With Drum and Cup

He is, as he describes it, of mixed blood:

"Osage is my tribe of enrollment on my father's side; my mother was a Lutheran." These days both lines of his heritage interact to define just who he is.

In the mid-1970s, Tinker spent several years in Berkeley, California, first studying for ordination at Pacific Lutheran Seminary and then for a doctorate in Bible at Graduate Theological Union. While in the Bay area, which has the largest concentration of American Indians in the United States, Tinker organized a ministry to work as an agent of healing with Native American people in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.

Tinker believes that the church, which has historically been part of the oppressive authority over the Indian community, must participate in healing -- "self-healing" -- with Indian people. After years of organizing at the local level, Tinker made the difficult transition into the academic world by accepting a position at Iliff School of Theology in Denver teaching multicultural ministries. As associate pastor of Living Waters, a joint Episcopal-Lutheran parish, he brings together his faith and heritage into a common tapestry, and at Iliff he shares that vision with a new generation of pastors-to-be.

George Tinker was interviewed by Bob Hulteen at the Sojourners magazine office in Washington, DC, while he was in town to participate in planning an alternative response to the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival. He discusses the need to address historical inaccuracies in American mythology, the seductive allure of assimilation for Indian people, the appropriate response for the church in reconciliation, and the effects of New Age spirituality on Native Americans.

-- The Editors

Sojourners: You are here planning for what will be the "celebration of Columbus' discovery of America" 500 years ago. You have said about the anniversary that white people should be thinking differently, that we misunderstand the event. How would you say it should be characterized?

George Tinker: I think the whole notion of celebrating Columbus Day is part of the American foundational mythology. It is an illusion that people on this continent live with. My argument would be that living that illusion is not healthy for white Americans, that it is in fact living a lie.

You have to understand that from an American Indian perspective, celebrating the Columbus quincentenary is in fact celebrating Indian genocide. Indian people like to remind white Americans that the only thing Columbus discovered was that he was lost. About half a world lost.

Actually Columbus didn't even discover that he was lost. He died thinking that he had found Asia.

Another example of that mythology is the myth that George Armstrong Custer was a general, when in fact he was a mere lieutenant colonel, and not a very bright one at that. People believe he died a heroic death in a massacre, when in fact it was not a massacre. It was a fair fight in which Custer pulled off a surprise attack on the Indians. It just turns out that the Indians were stronger.

The mythology of Columbus begins with the notion that he was a scientific adventurer who was trying to prove that the Earth was round. But flat-Earth notions were only held at the uneducated popular level in Europe. The academicians all knew the world was round. In fact, notions of a round Earth go back to Greek philosophy in the West. Many American Indian tribes already knew that the world was round.

So for more than half a century before Columbus sailed, people had been playing with the notion of making that trip; they had plotted it and planned it. The only question was, How long before you landed? There was no notion of falling off the Earth.

Another aspect of the Columbus mythology that needs to be shattered is that he was an esoteric scientist trying to make a point. In fact, that voyage was engaged in for one purpose only -- to become wealthy. Columbus expected to become wealthy. He had promised his bankers, and the King and Queen of Spain, Isabel and Ferdinand, that they would become more wealthy. And in the long run they did exactly that.

The other side of it for Indians is the result of Columbus's misadventures: 10 years after Columbus's arrival on the island of San Salvador, the entire population, estimated to be 100,000 people, perished. Within 30 years, nearly the entire population on the island of Hispaniola perished. Bartolome de Las Casas [famous 16th-century priest and historian] says there were three million people on Hispaniola alone.

Within 58 years -- by mid-century in the 1500s -- the population of Mexico was reduced by 80 percent, from 25 million to five million. That's the kind of genocide we are talking about.

For American Indian people, it's not a matter of being anti-Hispanic or anti-Italian. But Columbus becomes the symbol of the continuing genocide of Indian people, because of what happened in the Caribbean, and then in Mexico, and then in South America.

It happened under the aegis of the British in Virginia and the English Puritans in the Northeast. And it has simply continued, usually with some pretense of wanting to take care of the Indians, civilize them, Christianize them. That's especially true when people want to deprive Indians of their land.

Part of the problem today is that Indians are such a small minority of the population on this continent. What may have been 25, or 30, or even 40 million people in 1492 has been reduced in the United States to one and a half million. Unlike black people, who are a political factor because they approach 20 percent of the population, Indians are not a political factor.

Sojourners: There's a clear line through history, both here in the United States and in countries around the world, of the ongoing genocide of indigenous people. Is there any multinational effort to bring together the peoples who are being killed, primarily at the hands of historically European people?

Tinker: For centuries, Indians in the jungles of Peru, Brazil, and other Central and South American countries were left largely undisturbed because the jungles were uninhabitable by the European immigrants and economically unfeasible. Now, as the population has grown and technologies have been developed to clear the jungle, Indians' lands are being taken away from them.

We in North America seem to have an ecological interest in saving the rainforests. But we are also complicitous in causing their demise, because we control the economic system that has generated such a horrendous Third World debt that the Third World countries can only satisfy the debt by using up the resources they have. One way of doing that is clearing rainforests and creating cattle ranges to provide Burger King and McDonalds with ground beef.

What happens to the people living in these areas when such change occurs? The reports we get, repeatedly, continually these days, especially from Brazil, state that Indians are simply being massacred in order to deprive them of their land. They are being massacred by private armies of entrepreneurs and big ranchers who are laying claim to the land, homesteading it.

A number of Indian organizations are struggling to make their voices heard. I suppose that's the hope for the future -- some sort of coalition among "Fourth World" peoples around the globe, including aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders. The Maouris in the Pacific are particularly strong on some of these issues. Indigenous people include many Africans, many Asians, and many oppressed groups in India.

Sojourners: What would you say to the environmental movement that focuses its attention on the rainforests, with little concern for the people whose entire subsistence is being destroyed? Is there a difference between the ecological concern and the justice concern?

Tinker: At one level you'll find Indian people in general support of the environmental movement for religious and theological reasons, not just for survival reasons. To treat the earth with respect is an Indian way of existing.

On the other hand, the justice concerns of people, and not just Indian people but all people, have to exceed issues of peace and ecology. The World Council of Churches, since Nairobi in 1975, has consistently talked of justice and peace, not peace and justice. Justice must precede peace.

The WCC tried to get it right with "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation." Some of us think they were just playing pin the tail on the donkey and that maybe there's a religious concern, a spiritual concern, for creation that needs to come first as the foundation for justice. But that is not solely an ecological concern.

There's been criticism from a lot of poor people -- marginalized people -- that the ecology movement has detracted from justice issues. I think that's a legitimate concern.

Sojourners: Could you say a little more about the importance of the land and the sense of creation preceding justice? It is very hard for most white Americans to comprehend an Indian's perspective on land and its ownership.

Tinker: Indian people look at the land as generative. It is where we come from. It's not something we possess or own. Land ownership is a Western European philosophical notion that's become rooted in political and economic systems.

When the Europeans first came to this country, they created legal and theological fictions that allowed them to take over Indian land. They said the Indians didn't really occupy the land, because they just roamed the land. Doctrines of vacant dominion developed. And if Indians died in a plague, the Puritans considered it an act of God to open it up to them because then there weren't enough Indians to occupy it.

There were consistent efforts in the 19th century to teach Indians private ownership of property because it was considered the civilized way of existing. Of course, what it did was destroy the structure of Indian society and culture and meant that Indians were reduced to levels of existence that forced codependent relationships upon the U.S. government.

As Indians were no longer able to take care of themselves, they had to rely on government subsidies and handouts. That codependency continues to this day -- in the relationship of Indian people to the church as well as to U.S. government agencies such as Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service.

Indians believe that the Creator put them in a specific place and that is their place. To move to another place is a very hard thing to do, and people die when they move. The Osages did not thrive when we were moved out of Missouri and into Kansas. And when we were moved out of Kansas and into Oklahoma it became even worse. That's the story of many, many tribes that were relocated in Indian territory, where they had to learn to live in relationship to a new land.

The relationship to a land is not only a spiritual relationship; it's one of physical economy as well. You know the land; you know the sacred sites; you know the medicines, the herbs, the foods that grow there and where they grow.

When you are moved to a new place, you suddenly don't have access to those things anymore, so that many of your patterns for religious ceremonies and observances are broken. How can you have a ceremony if you don't have access to the various things of the land that you need to conduct that ceremony?

And I guess I should say straight out that the gospel was not liberating for Indian people but was a form of bondage. It's not the gospel that's not liberating, though; it's the proclamation of the gospel that puts Indians in bondage. Consistently the missionaries of the European churches in all of our denominations confused gospel with European culture. The gospel they proclaimed was the gospel of "civilization," of a "superior culture." Steven R. Riggs, a 19th-century Presbyterian missionary in South Dakota, literally called it the "gospel of soap."

One wonders if we have to give up our Old Testament in order to leap into the New Testament -- the new covenant in Jesus. Yet Indian people were forced to disassociate themselves from their old ways -- from their religion and their culture.

In order to do that, they have to engage in an act of self-hatred and self-denial. They have to look at what they were and say, "All of that was evil." The Puritans said it straightforwardly: "The Indians are the legions of Satan."

Sojourners: Are they still doing that today?

Tinker: Of course. I think there are white missionaries who are trying to be much more sensitive. And some are extremely good and extremely faithful. But we have two problems. One is that we have a lot of white missionaries in all of our denominations who buy into that colonial mentality and are about the business of whipping Indians into shape culturally. It happens.

The other problem is that the institutional structures of church, just like the institutional structures of government, continue to impose themselves on Indian people. It may be on a subconscious level, but they nevertheless forcefully, powerfully, require a cultural shift toward assimilation. I suspect that most people in our North American churches believe in their heart of hearts that the solution to the "Indian problem" is assimilation.

Sojourners: And they become so angry when efforts toward assimilation aren't welcomed. They condemn Indians' desire for self-sufficiency, and they do it in pious language.

Tinker: That's right. It's, "How dare you Indians be that way when we offered you what we never offered black people, in order to make you white?" The oppression is different in those two cases.

You see, white America wants change to happen on its own terms. White people want reconciliation. They can't understand that their insistence on reconciliation is an insistence that it happen on their terms.

My colleague [at Iliff] Vincent Harding has an interesting analogy. He's a black historian of enormous repute. He says that for years white America was busy building this house, and then had people from different cultural groups living in the yards or the shanties around the house.

The liberal contribution since the civil rights activity of the '60s has been to say, "We have to open our house and invite these people to come in and stay." But the problem, as Vincent says, is, "It's still their house. We're still guests." We need to think about building a new house where everybody gets equal say in its design and has equal ownership. Then we need to tear that old house down.

Sojourners: Liberation theology as it's been given to us by Central Americans, South Africans, and others has helped people who are oppressed to find their place in the gospel story. You are a New Testament scholar. Do American Indian people find themselves in the Bible story?

Tinker: I think the gospel can speak forcefully to Indian people. There's no doubt about that. But I think Indian people have to be free finally to determine what the gospel is themselves instead of being told what the gospel is.

The problem is that too many missionaries seem to be under the impression that Indian people are incapable of having a spiritual thought without pastoral coaching. I think liberation theology can eventually have an impact on Indian people. It hasn't yet.

We haven't figured out liberation modes for interpreting the gospel. We are consumers of the denominational theologies of our churches, period. That's what has to change.

The problem with Latin American liberation theology, first of all, is that it is given over to Marxist thought. For American Indians that is wholly inadequate and inappropriate. It is replacing one Western philosophical economic system with another. Marxist thought does not pay attention to the realities of indigenous cultures. It can't. It is a social and political movement that lumps people together into some amorphous, cultural whole called "the people."

What's happened in Latin America is that Indian people have consistently been oppressed -- and not only by Third World governments that are rightist, but by leftist governments as well. The Sandinista experiment came crashing down, according to Pravda -- and I would tend to agree with their editorial assessment -- because Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas had alienated Indian people and lost the Indian vote.

I'm sure at some point the Sandinistas tried to correct the situation, but they were never able to. There was a consistent Indian resistance movement that was not contra. It rarely got written about in the American press. It was not anti-American particularly, but it certainly wasn't pro-American either.

I'm talking about Brooklyn Rivera, the appointed leader of the Miskito Indians, who, by the way, now has a cabinet-level position in the Violeta Chamorro government. Well, it hasn't been reported in this country, because it ain't important, right?

Let me say one other thing about Marxism not fitting Indian people. Sometimes in the debate that goes on, one is led to believe that there are only two options -- capitalism and Marxism. Indian people by and large would stand opposed to both because of their cultural, economic, and social impact on Indian people.

Indian people would far quicker say, "We should simply be allowed to have our own way of doing things." And since 1492 that has not been the case. Things have been imposed upon us by an outside, militarily superior force. And of course Europeans confuse military superiority with cultural superiority.

Sojourners: It seems to me that Indian people have much to evangelize white America about in terms of finding some of those things that white America has lost.

Tinker: I'd go a step further and say that Indian people may have an understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ that is more authentic than white Americans' understanding of the gospel.

It seems to me that much of the gospel has been interpreted throughout history by Europeans and Americans. Before long it is not the gospel that is being interpreted but an interpretation of the gospel. Some things become so commonplace that you can't think of understanding them differently.

The kingdom of God has consistently been understood in temporal terms by Europeans, primarily Lutheran New Testament scholars, beginning a century ago. The kingdom of God was dealt with as a question of when it is going to happen. The question of where it is was consistently disallowed, that's not at stake.

It's a question of eschatology: When will it happen? And you get all these jargonized responses of realized eschatology, actualized eschatology, imminent eschatology.

I would argue that the European intellectual tradition is fundamentally temporal, with spatial aspects being subordinate to this primary category of time. But Indian people are just the opposite. We're spatial, rooted in the land. And when we read about the kingdom of God, the first and only thought to come naturally to Indian people is, "Well, we don't know much about kings and kingdoms, but it must be someplace. It must be somewhere."

As Indian people we wrestle with that, and I've wrestled with it out loud with numerous Indian groups and Indian people: The kingdom of God has got to be right here. In other words, it becomes a metaphor for creation.

Jesus' call to repent, to return to the kingdom, is a call to come into a proper relationship with the rest of creation, and with the Creator. A proper relationship recognizes that I am simply a part of the creation, one of God's creatures along with the other two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, the wingeds, and the other living, moving things -- including the trees, the grass, the rocks, the mountains.

All those things are relative. That's the universal Indian notion of the interrelationship of all things in creation. Human beings are a part of creation -- not apart from it and somehow free to use it up or abuse it.

This is a whole different slant on the kingdom of God and, immediately and implicitly, on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Sojourners: The New Age movement claims to have adopted what its leaders say is a native spirituality or outlook on creation. How do you feel about that?

Tinker: I think it is misguided, for a number of reasons. One is that there is a great romanticizing of Indian people and Indian spirituality.

There is also a great dearth of spiritual rootedness in white America, so people are really searching. And that's real, that's legitimate. But they're searching in the wrong places. They are searching to appropriate somebody else's spirituality instead of working within their own culture to uncover what is there.

When people come to the Indian world and try to appropriate Indian spirituality in that New Age fashion, a number of things happen. People such as Lynn Andrews [author of Medicine Woman and Crystal Woman: The Sisters of the Dreamtime] make a lot of money at it. They also make up information.

We now know from public press revelations, for instance, that Lynn Andrews never was in conversation with Indian women elders in Canada. The whole thing was a fabrication. But it's worth $10,000 per lecture. Real Indian spiritual leaders don't earn that kind of money.

New Age thinking quite often is economically motivated. A lot of New Age people out there are ripping off Indian things and making money at it.

For some people it is just a way of enhancing their own private spirituality. In fact, for most New Agers, Native American beliefs provide a way of enhancing private spirituality. That is as un-Indian as you can get.

White people come out to dance a sun dance in order to accumulate some sense of spiritual self-worth, when in fact one doesn't dance the sun dance for that reason. We dance the sun dance so that the people in that place might live. Why would somebody drive all the way from Texas to South Dakota to dance the sun dance so that the people in Rosebud might live? Well, they don't. They drive that far to prove themselves.

And in the process those lies creep into Indian thinking. I find it horribly destructive of Indian people for whites to be involved in Indian things that are that intense, that private, that intimate.

I don't think that Indian people ought to try to make Indians out of white Americans. We can model our spirituality in ways that enable our white brothers and sisters to reclaim their own spirituality. That is part of evangelism because, you see, there is no doubt in the Indian mind that white Americans are brothers and sisters, relatives, just as much as the others of the four nations of the earth -- the black nation, the red nation, the yellow nation, and the white nation.

The white American church needs to hear this, especially since it has been a part of the problem, not the solution. In my opinion, part of the churches' own spiritual need is to engage in acts of confession and repentance, of reconciliation and healing. But still I draw inspiration and energy from my church more than anything else, and from the people. I am the associate pastor of an Indian church in a very poor community. My church is a community of people who are really struggling to affirm both their commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ and their Indianness at the level of culture, ideas, spirituality. We are struggling to understand the gospel from an Indian perspective.

It's very clear that we will no longer have an interpretation of the gospel imposed on us by anyone. We will even resist having the structure of the congregation imposed on us by judicatory authorities.

We've tried to say consistently, "No, we'll decide what we ought to be doing, and what will be healing to the Indian community ."The vision is one of healing and wholeness for the Indian community, so that my congregation is extremely active in the urban Indian community, and many are active still in their connections back home on the reservation.

When we are together in prayer several things happen. First of all, we bring our Indian identity into the liturgy. Second, we show respect always to the traditional religion of our tribes, to the traditional spiritual leaders; and in conversation with them we have brought some of that with us into our liturgy. We might quite naturally have a medicine man in church on Sunday, and we would have that medicine man pray for us. Usually those people would also come to Communion.

Third, we affirm our Indian identity, and we bring those things from the tradition into our service. We use a drum and we sing traditional ceremony songs, prayer songs, not Christian, as the proper preface to our Holy Communion.

When we celebrate Communion, our people are very, very clear that Christ is present on the altar. More clear I think than white Episcopal and Lutheran churches. The power of Christ is present in body and blood and spirit.

The fourth item is that our people speak for themselves. They don't need pastoral leadership to tell them what it is they are about. When we go to conferences, Indian ministry conferences, it is invariably the case that as we go around the room it is the pastor or ministry director who gets up to report. When it comes around to Living Waters, somebody will reach over and touch me on the shoulder and say, "It's all right, we'll take care of it."

Last summer we had eight people in the congregation who danced in four different sun dances. Of course the missionaries have said all along that those ceremonies are pagan and we can't do that. Our people insist that they are free in the gospel, free in Christ Jesus, to participate in Indian religious forms and ceremonies. We intend to live in that freedom.