Theologian George Tinker claims indigenous traditions and spirituality as the true roots of his American Indian theology of liberation. These traditions are based on an understanding of existence radically different from that of traditional Western and liberation theologies. Tinker calls for respect for distinct indigenous spiritualities and cultures, and also for allowing these perspectives to critique Western approaches to theology.
Tinker was assistant professor of cross-cultural ministries at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and associate pastor of Living Waters, a joint Episcopal-Lutheran Indian parish, when this article appeared. This article is adapted from a speech he delivered to the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 1992. - The Editors
This is a challenge to hear the voices of indigenous peoples.
We make up a Fourth World, if you will, oppressed both by the powerful nations and by the so-called developing nations. As Fourth World peoples we share with our Third World relatives the hunger, poverty, and repression that have been the continuing common experience of those overpowered by the expansionism of European adventurers and their missionaries 500 years ago.
What distinguishes Fourth World indigenous peoples from Third World peoples, however, are deeper, more hidden, but no less deadly effects of colonialism that impact our distinct cultures in dramatically different ways. These effects are especially felt in the indigenous spiritual experience, and our struggle for liberation is within the context of this distinctive spirituality.
Our liberation struggle has been overlooked, until recently, in Third World liberation theology models of social change, which often remained inappropriate and ineffective in the struggle of indigenous people for self-determination. In fact, most liberation theologies' themes were derived from the very modes of discourse of the Western academy against which indigenous peoples have struggled for centuries. These modes--whether theological, legal, political, economic, or even the so-called social sciences--have shaped colonial, neo-colonial, and now Marxist regimes that, in the name of development, modernization, or even solidarity, have inflicted spiritual genocide on Fourth World peoples.
Gustavo Gutierrez, the foremost thinker on liberation theology, argues four important points: (1) liberation theology should focus on the "non-person" rather than on the non-believer; (2) liberation theology is a historical project that sees God as revealed in history; (3) liberation theology makes a revolutionary socialist choice on behalf of the poor; and (4) liberation theology emerges out of the praxis of the people. The latter emphasis on praxis is perhaps the most enduring and pervasive gift of liberation theology.
However, a Native American theology finds the emphasis on the historical unsuitable and begins with a much different understanding of Gutierrez' category of the non-person. Moreover, Native American culture and spirituality implies different political solutions from those currently imposed by any socialist paradigm. In the context of these differences, my hope is for constructive dialogue leading to mutual understanding and solidarity between Third and Fourth World peoples and an advance of genuine and wholistic liberation.
Resistance to Class Categories
IN AN EARLY ESSAY in the progressive theology journal Concilium, Gutierrez described the meaning of the "non-person" in language that strongly distinguished the concern of liberation theology from the rest of modern theology:
Much contemporary theology seems to start from the challenge of the non-believer. He [or she] questions our religious world and faces it with a demand for profound purification and renewal....This challenge in a continent like Latin America does not come primarily from the man [or woman] who does not believe, but from the man who is not a man, who is not recognized as such by the existing social order: He is in the ranks of the poor, the exploited; he is the man who is systematically and legally despoiled of his being as a man, who scarcely knows that he is a man. His challenge is not aimed first at our religious world, but at our economic, social, political and cultural world; therefore it is an appeal for the revolutionary transformation; of the very bases of a dehumanizing society....What is implied in telling this man who is not a man that he is a son of God?
This powerful statement names the alienation of marginalized poor and oppressed peoples and the impetus for a liberation theology response to people who suffer under unjust systems. However, it falls short in naming the particularities of indigenous peoples' suffering of non-personhood. The very affirmation of Third World "non-persons" tends to continue what has been, in praxis, a disaffirmation of indigenous people for now 500 years in the Americas.
While he avoids the language of explicit political programs, Gutierrez, like other Latin American theologians, explicitly and implicitly identifies the preferential option for the poor with socialist and even implied Marxist solutions that analyze the poor in terms of social class structure. This overlooks the crucial point that indigenous peoples experience their very personhood in terms of their relationship to the land. These theologians' analyses are powerful and effective to a point, but by reducing the non-person to a class of people that share certain universal attributes, some more telling attributes are disregarded.
Native American peoples resist categorization in terms of class structure. Instead, we insist on being recognized as "peoples," even nations, with a claim to national sovereignty based on ancient title to our land. Classification, whether as "working class" or "the poor," continues the erosion of our cultural integrity and national agenda. As much as capitalist economic structures--including the church (missionaries) and the academy (anthropologists)--have reduced Native American peoples to non-personhood, so too the Marxist agenda fails finally to recognize our distinct personhood.
Reducing our nationness to classness imposes upon us a particular culture of poverty and especially a culture of labor. It begs the question as to whether indigenous peoples desire production in the modern economic sense in the first place. To put the means of production into the hands of the poor eventually makes the poor exploiters of indigenous peoples and their natural resources. Finally, it seriously risks violating the very spiritual values that hold an indigenous cultural group together as a people.
This is not to suggest simply discarding Marxist or other tools of analysis. Rather, this is a constructive critique of these tools and the implicit hegemony they exercise in much of our midst in the Third World.
THE FAILURE TO recognize the distinct personhood of Native American peoples has a history as long as the history of European colonialism and missionary outreach in the Americas. In particular, it should be noted that the church's failure to recognize the personhood of Native Americans was the most devastating. Less direct than the military (yet always accompanied by it), missionaries consistently confused the gospel of Jesus Christ with the gospel of European cultural values and social structures. They saw our cultures and our social structures as inadequate and needing to be replaced with what they called a "Christian civilization."
Many liberation theology and socialist movements in general promise no better than the continued cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. From an American Indian perspective, the problem with modern liberation theology, as with Marxist political movements, is that class analysis gets in the way of recognizing cultural discreetness and even personhood. Small but culturally unique communities stand to be swallowed up by the vision of a classless society, of an international workers' movement, or of a burgeoning majority of Third World urban poor. This too is cultural genocide and signifies that indigenous peoples are yet non-persons, even in the light of the gospel of liberation.
God in Place and Time
IN THE POWER OF the Poor in History, Gutierrez argues that God reveals God's self in history. I assert that this is not only not a self-evident truth, but that Native American theology that is true to our culture must begin with a confession that is both dramatically different from and exclusive of Gutierrez' starting point. Essentially, a Native American theology must argue out of spiritual experience and praxis that God reveals God's self in creation, in space or place and not in time.
The Western sense of history as a linear temporal process means that those who heard the gospel first have and always maintain a critical advantage over those of us who hear it later and have to rely on those who heard it first to give us a full interpretation. This has been our consistent experience with the gospel as it has been preached to us by the missionaries of all the denominations, just as it has been our experience with the political visions proclaimed to us by the revolutionaries.
The problem, from 16th-century historian Las Casas to Marx, is the assumption of a hegemonic trajectory through history that fails to recognize cultural distinctions. With the best of intentions, solutions to oppressed peoples' suffering are proposed as exclusive programs that don't allow for diverse possibilities.
Whatever the conqueror's commitment, to evangelization and conversion or to military subjugation and destruction, it was necessary to make the conquest decisive--at military, political, economic, social, legal, and religious levels. And just as the conquest had to be decisive, so too must modern revolutions be decisive. They allow no room for peoples who consider themselves distinct--economically, politically, socially, and culturally--to find their own revolution or liberation.
A prime example was the situation of the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution. Summarily relocated from their coastal territories, where they had self-sustaining local economies, to high-altitude communal coffee plantations, Miskito peoples were forced to labor as culturally amorphous workers with no regard to the abject cultural dislocation they had suffered. The Miskito Indians had been a people; the removal from their land reduced them to a class whose cultural identity could not be a factor.
Whether in capitalist or socialist guise, then, history and temporality reign supreme in the West. On the other hand, Native American spirituality and values, social and political structures, and even ethics are rooted not in some temporal notion of history but in spatiality. This is perhaps the most dramatic (and largely unnoticed) cultural difference between Native American thought and the Western intellectual tradition.
The question is not whether time or space is missing in one culture or the other, but which is dominant. Of course Native Americans have a temporal awareness, but it is subordinate to our sense of place. Likewise, the Western tradition has a spatial awareness, but it lacks the priority of the temporal. Hence, progress, history, development, evolution, and process become key notions that invade all academic discourse in the West, from science and economics to philosophy and theology. History becomes the quintessential Western intellectual device.
If Marxist thinking and the notion of a historical dialectic were finally proven correct, then American Indian people and all indigenous peoples would be doomed. Our cultures and value systems, our spirituality, and even our social structures, would give way to an emergent socialist structure that would impose a notion of the good on all people regardless of ethnicity or culture.
Drawn Together in Creation
ONE COULD ARGUE with Native American peoples that we must learn to compromise with the "real world," that to pursue our own cultural affectations is to swim upstream against the current of the modern socioeconomic world system. When rightists or capitalists of any shade assert this, I know they are arguing the self-interest or prerogatives of those who own the system. When Third or Fourth World peoples make the argument, I am curious how readily some of us concede to Western categories of discourse. How easily we internalize the assumption that Western, Euro-American philosophical, theological, economic, social, spiritual, and political systems are necessarily definitive of any and all conceivable "real" worlds.
Native Americans think that our perception of the world is just as adequate, perhaps more satisfying, and certainly more egalitarian than the West's. In order to sense the power of our culturally integrated structures of cognition, a beginning understanding of Native American spirituality is necessary, for all of existence is spiritual for us. That is our universal starting point, even though we represent a multitude of related cultures, with a great variety of tribal ceremonial structures expressing that spirituality.
That the primary metaphor of existence for Native Americans is spatial does much to explain the fact that American Indian spirituality and American Indian existence itself are deeply rooted in the land, and why our conquest and removal from our lands was so culturally and genocidally destructive to our tribes. There is, however, a more subtle level to this sense of spatiality and land rootedness. It shows up in nearly all aspects of our existence, in our ceremonial structures, our symbols, our architecture, and in the symbolic parameters of a tribe's universe.
The fundamental symbol of Plains Indians' existence is the circle, a symbol signifying the family, the clan, the tribe, and eventually all of creation. Because it has no beginning and no end, all in the circle are of equal value.
In its form as a medicine wheel, with two lines forming a cross inscribed vertically and horizontally across its whole, the circle can symbolize the four directions of the Earth, and more important, the four manifestations of Wakonta (the Sacred Mystery, Creator, God) that come to us from these directions. Native American egalitarian tendencies are worked out in this spatial symbol in ways that go far beyond the classless egalitarianism of socialism.
In one layer of meaning, these four directions hold together in the same equal balance the four nations of Two-leggeds, Four-leggeds, Wingeds, and Living-moving Things--encompassing all that is created, the trees and rocks, mountains and rivers, as well as animals. Human beings lose their status of primacy and "dominion." In other words, American Indians are driven implicitly and explicitly by their culture and spirituality to recognize the personhood of all "things" in creation. When the Lakota peoples of North America pray Mitakuye ouyasin, "For all my relatives," they understand relatives to include not just tribal members, but all of creation.
THIS MATRIX OF cultural response to the world that we might call spirituality continues to have life today in North America among our various Indian tribes, even for those who remain in the church and continue to call themselves Christian. More and more frequently today, Indian Christians are holding on to the old traditions as their way of life and claiming the freedom of the gospel to honor and practice them as integral to their inculturated expression of Christianity.
Today there can be no genuine American Indian theology that does not take our indigenous traditions seriously. This means, of course, that our reading of the gospel and our understanding of faithfulness will represent a radical disjuncture from the theologies and histories of the Western churches of Europe and America--as we pay attention to our stories and memories instead of to theirs.
This inculturation of an indigenous theology is symbolic of American Indian resistance and struggle today. More than symbolic, it gives life to the people. However, we also see the possibility that our interpretations can prove renewing, redeeming, and salvific for Western theology and ecclesiology.
An American Indian theology coupled with an American Indian reading of the gospel might provide the theological imagination to generate a more immediate and attainable vision of a just and peaceful world. Respect for creation must necessarily result in justice, just as genuine justice necessarily is the achievement of peace.
We understand repentance as a call to be liberated from our perceived need to be God and instead to assume our rightful place in the world as humble human beings in the circle of creation with all the other created. While Euro-cultural scholars have offered consistently temporal interpretations of the gospel concept basileia ("kingdom") of God, an American Indian interpretation builds on a spatial understanding rooted in creation. If basileia has to do with God's hegemony, where else is God actually to reign if not in the entirety of the place that God has created?
While God revealing God's self in history holds out some promise for achieving justice and peace in some eventual future moment, the historical/temporal impetus must necessarily delay any full realization of the basileia of God. Instead, American Indian spirituality calls us to image ourselves here and now as mere participants in the whole of creation, with respect for and reciprocity with all of creation, and not somehow apart from it and free to use it up at will. The latter is a mistake that was and is epidemic in both the First and Second Worlds and has been recklessly imposed on the rest of us in the name of development.
This understanding of basileia and repentance mandates new social and political structures, genuinely different from those created by either of the dominant Euro-cultural structures of capitalism or socialism. The competition generated by Western individualism, temporality, and paradigms of history, progress, and development must give way to the communal notion of inter-relatedness and reciprocity.
I am not espousing a value-neutral creation theology in the style of Matthew Fox or a New Age spirituality of feel-good individualism. Rather, ultimately this is an expression of a "theology of community" that must generate a consistent interest in justice and peace.
If I image myself as a vital part of a community, indeed as a part of many communities, it becomes more difficult for me to act in ways that are destructive of these communities. The desire or perceived necessity for exerting social, political, economic, or spiritual control over each other gives way to mutual respect, not just for individuals, but for our culturally distinct communities.
If we believe we are all relatives in this world, then we must live together differently than we have. Justice and peace, in this context, emerge almost naturally out of a self-imaging as part of the whole, as part of an ever-expanding community that begins with family and tribe, but is finally inclusive of all human beings and all of creation. Such is the spirit of hope that marks the American Indian struggle of resistance in the midst of a world of pain.
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