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Activities: Context Activities "God Is Red": The Clashes and Contacts of Native Religion and Christianity  Back to Context Activities
Although Vine Deloria Jr. argues in his classic and polemical book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion that Christianity and Native religions are polar opposites, since the very first days of European-Indian contact, many Native Americans have adopted and adapted Christianity for their own purposes. As scholars have noted, native religions always sought out new forms of power that could be incorporated into their religious practices. Thus while white New England missionaries often assumed that they were converting natives into "red Puritans," practitioners of Native Christianity most often created an emergent religion: one that added new spiritual practices to an existing framework. Although there are probably as many different forms of Native Christianity as there are Native Christians, a few basic generalizations provide an important starting point for understanding the forms taken by this melding of religions. For instance, Deloria argues that the fundamental difference between Christianity and native religion is an orientation to time in the former and an orientation to space in the latter. That is, Christianity is a time-based religion, predicated on the ideas that the universe has a definite beginning and a definite end and that human life is a sort of "dress rehearsal" for the last judgment and afterlife-placement. Native religion, Deloria claims, is space-based: it grows out of and accounts for the particular landscape of the tribe, has no conception of a primordial time when humans were pure but then fell into sin, and anticipates no future of a radically different order (as Christianity posits will come about at the Second Coming of Christ). For native religion, humans have always been and will always be the way they are, and the world will always be more or less as it is; even the afterlife is primarily a pleasant version of life in the tribe. Our job, writes Deloria, is to deal ethically and responsibly with each other and with the web of all creation to which we are here and now connected—the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors—rather than to prepare for some future moment in which all will be transformed. Deloria's generalizations do not hold true for all native cultures: some tribes such as the Pomo of California do speak of a time in which the world was radically different. Even though Deloria's abstractions have been hotly debated by scholars, this healing vision of spiritual practice is reflected in the work of many contemporary Native American writers, especially and most elaborately in Silko's Ceremony, but also in the poetry of Ortiz and Tapahonso. Native versions of Christianity often present a mixture of these two religious outlooks. For example, a popular story for missionaries was the idea that Native Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israelites. This story fit with the notion of Christianity as a time-based religion: from the missionaries' perspective, American Indians' history began with the arrival of the whites and moved forward with conversion and the eventual return of Christ. For early Native American Christian converts, however, the story was not so simple. Many, such as Guaman Poma of Peru and William Apess (Unit 4), argued that Native Americans were already Christians upon the arrival of the whites—in fact, they were much better Christians than the Europeans! This notion reflects the perspective that humans have always been and will always be the way they are and that the world will always be more or less as it is. Similarly, movements such as the Ghost Dance combine Christian apocalyptic thought with a basic faith in the interconnectedness of the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors. By appropriating elements of Christianity, Ghost Dance dancers and singers aimed to fight the enemy with its own weapons, in this case with religious firearms. The history of Christianity and Native American communities has not always been uplifting. Since the earliest days of European settlement, Native Americans have been the object of strenuous conversion attempts that nevertheless failed to guarantee them equal treatment either before the law or in American religious life. Indeed, Native American converts were often viewed with suspicion both by their own communities and by European settlers: for example, Mary Rowlandson (Unit 3) has only unkind things to say about "Praying Indians" and indeed most praying Indians were forcibly interned and starved on an island in Boston Harbor during King Philip's War. Samson Occom (Unit 3), a Mohegan from Connecticut who was converted to Christianity at sixteen and later became a popular preacher in America and England, recalls similar mistreatment. In his A Short Narrative of My Life (1768), he sums up the years of discrimination and abuse he suffered: "I must Say, 'I believe [my mistreatment by white Christians] is because I am a poor Indian.' I Can't help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so.—" Questions
[2059] N. C. Wyeth, The Supplicant (1919), courtesy of Reed College Library Special Collections, Portland, Oregon. Illustration from the N. C. Wyeth edition of Last of the Mohicans. Here Cora pleads with the Delaware sachem Tamenund for the life of her sister, Alice. The theme of white women at the mercy of "savage" natives was made popular by early American captivity narratives. [2466] John Eliot, First page, Genesis from the Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New (1663), courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. This translation of the first page of Genesis into Massachusett an Algonquian language, was done with the help of John Sassamon (Massachuset), whose murder in 1675 for being an English informant began King Philip's War. [2836] Bernard Picard, Illustration from Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses des Peuples Idolátres (1723), courtesy of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation, Inc. European depictions of Native American ceremonies, such as this one from Picard's six-volume masterpiece on world religions, often tell us more about Europeans and their anxieties than about the actual experiences they record. [3249] Joseph-Francois Lafitau, An Iroquois Funeral as Observed by a French Missionary, Early 1700s (1724), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections. Detail from Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquians Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times [in Europe]). This drawing provides insight into Iroquois death rituals. [4210] Anonymous, John Collier and Hopi Men (c. 1920), courtesy of CSULB, National Archives. Indian Commissioner John Collier helped fight the U.S. government's assimilationist policies and argued for the protection of American Indian cultures, religions, and languages. He is best known for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. [6783] Edward S. Curtis, Altar Peyote with Rattle (Osage) (1930), courtesy of the Library of Congress [E77.C97]. The Osage Indians of Missouri were ardent practioners of the Peyote Religion. Ceremonies include a prayer meeting in a house designed for the ritual and the singing of Peyote songs. Taken from a cactus, peyote buttons have hallucinogenic properties. Peyote cults entered the United States from Mexico in the nineteenth century. [7588] George Catlin, Dog Feast, from The Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1842), courtesy of Tilt and Bogue, London. In Letter no. 28, Catlin remarks, "The dog-feast is given, I believe, by all tribes in North America; and by them all, I think, this faithful animal, as well as the horse, is sacrificed in several different ways, to appease offended Spirits or Deities" (Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians). |
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