Native Americans
I attended a majority white high school in the late '70s and since that time my life has been one cross-cultural bowl of spaghetti. It tastes good but is really messy, sometimes sauce all over your shirt.
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SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE stand on the grass waiting to enter the auditorium for the opening service of a Christian conference. People are holding bold, pre-printed signs (Teach for America, Evangelicals for Social Action, New York Theological Seminary) for the processional.
Meanwhile Richard Twiss has found a piece of scrap paper, because he doesn’t have a sign. He writes something with a ballpoint pen, then shows it to the four friends he’s standing with who are, like him, Native American evangelical theologians involved in ministry.
The others smile. The sign says: “Fighting Terrorism since 1492.”
It’s a cry for justice. It’s a serious reaction to the pain their communities continue to feel. It’s a reaction to all the other streams of “justice work” around them. It’s subversively funny. And it’s ballpoint pen on scrap paper, so it seems characteristic in another way: As they process in behind the sign over Twiss’ head, nobody in the auditorium can read what it says.
“It’s a problem of being heard,” says Randy Woodley, one of the theologians. “I feel like 500 years ago, maybe God did bring the white [people] over. But it was supposed to be something mutual, where we learned from each other. Instead the white [people] conquered, helped out by their understanding of Christianity. Five hundred years later, we ask ourselves, now are people ready to listen?”
I've written a lot on Palestine and Gaza in recent years. Any of us who travel (or read) know that peace in the world can't be separated from peace in Israel -- peace for Jews, and peace for Muslim and Christian Palestinians.
There seems to be much concern lately over the people being referred to as "illegal immigrants." Let's define our terms: "Immigrant" - somebody who has come to a country and settled there. "Illegal" - forbidden by law. Concern about illegal immigrants has a familiar ring to us Native Americans. We have been empathizing with those concerns for over half a millennium.
Let's see ...Were the [...]
Millions of Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving again this year with a philosophy of Manifest Destiny. Many Native Americans will not celebrate Thanksgiving at all. They will view the holiday as a national day of mourning. To them, the Thanksgiving Myth justifies the genocide of indigenous peoples and acquiesces to notions of White supremacy. They will protest at Plymouth Rock and [...]
The largest gathering of American Indians in U.S. history came together in Washington, D.C., in September for the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Spokane Indian Sherman Alexie often snaps "that's personal" during interviews, yet the characters in his books and films closely follow his own life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation...
Last year’s anti-World Trade Organization uprising was a reminder that there are detractors from the Pax Capitalista that currently placates some Americans with e-money and numbs others with the not-so-cheap thrills of day-trading. With unfettered consumption and development largely unchallenged, Seattle was one of those rare signs that this economic boom is leaving in its wake newly impoverished people and a devastated environment that has never been in worse shape.
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, by long-time Native American activist Winona LaDuke, is another disturbing signpost. This book implicates the current boomtown mentality flowing through America and cautions us to learn new ways to live in harmony with the environment and with our neighbors.
LaDuke examines the often heroic struggles of indigenous communities in North America and Hawaii to regain control of their traditional lands and resist the onslaught of "development"—which is rarely aimed at improving life for America’s Native peoples, but very often comes at the expense of their land and resources.
There are close to 200 environmental groups based in Native communities, most of them, as LaDuke says, "underfunded at best and more often, not funded at all." In these small groups, which lack the cash of their mainstream counterparts in the environmental movement (who, as this book points out, have rarely proved to be Native people’s allies), LaDuke found Native environmentalists who "sing centuries-old songs to renew life, to give thanks for the strawberries, to call home fish, and to thank Mother Earth for her blessings."
Housing and Urban Development officials and Native American tribal leaders are launching a project to build and renovate housing on tribal lands.
It's a misty morning on Big Chippewa Lake. An Anishinabeg couple drags their canoe toward the water's edge. The woman boards in front and sits on her haunches.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.
Most of us have places that, for us, hold a special sense of the divine-sacred locations where we go for prayer, meditation, and reflection.
