Christianity and the American Indian - Research Paper Example

?I. INTRODUCTION A number of historical factors have contributed to the re-shaping of the lives of Native Americans. Europeans involved Native warriors in fighting wars among the colonizers1. Settlers brought diseases which Native immune systems were not developed to defend against. The railroad brought people who encouraged the government to divide up the land and allocate it to the newcomers. Political treachery resulted in broken treaties and massacres of Native Americans2. But aside from these material realities, and of far more reaching impact, was the profound clash of worldviews. Specifically, these worldviews were deeply rooted in religion and experiences of the sacred. It is the thesis of this paper that the influence of Christianity on Native American culture played a significant role in reshaping the lives of the Amerindians through suppression of spiritual ceremonies and a flagrant disregard for an existence considered to be based on superstition and ignorance. II. BODY Most of the European settlers who came to America were of a Christian religious orientation.3 A basic experience of the sacred in Christianity is that God is The Father. George Washington, and those who took up management of the “Indians” under his leadership and after his time, perceived the Europeans to be more civilized, of superior intelligence and leadership capability, and entrusted by God to represent His will in I II converting the “savages” to Christian values, beliefs, over-all perspective, and guidelines for living.4 It is every Christian’s duty to evangelize the “truth”. Government authority in White America, being Christian, must represent God to the Natives. The government presented itself as “Father”, or “The Great White Father”5 Identifying themselves as “Father” was a symbol of God-like self-perception, a belief in their own inviolable sacred authority. “Father”, from a patriarchal European mindset, indicated a belief in their own omnipotence and omniscience, an assumption that they know best. A father is responsible, loving, kind, truthful, supportive, caring, guiding his children in a right way. The White Father, on the other hand, was irresponsible, violent, continuously telling lies and betraying “his children”, enforcing policies that depleted Native resources and ruined the land, humiliated, insulted and starved the Indians. The path he led them on was intolerable and destructive. While the government and settlers forced conversion to Christianity, speaking of a Jesus who loved them, at the same time they were continuously punitive toward the Native Americans. Native children were eventually forced into mission-sponsored boarding schools where they were forced to join and attend Christian churches and demonstrate Christian ideals. Native language and religious traditions were strictly prohibited, and the slightest infractions were severely and violently punished6. III Their parents fared similarly. They suffered terrible challenges and limited resources on reservations. They were molded into helplessness, their traditional ways stripped from them. Practicing their religious traditions was legally forbidden.7 The law allowed Native spiritual leaders to be imprisoned up to 30 years.8. This was the law until 1978, when a new law was finally passed, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, recognizing the rights of the Native American sovereign nations to practice their own cultural and religious traditions9. This was followed, in 1993, by the Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act, which allowed religious use of peyote, s traditional practice critical to the spiritual practices of Peyote Indians.10 Of course, by then most of these traditions had been lost.. “Within four hundred years of their first contact, the white man had succeeded in stripping Native American civilizations of virtually all of their land and had nearly wiped their cultures from the face of the earth.11 The Christian concept of there being only one truth, Christian truth, was not congruent with Native American tradition. Jesus sacrificed himself to redeem them from death. Native Americans, however, had stories of the Corn Mother and White Buffalo Calf Woman, who had also sacrificed themselves for their children12. Furthermore, Corn Mother and White Buffalo Calf Woman did not require the destruction of Native IV American people and culture, the way Jesus apparently did, based on the demands of his alleged representatives on earth. Another point of conflict between Christian and Native American worldviews was in the area of ecological sacred trust. The White Man’s Christian God had reputedly authorized men to have power and dominion over the earth. This teaching led to an assumption of human superiority and a practice of exercising power over nature, and exploiting the land and its creatures for human purposes. Indians, being non-Christian and allegedly uncivilized, were relegated to the level of “creatures”, a group that maintaining power over was religiously justified. Developing the land and exploiting its resources was a White Man’s way of obeying God. Competition and defeat of inferior life forms was acceptable. Buffalo and mountains and Indians and rivers were appropriate targets of competition and defeat, thought to be sanctified by God. Native American ideology was framed much differently. Humans are part of nature, and all parts of nature are of equal status and worthy of equal respect. Killing an animal for food required a prayer of respect and apology.13 The earth is sacred. All forms of life are her children. Native Americans held an animate perspective, while European settlers and the White government held an inanimate perspective. An animate perspective sees all as containing Spirit. Even a rock or a grain of sand or a leaf of tobacco shares Spirit with humans. An inanimate perspective sees only material resources. V Christianity teaches that God breathed into man and he became a living soul. It does not emphasize that the breath of God was breathed into the rest of nature. So there is no encouragement to see God in the various parts of nature, and no encouragement to respect creation as inspirited and equal to man. A non-animate worldview engenders disrespectful competition, while an animate worldview engenders respectful cooperation. From the Christian perspective, nature is “other” to man. Man was banished from the original garden homeland and now must sweat and toil in competition with nature. From the Native American perspective, we are all part of the interconnected web of life, and this web vibrates with Spirit. Cooperation benefits the whole. This distinction is perhaps at the very heart of the tragic impact on Native America by Christianity. European settlers and the White government could not see outside of their inanimate worldview and so could not feel the interconnection that mobilizes cooperation. Out of their Christianity-justified model of competitive superiority, they could not refrain from destroying the land and existing culture. They could not appreciate the rituals, the drum beat, the dancing, the teaching stories, the shamanism, the natural healing methods, the spirit songs, the art, the values and ideals, parenting approaches, the active-learning educational approach, the cooperative governing councils, the ways of respect, the spirituality, the wisdom, the heart of Native America. Not seeing and not appreciating, they destroyed it. VI Even when some sacred value could be allocated to Native Americans, such as in the case of the Mormons who identified them as “Lamenites” (the Lost Tribe of Israelites), still even these Christians repossessed their homes, when they went on extended visits to relatives on reservations, to strengthen family ties. Even these Christians burned the homes they had provided, in exchange for conversion, and took back all the land except the cemetery14. Mormon Christians, along with Pentecostal Christians, are still insisting, even today, that Native Americans must convert and give up pow-wows, sweats, Sun Dances, Squaw Dances and other ceremonies that define their spiritual practices.15 Because Native American spirituality is not confined to a weekly church service but is inherent in every moment of daily living,16 the forced removal or re-scripting of Native American traditional spiritual practices engages the destruction of Native American identity. Even in today’s resurgence of Native American efforts to reconstruct identity and traditions of spirituality, Christianity is a contaminant. Sweat lodges are often started with a Christian cross17. Peyote, a shamanic entheogen, is now officially a sacrament, like communion, in the Native American church18. Native American converts to Christianity must content themselves with the occasional symbols of their old traditions, as they have been quietly woven into Christian church experience on reservations. For V!! example, in some Christian churches on reservations, there is a sacred pipe laid on the altar, next to the communion bread and wine19. A further distillation and distortion of traditional Native American spiritual traditions occurs with New Age adoption, unwelcome adaptation and commercialization of sweat lodges, drumming circles, pow-wows, peyote journeying, dream catchers, vision quests, medicine wheel teachings, the co-opting of Native American symbols for “Indian” jewelry and “Indian” fabric art, and lucrative weekend workshops in neo-shamanism where non-native participants circle fires, throw tobacco in and learn to say, “Ho”, believing that they are now upholders of Native American tradition and just as ignorant as their ancestors who considered Native spirituality to be all superstition. III. CONCLUSION From a non-native perspective, these materials are there for the taking. From a Native American perspective, almost everything has been forcibly taken, legislated against, punished, betrayed, suppressed, flagrantly disregarded, distorted, marginalized, mocked, mislabeled and destroyed. Growing up in alcohol-challenged environments, depressing urban slums and on depressing reservations, funded by casinos and tourist dollars, interpreted by White anthropologists and White social workers, managed by White Christianity-based values and White Christianity-oriented government bodies, educated into the White version of Christianity-filtered history, always confronted by loss and no longer certain what exactly was there before it became lost, they suffer. Cannot some few tatters of cultural and spiritual dignity remain? BIBLIOGRAPHY Miller, Eric, "George Washington And Indians", 1984, accessed 23 May 2011 http://www.dreric.org/library/northwest.shtml Orrin, M., “Seeking Native American Spirituality: Read This First”, Native Languages of the Americas Website, last updated 2011, accessed 23 May 2011, http://www.native-languages.org/religion.htm Roller, Julia, , “Native and Christian”, accessed 23 May 2011, http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/nm/julia/history.html Ruvolo, David, “A Summary of Native American Religions”, accessed 23 May 2011, http://are.as.wvu.edu/ruvolo.htm Turabian, Kate L, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 124) Wikipedis, s.v. “Americanization of Native Americans” (hereafter called Wikipedia), last updated 22 April 2011 Read More