Shining Through
Native Spirituality Sheds a New light on Christianity

 By Rea Howarth
[from American Indian Report – December, 1999]

  At bottom, all the hoopla around the dawning of the “third” millennium marks the birth of a poor child into a middle-eastern tribe that knew itself to be in a covenant relationship with the Creator whom they called Yahwe.  The birth of Jesus is an event that continues to reverberate in human history.  And as one millennium ends a new begins, his followers are facing some tough truths:

                That Christianity was not Good News for most, if not all the world’s indigenous peoples.  That doctrines founded upon a literal view of the Jewish creation story, giving rise to notions that humans were created to dominate the earth and all its creatures, and a doctrine of original sin that says humans are inherently evil and can only be reunited with God through Christ, have wreaked more human and ecological havoc than can ever be calculated.

                With that dawning comprehension—still far from complete and even fiercely resisted in some quarters—there is a growing sense that perhaps something good can come of indigenous peoples’ encounter with Christian missionaries after all.  That perhaps what may save Jesus’ message for Christianity is a resurgence and an appreciation of the Native spirituality that Christian zealots once tried so hard to obliterate.

                Throughout North and South America, Asia and Africa, indigenous theologians are rethinking Christianity in ways that rescue it from its Euro-centered view with its emphasis on medieval doctrines, returning it to the central tenets of the stories and teachings handed down by the earliest Christians.

                Since the first missionaries appeared in North America, there has been a tension among Native Americans between those who embraced Christianity and those who clung to the traditional ways.  But for the past 30 years, American Indian theologians and scholars have been working at reshaping the dimensions of contemporary Christianity.  Their efforts are sometimes criticized by other American Indians as futile.

                “Christianity doesn’t come in clean,” said Dr. Martin Brokenleg, professor of Native American Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D.  “It comes in collusion with government policies and military oppression and, certainly, with education efforts to alter native beliefs and practices, and the church is complicit with that.”

                Nevertheless, Brokenleg said, most Native Americans separate Christian philosophies from the institutional church.  While there’s great respect for the teachings of Jesus, there is very harsh criticism of the church because of its complicity with the institutions that tried to destroy native culture.  In order to dominate, Europeans eradicated the buffalo and used food rationing as a means of control, and church people were doing all of these things.  “The three major institutions that came into reservations were government, church and schools,” Brokenleg said, “and the entire purpose was suppression of native identity and philosophy 

                “Its purpose was to ‘civilize’ native peoples and eradicate as much of their native traits as possible, and substitute Victorian manners and thought.”

                The first two generations of Lakota people impacted by the western expansion of the United states “absorbed that lesson completely because the pressure was so intense,” said Brokenleg.  “In fact, criticism of younger people reattaching to traditional ways is often very harsh from old people because they absorbed the lessons of the oppressors.”

                Brokenleg, who is canon at the Episcopal cathedral in Sioux Falls and an ordained priest for 27 years, works in the area of inculturation, the process by which Christianity is expressed in the symbols and expressions of a particular culture.

                “When missionaries came to native people, they came to a place where God had already been active,” Brokenleg said.  The Lakota relationship with God was expressed through sweat lodge ceremonies, the sun dance, the pipe.  “That’s our old testament,” Brokenleg said.  “That’s foundational for us to be practitioners of the teachings of Christ.

                Bishop Steve Charleston (Choctaw), newly-installed president and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., explored the idea in an article on “The Old Testament of Native America.”

                “It’s a covenant, just like the one the ancient people of Israel had,” he said.  “Through the traditions handed down through the generations.  Native people remember their original covenant with the Creator.  That becomes our basis for our religious faith and it comes from taking our historical covenant relationship with God seriously.”

                Contemporary Native theologians such as The Rev. George Tinker (Osage/Cherokee), a professor at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver and a member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, are broadening Christian perspectives in North America.  They are moving beyond the seminal work done by liberation theologians from South and Central America to an indigenous North American perspective that draws deeply from traditions.  Their theology is rooted in creation with the fundamental goal of achieving harmony and balance.

                In an essay on “Spirituality, Native American Personhood, Sovereignty and Solidarity,” Tinker suggests that “a Native American theology coupled with a Native American reading of the Gospel might provide the theological imagination to generate a more immediate and attainable vision of a just and peaceful world.”

                Jesus’ call to repentance in the first chapter of Mark, he said, is a call to the people of Israel to return to a proper relationship with the Creator.

                “I understand it as a call to be liberated from our human perceived need to be God and instead to assume our rightful place in the world as humble, two-leggeds in the circle of creation with all the others created,” said Tinker.

                This is not a value-neutral creation theology or a “new-age spirituality of feel-good individualism,” Tinker cautioned.  “Rather, it is an ultimate expression of a ‘theology of community’ that must generate a consistent interest in justice and peace.  Namely, 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 the community.”

                Not surprisingly, the most controversial issue for Native and European-American Christians is cultural self-expression within the worship setting.

                Rev. John Hatcher, works out of the Catholic diocesan office in Rapid City, and serves in an advisory role to a Lakota Catholic committee that meets twice annually to discuss the used of Lakota symbols and rituals in Catholic worship.  A document that the committee drafted on the Eucharist was approved by former diocesan Bishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M., a Capuchin friar and now archbishop of Denver.  Chaput, a member of the Potawatomi Tribe of Kansas, was among the group of American Indians who greeted Pope John Paul II during his 1987 trip to Phoenix.  There, the Pope watched native dancers and warmly embraced the cultural expression of native peoples in signs and symbols as a legitimate form of Catholic religious expression, a key moment in the religious lives of American Indian Catholics.  But a challenge to European-American Catholics who often don’t see that the dominant liturgical celebrations are a reflection of their own cultural heritage—whether it’s the green Advent wreath made of pine or cypress boughs or the hymns that are sung.

                Through Chaput’s influence the expansion of cultural expression has been slow, but steady.  Today, for example, Lakota Catholic parishes use sage or cedar during services.  A purification rite is used during the penitential rite of the liturgy, and the four-direction song is sung.  There may be a cedar or sage blessing and if a native deacon is present, he will use it before the Gospel reading and during the presentation of the gifts at offertory.

                All these symbols came from people who were deacons and lay leaders with ministerial education, “not the white missionary personnel,” said Hatcher.  “This comes from the Lakota people themselves.  They are the ones who have the control and make the proposals and enter into dialogue with the bishop.

                “There is a tendency,” he noted, for others on the reservations to view the parish as a European church, “but it’s a Catholic Lakota community,” he emphasized.

                Sometimes the use of traditional Lakota rites upsets some Catholics.  “I always ask, ‘what are they talking about?’ White missionaries have no business using native symbols.  But if the Lakota are doing it, that’s another thing.”

                Each tribe has a different approach, Hatcher said.  “You have to be very sensitive to where the local leadership is on these various issues.”

                Through workshops and an annual conference, Kateri Mitchell, director of the National Tekakwitha Conference in Great Falls, Mont., works at helping American Indian Catholics reassert their native identities in worship.  Mitchell is a Catholic nun and a Mohawk Indian.

                “Basically, it is to help people understand and affirm their own traditions,” she said.  The workshops and conferences help teach people to understand that “you can be who you are within a spiritual and liturgical worship experience.

                “For many years, we pushed down our identity.  There still needs to be a lot of teaching and affirmation of our own spirituality because it has not played a prominent role in our liturgical celebrations.”

                Some find a sense of peace in bringing native expressions into their worship experience, but others experience it differently.  American Indian Catholics and others sometimes view Native spirituality as evil or wrong, she said.  Such people are “not going to change.”

                “If people are set in their ways, there’s no room for anything new.  For some of us, we are called to live in an integrated way of life or on an integrated spiritual path.  Others may not be called to that.  Therefore, both those who are called and those who are not, need to respect each other for where they are being called at the present time.  There are no two paths,” she said.  “It is all one.  If people have not been able to journey in that way, there is nothing I personally can do in a short time.”

                The key, Mitchell said, is that adults must realize that spiritual development is ongoing.  “It is a process that does not end at a certain age.  It just continues to expand, to be enriched and deepened, so that our relationship with our Creator gets stronger, becomes richer and we’re empowered.”

                Like many American Indians, Odette Wright (Nanticoke) a Methodist lay leader, follows both traditional and Christian practices.

                She teaches that the Native American “spiritual realm is related to the land and all the elements of the Mother Earth.”

                “It’s really just very simple,” she said.  “The Creator made the earth and we have to take care of it. …I have my Christian way and I also have my spiritual way.  I feel that we all have visions, but we don’t all pay attention to them”  While she has been in sweat lodges and participates in prayer circles and pipe circles, she does not practice all her tribe’s traditions out of respect for the feelings of her traditional community members.

                She feels she needs both.  “It enhances me.  I feel so good when I can do the spiritual way, because it’s me.  The church is so structured, it’s kind of hard for Native people to feel comfortable.”

                At bottom, balancing Christianity with tribal traditions makes Wright feel more connected to her roots.  “I am able to be who I really am,” she said.

                The relationship between mainstream Christianity and Native American spirituality has been changing since the 1960s, when contemporary native activism began developing its own message against the backdrop of the civil rights movement.

                When Vine Deloria Jr. (Yankton Sioux), professor of history at the University of Colorado wrote God is Red and called native ministries to a “more real involvement,” people listened.

                American Indian Episcopalians organized the National Committee on Indian Work in 1969 and reorganized it as an all-native organization in 1977.  Native Presbyterians set up a similar Consulting Panel on Indian Ministries in 1969 after a key meeting on the Nez Perce reservation.  Native Methodists organized a National American Indian Committee in 1970.  Native Catholics reorganized the Tekakwitha Conference formerly a missionary support group, turning it into a vibrant locus for inculturation efforts within the Catholic Church.

                Individually and within formal and informal interfaith alliances, native theologians, ministers, priests, and active lay ministers have fostered leadership development, redesigned seminary and university curricula, fought racism and engaged in advocacy on behalf of tribal peoples, and in so doing, raised the consciousness of millions of white Americans, transforming attitudes and opinions.

                Although vestiges of racism remain, today mainstream Christian denominations and related organizations are taking concrete political stands on issues that are close to the hearts of American Indians, and have established partnerships between native congregations and the broader churches that are based on respect.

                One conspicuous example is the Columbia River Pastoral Letter Project, a three-year study and reflection on the Columbia River watershed by seven Catholic bishops in the Pacific Northwest and southeastern British Columbia which seeks to confront the destruction of salmon habitat.  In a draft of the pastoral letter which they hope to issue in 2000, the bishops recognized the right of salmon to exist as members of community of living beings, and pay homage to and note the similarities between the religious beliefs of the Native peoples whose “religious beliefs respected the way of nature, personified as a nurturing mother for all creatures,” and the tenets of Christianity.

                The United Methodist Church established an annual Native American Awareness Sunday that combines a special offering in support of urban initiatives like the Ministry of Presence among American Indians in Chicago and, “raises the awareness of American Indians to other cultures,” said Randy Holman Schmidt, coordinator of the project.  Offerings help support seminary scholarships for American Indians, support struggling native congregations, and develop awareness of Native spirituality among Euro-American Methodists.

                The Methodists also established the Native American International Caucus (NAIC), which is staffed by American Indians, to serve as an advocate for native people and has established regional agencies for Native American ministries.

                Rev. Alvin Deer (Creek/Kiowa), executive director of the NAIC, said the caucus has produced a hymnal, Native American Voices, in about a dozen native languages and also tries to ensure that Indians are not excluded from leadership roles during quadrennial elections for boards and agencies.

                “Everyone is welcome at the table, as they might say,” he said.  “It pretty much carries through from words to actions.”  However because overall church membership has been declining, the United Methodist Church (UMC) has been downsizing which “does, of course, reduce the voice of ethnic people in church.”

                “As a Native American group, we also have looked at the history of our church and all churches, and their relationship to Native American people.  We are well-aware of the abuses,” he said.  “In 1996, I wrote a resolution to our general conference, the legislative body that meets every four years, asking the church to apologize for the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 (let by a Methodist preacher who led forces that massacred a peaceful tribe that was flying the American flag).  The resolution passed unanimously.”  The occasion was witnessed by a Cheyenne and an Arapaho chief.  In fact, the Methodists plan to issue an official apology for their stand on slavery to African-Americans at the next general conference and are reaching out to African Methodist churches which were established because of segregation.

                “It’s amazing,” Deer reflected.  “But there are some reconciliation things going on across the western hemisphere.”  Deer said he was not aware of acts of reconciliation in South America, but the churches in Canada and the United States are “coming to grips with it.”

                The Methodists also are developing a statement on Native American spirituality for the entire church to learn from.  But “I’m not sure that as a church, we have confronted our own racism,”  Deer said.  The UMC has a general commission on race in Washington, D.C., to look at racism within the church.  “And yet, it is probably the most underfunded agency in the church,” Deer said.  “They do monitoring, but they haven’t done the hard stuff.”

                The Friends Committee on National Legislation maintains a full-time legislative advocacy program for Native Americans.  Aura Kanegis, monitor Department of Interior appropriations and other legislation affecting American Indians to advocate for tribal self-determination and seek the support of Quakers to lobby their individual representatives and senators on legislative issues that impact on the welfare of American Indians.  Its extensive Web site helps local activists and grassroots organizers get the information and resources they need to be effective advocates.

                The Episcopalian church also has done broad outreach through Native Ministries, an Urban Indian Coalition, cross-cultural ministry projects, E-Racism committees, and other Indian organizations.  The Presbyterians and Lutherans also maintain active urban and reservation ministries and try to educate the broader churches to the needs and gifts of their native fellow-Christians.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has a four-point plan for supporting existing native congregations and the establishment of new ones.  The plan also supports work for justice, land social ministries to promote multi-cultural understanding; all but one of the drafters of the plan were American Indian and Alaskan Natives.  And the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice has taken up the cause of Leonard Peltier, and other American Indian causes.

                Ecumenical bodies like the National Council of Churches and Church Women United have taken stands on issues affecting American Indians, not only around economic matters, but spiritual concerns including preservation of sacred sites like the Petroglyph National Monument and the reclamation of lands and resources lost through theft or fraud.