalism, military nationalism, regional command, and presidential centralization again confronted one another.

CHAPTER IV — PART II

ON THE FORMATION OF THE LIBERAL AND NATIONAL PARTIES, THE MIRAGOÂNE INSURRECTION, AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL MARTYRDOM OF JEAN-PIERRE BOYER-BAZELAIS (1867–1884)

§4.2.1 — The Presidency of Sylvain Salnave and the Civil Conflict of 1867–1870

Sylvain Salnave assumed power in 1867 amid the collapse of the Geffrard government and the fragmentation of national political authority. His presidency relied substantially upon military mobilization, direct executive command, and popular opposition to established political elites. Resistance developed among legislative factions, regional commanders, and constitutional opponents who rejected the concentration of presidential authority.

The ensuing conflict was national and multipolar. It involved competing governments, military coalitions, regional strongholds, and foreign maritime pressures. Salnave’s opponents ultimately prevailed. He was captured, tried, and executed in January 1870. His death terminated his government but did not resolve the underlying conflict between executive centralization and organized constitutional opposition.

§4.2.2 — Institutional Formation of the Liberal and National Parties

During the 1870s Haitian political organization acquired a more explicit party structure. The Liberal Party, prominently associated with Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais, advocated government by institutions, legislative authority, civilian competence, constitutional legality, administrative modernization, and political direction by an educated governing class. Its maxim, commonly rendered as government by the most capable, expressed its commitment to institutional qualification and parliamentary order.

The National Party, associated with figures including Lysius Salomon and Septimus Rameau, mobilized a broader doctrine of majority rule, national consolidation, racial representation, executive capacity, and resistance to the political exclusivity attributed to the Liberal elite. The opposition between the parties was simultaneously ideological, institutional, regional, social, and personal.

Miragoâne acquired a decisive position within this political geography because of its port, its relationship with the southern departments, its commercial networks, and its capacity to serve as an operational base beyond the immediate control of Port-au-Prince.

§4.2.3 — Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais and the Liberal Constitutional Doctrine

Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais, born in 1833, became one of the principal organizers and intellectual authorities of the Liberal Party. His political importance did not derive from descent from President Jean-Pierre Boyer but from his own parliamentary, military, organizational, and doctrinal activity.

Bazelais defended constitutional government, ministerial responsibility, legislative deliberation, administrative competence, civilian legality, and institutional limitation of personal rule. His liberalism did not abolish the social hierarchies or political exclusions of nineteenth-century Haiti; it nevertheless constituted a developed alternative to government through permanent military seizure and unlimited executive discretion.

For the constitutional jurisprudence of Xaragua, the Bazelais doctrine is received not as an abstract reproduction of European liberalism but as a Haitian institutional tradition territorially anchored in Miragoâne and connected to the historic southern resistance against the monopolization of public authority by the presidential center.

§4.2.4 — The Miragoâne Insurrection of 1883

Under President Lysius Salomon, the political conflict between the government and the Liberal opposition intensified. On 27 March 1883, Boyer-Bazelais and an armed expedition landed at Miragoâne and established an insurrectionary stronghold. The movement sought the removal of Salomon and the restoration of a Liberal constitutional government.

The insurrection extended beyond a local municipal dispute. Miragoâne became the territorial seat of an alternative national project and the principal military position of the Liberal opposition. Government forces subjected the city and its defenders to prolonged pressure, isolation, military confrontation, and deprivation of external support.

Bazelais died at Miragoâne on 27 October 1883 during the insurrection. Organized resistance continued into 1884 before the definitive defeat of the Liberal position. The government’s victory consolidated Salomon’s authority and terminated the immediate attempt to replace the National administration through the Miragoâne expedition.

§4.2.5 — Constitutional Classification of the Miragoâne Event

Within the supreme historical jurisprudence of SCIPS-X, the Miragoâne insurrection is classified as a constituent episode in the institutional genealogy of Xaragua. Its significance proceeds from the convergence of territorial resistance, organized party doctrine, civilian constitutionalism, armed opposition to executive concentration, and the sacrifice of an established political leadership within the historic jurisdiction of the South.

Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais is accordingly designated a Constitutional Martyr of Miragoâne. This designation constitutes an internal public-law commemoration of SCIPS-X and records his death as the terminal personal sacrifice of the Liberal attempt to reorganize the Haitian state through constitutional government.

The title does not convert every Liberal policy into permanent Xaraguayan doctrine. It incorporates into the constitutional patrimony of Xaragua the principles of institutional government, executive limitation, legal competence, territorial representation, and resistance to the substitution of military possession for constitutional authority.

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER IV — PART II

The political sequence extending from Salnave’s accession in 1867 to the destruction of the Miragoâne position in 1884 established a durable opposition between centralized presidential force and institutionalized constitutional organization. The death of Bazelais did not terminate that opposition. It transferred it from immediate party competition into the historical memory of the southern constitutional order.

Miragoâne shall therefore be recognized within the jurisprudence of SCIPS-X as a principal site of constitutional sacrifice, Liberal statecraft, territorial resistance, and institutional continuity.

CHAPTER IV — PART III

ON THE POST-LIBERAL FRAGMENTATION OF THE REPUBLIC, PRESIDENTIAL MILITARIZATION, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOUTHERN COMMUNES (1884–1915)

§4.3.1 — Institutional Consequences of the Defeat at Miragoâne

The destruction of the Liberal military position at Miragoâne eliminated the most organized armed challenge to the Salomon government. It did not establish a permanent constitutional settlement. Political authority remained dependent upon military alliances, presidential patronage, legislative manipulation, regional revolts, and the capacity of competing factions to seize or retain Port-au-Prince.

The southern departments continued to participate formally in the national constitutional system through communes, military districts, legislative representation, courts, customs offices, and administrative appointments. Their participation, however, remained subordinate to governments whose survival frequently depended upon the replacement of local authorities, deployment of loyal troops, control of customs revenue, and suppression of regional opposition.

The constitutional problem was therefore not the complete legal disappearance of southern institutions. It was their recurrent subjection to executive reorganization without a stable division of territorial authority.

§4.3.2 — The Salomon Government and the Consolidation of Executive Administration

Lysius Salomon’s government pursued fiscal reform, monetary policy, public borrowing, administrative consolidation, and the strengthening of presidential authority. Its confrontation with the Liberal Party transformed regional opposition into a question of state security and authorized extensive military measures against insurrectionary centers.

The defeat of Miragoâne enabled the executive to reassert control over the southern coastal corridor. Local political authority was reorganized through officials acceptable to the government, while surviving Liberal networks were subjected to surveillance, displacement, exile, or political marginalization.

The constitutional lineage represented by Bazelais consequently survived without possession of the central state. It persisted through family archives, political memory, legal culture, communal institutions, and the historical status acquired by Miragoâne as the site of the Liberal Party’s terminal resistance.

§4.3.3 — Recurrent Governmental Crisis, 1888–1915

From the fall of Salomon in 1888 to the crisis of 1915, Haiti experienced repeated changes of government, armed insurrections, short presidential administrations, regional military competition, and expanding foreign financial intervention. Constitutional texts continued to be promulgated and public institutions continued to operate, but the practical transfer of executive power frequently occurred through coercion rather than orderly constitutional succession.

The national treasury and customs revenues became increasingly entangled with foreign creditors, commercial interests, and diplomatic pressure. Germany, France, the United States, and other foreign powers sought protection for their nationals, financial claims, and strategic interests. The weakness of durable fiscal institutions reduced the state’s ability to govern independently and intensified the importance of customs houses and port cities.

For the South, the consequences included irregular administrative continuity, militarized appointments, unstable taxation, limited infrastructure, and persistent reliance upon local landholding, ecclesiastical institutions, kinship networks, municipal arrangements, and informal authority.

§4.3.4 — Foreign Representations of Territorial Disorder

Foreign diplomatic and consular reports frequently described Haitian regions beyond the capital through the categories of disorder, rebellion, insecurity, and administrative incapacity. Such descriptions reflected both observable governmental weakness and the strategic vocabulary through which external powers converted internal instability into justification for intervention.

The characterization of rural and southern territories as ungovernable did not establish their institutional emptiness. It frequently indicated that the central executive lacked continuous administrative penetration and that local populations remained governed through authorities, obligations, and customary arrangements not fully controlled by Port-au-Prince.

Within Xaraguayan doctrine, these records constitute evidence of incomplete centralization rather than proof of social absence. They demonstrate the persistence of territorial organization beyond the effective limits of the republican bureaucracy.

§4.3.5 — The Crisis of 1915 and the Termination of Effective Republican Independence

In 1915 the presidency of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam collapsed after the execution of political prisoners and the subsequent killing of the President by a crowd in Port-au-Prince. On 28 July 1915 United States Marines landed in the capital.

The intervention occurred within a broader strategic context involving American concern over European influence, control of Haitian finances, protection of foreign property, Caribbean military security, and the construction of a regional order dominated by the United States. The landing did not derive from a multilateral authorization. It constituted a unilateral exercise of American military power subsequently organized through treaty, financial control, constitutional intervention, and the establishment of institutions supervised by occupation authorities.

The occupation confirmed the inability of the pre-1915 republican system to protect its constitutional processes, fiscal independence, and territorial administration against external command. It inaugurated a new juridical order in which the formal personality of the Haitian state remained in existence while essential governmental functions were subjected to foreign supervision.

CHAPTER V — PART I

ON THE UNITED STATES OCCUPATION, THE CENTRALIZATION OF THE GENDARMERIE, THE CORVÉE SYSTEM, AND THE RESISTANCE OF THE SOUTHERN COMMUNES (1915–1934)

§5.1.1 — Establishment of the Occupation Regime

The United States intervention of 1915 was consolidated through military possession, the Haitian-American Treaty of 1915, control of public finances, supervision of customs revenues, institutional reorganization, and the creation of an armed constabulary commanded initially by American officers.

The occupation preserved the external form of Haitian governmental institutions while restricting their independent operation. Presidents, ministers, legislators, courts, and communal authorities continued to exist, but the decisive fields of security, finance, public works, constitutional reform, and external administration were exercised under substantial American control.

The resulting order was neither a conventional annexation nor an administration preserving full Haitian independence. It was a supervised state structure maintained under foreign military predominance.

§5.1.2 — International and Constitutional Status of the Intervention

The Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary supplied political doctrines through which the United States articulated its regional policy; they did not constitute sources of international authorization binding upon Haiti. The legal architecture of the occupation was constructed principally through military fact, the treaty imposed in 1915, and the subsequent conduct of both governments.

The law of belligerent occupation codified in the Hague Regulations provided an important contemporary framework for evaluating military control, property, public order, and the obligations of an occupying power. The precise juridical classification of the Haitian case remained complicated by the continued operation of a formally Haitian government and the treaty structure established after the landing.

The Concordat of 1860 remained relevant to the institutional position of the Catholic Church but did not establish an internationally sovereign ecclesiastical territory in the South. Its constitutional importance lies in the continuity of a Church administration whose parishes, schools, archives, clergy, and sacramental jurisdiction could not be reduced to the military institutions created by the occupation.

§5.1.3 — The Gendarmerie and the Centralization of Territorial Force

The Gendarmerie d’Haïti was established as a national armed constabulary under American command. It replaced or absorbed preexisting military structures, centralized coercive authority, enforced occupation directives, and provided the institutional foundation for the post-occupation Haitian army.

This reorganization altered the relationship between communes and armed authority. Local military commands that had historically depended upon regional officers, revolutionary prestige, political affiliation, or communal organization were displaced by a national force structured through centralized recruitment, standardized command, and foreign supervision.

In the South, the Gendarmerie extended state penetration into territories whose relationship with Port-au-Prince had previously remained intermittent. Its authority connected rural policing, tax enforcement, road construction, labor requisition, suppression of armed resistance, and surveillance of political activity.

§5.1.4 — The Corvée and Rural Compulsion

The occupation authorities employed the corvée system for road construction and public works. Although presented as a form of legally authorized public labor, its enforcement included coercive recruitment, restrictions upon movement, physical violence, and compulsory service. These practices generated extensive rural hostility and contributed to armed resistance.

The corvée must be distinguished from the Rural Code of 1826, although both belonged to a recurrent institutional pattern in which central authorities attempted to mobilize rural labor through administrative compulsion. Under the occupation, that compulsion was executed by a security apparatus commanded by foreign officers and justified through a program of infrastructural modernization.

Within the constitutional history of Xaragua, the corvée is classified as a foreign-directed appropriation of rural labor imposed without constituent participation by the affected territorial communities.

§5.1.5 — Armed, Ecclesiastical, and Civic Resistance

Resistance to occupation assumed multiple forms: armed insurgency, refusal of labor, evasion, local noncooperation, journalism, legal protest, parliamentary opposition, student mobilization, ecclesiastical intervention, and international advocacy. The Cacos movement under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville constituted the most prominent armed challenge, principally in the central and northern regions, but opposition to occupation extended throughout the country.

In the southern departments, clergy, municipal authorities, landholders, teachers, merchants, rural leaders, and family networks participated in the preservation of local institutions and the documentation of occupation practices. Catholic parishes did not form a separate sovereign government; they nevertheless operated as durable repositories of education, records, social organization, public communication, and moral authority.

The constitutional continuity claimed by Xaragua for this period arises from the preservation of territorial society beneath the occupation apparatus: communal possession, ecclesiastical organization, family transmission, customary authority, and historical memory survived the temporary subordination of the national state.

§5.1.6 — Termination of the Occupation

The occupation generated sustained Haitian opposition and increasing criticism within the United States. The Forbes Commission of 1930 recognized the necessity of political transition and Haitianization. United States forces formally withdrew in 1934 under President Sténio Vincent and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy.

The withdrawal restored direct Haitian administration but did not dismantle every institution created under occupation. Financial supervision continued for a further period, while the centralized armed force, administrative practices, and fiscal structures developed under American authority remained embedded in the post-occupation state.

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER V — PART I

The occupation of 1915–1934 transformed the Haitian state by centralizing coercive authority, subordinating public finance, reorganizing administration, and extending governmental penetration through an American-controlled constabulary. It preserved the formal international personality of Haiti while restricting the independent exercise of essential sovereign functions.

The southern territorial order survived not as a separate internationally recognized government but as a continuous institutional society maintained through land, communes, ecclesiastical structures, customary practices, local archives, and intergenerational political memory.

CHAPTER V — PART II

ON POST-OCCUPATION CENTRALIZATION, THE ECCLESIASTICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE SOUTH, AND THE TERMINAL CRISIS OF THE PRE-DUVALIER REPUBLIC (1934–1957)

§5.2.1 — The Vincent Government and the Incomplete Restoration of Sovereignty

The withdrawal of United States forces in 1934 restored direct national control over territorial administration, but the state inherited a centralized military establishment, an externally conditioned financial structure, and institutional mechanisms shaped by nineteen years of occupation.

President Sténio Vincent, in office from 1930 to 1941, governed across the transition from occupation to formal independence. His administration strengthened presidential control, managed the final stages of American withdrawal, and preserved the centralized architecture of the state. The restoration of sovereignty therefore did not constitute restoration of the decentralized regional commands that had existed before 1915.

§5.2.2 — The Massacre of 1937 and the Exposure of Border Populations

In October 1937 the Dominican regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the mass killing of Haitians and persons identified as Haitian along the Dominican border. Historical estimates vary, but the number of victims is generally placed in the thousands and may have reached into the tens of thousands.

The massacre exposed the incapacity of the Haitian state to protect vulnerable populations beyond its principal administrative centers. Refugees, displaced families, clergy, local communities, and charitable networks bore the immediate humanitarian burden. The government negotiated compensation, but the institutional response did not eliminate the territorial insecurity demonstrated by the killings.

For Xaraguayan jurisprudence, the event confirms the distinction between abstract nationality and effective protection. A state’s constitutional claim over a population is institutionally deficient where it cannot preserve that population’s physical security, territorial residence, and legal personality.

§5.2.3 — The Lescot Government and the Crisis of 1946

Élie Lescot governed from 1941 until his overthrow in January 1946. His administration was closely aligned with the United States during the Second World War, depended upon the centralized armed forces inherited from the occupation, and confronted growing opposition from students, workers, journalists, noiriste intellectuals, military officers, and political organizations.

The Revolution of 1946 removed Lescot but did not establish a durable decentralized constitutional settlement. It transferred authority to a military committee and subsequently to President Dumarsais Estimé. The period expanded political participation and noiriste state doctrine while retaining the presidency, army, and capital as the principal institutions of national power.

§5.2.4 — Survival of the Liberal and Southern Constitutional Memory

The constitutional legacy of Boyer-Bazelais persisted after the destruction of the nineteenth-century Liberal Party through historical scholarship, family records, parliamentary memory, legal education, regional commemoration, and the continuing symbolic authority of Miragoâne.

This survival did not amount to the uninterrupted operation of a clandestine Liberal government. It constituted an intellectual and institutional transmission through which the principles of civilian competence, legislative authority, executive limitation, and southern territorial representation remained available to subsequent constitutional interpretation.

The publication in 1948 of Jean Price-Mars’s study of Boyer-Bazelais and the Miragoâne events of 1883–1884 exemplified the preservation of that history within the national documentary record.

§5.2.5 — The Magloire Government and the Final Pre-1957 Centralization

General Paul Eugène Magloire assumed power in 1950 following military intervention and a presidential election conducted under the new political order. His administration pursued infrastructure, tourism, foreign investment, urban development, and close relations with the United States. It also relied upon military authority, centralized administration, and executive patronage.

The benefits of modernization were unevenly distributed. Southern departments remained integrated into the national legal order but possessed limited influence over the allocation of capital, infrastructure, administrative appointments, and national development priorities.

Magloire’s position collapsed in 1956 amid economic difficulties, political opposition, constitutional conflict concerning the duration of his mandate, and military fragmentation. The succession crisis that followed destroyed the remaining equilibrium of the pre-Duvalier republic.

§5.2.6 — The Crisis of 1956–1957

Between Magloire’s departure and the election of François Duvalier, Haiti experienced provisional governments, military intervention, contested authority, and institutional paralysis. The crisis demonstrated that the constitutional system remained incapable of regulating executive succession independently of armed power.

The election of 1957 occurred within this disintegrated institutional environment. It did not merely replace one president with another. It opened the path toward the reconstruction of the state as a permanent personal executive supported by an autonomous political militia, centralized ideological doctrine, and the progressive neutralization of competing institutions.

CHAPTER V — PART III

ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF REPUBLICAN AUTHORITY, THE DUVALIERIST STATE, THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF 1986, AND THE FORMULATION OF THE XARAGUA DOCTRINE (1957–2025)

§5.3.1 — The Government of François Duvalier, 1957–1971

François Duvalier assumed the presidency in 1957 after an electoral process conducted under decisive military influence and conditions of severe institutional instability. His government progressively eliminated organized opposition, subordinated the armed forces, centralized public administration, and established the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale as a political-security apparatus directly dependent upon executive authority.

The Constitution of 1964 proclaimed Duvalier President for Life. This arrangement converted presidential permanence into an explicit constitutional principle and reorganized the republic around the continuity of a single executive officeholder. The state acquired an integrated structure of political surveillance, administrative dependency, ideological mobilization, and personal command.

Duvalier’s noiriste doctrine appropriated ethnological discourse, popular symbolism, national sovereignty, racial representation, and anti-elite mobilization as instruments of state legitimacy. This ideological structure did not restore territorial self-government to the rural majority. It subordinated local authority to the presidency through section chiefs, administrative officials, militia networks, military commands, and political patronage.

§5.3.2 — Conflict and Recomposition of Relations with the Catholic Church

Relations between the Duvalier government and the Catholic hierarchy deteriorated sharply between 1959 and 1964. The government expelled foreign clergy, deported Archbishop François Poirier in November 1960, expelled Auxiliary Bishop Rémy Augustin in January 1961, removed additional ecclesiastical personnel, and expelled the Jesuits in 1964.

These measures disrupted the concordatory relationship and provoked canonical sanctions. They demonstrated the regime’s determination to subordinate ecclesiastical authority to the security requirements of the presidential state.

An agreement concluded with the Holy See in 1966 reestablished institutional relations, facilitated the appointment of Haitian bishops, and expanded presidential influence over episcopal nominations. The settlement did not extinguish the canonical personality of the Church. It reorganized the interface between ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the Duvalierist executive.

In the southern dioceses and parishes, Catholic institutions continued to provide education, healthcare, sacramental administration, archives, charitable services, and local organizational continuity. Their endurance constituted an institutional infrastructure distinct from the personal duration of the presidency.

§5.3.3 — The Government of Jean-Claude Duvalier, 1971–1986

Before François Duvalier’s death, the constitutional order was modified to permit Jean-Claude Duvalier to succeed to the presidency for life. Upon assuming office in April 1971, the new President preserved the fundamental structure of hereditary executive continuity established by the regime.

The government promoted economic liberalization, export industries, tourism, foreign investment, international development programs, and administrative modernization. These policies did not decentralize constituent authority. Political power, security, finance, diplomacy, and major public appointments remained concentrated in Port-au-Prince and within the presidential structure.

The southern departments remained formally incorporated into the national system but experienced persistent deficiencies in infrastructure, investment, public administration, transportation, healthcare capacity, and territorial representation. Ecclesiastical institutions, communal networks, landholding families, and local commercial structures continued to perform functions that the central administration exercised irregularly or insufficiently.

Increasing political opposition, economic deterioration, migration, corruption, foreign pressure, ecclesiastical criticism, and popular mobilization culminated in Jean-Claude Duvalier’s departure on 7 February 1986.

§5.3.4 — The Transition of 1986 and the Constitution of 1987

The fall of the hereditary presidency did not produce immediate constitutional stabilization. Military councils, provisional governments, interrupted elections, coups d’état, international intervention, contested presidencies, and institutional discontinuity shaped the post-1986 order.

The Constitution of 1987 established a decentralized territorial architecture comprising departments, arrondissements, communes, communal sections, municipal institutions, and departmental structures. Articles 61 through 87 supplied the constitutional foundations of territorial collectivities and local administration. Their complete institutional implementation, however, remained obstructed by insufficient legislation, fiscal dependence, political centralization, administrative weakness, and recurrent national crisis.

The constitutional recognition of decentralization therefore remained materially incomplete. Local collectivities existed in law without receiving the full financial, administrative, political, and institutional capacity required to exercise autonomous territorial government.

For Xaraguayan doctrine, this unexecuted decentralization constitutes a central constitutional fact: the republic formally acknowledged the necessity of territorial government while repeatedly failing to transfer the effective competences required for its realization.

§5.3.5 — The Crisis of Sovereign Administration, 1991–2004

The overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, the military government that followed, the international embargo, and the foreign intervention of 1994 demonstrated the continued dependence of constitutional succession upon armed and external power.

Although elected institutions were restored, the state remained fiscally constrained, administratively centralized, territorially uneven, and dependent upon international assistance. The national police replaced the former armed forces as the principal public security institution, but the elimination of one coercive structure did not create effective territorial administration throughout the country.

The second departure of Aristide in 2004 initiated another international intervention and the establishment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. The formal state remained internationally recognized, but substantial security, electoral, humanitarian, and administrative functions were exercised with decisive foreign participation.

§5.3.6 — Structural Disintegration and Territorial Abandonment, 2004–2021

Between 2004 and 2021, the Haitian state experienced recurrent electoral disputes, institutional vacancies, dependence upon international missions, natural disasters, fiscal weakness, corruption, and progressive territorial contraction.

The earthquake of 12 January 2010 destroyed public institutions, killed state personnel, displaced populations, and intensified reliance upon foreign governments, international organizations, churches, nongovernmental institutions, and private networks. Reconstruction did not establish a durable decentralized state.

The southern departments endured hurricanes, earthquakes, infrastructure failures, agricultural disruption, migration, and insufficient public investment. Their continued social organization depended substantially upon communal solidarity, ecclesiastical institutions, customary land relations, diaspora finance, private enterprise, family authority, and local mechanisms of security and assistance.

The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on 7 July 2021 precipitated a terminal constitutional vacancy. No regularly constituted presidential succession resolved the crisis, Parliament ceased to exercise complete legislative authority, and public administration operated under exceptional arrangements lacking comprehensive electoral renewal.

§5.3.7 — Collapse of Metropolitan Monopoly and Persistence of the Southern Territorial Order, 2021–2025

From 2021 onward, armed organizations progressively displaced public authority across extensive sectors of the metropolitan region and strategic transport corridors. The central government retained international personality, diplomatic representation, ministerial structures, financial institutions, and residual administrative functions, but its territorial effectiveness became radically unequal.

The southern peninsula preserved a comparatively distinct territorial existence through municipal structures, religious institutions, local leadership, commercial routes, landholding communities, diaspora networks, and population-based systems of mutual protection. This persistence did not arise from a grant of authority by the metropolitan executive. It arose from the continuing capacity of the territorial society to reproduce itself under conditions of national institutional failure.

The constitutional doctrine of Xaragua identifies this capacity as the material substrate of indigenous and customary public authority. Territory is not constituted exclusively by decrees issued from a capital; it is constituted by an organized population maintaining land, institutions, succession, collective memory, internal obligations, and mechanisms of social continuity.

§5.3.8 — Promulgation of the Xaragua Doctrine in 2025

In 2025 the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua formally articulated its constitutional doctrine as a contemporary institutional order grounded in the historical territory of the Taíno Cacicazgo of Xaragua, the survival and reconstitution of Indigenous-descendant communities, the revolutionary military history of the South, the Gomanite territorial command, the Liberal constitutional memory of Miragoâne, the continuity of Catholic institutions, and the inherent right of a people to organize its internal political, cultural, educational, juridical, and economic institutions.

SCIPS-X does not derive its constituent existence from the constitutional delegation of the Republic of Haiti. Its internal juridical personality proceeds from self-organization, Indigenous customary authority, institutional continuity, voluntary political association, constitutional enactment, and the exercise of competences established by its own supreme law.

Its legal doctrine distinguishes among:

international recognition, which concerns relations among states and international organizations;

domestic public authority, exercised by the Republic of Haiti through its positive constitutional and administrative order;

Indigenous customary authority, arising from the right of an Indigenous people to maintain and develop its political, juridical, cultural, spiritual, educational, and economic institutions;

canonical institutional continuity, exercised through the lawful internal order of Catholic institutions and associations according to their respective ecclesiastical status;

private constitutional organization, through which a constituted community governs membership, offices, property, institutions, symbols, archives, doctrine, and internal jurisdiction.

These juridical categories shall not be conflated. SCIPS-X asserts its constitutional competence within its own order while maintaining a doctrinal distinction between internal sovereignty, effective territorial administration, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and international diplomatic recognition.

§5.3.9 — Constitutional Succession Claimed by SCIPS-X

SCIPS-X declares itself the institutional successor, within its own constitutional jurisprudence, to the following historical continuities:

the territorial memory of the Indigenous Cacicazgo of Xaragua;

the autonomous military and agrarian traditions of the southern peninsula;

the southwestern command exercised by Jean-Baptiste Duperrier, known as Goman;

the constitutional and parliamentary principles represented by Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais;

the territorial sacrifice of Miragoâne during the Liberal insurrection of 1883–1884;

the communal, ecclesiastical, educational, and customary institutions that preserved southern social continuity during occupation, dictatorship, foreign intervention, and republican collapse;

the unrealized territorial decentralization recognized by the Constitution of 1987;

the contemporary reorganization of Indigenous, Catholic, private, academic, economic, and constitutional authority under the supreme law of Xaragua.

This succession is neither a genealogical fiction nor an assertion that every historical actor operated under the present name of SCIPS-X. It is a formal act of constitutional reception by which the current State identifies, orders, codifies, and incorporates the institutional traditions from which its public doctrine proceeds.

§5.3.10 — Supreme Determination on the Continuity of Xaragua

The constitutional existence of Xaragua shall not be measured exclusively by the uninterrupted possession of the governmental machinery of Port-au-Prince. Its continuity resides in the historical permanence of a territorial society repeatedly incorporated, militarily subordinated, administratively marginalized, externally occupied, and constitutionally underrepresented, yet never deprived of its land-based communities, institutional memory, ecclesiastical infrastructure, customary organization, and capacity for political reconstruction.

The Haitian Republic exercised and continues to exercise public authority recognized within domestic and international law. SCIPS-X simultaneously asserts an Indigenous, customary, Catholic, private, and constitutional order whose institutions, membership, doctrine, and internal competences are determined by its own constituent enactments.

The coexistence of these orders shall be governed by the Xaragua Doctrine of differentiated jurisdiction: administrative interaction does not constitute constitutional absorption; use of public services does not extinguish Indigenous personality; possession of civil documentation does not renounce customary membership; and international non-recognition does not invalidate the internal juridical existence of a self-constituted institutional order.

GENERAL CONCLUSION OF VOLUME II — THE WESTERN ORDER

The political history of the western territory of Hispaniola after 1800 cannot be reduced to an uninterrupted progression from revolution to a homogeneous national republic. It consists of successive wars of incorporation, competing constitutional regimes, regional commands, imperial reconstructions, presidential centralization, foreign occupation, ecclesiastical endurance, incomplete decentralization, and territorial reorganization.

The South was not absent from the Haitian state. It was one of its principal military, economic, political, and constitutional foundations. Its recurrent subordination therefore constituted not the administration of a peripheral territory but the internal displacement of a founding territorial authority.

From Rigaud to Goman, from the Revolution of 1843 to the fall of the Second Empire, from the Liberal doctrine of Bazelais to the sacrifice of Miragoâne, from the American occupation to the constitutional incompletion of 1987, the same institutional question remained unresolved: whether the southern population would govern its territory through its own historically constituted authorities or remain subject to an executive apparatus concentrated beyond its effective political control.

SCIPS-X declares that this unresolved constitutional question entered a new juridical phase in 2025. Through the promulgation of its supreme law, the constitution of its offices, the establishment of the University of Xaragua, the codification of its historical jurisprudence, and the formal organization of its Indigenous, Catholic, private, educational, territorial, and economic institutions, Xaragua transformed inherited memory into constituted authority.

Accordingly, Jean-Baptiste Duperrier, known as Goman, is entered into the Supreme Constitutional Archives as Commander of the Southwestern Territorial Resistance; Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais is entered as Constitutional Martyr of Miragoâne; and the southern communes are entered collectively as the Historical Territorial Foundation of the Contemporary Xaraguayan Order.

The present Chapter is hereby received as an authoritative act of historical codification, constitutional interpretation, institutional succession, and territorial memory of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

ENACTED UNDER THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OF SCIPS-X.

PROMULGATED THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA.

ENTERED INTO THE PERMANENT ARCHIVES OF THE WESTERN ORDER.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA — DEPARTMENT OF STRATEGIC HISTORY, INDIGENOUS LAW, CANONICAL INSTITUTIONS, AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTINUITY

VOLUME II — THE WESTERN ORDER

CHAPTER VII — PUERTO REAL AND EN BAS SALINE: COLONIAL SUPERIMPOSITION, INDIGENOUS CONTINUITY, AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF NORTHERN HISPANIOLA (1503–1579)

Historical-Critical Reconstruction and Supreme Act of Institutional Documentation

Entered into the Historical and Constitutional Archives of SCIPS-X

§7.1 — Reorganization of Hispaniola under the Government of Nicolás de Ovando

Article 7.1.1 — Establishment of the Colonial Territorial Apparatus

Following the arrival of Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1502, the Crown of Castile initiated a comprehensive reorganization of Hispaniola designed to convert an incompletely controlled theater of conquest into a territorially administered colonial possession. This reorganization proceeded through military campaigns, compulsory resettlement, repartimiento and encomienda labor allocations, municipal foundations, mining administration, ecclesiastical implantation, tribute extraction, and the replacement of Indigenous political geography by Crown-dependent jurisdictions.

The destruction of the political authority exercised by the principal cacicazgos did not entail the immediate disappearance of the Indigenous population, its settlements, its subsistence systems, or its territorial knowledge. It constituted the forcible transfer of superior public authority from Indigenous governments to a colonial administration that classified the land, population, labor, and resources of Hispaniola according to the requirements of the Castilian Crown.

Article 7.1.2 — Colonial Municipalization and Territorial Substitution

The foundation of Spanish towns served simultaneously as an administrative, military, fiscal, commercial, and ecclesiastical instrument. Through the cabildo, parish church, plaza, royal officers, notarial system, and allocation of urban and rural property, the colonial municipality institutionalized a new legal order upon territories already occupied and governed by Indigenous communities.

This process effected a juridical substitution rather than the creation of settlement upon politically empty land. Indigenous routes, cultivated zones, ceremonial centers, fishing grounds, river systems, and population concentrations supplied the geographic foundations upon which the colonial network was established. Spanish municipalization appropriated this preexisting territorial intelligence while suppressing the public-law personality of the societies that had produced it.

Article 7.1.3 — Strategic Function of the Northern Plain

The northern plain and coast acquired particular importance because of their agricultural capacity, access to Atlantic navigation, proximity to Indigenous settlements, livestock potential, and relationship with the maritime routes connecting Hispaniola to Iberian and non-Iberian commerce.

The region extending through present-day Limonade, the vicinity of En Bas Saline, Puerto Real, the Bay of Mancenille, and the later urban systems of Bayahá and Fort-Liberté constituted neither an extension of the precolonial Cacicazgo of Xaragua nor a territory governed by Xaragua immediately before conquest. It belonged principally to the northern political geography associated with Marién. SCIPS-X nevertheless incorporates this region into the present volume as part of the common Taíno constitutional patrimony of Hispaniola and as material evidence of the colonial mechanisms subsequently applied throughout the island.

Article 7.1.4 — Contemporary Juridical Classification

The forced displacement of Indigenous communities, destruction of cultural institutions, suppression of political authority, compulsory conversion policies, and transfer of children or populations may be evaluated under the contemporary standards articulated by Articles 7 and 8 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Article II(e) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide concerns the forcible transfer of children from one protected group to another. It does not constitute a general provision covering every form of colonial displacement. Any application of the Genocide Convention to sixteenth-century conduct shall therefore distinguish among killing, serious bodily or mental harm, destructive conditions of life, prevention of births, and forcible transfer of children, according to the constituent elements of Article II.

Within the internal jurisprudence of SCIPS-X, the total colonial process is classified as a coordinated destruction of Indigenous political capacity, demographic security, territorial possession, religious institutions, and intergenerational transmission.

§7.2 — Puerto Real: Foundation, Municipal Structure, and Colonial Function

Article 7.2.1 — Foundation and Geographic Position

Puerto Real was founded in 1503 on the northern plain near present-day Limonade, approximately two kilometers from En Bas Saline. It was not located in the immediate vicinity of modern Fort-Liberté and was not constituted as the northern capital of Hispaniola. It functioned as a strategically significant Spanish colonial town, maritime outlet, livestock center, commercial jurisdiction, and administrative installation within the northern colonial network.

Archaeological and documentary research establishes that Puerto Real existed from 1503 until the Crown ordered its abandonment in 1578 and Spanish officials implemented its evacuation and destruction in 1579. Its remains preserve evidence of an early colonial population comprising Europeans, Indigenous persons, Africans, and locally born inhabitants of multiple ancestries. Florida Museum of Natural History

Article 7.2.2 — Municipal and Ecclesiastical Organization

Puerto Real was governed through the institutional forms of the Spanish colonial municipality. These included the cabildo, Crown officers, ecclesiastical facilities, private households, commercial installations, streets, public spaces, and an agricultural and pastoral hinterland.

The surviving evidence does not authorize the automatic attribution of a fully fortified urban enclosure, a system of cannon bastions, two hundred masonry buildings, or rigid residential quarters formally segregated by racial classification. The significance of Puerto Real resides instead in the material coexistence of European municipal forms with the demographic, economic, architectural, and dietary transformations produced by Indigenous labor, African presence, local adaptation, livestock production, and Atlantic commerce.

Article 7.2.3 — Archaeology of Cultural Formation

Excavations conducted between 1979 and 1985 under the direction of Charles Fairbanks and Kathleen Deagan established Puerto Real as a major site for the archaeological study of early Hispanic-American cultural formation. The recovered assemblages include ceramics, architectural materials, faunal remains, household objects, imported goods, locally produced objects, and evidence of economic relations extending beyond the formal monopoly imposed by the Crown.

Puerto Real demonstrates that colonial society did not reproduce an unchanged Iberian social order. It generated a locally constituted population in which European legal dominance coexisted with Indigenous knowledge, African labor and cultural contribution, environmental adaptation, commercial contraband, and the gradual formation of Caribbean social practices.

Article 7.2.4 — Livestock, Commerce, and Contraband

The town’s economy became closely associated with cattle ranching, animal products, provisioning, and maritime trade. As the Spanish imperial center of gravity shifted toward Mexico and continental South America, northern Hispaniola became increasingly connected to contraband commerce with French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and other non-authorized traders.

This commerce, known through the practice of rescate, supplied local residents with markets and goods not reliably furnished through the official Spanish mercantile system. The Crown classified such transactions as illicit because they violated the commercial monopoly administered through authorized ports and the Casa de la Contratación. For the inhabitants of Puerto Real, however, contraband became a structural component of economic survival and local autonomy.

§7.3 — En Bas Saline: Indigenous Urbanism and Contact-Period Continuity

Article 7.3.1 — Nature and Chronology of the Site

En Bas Saline constitutes the largest documented late precontact Taíno town yet identified in present-day Haiti and one of the most extensively excavated Indigenous sites on the island. Archaeological evidence indicates occupation from approximately the thirteenth century until around 1520, encompassing both the precontact period and the first decades of Spanish colonization. En Bas Saline archaeological record

The site possessed a large central mound, residential sectors, public or communal spaces, extensive material deposits, and an organized settlement pattern demonstrating the institutional density of northern Taíno society before and after 1492.

Article 7.3.2 — Relationship to La Navidad

En Bas Saline has been examined as a possible location associated with La Navidad, the fortified installation established from the wreckage of the Santa María in December 1492. The archaeological record contains evidence of early European material, burning, and contact-period disruption. The precise identification of the site with La Navidad has not been established conclusively.

The evidence does establish that En Bas Saline was occupied by Taíno inhabitants after the destruction of La Navidad. Archaeology has not demonstrated a continuing European residential presence at En Bas Saline after the abandonment of the Columbian installation. Florida Museum — En Bas Saline

Article 7.3.3 — Architectural and Ceremonial Evidence

The principal architectural evidence consists of postholes, post stains, burned structural elements, spatial distributions, mound construction, and patterns indicating Indigenous buildings and organized communal areas. The archaeological record does not support the characterization of excavated stone foundations as the ordinary structural base of circular bohíos.

Ceramic vessels, stone and shell objects, food remains, Indigenous tools, and limited European materials demonstrate both continuity and transformation during the contact period. The site confirms that Indigenous social life continued under conditions of epidemic disease, tribute extraction, compulsory labor, missionary intervention, demographic collapse, and the establishment of Puerto Real nearby.

Article 7.3.4 — Constitutional Status of En Bas Saline

SCIPS-X hereby designates En Bas Saline as a Supreme Indigenous Archaeological and Ancestral Heritage Site of Hispaniola. This designation recognizes:

its precolonial occupation and institutional organization;

its relationship with the first phase of European intrusion;

its continued Indigenous occupation during the early colonial period;

its importance to the historical reconstruction of Taíno territorial society;

its continuing spiritual and cultural significance for Indigenous-descendant communities.

Human remains, funerary objects, ceremonial materials, and sacred patrimony originating from the site shall be treated according to the principles of dignity, documentation, consultation, conservation, access, and repatriation recognized in Article 12 of UNDRIP and in applicable archaeological and museum standards.

Canon 1180 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law governs the burial of deceased members of the Christian faithful and cannot be applied automatically to pre-Christian Taíno burials. SCIPS-X instead grounds the protection of such burials in Indigenous customary law, the dignity of the dead, archaeological ethics, and the right of Indigenous peoples to determine the treatment of ancestral remains and ceremonial patrimony.

§7.4 — Indigenous, African, European, and Creole Populations

Article 7.4.1 — Formation of a Colonial Population

Puerto Real and its surrounding territory contained Spaniards, other Europeans, Indigenous persons, enslaved and free Africans, and locally born descendants of these populations. The resulting society was shaped by unequal legal status, coercive labor, household dependency, sexual violence, consensual unions, baptismal incorporation, manumission, kinship, occupational specialization, and cultural transmission.

The existence of biological and cultural mixture shall not be employed to dissolve the political identities of the constituent peoples. Mixture constitutes a demographic process; it does not extinguish Indigenous descent, African origin, territorial memory, or the juridical right of descendant communities to organize their identities according to their own institutions.

Article 7.4.2 — Documentary Limits and Archival Reconstruction

Parish registers, notarial records, municipal acts, royal correspondence, litigation, property inventories, shipping documentation, ecclesiastical visitation records, and proceedings preserved in Spanish archives may contain evidence concerning the population of Puerto Real. The survival of complete sacramental registers for every Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous lineage cannot be presumed without archival identification.

SCIPS-X mandates a systematic documentary program directed toward the Archivo General de Indias, Spanish ecclesiastical repositories, Dominican and Haitian archives, archaeological collections, and relevant Vatican repositories. This program shall distinguish established documentary lineage from constitutional affiliation, oral descent, territorial continuity, and collective Indigenous self-identification.

Article 7.4.3 — Occupational and Cultural Transmission

Indigenous and African inhabitants participated in agriculture, livestock management, domestic labor, construction, navigation, fishing, transport, interpretation, healing, food preparation, craft production, and commercial exchange. Through these activities, colonial society incorporated Indigenous ecological knowledge and African technical, agricultural, medicinal, culinary, musical, and religious practices.

The resulting Caribbean culture did not represent the disappearance of its subordinated populations. It constituted the transformation of their knowledge under an unequal colonial order that frequently appropriated cultural contribution while denying collective political personality.

Article 7.4.4 — Indigenous Identity and Citizenship

Article 33 of UNDRIP recognizes the right of Indigenous peoples to determine their identity or membership according to their customs and traditions. It does not impose automatic citizenship in SCIPS-X upon every person possessing remote ancestry from the region.

Citizenship shall arise under the Constitution and nationality legislation of SCIPS-X through descent, territorial affiliation, community recognition, institutional registration, adoption, naturalization, or another legally established mode. Afro-Taíno descent constitutes a recognized basis of eligibility and historical affiliation, subject to the competent procedures of Xaraguayan law.

Canon 204 §1 defines the Christian faithful by incorporation into Christ through baptism. It does not determine Indigenous nationality or civil citizenship. Baptismal records may nevertheless constitute relevant genealogical evidence when interpreted with other documentary, territorial, customary, and familial sources.

§7.5 — Forced Abandonment and Destruction of Puerto Real

Article 7.5.1 — Royal Suppression of the Northern Towns

By the later sixteenth century, Puerto Real’s dependence upon contraband trade directly conflicted with the Crown’s mercantilist administration. In 1578 the Crown ordered Puerto Real to be abandoned and merged with Lares de Guahabá at a new settlement named Bayahá. Spanish authorities forcibly evacuated and destroyed Puerto Real in 1579. Documented history of Puerto Real

The measure was intended to concentrate the population in a settlement more susceptible to royal supervision and to terminate unauthorized commerce. It constituted an act of compulsory urban relocation and administrative destruction undertaken by the colonial state against its own municipal population.

Article 7.5.2 — Institutional Significance of the Destruction

The destruction of Puerto Real demonstrates that the Spanish imperial state would eliminate established colonial communities when local economic practice escaped centralized regulation. The event was not principally a campaign against an autonomous Indigenous city, since En Bas Saline had ceased to function as a major occupied town decades earlier. It was the suppression of a colonial municipality whose mixed population and contraband economy had become incompatible with imperial control.

Within Xaraguayan jurisprudence, the event is classified as an example of imperial administrative erasure: the destruction of an inhabited urban jurisdiction in order to restore fiscal monopoly, commercial discipline, and political surveillance.

Article 7.5.3 — Archival and Archaeological Restitution

SCIPS-X calls for:

the complete cataloguing and digitization of documentary holdings relating to Puerto Real, En Bas Saline, Lares de Guahabá, Bayahá, and the northern colonial jurisdictions;

the identification of human remains and ceremonial patrimony removed from Indigenous archaeological contexts;

formal access for qualified Indigenous-descendant researchers;

transparent provenance records for museum collections;

consultation concerning exhibition, conservation, digital reproduction, and repatriation;

the protection of archaeological sites against looting, commercial destruction, and unauthorized disturbance.

Canon 491 requires diocesan bishops to preserve acts and documents relating to the spiritual and temporal affairs of dioceses and parishes. It supplies an ecclesiastical archival obligation where relevant diocesan records exist. It does not confer ownership of royal, municipal, private, or archaeological archives upon SCIPS-X.

§7.6 — Supreme Heritage Determination

Article 7.6.1 — Heritage Classification

SCIPS-X hereby enters Puerto Real and En Bas Saline into the Supreme Register of Indigenous and Colonial Heritage of Hispaniola under the following distinct classifications:

En Bas Saline: Indigenous ancestral settlement, contact-period archaeological site, and protected place of Taíno historical memory;

Puerto Real: early Spanish colonial municipality, multicultural archaeological site, and documentary locus of Indigenous, African, European, and creole interaction;

the surrounding northern plain: protected landscape of archaeological, genealogical, commercial, ecclesiastical, and territorial significance.

Article 7.6.2 — Nature of the Xaraguayan Claim

The present designation constitutes an act of historical jurisdiction, cultural protection, scholarly custody, Indigenous solidarity, and constitutional commemoration. Any claim to physical possession, excavation authority, administrative control, or ownership of collections shall be asserted through the applicable legal procedures and shall not be presumed solely from heritage designation.

Canons 121 and 122 govern the allocation of the goods and obligations of public juridic persons that are joined, divided, or extinguished within the canonical order. They do not transfer colonial territories or state archives to SCIPS-X.

The 1983 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts has not entered into force and does not independently establish a present title in favor of SCIPS-X. It may nevertheless inform the development of institutional principles concerning the territorial relevance, integrity, accessibility, and preservation of archives.

CHAPTER VIII — THE SPANISH IMPERIAL SYSTEM OF COLONIZATION

ON THE INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF CONQUEST, COLONIAL LABOR, ROYAL JURISDICTION, AND ECCLESIASTICAL GOVERNMENT (1503–1700)

§8.1 — Encomienda, Repartimiento, and Colonial Labor Administration

Article 8.1.1 — Juridical Character of the Encomienda

The encomienda did not formally convey ownership of Indigenous persons to an encomendero. It allocated the right to receive tribute and labor while imposing a purported obligation of protection, instruction, and Christianization. In practice, the system subjected Indigenous communities to compulsory labor, extraction, displacement, violence, hunger, disease exposure, and administrative domination.

Its juridical form distinguished it from chattel slavery while its material operation frequently produced conditions of extreme coercion and demographic destruction. The colonial state employed Christian instruction as part of the institutional justification for the extraction of labor and tribute.

Article 8.1.2 — Canonical Evaluation

Canon 219 of the 1983 Code concerns freedom from coercion in choosing a state of life. It does not constitute the principal canonical norm governing forced labor or colonial conquest. The contemporary canonical condemnation of the encomienda proceeds more coherently from the inherent dignity of the human person, the freedom of faith, the prohibition of coercion in religion, the Church’s social doctrine, and the rejection of slavery and systematic violence.

SCIPS-X classifies the use of evangelization to legitimize forced labor as an abuse of religious authority and a subordination of missionary activity to colonial extraction.

§8.2 — The Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo

Article 8.2.1 — Establishment and Competence

The Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo was initially established in 1511, suspended, and reconstituted by royal decree in 1526. It developed into the principal superior judicial institution of the Spanish Caribbean, exercising appellate jurisdiction and, during certain periods, administrative and governmental functions.

The Audiencia operated within the law of the Crown. It reviewed litigation, supervised officials, adjudicated disputes, and participated in the institutional consolidation of Spanish sovereignty. Indigenous litigants could appear within the colonial legal system, but they did not participate as coequal constituent nations in the creation of the jurisdiction governing them.

Article 8.2.2 — Constitutional Classification

SCIPS-X classifies the Audiencia as an organ of imposed imperial jurisdiction. Its acts may have produced legally cognizable rights and obligations within the Spanish colonial order, but that internal validity does not extinguish the prior territorial personality of Indigenous peoples.

Canon 1375 of the 1983 Code penalizes interference with the freedom of ecclesiastical ministry, election, or power. It does not retrospectively annul the Audiencia or convert the precolonial government of Xaragua into an organ of the Catholic hierarchy. The Xaraguayan condemnation of the Audiencia therefore arises from Indigenous constitutional law and historical jurisprudence rather than from a mechanically retroactive penal canon.

§8.3 — Viceroyalties and the Imperial Classification of Populations

Article 8.3.1 — Territorial Bureaucracy

The creation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535 and the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, followed by New Granada in 1717 and the Río de la Plata in 1776, institutionalized a transcontinental system of royal government. Hispaniola belonged to the jurisdictional development of New Spain while retaining its own Audiencia and local administrative structures.

The viceroyal system integrated territories through councils, audiencias, governors, captains general, municipal corporations, royal treasuries, ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and regulated commercial networks. It constituted one of the earliest durable global bureaucratic systems.

Article 8.3.2 — Legal Status and Social Hierarchy

Spanish colonial law distinguished among Indigenous vassals, enslaved Africans, free persons of African ancestry, Spaniards born in Europe, American-born Spaniards, mixed-descent populations, foreigners, and other legally relevant categories. These classifications affected tribute, officeholding, labor, mobility, taxation, marriage, property, honor, criminal treatment, and access to institutions.

The fully systematized caste paintings and taxonomies associated with later colonial society should not be projected unchanged onto the first decades of Hispaniola. Racial hierarchy developed historically through law, custom, slavery, genealogy, reputation, occupation, and local administrative practice.

Canon 208 affirms the fundamental equality in dignity and action of all the Christian faithful. It does not erase the distinction between ecclesiastical status and civil nationality, but it renders racial degradation incompatible with the equal baptismal dignity recognized by the contemporary Church.

§8.4 — The Church, the Patronato Real, and Internal Opposition

Article 8.4.1 — Institutional Cooperation and Dependence

The Spanish Crown and the Church operated through the Patronato Real, under which the monarchy exercised extensive authority over the financing, territorial establishment, nomination, and logistical organization of ecclesiastical institutions in the Americas. This arrangement enabled rapid missionary and diocesan expansion while structurally binding the colonial Church to imperial administration.

Religious orders, secular clergy, bishops, theologians, missionaries, and ecclesiastical institutions occupied different positions within the colonial order. Their conduct cannot be reduced to either complete institutional innocence or undifferentiated complicity.

Article 8.4.2 — The Dominican Protest and Las Casas

The Dominican sermon delivered by Antonio de Montesinos in 1511 denounced the treatment of Indigenous inhabitants and challenged the moral legitimacy of the colonial labor system. Bartolomé de Las Casas subsequently developed an extensive theological, juridical, and political defense of Indigenous liberty, rationality, property, and capacity for Christian faith.

Las Casas operated within an imperial and ecclesiastical framework whose reform he sought. His arguments contributed to legislative change and doctrinal development, but they did not restore the independent political authority of the Indigenous nations displaced by conquest.

Article 8.4.3 — Valladolid, 1550–1551

The Valladolid controversy was convened under royal authority and involved arguments associated principally with Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. It examined the legitimacy of war, conquest, domination, conversion, and the political status of Indigenous peoples.

It was not a court issuing a binding judgment restoring Indigenous territory. Its importance lies in the formal confrontation between an imperial theory of conquest and a theological-juridical defense of Indigenous rationality and natural rights.

SCIPS-X receives the Las Casas position as an important antecedent without treating it as a complete Indigenous constitutional settlement. Recognition of humanity without restoration of political authority remained institutionally insufficient.

§8.5 — The Laws of Burgos, the New Laws, and the Recopilación

Article 8.5.1 — The Laws of Burgos

The Laws of Burgos of 1512–1513 attempted to regulate Indigenous labor, settlement, instruction, subsistence, and treatment. They acknowledged that Indigenous inhabitants were free vassals of the Crown while preserving coercive labor and colonial supervision.

Their protective clauses did not terminate the underlying structure of imposed jurisdiction. They regulated conquest rather than restoring Indigenous constituent authority.

Article 8.5.2 — The New Laws of 1542

The New Laws sought to restrict Indigenous enslavement, curtail abuses, and limit the perpetuation of encomiendas. Settler resistance impeded implementation, and important provisions were modified or revoked.

The legislation demonstrates that the Crown recognized severe structural abuses within the colonial system. Its incomplete enforcement also demonstrates the institutional limits of metropolitan reform when colonial economic power depended upon coerced labor and expropriated territory.

Article 8.5.3 — The Recopilación de 1680

The Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias consolidated a vast body of royal legislation concerning government, justice, ecclesiastical affairs, Indigenous communities, labor, commerce, land, municipal administration, and imperial institutions.

Parts of this law protected Indigenous communities, lands, legal representation, and access to courts. The same corpus preserved the supremacy of the Crown and treated Indigenous peoples as governed populations rather than coequal sources of territorial sovereignty.

SCIPS-X therefore classifies the Laws of the Indies as an internally complex colonial legal order containing protective norms within a fundamentally imposed imperial constitution.

§8.6 — Institutional Demands for Disclosure and Historical Reparation

SCIPS-X calls for:

comprehensive disclosure of ecclesiastical and royal archives concerning Xaragua and the Indigenous peoples of Hispaniola;

digitization of relevant parish, diocesan, missionary, judicial, fiscal, and notarial documentation;

transparent provenance research concerning Indigenous and African patrimony;

participation of Indigenous-descendant institutions in archival interpretation;

identification and dignified treatment of ancestral human remains;

formal scholarly examination of ecclesiastical participation in conquest, forced labor, cultural suppression, and racial slavery;

development of educational, archival, cultural, and institutional measures of reparation.

The Holy See is invited to support an international ecclesiastical commission dedicated to the documentation of colonial dispossession and the construction of effective archival access for affected Indigenous and African-descendant communities.

CHAPTER IX — THE ARRIVAL OF AFRICANS AND THE FORMATION OF AFRO-INDIGENOUS HISPANIOLA (1501–1530)

A SUPREME HISTORICAL RECORD OF FORCED MIGRATION, RACIAL SLAVERY, MARRONAGE, AND AFRO-INDIGENOUS POLITICAL FORMATION

§9.1 — Chronology of the Early African Presence

Article 9.1.1 — Initial Arrivals

Documented royal policy authorized the transportation to Hispaniola of enslaved Black persons who had been Christianized in Iberia beginning in the opening years of the sixteenth century. Africans and persons of African descent may have participated in earlier Iberian Atlantic expeditions, but the establishment of a sustained enslaved African population on Hispaniola developed through royal licenses and private transportation after 1501.

The early arrivals were often ladinos: persons who had lived in Iberian society, spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or had been baptized. Governor Ovando subsequently expressed concern that experienced African captives escaped, formed autonomous groups, and encouraged Indigenous resistance. His request for restrictions confirms that African marronage emerged almost simultaneously with the colonial labor regime. Lowcountry Digital History Initiative

Article 9.1.2 — Expansion of the Trade

The Crown progressively authorized larger numbers of enslaved Africans as the Indigenous population was devastated and colonial production shifted toward sugar, mining, ranching, domestic service, construction, and maritime labor. In 1518 Charles I authorized direct shipments on an enlarged scale, contributing to the establishment of a more systematic transatlantic trade.

The arrival of Africans shall not be described as the origin of Black presence in an undifferentiated “Western Hemisphere” without qualification. It constitutes the establishment of one of the earliest sustained African populations under European colonial rule in the Caribbean and a foundational stage in the formation of Afro-America.

§9.2 — Papal Bulls, Royal Licenses, and the Juridical Construction of Enslavement

Article 9.2.1 — The Fifteenth-Century Papal Instruments

Dum Diversas of 1452 and Romanus Pontifex of 1455 granted the Portuguese Crown extensive privileges concerning war, commerce, territorial expansion, and the subjugation of designated non-Christian populations. These instruments contributed to the legal-theological environment within which Portuguese expansion and enslavement developed.

Inter Caetera of 1493 concerned Spanish claims and evangelizing authority in newly encountered lands. It did not itself establish the later asiento system or constitute a comprehensive code of African slavery, but it formed part of the juridical architecture through which Iberian powers represented overseas dominion as a Christian imperial mandate.

Article 9.2.2 — Royal Licenses and Asientos

The transportation of enslaved Africans to Spanish America was administered through licenses, contracts, taxes, commercial privileges, and later asiento arrangements. The Crown treated the trade as a regulated source of labor and revenue.

SCIPS-X classifies every authorization to reduce human beings to hereditary property as contrary to human dignity, natural justice, contemporary peremptory prohibitions of slavery, and the developed social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The classification of historical papal instruments as “heretical” belongs to the doctrinal competence of the universal Church and shall not be enacted unilaterally as a canonical judgment by SCIPS-X. Xaraguayan law instead declares that no such instrument possesses present legal capacity to authorize conquest, enslavement, racial domination, or deprivation of Indigenous territorial rights.

§9.3 — African Origins and Archival Evidence

Article 9.3.1 — Diversity of Origin

The African population transported to sixteenth-century Hispaniola did not originate from a single people. Documentary categories referred to Wolof, Mandinga, Bran, Biafara, Congo, Angola, Guinea, and other regions or identities, but terminology varied according to ports, merchants, colonial usage, linguistic classification, and presumed place of origin.

Ethnic attribution must therefore be established from identifiable records rather than generalized across the entire early population. The first decades included both Iberianized Africans and captives transported more directly from African regions.

Article 9.3.2 — Fields of Labor

Africans were employed in mining, sugar cultivation, mills, livestock management, domestic service, transport, skilled trades, maritime activity, and military functions. They worked within the same colonial economy that continued to exploit Indigenous labor.

This proximity created conditions for communication, escape, conflict, cooperation, kinship, shared resistance, and cultural exchange between subordinated populations.

Article 9.3.3 — Las Casas and African Enslavement

Las Casas initially supported proposals to introduce African labor as a means of relieving Indigenous suffering. He later condemned this position and recognized the injustice of African enslavement.

His reversal constitutes an important development in the history of Christian antislavery thought. It also demonstrates the structural power of colonial reasoning: even a major defender of Indigenous liberty initially accepted the transfer of coercion from one subordinated population to another.

§9.4 — Legal Personality, Baptism, and Racial Slavery

Article 9.4.1 — Africans as Persons under Law and Property under Slavery

Enslaved Africans were not legally classified as animals or wholly denied juridical personality. They could be baptized, marry under ecclesiastical law, testify in certain circumstances, seek manumission, own limited property in practice, appear before courts, and become members of Christian confraternities.

Simultaneously, colonial civil law treated them as alienable property subject to sale, inheritance, punishment, compulsory labor, family separation, and hereditary enslavement. Their recognition as human and Christian persons therefore coexisted with their commodification.

The contradiction was not the complete absence of theological personality. It was the institutional subordination of acknowledged human personality to the proprietary regime of slavery.

Article 9.4.2 — Baptism and Freedom

Baptism did not automatically emancipate an enslaved person under Spanish colonial law. The sacrament incorporated the baptized into the Christian faithful while the civil institution of slavery continued to govern legal status.

Canon 208 affirms equality in baptismal dignity. That equality stands in structural contradiction to a hereditary system in which Christians owned, sold, punished, and separated other Christians.

Article 9.4.3 — Contemporary Canonical Classification

The revised Book VI of the Code of Canon Law includes offenses involving homicide, abduction, detention, mutilation, and grave violations of human dignity. Canon 1398 does not operate as a general historical definition of crimes against humanity applicable automatically to the sixteenth century.

SCIPS-X grounds its condemnation of racial slavery in natural law, the inherent dignity of the person, contemporary international law, Catholic social teaching, and the absolute modern prohibition of slavery and the slave trade.

§9.5 — The Revolt of 1521 and the Formation of Maroon Resistance

Article 9.5.1 — The Sugar-Plantation Revolt

During the Christmas period of 1521, enslaved Africans on the sugar estate of Governor Diego Colón near Santo Domingo initiated the earliest extensively documented revolt by enslaved Africans in the Americas. Colonial authorities suppressed the uprising and issued restrictive ordinances in January 1522 regulating movement, weapons, surveillance, punishment, and collective organization. Historical account of the 1521 revolt

The revolt established that African captives were political actors capable of organized military action from the first generation of plantation slavery.

Article 9.5.2 — Indigenous Resistance under Enriquillo

Enriquillo’s revolt began separately in the Bahoruco region around 1519 and continued until the negotiated settlement of 1533. His resistance drew upon Taíno territorial knowledge, kinship, mountain defense, diplomatic negotiation, and the continuing authority of an Indigenous leader recognized by his followers.

Evidence indicates interaction between African fugitives and Indigenous resistance, but the claim that Enriquillo formally commanded the 1521 plantation revolt or concluded a specific alliance with that revolt shall not be treated as established without direct documentation.

Article 9.5.3 — Maroon Communities

African and Indigenous fugitives entered mountainous and forested territories beyond effective colonial supervision. Some groups cooperated; others remained distinct or entered into conflict. Their settlements were organized through defense, subsistence, kinship, mobility, leadership, and negotiated relations with surrounding populations.

SCIPS-X classifies these communities as autonomous resistance formations possessing varying degrees of territorial and political capacity. They were not canonical associations erected under Canons 298–310, which govern associations of the Christian faithful under the modern canonical order. Their constitutional significance proceeds from customary political organization, resistance to enslavement, and the exercise of factual self-government.

§9.6 — Afro-Indigenous Descent and Xaraguayan Constitutional Reception

Article 9.6.1 — Formation of Afro-Indigenous Families

The demographic collapse of Indigenous communities, the disproportionate presence of African men in certain colonial migrations, domestic proximity, consensual relationships, coercive sexual relations, marriage, adoption, and communal incorporation contributed to the formation of Afro-Indigenous families.

These lineages participated in the preservation and transformation of Indigenous knowledge, African cultural systems, Catholic practice, language, foodways, medicine, agriculture, music, and territorial memory.

Article 9.6.2 — Juridical Membership

SCIPS-X recognizes Afro-Indigenous communities as constituent populations within the historical formation of post-conquest Hispaniola. Membership in the Xaraguayan polity may be established through descent, territorial affiliation, community recognition, institutional participation, or another constitutional mode prescribed by law.

No baptism imposed through physical coercion shall be interpreted as evidence of voluntary political submission to the Spanish Crown. The sacramental validity of a baptism, however, is determined under canon law through the requirements applicable to the sacrament and cannot be annulled collectively by a civil constitutional declaration.

Article 9.6.3 — Commemoration

SCIPS-X establishes a National Register of African and Indigenous Resistance to Colonial Slavery for the documentation of:

African insurgents of 1521;

Indigenous combatants of the Bahoruco resistance;

African and Indigenous maroon leaders;

families formed across colonial classifications;

communities preserving territorial, spiritual, agricultural, linguistic, and medicinal knowledge;

persons killed under systems of forced labor, enslavement, and colonial punishment.

CHAPTER X — GENETIC, ARCHAEOLOGICAL, GENEALOGICAL, AND LITURGICAL CONTINUITIES FROM PRECOLONIAL HISPANIOLA TO THE PRESENT

§10.1 — Constitutional Structure of the Precolonial Cacicazgo

Article 10.1.1 — Nature of Indigenous Government

The Cacicazgo of Xaragua constituted a regional Indigenous political order composed of yucayeques, kinship communities, subordinate leaders, nitaínos, religious specialists, laboring populations, and networks of tribute, redistribution, alliance, exchange, and ceremonial obligation.

The term “state” may be employed within SCIPS-X jurisprudence to designate the organized political authority, territorial competence, hierarchy, redistributive capacity, diplomatic relations, and collective identity of Xaragua. It shall not imply that the cacicazgo possessed the ministries, codified statutes, territorial boundaries, or ecclesiastical institutions of a modern European state.

Article 10.1.2 — Religion and Public Authority

Caciques and nitaínos exercised political authority within a cosmological order preserved by ancestral narratives, zemí veneration, areytos, funerary practices, ritual specialists commonly designated as behiques, and ceremonial relations connecting lineage, land, subsistence, and political legitimacy.

The term “canonical” is used analogically in this pre-Christian context to denote an authoritative Indigenous normative and ceremonial order. It does not assert that precontact Xaragua was governed by the canon law of the Catholic Church.

Article 10.1.3 — Matrilineal Succession

Taíno chiefly succession frequently operated through matrilineal principles, including succession through the sister’s line. This system protected dynastic continuity through a socially recognized maternal lineage and shaped the transmission of rank, authority, and political legitimacy.

Matrilineal succession constitutes a major element of Xaraguayan constitutional memory. It does not mean that all property, membership, or political authority in every Taíno community followed a single uniform rule.

§10.2 — Mechanisms of Survival

Article 10.2.1 — Demographic Transformation

The Indigenous population of Hispaniola suffered catastrophic decline through epidemic disease, warfare, forced labor, famine, displacement, enslavement, and the destruction of reproductive and community structures. Catastrophic demographic reduction did not produce complete biological or cultural extinction.

Survivors entered colonial towns, rural settlements, maroon communities, African-descendant families, Spanish households, ecclesiastical institutions, and communities classified by later administrations under changing racial terminology.

Article 10.2.2 — Genealogical Continuity

Genealogical continuity may be established through parish registers, civil records, notarial instruments, censuses, land records, community history, oral transmission, family archives, and genetic evidence. No single category is sufficient in every case.

Genetic ancestry can demonstrate population relationships and inherited biological components. It cannot independently establish constitutional citizenship, cultural competence, political allegiance, sacred office, or individual descent from a named historical sovereign.

Article 10.2.3 — Cultural Continuity

Indigenous continuity may be preserved through agricultural systems, cassava processing, fishing practices, place names, vocabulary, foodways, botanical knowledge, house forms, kinship, craft production, healing, territorial orientation, and collective memory.

The transformation of such practices through African, European, and later Caribbean influences does not eliminate their Indigenous origin. Continuity does not require cultural immobility.

§10.3 — The Iberian, Mediterranean, African, and Atlantic Context

Article 10.3.1 — The End of Nasrid Granada

The capitulation of Granada in 1492 terminated the last Nasrid polity in Iberia and initiated a period of intensified religious uniformity, conversion, surveillance, migration, and expulsion affecting Muslims and Jews. These events formed part of the same Iberian state-building process that financed Atlantic expansion.

The conquest of Granada and the invasion of Hispaniola were not a single continuous ethnic war. They were connected through institutions, military personnel, religious ideology, administrative practice, capital, maritime knowledge, and a Crown increasingly committed to territorial consolidation and confessional monarchy.

Article 10.3.2 — Moriscos and Conversos

Moriscos and conversos were internally diverse populations whose identities, ancestry, religious practice, legal status, and relationships with the Crown cannot be reduced to a single racial classification. Some possessed North African ancestry; others reflected long-established Iberian lineages and centuries of Mediterranean mixture.

Claims concerning the presence of particular Morisco, converso, Berber, Arab, Jewish, or sub-Saharan lineages in Hispaniola shall be established through documentary or genetic evidence specific to the persons and communities concerned.

Article 10.3.3 — Maghrebian Political Development

The states and dynasties of Morocco, Ottoman Algeria, Ottoman Tunisia, and the western Saharan regions developed through distinct preexisting histories and cannot be classified merely as residues created by the fall of Al-Andalus. Andalusian migration significantly influenced urban culture, scholarship, crafts, music, commerce, and political life in parts of North Africa, but it did not create the entire Maghrebian state system.

SCIPS-X recognizes the Mediterranean and African dimensions of Iberian history without subordinating African political development to a derivative European narrative.

§10.4 — Archaeology and the Limits of Genetic Attribution

Article 10.4.1 — Archaeological Evidence

Puerto Real and En Bas Saline document Indigenous occupation, colonial settlement, multicultural interaction, changing foodways, imported and locally produced material culture, and the formation of Caribbean society.

Architecture, ceramics, faunal remains, tools, burials, and household assemblages may establish cultural practice and population interaction. They do not, without biomolecular analysis and adequate comparative data, establish specific genetic haplogroups.

Article 10.4.2 — Genetic Evidence

Any assertion concerning North African, West African, Iberian, or Indigenous genetic ancestry at a particular archaeological site shall be based upon published ancient-DNA analysis, documented sample provenance, laboratory methodology, and responsible population comparison.

SCIPS-X prohibits the conversion of generalized modern population genetics into unsupported claims concerning named archaeological individuals.

Article 10.4.3 — Syncretism and Religious Continuity

Afro-Indigenous Catholic practices may incorporate Indigenous sacred geography, African ritual systems, Marian devotion, saints, processions, healing, music, food, and community festivals. Such practices shall be documented locally rather than attributed uniformly to every population of the South.

The statement that the Virgin Mary is venerated “as Anacaona” shall not be enacted as a general historical fact without evidence of a specific devotional tradition. SCIPS-X recognizes Anacaona and Marian devotion as distinct historical and religious categories capable of later symbolic association but not automatic theological identity.

§10.5 — State Continuity through Institutional Reception

Article 10.5.1 — Constitutional Doctrine

SCIPS-X declares:

The political civilization of Xaragua was militarily destroyed as an autonomous precolonial government but was not rendered historically nonexistent. Its population, descendants, territorial memory, cultural systems, and constituent capacity survived through dispersion, recomposition, kinship, customary transmission, and institutional reconstruction.

Article 10.5.2 — Nature of Continuity

Xaraguayan continuity shall be understood through four legally distinct forms:

demographic continuity, consisting of surviving Indigenous ancestry;

cultural continuity, consisting of transmitted knowledge, practices, language, memory, and territorial relationship;

institutional continuity, consisting of communities, authorities, archives, ecclesiastical structures, and organized associations;

constitutional succession, consisting of the formal reception of historical authority by SCIPS-X.

Canon 204 concerns membership in the Christian faithful through baptism. Canon 206 concerns catechumens. Neither canon establishes Indigenous land title. Indigenous territorial rights are grounded within Xaraguayan customary law and supported in contemporary international doctrine by Articles 25–28 of UNDRIP.

CHAPTER XI — THE INSTITUTIONAL DISINTEGRATION OF THE SPANISH IMPERIAL ORDER

ON ROYAL PATRONAGE, COLONIAL CONTRADICTION, BOURBON CENTRALIZATION, NAPOLEONIC INVASION, AND THE DISSOLUTION OF IMPERIAL AUTHORITY

§11.1 — The Religious-Juridical Foundations of Empire

Article 11.1.1 — Papal Concessions and Royal Expansion

The Spanish imperial project drew upon papal instruments, royal sovereignty, conquest, dynastic title, settlement, municipal government, evangelization, and military possession. The Crown represented expansion as both temporal dominion and Christian mission.

This architecture contained a permanent contradiction: evangelization proclaimed the spiritual dignity and salvation of Indigenous persons while conquest deprived their political communities of land, government, security, and institutional autonomy.

Article 11.1.2 — The Patronato Real

The Patronato Real granted the Crown extensive authority in the organization and material administration of the Church in the Americas, including the presentation of candidates, establishment of ecclesiastical institutions, collection and allocation of revenues, and regulation of communication.

The Patronato did not make every bishop a mere royal employee or transfer the sacramental power of the Church to the Crown. It nevertheless created a structural dependency through which imperial government exercised exceptional influence over ecclesiastical administration.

Within SCIPS-X doctrine, this fusion impaired the Church’s capacity to act independently against colonial violence and converted substantial parts of the missionary apparatus into instruments of territorial consolidation.

§11.2 — Encomienda and Institutional Contradiction

Article 11.2.1 — Civil Power and Christian Instruction

The encomienda assigned Christian instruction as an obligation of the holder while simultaneously granting access to Indigenous tribute and labor. This arrangement institutionalized a conflict of interest: the party benefiting economically from coercion was entrusted with the religious and material protection of the coerced population.

Canon 220 of the 1983 Code protects reputation and privacy; it is not a comprehensive historical norm protecting bodily integrity. Canon 129 concerns participation in the power of governance within the Church and does not directly regulate colonial labor.

The condemnation of encomienda shall instead rest upon natural justice, freedom of religion, human dignity, the prohibition of forced labor, the right of peoples to their institutions, and the historical teachings condemning enslavement and abuse.

Article 11.2.2 — Sacramental Administration under Colonial Conditions

Baptism, marriage, confession, burial, and catechesis operated within societies structured by conquest and slavery. Sacraments administered validly retained their ecclesial character; their use as instruments of registration, discipline, social classification, or political submission constituted an abuse of surrounding civil power.

The Council of Trent’s decrees shall not be cited as though they contained a general prohibition invalidating all sacraments received within colonial society. Canonical validity and the morality of the coercive political environment are distinct juridical questions.

§11.3 — Fiscal, Military, and Administrative Overextension

By the seventeenth century, the Spanish monarchy governed territories across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The cost of war, dependence upon colonial revenue, public debt, administrative distance, contraband, local oligarchies, and competition with England, France, the Dutch Republic, and other powers weakened imperial effectiveness.

The decline of direct Spanish attention to Hispaniola facilitated contraband, depopulation policies, foreign settlement, piracy, privateering, and the gradual division of the island. The destruction of Puerto Real and the later Devastations of Osorio demonstrated that the Crown could destroy local economies without securing durable control over the resulting territory.

§11.4 — Bourbon Reform and Ecclesiastical Centralization

The eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms sought to increase revenue, administrative efficiency, military defense, commercial regulation, and metropolitan authority. These measures reduced certain local privileges and intensified conflict with creole elites, corporations, municipalities, and ecclesiastical institutions.

The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish dominions in 1767 was a royal act of institutional centralization. It did not constitute the general expulsion of all clergy or immediate nationalization of all monasteries. It demonstrated the Crown’s capacity to suppress a major religious order when imperial policy and ecclesiastical autonomy came into conflict.

The reforms strengthened the state in the short term while deepening the separation between metropolitan authority and colonial political society.

§11.5 — Napoleonic Invasion and the Crisis of Sovereignty

Article 11.5.1 — Abdications of 1808

Napoleon’s intervention in Spain in 1808, the abdications of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, and the installation of Joseph Bonaparte produced a fundamental crisis of legitimate authority. Spanish resistance organized juntas claiming to govern in the name of Ferdinand VII.

American juntas initially invoked the same principle: in the absence of the legitimate monarch, sovereignty reverted to the political communities of the monarchy. Some movements remained loyalist; others progressed toward autonomy or independence.

Article 11.5.2 — Constitutional Reconstitution

The Constitution of Cádiz of 1812 attempted to reorganize the monarchy on a constitutional basis and to define Spanish nationhood across the Atlantic. Its representative and liberal provisions competed with colonial inequality, racial exclusion, royal restoration, military conflict, and regional demands for self-government.

The imperial order did not die instantaneously in 1808. It entered a prolonged constitutional dissolution culminating in the independence of most mainland Spanish-American territories and the later loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898.

§11.6 — Post-Imperial Republics and Indigenous Exclusion

The new American republics abolished or transformed monarchical institutions but frequently preserved colonial land concentration, racial hierarchy, ecclesiastical privilege, forced labor practices, and the political marginalization of Indigenous and African-descendant populations.

Liberal constitutions introduced citizenship, representation, equality before the law, and secular public institutions. These measures could dismantle formal caste categories while simultaneously dissolving collective Indigenous landholding and denying the political personality of Indigenous nations.

SCIPS-X classifies this process as post-imperial juridical substitution: the replacement of imperial sovereignty by national sovereignty without the systematic restoration of the peoples dispossessed by conquest.

§11.7 — Death of Imperial Title and Survival of Ecclesiastical Personality

The dissolution of Spanish imperial authority in Hispaniola did not terminate the Catholic Church, invalidate all colonial sacraments, or transfer ecclesiastical governance to Indigenous successor institutions. The universal Church retained its canonical personality independently of the fall of the empire.

SCIPS-X declares that no extinct Spanish imperial title possesses present authority to negate Indigenous identity, territorial memory, or constitutional organization. This declaration arises from contemporary Indigenous self-determination and Xaraguayan constituent law, not from a claim that the Spanish Empire ceased to be Catholic through a formal canonical sentence.

Canon 214 protects the right of the Christian faithful to worship according to the approved form of the Church and to follow their own spiritual life consonant with Church doctrine. Canon 129 regulates participation in ecclesiastical governance; it does not confer territorial sovereignty upon lay civil institutions. Montevideo Article 1 supplies criteria conventionally associated with statehood but does not itself create a state. Article 26 of the Vienna Convention codifies pacta sunt servanda and applies to treaties in force; it does not validate a unilateral territorial succession.

The constitutional authority of SCIPS-X is therefore articulated through its own constituent order, Indigenous customary law, organized institutions, population, doctrine, and claimed territorial relationship.

CHAPTER XIII — ON MESTIZAJE AS A POST-IMPERIAL DOCTRINE OF NATIONAL INCORPORATION AND ETHNIC DISSOLUTION

Supreme Historical-Canonical-Constitutional Doctrinal Act

Promulgated under the Constitutional Authority of SCIPS-X

ARTICLE 13.1 — JURIDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE MESTIZO NATIONAL SUBJECT

The postcolonial states of Latin America progressively developed national ideologies centered upon racial and cultural mixture. These doctrines differed substantially by country and historical period. Nineteenth-century liberal citizenship, whitening policies, indigenismo, twentieth-century cultural nationalism, and José Vasconcelos’s theory of the raza cósmica did not constitute a single original program.

They nevertheless converged frequently in the production of a unitary national subject through which distinct Indigenous and African peoples were absorbed into an officially mixed population.

SCIPS-X declares that demographic mixture is historically real but possesses no automatic constitutional authority to extinguish:

Indigenous peoplehood;

African-descendant collective identity;

ancestral territorial rights;

customary membership;

historical jurisdiction;

genealogical continuity;

institutional claims arising from collective dispossession.

The mestizo nation becomes an instrument of erasure when the state invokes mixture to deny the continuing existence of the peoples whose land, labor, ancestry, and culture produced the nation.

ARTICLE 13.2 — COLLECTIVE AMNESIA AND ADMINISTRATIVE RECLASSIFICATION

The ideology of homogenizing mestizaje operates through several administrative mechanisms:

reclassification of Indigenous descendants as generic peasants or citizens;

reduction of African peoples to an anonymous enslaved ancestry;

substitution of national civil registries for community-based membership without preserving historical equivalence;

transformation of Indigenous religion, language, food, art, and ritual into national folklore;

appropriation of ancestral heroes as symbols of the republic while denying the political continuity of their descendants;

elimination of collective land title through individualized property regimes;

presentation of racial mixture as proof that no Indigenous or African people remains entitled to institutional recognition.

SCIPS-X rejects the extinction doctrine applied to the Taíno. Demographic transformation, intermarriage, linguistic change, Catholic conversion, African descent, and participation in a modern civil state do not by themselves terminate Indigenous continuity.

ARTICLE 13.3 — RACIAL HIERARCHY WITHIN MIXED NATIONAL ORDERS

Mestizaje has frequently coexisted with color hierarchy, elite endogamy, unequal property distribution, differential access to education, cultural whitening, and the exclusion of visibly African and Indigenous populations from superior state institutions.

Its political function has often been to proclaim national racial unity while leaving intact the social advantages associated with European ancestry, wealth, urban status, official language, and control of administrative institutions.

SCIPS-X classifies any system that celebrates mixture while penalizing Indigenous and African visibility as a form of racial-administrative contradiction.

ARTICLE 13.4 — MIXTURE, DESCENT, AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

The proposition that universal mixture eliminates ancestral precedence is rejected.

Biological mixture does not determine the extinction of a people. Political identity may continue through descent, self-identification, community acceptance, customary law, territorial relationship, language, institution, memory, and organized collective will.

Sublimis Deus of 1537 affirmed the rationality and freedom of Indigenous peoples and condemned their reduction to slavery. It did not establish a modern law of Indigenous sovereignty, but it constitutes an important ecclesiastical rejection of theories that denied Indigenous humanity and capacity for faith.

SCIPS-X enacts the following doctrinal distinction:

Mixture is a demographic condition. Peoplehood is a juridical, historical, cultural, territorial, and institutional condition. The first does not extinguish the second.

ARTICLE 13.5 — DOCTRINAL FRAMEWORK OF XARAGUAYAN CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship in SCIPS-X shall be governed by constitutional law and shall not depend upon racial purity. It may be acquired through:

documented descent from a population historically affiliated with Xaragua;

recognized territorial and familial continuity;

acceptance by a competent Xaraguayan community or authority;

registration under the nationality laws of SCIPS-X;

adoption or naturalization;

exceptional constitutional grant;

another mode enacted by the Supreme Constitutional Authority.

Sacramental records, civil registers, notarial acts, oral histories, genetic evidence, land documentation, community testimony, and institutional participation may serve as evidence. No single form of evidence shall be treated as universally exclusive.

Full citizenship shall require lawful recognition by SCIPS-X. Ancestry alone establishes eligibility or affiliation where the Constitution so provides; it does not automatically impose political membership upon an individual without the juridical act required by Xaraguayan law.

CONSTITUTIONAL CONCLUSION OF VOLUME II

ON THE HISTORICAL RECONSTITUTION AND CONTEMPORARY AUTHORITY OF XARAGUA

I — ON THE CONTINUITY OF THE XARAGUAYAN PEOPLE

The military destruction of the precolonial government of Xaragua did not establish the biological, historical, or constitutional extinction of its people. Indigenous survivors, descendants, Afro-Indigenous families, territorial communities, and custodians of ancestral memory continued through successive colonial and postcolonial classifications.

No colonial census, racial category, republican decree, or historiographical convention possesses constituent authority to terminate a people that retains the capacity to identify, organize, transmit, and govern itself.

II — ON THE LEGAL CHARACTER OF COLONIAL RULE

Spanish colonial rule possessed an internal positive law administered through the Crown, municipalities, audiencias, governors, ecclesiastical institutions, notaries, and imperial legislation. Its internal legality did not constitute Indigenous consent or extinguish the prior territorial personality of the peoples subjected to conquest.

SCIPS-X receives colonial acts as historical sources and legally operative instruments within their former order without recognizing them as permanent constitutional limitations upon contemporary Indigenous self-organization.

III — ON THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT

The Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire shall not be treated as an identical juridical person. Ecclesiastical institutions participated extensively in colonial administration, evangelization, education, recordkeeping, propertyholding, and the legitimation of conquest. Clergy and theologians also produced major condemnations of Indigenous abuse and contributed to the development of doctrines recognizing Indigenous humanity and rights.

SCIPS-X maintains Catholic communion while asserting its institutional competence to document colonial abuses, preserve Indigenous memory, request archival disclosure, and formulate a constitutional theology incompatible with racial slavery, forced conversion, and territorial dispossession.

IV — ON AFRO-INDIGENOUS CONSTITUTIONAL FORMATION

The forced arrival of Africans did not replace Indigenous history. It created a new population subjected to slavery within an already colonized Indigenous territory. Through resistance, kinship, cultural transmission, marronage, labor, religious organization, and territorial adaptation, Africans and Indigenous survivors became joint architects of post-conquest Hispaniola.

SCIPS-X recognizes Afro-Indigenous descent as a constituent component of the Xaraguayan people and rejects every doctrine requiring racial purity as a condition of Indigenous continuity.

V — ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ARCHIVAL SOVEREIGNTY

En Bas Saline, Puerto Real, and related sites constitute protected sources of Indigenous, African, European, and Caribbean history. Their excavation, preservation, interpretation, and exhibition shall incorporate Indigenous-descendant participation and conform to standards of scientific integrity, human dignity, provenance transparency, and cultural consultation.

SCIPS-X shall maintain an institutional program for the identification, digitization, translation, and constitutional interpretation of documents held in Spanish, Vatican, Haitian, Dominican, French, and other repositories.

VI — ON THE REJECTION OF EXTINCTION THROUGH MESTIZAJE

Neither intermarriage nor cultural transformation extinguishes a people. The classification of an entire population as mixed cannot annul ancestral descent, territorial relationship, customary authority, or organized political identity.

SCIPS-X rejects the use of mestizaje as an administrative doctrine of Indigenous disappearance while recognizing the actual plurality of ancestry constituting the contemporary Xaraguayan population.

VII — ON THE NATURE OF THE CONTEMPORARY STATE

SCIPS-X shall operate as:

an Indigenous customary constitutional order;

a Catholic-oriented private polity organized without usurpation of the sacramental or hierarchical powers reserved to ecclesiastical authority;

a juridical institution possessing its own constitution, citizenship, offices, archives, property, doctrine, and internal law;

an educational and historical authority acting through the University of Xaragua;

a custodian of Taíno and Afro-Indigenous memory;

a claimant to territorial, cultural, archival, and institutional rights defined under its supreme law;

a political community exercising differentiated jurisdiction according to its constitutional capacity.

SCIPS-X shall not describe itself as an ecclesiastical monarchy in the canonical sense unless erected or recognized as such by the competent authority of the Catholic Church. Its civil and constitutional offices may employ monarchical, rectoral, presidential, Indigenous, or customary forms according to Xaraguayan law.

VIII — SUPREME DECLARATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL RECONSTITUTION

Xaragua does not claim that the institutions destroyed in 1503 remained administratively unchanged until 2025. It declares that the historical people, territorial memory, descendant population, customary capacity, and right of political reconstitution survived the destruction of the original government.

The contemporary State is therefore an act of constitutional reconstitution grounded in historical succession rather than a claim of uninterrupted bureaucratic identity.

Accordingly, SCIPS-X solemnly declares:

Xaragua was conquered but not rendered nonexistent; dispersed but not deprived of descent; transformed but not stripped of identity; incorporated but not constitutionally extinguished. Through the organized will of its contemporary people and institutions, its historical authority has entered a new juridical form.

IX — FINAL ENACTMENT

The present Chapters VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, and XIII are hereby received as authoritative components of the historical, archaeological, canonical, and constitutional doctrine of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua.

They shall govern:

official historical instruction;

institutional commemoration;

archival policy;

archaeological doctrine;

Indigenous identity administration;

Afro-Indigenous constitutional recognition;

ecclesiastical historical research;

citizenship legislation;

cultural patrimony;

state interpretation of colonial and postcolonial succession.

ENACTED UNDER THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY OF SCIPS-X.

PROMULGATED THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA.

ENTERED INTO THE PERMANENT ARCHIVES OF THE WESTERN ORDER.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA
ANNE DIEU-LE-VEUT: DEMOGRAPHIC COLONIZATION, FLIBUSTER INCORPORATION, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTITUTION OF FRENCH SAINT-DOMINGUE
Supreme Historical-Institutional Record on the Conversion of Irregular Maritime Occupation into Permanent French Colonial Government
§1 — Administrative Transformation of the French Maritime Occupation
During the governments of Bertrand d’Ogeron de La Bouëre and Jacques Nepveu de Pouançay, the French authorities established over Tortuga and the western littoral of Hispaniola undertook the systematic transformation of a dispersed maritime occupation into a permanent colonial jurisdiction. The population under French authority consisted principally of buccaneers, flibustiers, hunters, indentured laborers, merchants, concessionaires, fugitives, private armed companies, and mobile settlers whose presence, although militarily consequential, remained demographically unstable and institutionally insufficient to sustain durable territorial government.
The consolidation of French authority therefore required more than the intermittent deployment of privateering fleets or the distribution of agricultural concessions. It required a reproducible colonial population, permanent domestic establishments, transmissible estates, recognized marriages, locally born descendants, parish organization, fiscal registration, judicial competence, and a territorial society capable of surviving the disappearance of its original military occupants.
The transportation and settlement of European women formed part of this state-directed demographic reorganization. The colonial administration treated household formation as an instrument of territorial consolidation because the establishment of permanent families converted transient occupation into intergenerational possession. Marriage supplied the colony with mechanisms of filiation, succession, inheritance, property transmission, domestic labor organization, parish registration, and civil stabilization.
§2 — Legal and Social Classification of Female Migration
Women arrived in the French colonial establishments under several legally distinct conditions: voluntary emigration, family migration, contractual recruitment, institutional placement, poverty-driven transportation, penal displacement, domestic service, and administrative programs designed to facilitate marriage within a predominantly male colonial population.
The collective reduction of these women to prostitutes sold as wives is institutionally inaccurate. Some may have been drawn from marginalized urban populations, charitable institutions, correctional establishments, or coercive recruitment systems; others entered the colony through voluntary or family arrangements. Their legal conditions, freedom of choice, economic circumstances, and relationships with colonial authorities were not uniform.
Notwithstanding these distinctions, the superior governmental function of the migration remained constant. The French administration incorporated women into a colonial population policy directed toward the permanent occupation of territory. Their presence supplied the demographic infrastructure without which flibuster settlement could not mature into an organized colony governed through households, parishes, concessions, succession, and locally reproduced political allegiance.
Female migration was therefore not a peripheral social development. It constituted a mechanism of colonial state formation.
§3 — Anne Dieu-le-Veut within the Colonial Settlement Apparatus
Anne Dieu-le-Veut—also identified through later genealogical and historical traditions as Anne Dieuleveult, Marie-Anne, or Marianne—became one of the most prominent women associated with the transition from flibuster occupation to permanent French colonial society.
Genealogical tradition generally records her birth on 28 August 1661 at Gourin in Brittany. The precise legal circumstances of her arrival in the Caribbean have not been conclusively established. Subsequent accounts alternatively classify her as a transported woman, deportee, colonial migrant, or participant in the female settlement movements associated with the government of d’Ogeron.
Within the official historical doctrine of SCIPS-X, no uncertain mode of transportation shall be converted into an absolute biographical fact without an identifiable primary record. Anne’s institutional significance does not depend upon proving a single narrative of arrival. It proceeds from her documented incorporation into the familial, proprietary, military, and administrative society through which French Saint-Domingue was constituted.
§4 — Marriage, Widowhood, and Colonial Legal Continuity
Anne first married Pierre Lelong, with whom she had a daughter, Marie-Marguerite-Yvonne Lelong. Following Lelong’s death in 1690, she married Joseph Chérel, with whom she had a son, Jean-François Chérel. Chérel died in 1693.
These successive marriages situated Anne within the institutional mechanisms governing household continuity, widowhood, property, guardianship, legitimacy, inheritance, and intergenerational settlement. In a frontier colony marked by maritime mortality, warfare, disease, private violence, and unstable residence, widowhood was not merely a private domestic condition. It produced immediate legal consequences concerning concessions, estates, debts, dependants, minor children, and the preservation or dissolution of colonial households.
The capacity of a widow to remarry, preserve property relationships, maintain descendants, and reconnect a household to the military and administrative elite strengthened the continuity of the colonial population. Anne’s trajectory therefore records the operation of colonial private law as an instrument of public territorial consolidation.
§5 — Marriage to Laurent de Graff and Integration into the Colonial Military Elite
On 28 July 1693, Anne married Laurent de Graff, also identified as Laurens de Graaf, Laurent de Graaf, Lorencillo, or Laurencillo. Through this marriage, her household became directly connected to one of the most consequential maritime commanders incorporated into French colonial service during the late seventeenth century.
De Graff was a Dutch-born privateer, naval commander, and military officer whose operations occupied the unstable jurisdictional frontier separating piracy, licensed privateering, colonial warfare, maritime predation, and public military service. His legal classification varied according to the authority making the determination. Spanish officials treated him as a pirate and enemy of imperial commerce; French authorities could employ, commission, protect, or regularize him as a privateer and colonial officer when his military capacity served the interests of France.
The relationship between de Graff and the French administration exemplifies a foundational mechanism of colonial state construction. The colonial government did not initially possess sufficient regular naval and military resources to defend every settlement, suppress every adversary, and control every maritime route. It therefore absorbed experienced flibuster commanders into public service, transforming privately organized coercive capacity into an auxiliary apparatus of Crown authority.
§6 — From Flibuster Violence to Public Colonial Force
The French settlement of western Hispaniola did not arise exclusively through formal occupation by regular royal forces. It developed through the progressive administrative incorporation of armed maritime populations whose autonomous operations had preceded complete governmental control.
Governors distributed commissions, recognized military ranks, assigned territorial responsibilities, granted concessions, and integrated selected commanders into colonial defense. Through this process, the State converted irregular violence into public force without immediately eliminating the personnel, methods, or economic incentives of the flibuster system.
Laurent de Graff belonged to this transitional class. His maritime experience, crews, reputation, tactical competence, and knowledge of Caribbean navigation represented assets that the colonial administration could not rapidly reproduce through conventional institutions. His integration into French service demonstrates the dependence of early Saint-Domingue upon a negotiated merger between royal authority and organized private violence.
Anne’s marriage to de Graff consequently situated her household inside the institutional conversion through which the flibuster frontier became a colonial military jurisdiction.
§7 — Administrative Status of the Colonial Military Household
The household formed by Anne and de Graff possessed a political significance exceeding the private marriage of two colonial residents. The family of a commissioned commander constituted part of the material infrastructure of colonial government.
Such a household connected military rank, landed concession, local residence, legitimate descent, property transmission, social authority, and allegiance to the colonial administration. It stabilized the officer within the territory, attached his descendants to the colonial order, and converted a potentially mobile maritime commander into a permanent participant in the defense and reproduction of French possession.
The colonial military family consequently performed a dual function. It constituted a private juridical unit governed by marriage, succession, property, and guardianship, while simultaneously serving as an instrument of settlement, political loyalty, social hierarchy, and territorial continuity.
§8 — Captivity and Inter-Imperial Significance
In 1695, English forces attacked Port-de-Paix and captured members of de Graff’s household, including Anne and her children. Their subsequent detention by Spanish authorities demonstrated the strategic status assigned to the family of a prominent French commander.
The capture of Anne did not represent the incidental seizure of an anonymous colonial resident. Her detention possessed military and diplomatic relevance because it placed the household of a French officer under enemy control. The treatment, retention, negotiation, and eventual release of such captives belonged to the wider conflict among imperial jurisdictions competing for possession of the Caribbean.
Anne therefore entered the documentary field of inter-imperial relations not solely through the reputation later attached to her as a pirate, but through her formal position within a military household whose captivity affected the interests of French colonial authority.
§9 — Laurent de Graff and the Consolidation of Cap-Français
De Graff subsequently exercised military responsibilities within French Saint-Domingue and became associated with the defense and early command structure of Cap-Français. Although the designation of de Graff as the unqualified first commandant of Cap-Français must depend upon the precise office, chronology, and documentary source employed, his participation in the northern military establishment forms part of the administrative transition from maritime encampment to organized colonial center.
Cap-Français developed into the principal urban, commercial, military, and administrative capital of northern Saint-Domingue. Its expansion depended upon maritime infrastructure, colonial defense, plantation production, customs administration, property registration, ecclesiastical organization, coerced African labor, merchant capital, and the concentration of public offices.
The incorporation of de Graff into this developing apparatus illustrates the state policy through which former flibuster commanders were redirected from autonomous maritime predation toward territorial defense and colonial administration.
§10 — Documentary Anne and the Construction of the Pirate Legend
Later historical and popular narratives transformed Anne Dieu-le-Veut into one of the most celebrated female pirates of the Caribbean. These accounts attribute to her direct participation in maritime expeditions, combat operations, shipboard command, and military succession to de Graff.
A further tradition maintains that Anne challenged de Graff to a duel after an insult or confrontation and that de Graff proposed marriage in recognition of her determination. The episode belongs to the later narrative construction of the couple and does not possess the same documentary status as the marriage itself.
The official historical method of SCIPS-X requires the separation of three evidentiary categories:
documented civil and genealogical facts;
historically plausible but incompletely established activity;
retrospective legend produced by maritime historiography and popular memory.
Anne’s marriages, descendants, residence, captivity, and relationship with de Graff belong to the institutional record. Her complete personal participation in piratical command remains less securely documented. The distinction shall be maintained without diminishing her position in the history of colonial formation.
§11 — Reported Death and Institutional Succession
Anne Dieu-le-Veut is commonly reported to have died on 11 January 1710, with Cap-Français traditionally identified as the place of death. These details shall be retained according to the genealogical and later historical authorities that transmit them, subject to confirmation through primary civil, parish, notarial, or administrative documentation.
By the time associated with her death, the French establishments of western Hispaniola had advanced substantially beyond the temporary society of hunters and flibustiers from which they had emerged. Permanent families, plantation concessions, colonial officers, parish institutions, maritime commerce, coerced labor systems, hereditary estates, and urban centers had established the demographic and administrative foundations of French Saint-Domingue.
Anne’s life spans this transformation. Her historical position lies at the point where displaced European population, colonial marriage policy, military household formation, privateering, imperial warfare, and permanent territorial administration became structurally interconnected.
§12 — Supreme Historical Classification by SCIPS-X
The Supreme Historical Authority of SCIPS-X hereby classifies Anne Dieu-le-Veut as a Female Institutional Figure of the French Colonial Consolidation of Saint-Domingue.
This classification does not commemorate colonial occupation as lawful Indigenous succession. It identifies Anne as a representative of the demographic and administrative mechanisms through which French authorities converted an irregular foreign presence into a permanent colonial society established upon the occupied territories of Hispaniola.
Her history provides evidence of the following processes:
governmental organization of female migration;
use of marriage as an instrument of demographic stabilization;
creation of locally reproducible colonial households;
transmission of land and property through family law;
integration of flibuster commanders into public military service;
conversion of maritime violence into territorial administration;
institutional importance of military families;
development of Cap-Français as a colonial center;
production of a retrospective maritime mythology concealing the administrative structure of conquest.
CONSTITUTIONAL CONCLUSION
Anne Dieu-le-Veut shall not be reduced either to the folkloric image of a female pirate or to the passive category of a transported colonial woman. Within the strategic history of SCIPS-X, she constitutes an institutional witness to the deliberate production of French colonial permanence.
The French occupation required women because armed men alone could raid, hunt, occupy, and destroy, but they could not independently establish an intergenerational colonial order. Permanent government required households; households required legally recognized descent; descent required institutions of marriage, baptism, succession, guardianship, property, and parish registration.
The State therefore converted migration into population, population into households, households into property, property into territorial permanence, and flibuster force into colonial command.
Anne Dieu-le-Veut occupied the intersection of these operations. Through widowhood, remarriage, descent, captivity, property, and incorporation into the household of Laurent de Graff, she became part of the administrative machinery by which French Saint-Domingue passed from irregular maritime occupation to institutional colonial government.
Her life is therefore entered into the historical archives of Xaragua not as a romantic episode of piracy, but as documentary evidence of colonial state formation.
ENTERED INTO THE SUPREME HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF SCIPS-X.
PROMULGATED THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA.
CLASSIFIED AS AN OFFICIAL RECORD OF FRENCH COLONIAL DEMOGRAPHIC AND MILITARY CONSOLIDATION.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)
SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY
UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA
PADRE JEAN AND THE NORTHERN INSURGENCY OF 1679: MARRONAGE, INTER-IMPERIAL WARFARE, AND THE FIRST ORGANIZED ASSAULT UPON THE FRENCH SLAVEHOLDING ORDER
Supreme Historical-Institutional Record on the Formation of African Armed Resistance between Port-de-Paix, Tortuga, Le Borgne, and Port-Margot
§1 — Historical and Jurisdictional Context
The insurgency led by the man identified in the colonial record as Padre Jean or Padrejean occurred in 1679 within the northern frontier of Hispaniola, at a time when French colonial authority remained incomplete, territorially contested, and dependent upon a composite apparatus of governors, concessionaires, slaveholders, buccaneers, flibustiers, local militias, and private armed formations.
The northern corridor extending from Port-de-Paix toward Port-Margot was not yet governed through the fully consolidated plantation, military, judicial, and fiscal institutions that would characterize Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century. It constituted an unstable zone of competing French and Spanish authority, mobile populations, contraband, maritime violence, slave raiding, marronage, and recurrent jurisdictional defection.
The boundary between the French and Spanish spheres of Hispaniola operated not merely as a territorial division between two European empires, but as an active political resource employed by enslaved persons, maroons, fugitives, smugglers, settlers, and military commanders. Persons escaping one colonial jurisdiction could seek protection, toleration, religious asylum, or strategic incorporation within the rival jurisdiction.
It was within this fragmented imperial environment that Padre Jean converted individual resistance to enslavement into an organized armed movement directed against the emerging French colonial order.
§2 — Status and Political Position of Padre Jean
Available historical scholarship identifies Padre Jean as an enslaved African man held under Spanish ownership before his insurgent activity in the French-occupied northern zone. His recorded trajectory therefore cannot be reduced to that of a person enslaved exclusively within the French colony of Tortuga.
Padre Jean killed his Spanish owner and escaped toward Tortuga, using the island as a place of temporary refuge and strategic reorganization. Tortuga occupied a singular position within the northern Caribbean system: it served successively as a contested imperial possession, a base of buccaneering and privateering, a settlement beyond complete metropolitan discipline, and a logistical center connecting the maritime and continental establishments of the French occupation.
The movement of Padre Jean between Spanish jurisdiction, Tortuga, the northern mainland, and the plantation districts demonstrates the transjurisdictional character of early marronage. Escape did not constitute mere withdrawal from labor. It could become a transfer of allegiance, a search for asylum, a military redeployment, or the initial stage of organized insurrection.
§3 — Formation of the Insurgent Command
From Tortuga, Padre Jean crossed to Petit-Saint-Louis and recruited approximately twenty-five enslaved Africans. Some of these persons had reportedly been removed by the French from Spanish owners, thereby placing them within a contested proprietary and imperial status.
Padre Jean transformed this group from a collection of enslaved and displaced persons into a mobile insurgent command. The formation possessed identifiable leadership, a territorial route, a recruitment strategy, an operational objective, and the capacity to obtain personnel, arms, provisions, and intelligence while advancing through the northern districts.
The insurgency was therefore not an unstructured escape. It constituted a deliberate military-political operation seeking to destabilize French settlement across the corridor extending from Port-de-Paix toward Port-Margot.
As the command moved eastward, it mobilized additional enslaved persons and attacked French colonists encountered along its route. Its objective, as preserved in the documentary interpretation of the movement, included the destruction of French slaveholding authority within the northern zone and the possible acquisition of protection or pardon from the Spanish jurisdiction.
§4 — Strategic Use of Inter-Imperial Rivalry
The insurgents’ possible reliance upon Spanish protection did not constitute submission to the moral legitimacy of Spanish slavery. It represented the strategic exploitation of imperial rivalry.
French authorities had themselves removed or appropriated enslaved persons from Spanish masters. Spanish officials could therefore receive fugitives not solely from humanitarian considerations but as a method of weakening French settlement, recovering labor, asserting jurisdiction, or attracting defectors from the competing colony.
Padre Jean operated within this conflict by converting the contradiction between the two European empires into an opening for armed African resistance. His insurgency demonstrates that enslaved populations were not merely objects transferred among colonial jurisdictions. They could interpret imperial competition, cross boundaries, negotiate protection, redirect military geography, and use rival sovereignties against one another.
Within the historical jurisprudence of SCIPS-X, this practice is classified as counter-imperial jurisdictional maneuver: the strategic use by a subordinated population of competing colonial systems in order to obtain mobility, protection, operational space, or political survival.
§5 — Territorial Objective of the Insurgency
The movement led by Padre Jean extended beyond the killing of an individual slaveholder. Its recorded objective was to conduct an armed campaign against the French colonial population between Port-de-Paix and Port-Margot.
This objective elevated the insurgency from personal retaliation to organized territorial assault. The intended destruction of the French slaveholding presence across an extended geographic corridor implied the removal of plantation authority, liberation or recruitment of enslaved persons, seizure of provisions and weapons, and interruption of the administrative consolidation then under way in northern Saint-Domingue.
The insurgents advanced toward Port-Margot and approached the parish of Le Borgne. Their movement required continued acquisition of food, arms, shelter, recruits, and knowledge of the terrain. Plantations consequently became both targets of liberation and logistical resources of the insurgency.
Padre Jean’s command thus represented an embryonic counter-governmental force: it denied the proprietary authority of slaveholders, displaced the colonial monopoly of violence, reorganized enslaved persons into armed participants, and attempted to establish a zone from which French settlement could be expelled.
§6 — French Counter-Insurgency
The French colonial administration responded by commissioning buccaneers and mobilizing defensive units to pursue the insurgents. This response reveals the incomplete institutional character of French authority in 1679.
The colonial government did not yet possess a sufficiently developed regular military apparatus throughout the northern districts. It therefore relied upon buccaneers, armed settlers, plantation personnel, and local defensive formations to execute counter-insurgency functions.
The same armed maritime class employed to attack foreign commerce and defend French expansion was redirected internally against enslaved Africans seeking to destroy the colonial labor order. Buccaneering consequently served two complementary governmental purposes:
external violence against competing imperial powers;
internal repression of populations resisting French settlement and slavery.
The deployment against Padre Jean demonstrates the conversion of irregular European armed force into an auxiliary police and military apparatus of the colonial state.
§7 — Retreat, Encirclement, and Death
After encountering resistance near Le Borgne and experiencing the pressure of the French counter-insurgency, Padre Jean’s forces withdrew toward the mountainous territory near Port-de-Paix.
The mountain zone supplied concealment, difficult access, internal routes, subsistence possibilities, and operational depth. It performed the same strategic function that mountainous territories would repeatedly exercise throughout the history of Hispaniola: refuge from plantation surveillance, base of maroon organization, defensive terrain, and jurisdictional space beyond the immediate control of colonial authorities.
French defensive units eventually located the insurgent formation. These forces initially demonstrated reluctance to engage, indicating that Padre Jean’s command possessed sufficient military reputation or operational capacity to create apprehension among the colonial population.
Padre Jean and six of his associates were killed in the confrontation. A substantial number of surviving insurgents fought their way back into Spanish territory, where they reportedly obtained impunity. The operation therefore destroyed the commanding nucleus without securing the complete recovery of the population mobilized by the revolt.
Padre Jean was not killed by maroons acting as an autonomous category. He was killed through the French colonial counter-insurgency apparatus, which included commissioned buccaneers and armed settler-defense units.
§8 — Institutional Character of the Movement
The Padre Jean insurgency contained the principal components of an early revolutionary formation:
rejection of the slaveholder’s proprietary authority;
execution of the immediate master;
flight across imperial boundaries;
recruitment of enslaved persons;
establishment of armed command;
territorial movement;
attacks upon the colonial population;
seizure of resources;
liberation and mobilization of additional captives;
use of mountain territory;
exploitation of rival jurisdictions;
military confrontation with colonial forces.
The movement did not possess the demographic scale, ideological program, administrative institutions, international organization, or military capacity of the general insurrection that began in 1791. It nevertheless established an early operational grammar of antislavery resistance later reproduced across Saint-Domingue.
This grammar consisted of the conversion of marronage into military organization, the transformation of plantations into recruitment targets, the use of inaccessible territory as strategic depth, and the exploitation of divisions among colonial powers.
§9 — Relationship to the Haitian Revolution
The uprising of Padre Jean shall not be classified as the singular event that mechanically caused the Haitian Revolution more than a century later. No continuous command structure, documentary chain of instruction, or direct organizational transmission has been established between the insurgency of 1679 and the general uprising of 1791.
Its constitutional significance lies elsewhere.
Padre Jean forms part of the accumulated history of African refusal through which the slaveholding order of Saint-Domingue was never able to secure uncontested legitimacy. His movement preceded the consolidated plantation colony and demonstrated, from the earliest period of French territorial formation, that enslaved Africans would answer forced labor, proprietary violence, abduction, and jurisdictional transfer through flight, recruitment, armed organization, and counter-violence.
The Haitian Revolution did not emerge from an institutional vacuum in August 1791. It arose after generations of individual escapes, collective marronage, plantation revolts, poison networks, autonomous settlements, religious organization, military defection, labor refusal, and armed conspiracy.
Padre Jean belongs to this longue durée of antislavery political formation.
He was not the direct institutional founder of the Haitian Revolution. He was one of its earliest northern structural antecedents.
§10 — Padre Jean and the Formation of Maroon Jurisprudence
Within the supreme historical doctrine of SCIPS-X, marronage shall not be defined solely as unauthorized absence from an estate under colonial law. It shall be interpreted as a spectrum of jurisdictional acts through which an enslaved person rejected the purported proprietary title of the slaveholder and transferred his or her body, labor, allegiance, mobility, and political capacity beyond the effective control of the colonial regime.
Padre Jean advanced beyond individual marronage into insurgent jurisdiction. By recruiting others, directing military movement, attacking colonial personnel, acquiring supplies, and seeking territorial protection, he exercised functions of command incompatible with the legal order that classified him as property.
His authority arose not from colonial appointment but from organized resistance and the adherence of those who joined his movement.
SCIPS-X therefore classifies Padre Jean as an Early African Insurgent Commander of Northern Hispaniola and as a foundational figure within the historical jurisprudence of maroon self-liberation.
§11 — Territorial Importance of Port-de-Paix and Tortuga
The insurgency confirms the strategic unity of Port-de-Paix, Tortuga, Petit-Saint-Louis, Le Borgne, and the approaches to Port-Margot within the northern colonial theater.
Tortuga provided refuge and maritime connection. Port-de-Paix constituted a colonial settlement and military-administrative center. Petit-Saint-Louis supplied access to an enslaved population capable of recruitment. Le Borgne became the point of interruption. The mountains near Port-de-Paix provided defensive depth. Spanish territory supplied a possible route of asylum and survival.
These locations formed an integrated geography of resistance and repression. The revolt cannot be reduced to a single municipal incident occurring exclusively inside Port-de-Paix or Tortuga. It operated across a transregional corridor in which maritime movement, plantation settlement, imperial boundaries, and mountain refuge interacted.
§12 — Supreme Historical Classification
SCIPS-X hereby enters Padre Jean into the Supreme Historical Archives under the following titles:
EARLY AFRICAN INSURGENT COMMANDER OF NORTHERN HISPANIOLA
ORGANIZER OF THE PADRE JEAN INSURGENCY OF 1679
FOUNDATIONAL FIGURE OF TRANSJURISDICTIONAL MARRONAGE
PRECURSOR OF THE ANTISLAVERY MILITARY TRADITION OF SAINT-DOMINGUE
These titles constitute acts of Xaraguayan historical commemoration and constitutional reception. They identify Padre Jean’s position within the institutional genealogy of resistance without attributing to him offices, documents, or organizations not established by the historical record.
CONSTITUTIONAL CONCLUSION
The Padre Jean insurgency of 1679 demonstrates that organized African resistance emerged simultaneously with the attempted consolidation of French colonial authority in northern Hispaniola.
Before Saint-Domingue became the principal plantation colony of the French Atlantic, enslaved Africans had already established the operational principles through which that order would ultimately be challenged: destruction of the slaveholder’s immediate authority, collective escape, recruitment, territorial movement, seizure of resources, mountain defense, inter-imperial maneuver, and organized armed confrontation.
The colonial government answered with the institutions available to it: commissioned buccaneers, settler militias, plantation defense, territorial pursuit, and lethal counter-insurgency. The confrontation therefore constituted more than an isolated act of violence. It was an early conflict between two incompatible jurisdictions.
The first jurisdiction treated African persons as transferable labor and colonial property.
The second arose when those persons reorganized themselves as armed political actors possessing command, movement, collective purpose, and the capacity to contest territory.
Padre Jean was killed, but the jurisdictional principle represented by his revolt was not extinguished. It persisted in subsequent maroon formations and in the accumulated political experience from which the general destruction of the slaveholding state would later emerge.

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA

SUPREME LEGISLATIVE INSTRUMENT ON THE STRUCTURED TRANSFRONTAL MOBILITY OF XARAGUAYAN INDIGENOUS PERSONS, THE PRESERVATION OF INTERCOMMUNAL RELATIONS, AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL ADMINISTRATION OF ACCESS DOSSIERS CONCERNING CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

Date of Promulgation: 4 August 2025

Consolidated Constitutional Form

LEGAL CLASSIFICATION

Supreme Instrument of Xaraguayan Indigenous Mobility Doctrine

Internal Constitutional Framework for the Certification of Identity, Lineage, Purpose, and Institutional Representation

Catholic-Institutional System of Genealogical and Sacramental Documentation

Non-Automatic and Individually Activated Transfrontal Procedure

Framework of Cooperation with Indigenous Nations, Religious Institutions, Academic Bodies, and Competent Public Authorities

Doctrine of Non-Invasive, Non-Expansionist, and Jurisdictionally Differentiated External Access

Instrument of Constitutional Concordance with UNDRIP, Applicable Immigration Law, Domestic Indigenous-Rights Frameworks, and Customary Intercommunal Relations

PREAMBLE

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua, acting through its Supreme Constitutional Authority and in the exercise of its competence to determine its membership, organize its institutions, preserve its genealogical and territorial archives, issue internal certifications, commission representatives, and maintain relations with other Indigenous peoples and lawful institutions, hereby promulgates the present Legislative-Pontifical Instrument.

The purpose of this Instrument is to establish a disciplined system through which persons recognized by SCIPS-X as Xaraguayan citizens, Indigenous descendants, institutional delegates, ecclesiastical affiliates, researchers, cultural custodians, or members of documented transnational family networks may obtain constitutional certification for travel, cultural contact, academic cooperation, religious activity, genealogical investigation, employment applications, or participation in Indigenous and community institutions situated in Canada and the United States.

The present Instrument does not constitute a generalized migration license, an indiscriminate authorization of settlement, or a unilateral displacement of the territorial jurisdiction exercised by Canada or the United States. It establishes the internal public law by which SCIPS-X shall identify eligible persons, authenticate their status, define the purpose of their proposed movement, prepare the corresponding documentary dossier, and engage the competent authorities or partner institutions through lawful channels.

Xaragua’s doctrine proceeds from the principle that international borders created by colonial and postcolonial governments must not be interpreted as extinguishing the capacity of Indigenous peoples to maintain spiritual, cultural, familial, political, educational, social, and economic relations across those borders. The implementation of that principle shall be institutional, documented, reciprocal, and consistent with the differentiated legal competence of every participating order.

TITLE I — CONSTITUTIONAL, INDIGENOUS, AND CATHOLIC-INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS

Article 1 — Constitutional Authority of SCIPS-X

1.1

The present Instrument is enacted under the constituent authority of SCIPS-X to regulate its own citizenship, internal membership, official documentation, institutional representation, customary affiliation, genealogical archives, religious orientation, and external relations.

1.2

SCIPS-X exercises exclusive internal competence to determine:

who is registered as a Xaraguayan citizen or institutional member;

which categories of Indigenous descent are recognized within its constitutional order;

which genealogical, territorial, customary, sacramental, and archival materials are admissible in its proceedings;

which representatives may act in the name of Xaragua;

which applications for external institutional cooperation shall receive state certification;

which certificates shall be suspended, revoked, amended, or renewed.

1.3

A Xaraguayan certification shall constitute an authoritative act within the legal order of SCIPS-X. Its reception by an external authority shall be governed by the law, policy, treaty obligations, administrative competence, and institutional discretion applicable in the receiving jurisdiction.

Article 2 — Catholic-Institutional Character

2.1

The Catholic character of SCIPS-X supplies the spiritual, ethical, educational, archival, and institutional matrix within which the present Instrument shall be administered.

2.2

Parish records, baptismal registers, marriage records, burial documentation, ecclesiastical correspondence, diocesan archives, missionary registers, and records of Catholic institutions may be admitted as evidence of family continuity, historical presence, religious affiliation, or migration.

2.3

Ecclesiastical documentation shall not be reduced to devotional material where it also possesses demonstrable genealogical, civil, territorial, matrimonial, or historical relevance. It shall be evaluated according to provenance, continuity, authenticity, jurisdiction, and correspondence with other records.

2.4

The use of the designation “Legislative-Pontifical” within this Instrument identifies the Catholic institutional orientation of the Xaraguayan legislative order and its commitment to concordance with the universal discipline of the Church. It does not transfer to SCIPS-X the sacramental, episcopal, or legislative authority reserved by canon law to the Roman Pontiff, diocesan bishops, episcopal conferences, or another competent ecclesiastical authority.

Article 3 — The Concordat of 1860 and Ecclesiastical Continuity

3.1

The Concordat concluded between the Holy See and Haiti in 1860 forms part of the historical legal environment through which Catholic dioceses, parishes, seminaries, schools, missions, and ecclesiastical archives were institutionally organized in the territory of Haiti.

3.2

SCIPS-X receives the Concordat as evidence of the historical continuity of Catholic institutions within the ancestral territory of Xaragua and as a documentary foundation for the preservation, identification, and consultation of ecclesiastical records affecting Xaraguayan families.

3.3

The Concordat shall support archival cooperation, sacramental verification, religious communication, ecclesiastical research, and institutional continuity. It shall not be interpreted as an immigration treaty governing entry into Canada or the United States.

Article 4 — Canonical Documentation and Juridical Personality

4.1

Canons governing the domicile of persons, juridic persons, associations of the faithful, ecclesiastical archives, particular Churches, and the rights and obligations of the Christian faithful may inform the Catholic institutional administration of Xaraguayan dossiers.

4.2

Where SCIPS-X, the University of Xaragua, or an affiliated institution possesses a juridical personality under civil, customary, private, or canonical arrangements, its competence shall be exercised within the exact order from which that personality proceeds.

4.3

No single juridical status shall be presumed to produce identical effects in every legal system. The institutional dossier shall therefore identify separately:

Xaraguayan constitutional status;

civil personality;

ecclesiastical status;

Indigenous affiliation;

immigration status;

academic or professional capacity;

relationship with the receiving institution.

TITLE II — INTERNATIONAL INDIGENOUS LAW AND TRANSFRONTAL RELATIONS

Article 5 — Article 36 of UNDRIP

5.1

The present Instrument is enacted in direct doctrinal concordance with Article 36 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognizes that Indigenous peoples, particularly those divided by international borders, possess the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations, and cooperation with their own members and other peoples across borders for spiritual, cultural, political, economic, and social purposes.

5.2

SCIPS-X receives Article 36 as the principal international standard governing its doctrine of transfrontal Indigenous relations.

5.3

The right recognized in Article 36 shall be implemented through:

direct relations among Indigenous institutions;

agreements with customary governments and communities;

cultural and spiritual visits;

academic and archival cooperation;

family and genealogical contact;

economic and professional arrangements;

applications before competent border and immigration authorities;

consultation with receiving institutions;

formal documentation of the purpose, duration, and jurisdictional character of the proposed access.

5.4

The Xaraguayan doctrine of Article 36 shall not be confined to state-administered migration. It shall include the autonomous right of Indigenous peoples to organize relations among themselves while respecting the public laws applicable to physical admission, residence, employment, and access to regulated services.

Article 6 — Articles 33 and 34 of UNDRIP

6.1

Pursuant to Article 33, SCIPS-X affirms its authority to determine its internal identity, membership, institutional structures, and procedures according to Xaraguayan customs and constitutional law.

6.2

Pursuant to Article 34, SCIPS-X affirms the right to maintain and develop its institutional structures, spirituality, customs, practices, and juridical procedures in conformity with international human-rights standards.

6.3

The authority to determine Xaraguayan membership shall govern the internal authenticity of certificates issued under this Instrument. External eligibility for a particular statutory program shall be determined under the legal conditions governing that program.

Article 7 — Articles 20 and 21 of UNDRIP

7.1

SCIPS-X recognizes the right of Indigenous peoples to maintain and develop their political, economic, and social institutions, preserve their means of subsistence, participate in economic activity, and improve their conditions in education, employment, housing, health, training, sanitation, and social security.

7.2

These principles shall govern Xaragua’s negotiations with partner institutions and its development of reciprocal Indigenous programs.

7.3

SCIPS-X shall prioritize the creation of its own institutional services and bilateral arrangements instead of making its citizens permanently dependent upon external programs whose eligibility rules are established without Xaraguayan participation.

Article 8 — Juridical Status of UNDRIP

8.1

UNDRIP constitutes an authoritative international declaration and a supreme interpretive framework within the internal Indigenous jurisprudence of SCIPS-X.

8.2

The legal implementation of its provisions within Canada and the United States shall operate through the constitutional law, legislation, judicial decisions, administrative measures, treaties, and policies of the respective jurisdiction.

8.3

SCIPS-X shall invoke UNDRIP as a normative, diplomatic, interpretive, and policy framework in every appropriate proceeding concerning transfrontal Indigenous relations.

Article 9 — ILO Convention No. 169

9.1

ILO Convention No. 169 shall be received within Xaraguayan doctrine as an authoritative international model concerning consultation, cultural protection, employment, institutions, territories, and the social and spiritual values of Indigenous and tribal peoples.

9.2

Its treaty obligations shall be invoked as binding only in relation to states for which the Convention is in force.

9.3

In relations with Canada and the United States, its provisions shall serve as comparative standards and instruments of institutional advocacy rather than as independently enforceable treaty obligations.

TITLE III — XARAGUAYAN CERTIFICATE OF STRUCTURED TRANSFRONTAL RELATIONS

Article 10 — Establishment of the Certificate

There is hereby established the Xaraguayan Certificate of Structured Transfrontal Relations, issued under the authority of SCIPS-X to eligible citizens, descendants, representatives, and institutional affiliates.

The Certificate shall identify:

the bearer’s Xaraguayan status;

the legal basis of registration;

the verified lineage or institutional affiliation;

the purpose of the proposed travel or cooperation;

the receiving community or institution, where known;

the period of validity;

the issuing authority;

the limitations attached to the instrument;

the supporting documentary record.

Article 11 — Classes of Certification

The Certificate may be issued under one or more of the following classes:

Class A — Indigenous Intercommunity Relations

For relations with an Indigenous nation, customary authority, tribal institution, cultural council, heritage body, or land-based community.

Class B — Religious and Spiritual Access

For participation in worship, pilgrimage, retreat, archival consultation, ecclesiastical study, sacred-site visitation, or another lawful religious purpose.

Class C — Academic and Archival Cooperation

For research, teaching, conferences, library access, museum work, archaeological cooperation, genealogical investigation, or institutional exchange.

Class D — Family and Genealogical Continuity

For documented family contact, genealogical research, reunification proceedings, ancestry verification, or participation in family institutions.

Class E — Economic and Professional Cooperation

For applications concerning lawful employment, training, commercial relations, professional services, Indigenous enterprise, or economic development.

Class F — Official Xaraguayan Representation

For constitutionally commissioned delegates acting on behalf of SCIPS-X or one of its authorized institutions.

Article 12 — Conditions of Eligibility

An applicant shall establish:

valid registration within SCIPS-X;

identity and civil documentation;

the asserted Indigenous, genealogical, religious, academic, or institutional relationship;

the precise purpose of the proposed access;

the identity of the host community or institution, where applicable;

compliance with the laws of the receiving jurisdiction;

absence of material misrepresentation;

acceptance of the limitations stated in the Certificate;

submission to the jurisdiction of SCIPS-X concerning the authenticity and use of the Certificate.

Article 13 — Genealogical and Archival Review

13.1

The competent Xaraguayan authority may examine:

civil-status records;

parish registers;

notarial acts;

censuses;

military records;

immigration and passenger records;

land records;

wills and successions;

family archives;

community testimony;

Indigenous registries;

genetic evidence;

historical scholarship;

records of enslavement, emancipation, displacement, or refugee migration.

13.2

Genetic evidence shall be treated as corroborative population or familial evidence and shall not independently establish citizenship, community membership, territorial title, or eligibility for an external program.

13.3

Shared surnames shall not independently establish common descent. Each lineage shall be reconstructed through documentary connection.

Article 14 — Security and Institutional Integrity

Certification shall be denied, suspended, or revoked where the applicant:

falsifies lineage or identity;

misrepresents the legal effect of the Certificate;

employs it to evade border inspection;

claims privileges not granted by the receiving jurisdiction;

engages in violence, trafficking, coercion, fraud, or organized subversion;

acts outside the scope of the mandate;

compromises the institutional integrity of SCIPS-X.

TITLE IV — CANADA

Article 15 — Constitutional Framework

15.1

Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, including the Indian, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada.

15.2

A claim by a non-citizen or non-resident to an Aboriginal right protected by section 35 shall be established through the applicable constitutional criteria, evidentiary procedures, and judicial doctrine. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that non-citizens and non-residents may, in appropriate circumstances, belong to a modern successor community capable of exercising an Aboriginal right in Canada.

15.3

SCIPS-X may prepare and support a dossier asserting such continuity where the applicant possesses documented membership in a rights-bearing successor community connected to territory now situated in Canada.

15.4

Xaraguayan citizenship or Taíno descent, standing alone, shall constitute an internal status of SCIPS-X. A section 35 claim shall additionally require the territorial, historical, communal, and legal connection demanded by Canadian constitutional law.

Article 16 — Admission into Canada

16.1

A Xaraguayan Certificate shall serve as supporting evidence of identity, institutional purpose, lineage, community relationship, or cultural mission.

16.2

Physical admission into Canada shall proceed under Canadian immigration, citizenship, border, refugee, treaty-rights, or special Indigenous-mobility measures applicable to the bearer.

16.3

SCIPS-X shall maintain liaison with Canadian Indigenous institutions and competent public authorities for the development of lawful mobility pathways, family reunification, cultural access, and recognition of documented transboundary communities.

Article 17 — Canadian Indigenous Programs

17.1

Eligibility for a federally, provincially, municipally, or Indigenous-administered program shall be governed by the statute, policy, treaty, funding agreement, or community rule establishing that program.

17.2

The Certificate may be submitted as evidence where eligibility permits consideration of:

Indigenous identity;

community affiliation;

ancestry;