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8. American Indian Theology
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168 | 8 American Indian Theology George (Tink) Tinker (wazhazhe udsethe, Osage Nation) Historical Backdrop American Indian peoples became Christian at moments of utter despair and in the face of huge trauma that devastated them.1 With the ever-present pressures of European colonialism on this continent, they turned to the very religion of their conqueror to find some sort of solace. As European mass murder and terrorism combined with European-generated epidemics took their toll on the aboriginal populations, suddenly the people found themselves with not enough knowledgeable participants to continue the old ceremonies .2 One can add to these difficulties U.S. government political pressure on Indian communities to comply with demands for land cessions and reckless resource development, all of which contributed to the degradation of Indian communities. Children were kidnapped from Indian families and incarcerated in facilities called boarding schools, kept at a distance from loving families for a dozen years each, finally returning home at eighteen with skewed perspectives on life itself, having been absent of familial love and the healthy personality development such love would have nurtured.3 At the same time, the U.S. government, in collusion with the White Christian religious establishment, took legal action to outlaw the practice of many of the traditional ceremonials of Indian communities, making it even more difficult to find spiritual help in traditional ways.4 Many of these ceremonies were practiced, however, but in hidden and secret locations and only by those brave enough to risk arrest and imprisonment. At the same time, many communities simply gave up trying to continue their ceremonies as the incursion of White culture decimated clan structures and made it much more difficult to find key participants to fulfill roles assigned to different clans.5 Throughout these beginnings, however, the missionaries never did learn to trust those Indians who converted. As a result, there were never many American Indian Theology | 169 Indian clergy serving Indian communities (i.e., congregations—but congregations do tend to be communities among Indian peoples). Two further points might be offered here. First, the generalization can be made that no Indian person ever made a perfectly free and informed choice for Christian conversion without the heavy-handed presence of colonial realities.6 Second, in every tribal context the first missionary to proclaim the Christian gospel always functioned to divide the community. That is, a community where ceremony was always communal and involving the whole of a town or village was no longer whole when the first member of the community made the choice to become a Christian. There were, of course, some well-known and celebrated Indian ministers through the colonization period. Yet these early Indian Christian ministers were not accommodationists to the same extent that their more modern Christian Indian descendents have become in recent times. Indeed, William Apess (Pequot, 1798–1839) was trained as a minister and living in Massachusetts early in the existence of the United States. He was a particularly incisive critic of American colonizer culture and its exercise of Christian preaching .7 Samson Occom (Mohegan, 1723–1792) was an earlier Indian Christian minister in colonial New England, who made the attempt to serve Indian people while maintaining a genuine connection to the traditional culture.8 Like Apess, he was clear in his criticism of White racism, noticing his bad treatment under Eliezer Wheelock, the Puritan founder of Dartmouth College , during a fund-raising trip to England and bitterly criticizing Wheelock’s betrayal of Indian people with respect to the use of the monies that Occom had helped raise. Peter Jones (Mississauga Ojibwe, 1802–1856) continued to serve as the chief of his community even as he became their pastor. As such, he also continued the communitarian values of their traditional Ojibwe culture as he worked to replace their old ceremonial traditions with the mission traditions he had adopted. Ultimately, his Christian mission discipline was challenged by traditionalists in the community, leading to a splintering of the band. At the same time, there were persistent and consistent attempts in many Indian national communities to maintain traditional communal structures in spite of pressures to convert. People like Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota, d. 1890) engaged in active resistance against all of colonizer culture and its constant pressure to convert to Christianity. Sitting Bull’s policy of “just say no” resulted in the sacrifice of his life, as the “Indian” agent on his reservation (that is, the appointed federal agent in charge of the Standing Rock Reservation...