18
The Future of Decolonization

OUR SPIRITUAL REALITIES do not exist in a vacuum. To be connected to our own spirituality, we must be connected to the spirituality of others. This means our spirituality is directly tied to institutions that police the spiritual lives of others. The fact that Indigenous ceremonies were banned in the US until 1978 and continue to be restricted is proof. In 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed by President Jimmy Carter so that Indigenous peoples would have protections for religious ceremonies in the US, a right that has often not been protected but instead has been violated by the government.

We have always been here, but what does it do to our spiritual essence to know that we will be punished for expressing our ways of knowing Creator, and how does that actually affect our connectedness as a whole? Colonization and white supremacy steal so much from Indigenous peoples and from Black peoples who were stolen from their homelands and enslaved in the US, and we cannot deny that this history is a spiritual one. So today, my spiritual liberation is tied up with the spiritual liberation of all my relatives who face oppression, whose bodies are policed and told that they are less than—are we not working to be liberated together, and are our spirits not bound together to fight institutional injustices that have existed in America since its beginning? Everyone who joins in this space with us is joining the work of fighting systems of dehumanization, and is joining in the lifelong work of decolonizing. We are bearing good fruit in hopes of creating newness in the world.

Telling women that we do not matter as much as men do is dehumanizing and damaging to the soul. The way that Christianity has appropriated and erased Jewish history and culture and practiced anti-Semitism is dehumanizing. So, decolonization is a spiritual matter just as it is a physical, mental, social, and political one. We have to see it in a holistic light.

The day I went to Lake Michigan, the original home of my people, for the first time, it was a perfect, windy spring morning in April. My dear friend Amy drove us in her minivan, forty minutes away from the city to a small town with tall trees that was now inhabited by people of Dutch heritage. We drove up to an area with a playground and picnic tables, and we climbed a set of stairs to reach the water.

Growing up around tiny lakes in the Midwest, my imagination did not lend itself to what Lake Michigan might actually be. So, when we took that last step of the uphill climb to look out at the beach before us, my breath caught in my chest.

White sand.

Waves.

Deadwood.

Teenagers huddled under towels and blankets.

Wind.

Memories.

I took off my shoes and walked as fast as I could, Amy trailing behind me with her camera. She said she’d capture this moment for me. The photos would keep me tethered to this place for years to come, the photos would help me remember. The quiet presence of the water lapped in and out with every wave, and I watched. I listened.

I whispered, Migwetch, Mamogosnan, Migwetch, Migwetch, over and over again, a prayer of gratitude for that moment that held me. And while I prayed, while I laid tobacco over the water’s crisp, iridescent skin, I was told to remember. The water told me to remember what I may not even consciously know.

The water has supplied life to us and nurtured us. We are simply recipients of gift upon gift.

I was asked to imagine the before—before those stairs were built to bring us to the shore, before there were paved parking lots and playgrounds. When it was just the people and the land, there was no room for colonizer thinking or actions.

When it was just the people and the land, we built fires and grew wild rice.

When it was just the people and the land, white supremacy was never an option.

We stayed there for about an hour, collecting pebbles and shells to take home to my children, and a piece of driftwood that sits in my home today and tells my own story back to me.

I was in Michigan for a conference, but before it started, I wanted to see the water, the water that my people once knew, the water that the Potawatomi people still know. Those that knew the significance of being in Michigan approached me throughout the weekend asking quietly, “So, how has it been for you to be here?” I’d smile and give a summary answer, “It’s been so great,” but I didn’t really have words for the weight, the gravity of it all.

I felt like a stranger to a land that knew me. I felt like the prodigal son returning to a father with open arms, only the thing that took me away was the gunpoint of forced removal.

The land and the water tell stories we cannot conceive of, even when we listen. And so, we just trust. We watch the water and let it give whatever it needs to give, and we receive it with open arms. This is the way.

It’s difficult to imagine our cities as something other than what they are. It’s difficult to think of them without buildings, streets, or storefronts. But if we can remember that they were once lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples, many cultures who stood on this ground and acknowledged the sacredness of the hills, mountains, and waters, many people who still do, maybe we can remember that this land is still sacred, that it is still space that we should inhabit while honoring it and the people who care for it.

This is what Lake Michigan is.

For the world to survive, for true justice to take place among us, decolonization must be a goal. We must fight against systems of colonial settler oppression—systems like toxic patriarchy and capitalist greed that give no care to the land—and we must do it together for the sake of all of us, telling our stories in those spaces. Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, a prophetic Tejana poet, says in a piece she wrote for On Being that storytelling is a lifeline in her family and the fuel that continues to lead her to decolonization. “In the nook of my grandfather’s arm, I learned of Moses and how he freed the Israelites. I wept as my grandfather recounted working in the cotton fields under the laborious sun that nearly turned his body into a leather purse.”1

Carolina reminds us that prayer is poetry, that poetry is storytelling, and that even our painful stories lead us out of the bondage of white supremacy and into liberation for ourselves and those around us.

Decolonization is not just for the oppressed. It is a gift for everyone. Just as growing pains hurt before the actual growth takes place, so it hurts to decolonize. For some, it hurts like hell, and then one day, we all appear on the other side of it, healed, our stories told in all their truth. Just like that, we all gather to bathe in the healing waters, and just like that, everyone is made clean.

In the winter of 2019, the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC, was interrupted when a confrontation broke out. Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha tribe, began to sing a famous song from the American Indian Movement as he stepped in between a group of Black Israeli protestors and white high schoolers from Covington Catholic, a private school in Kentucky. As Phillips sang and the confrontation between the two groups subsided, the young boys began to taunt him, one standing in his face as he sang and played his drum. Some did the tomahawk chop, a famous action from Atlanta Braves games, while others yelled, “Build the wall!” The media caught on to the story, spinning it in all sorts of directions, many of them centering the voices of the young Catholic boys in the confrontation. Some news outlets reached out to Indigenous writers to cover the story, but despite sharing our words and experiences, we watched the white story get centered over the Indigenous story once again, and those of us who have connected the dots throughout history know that this is not a one-time thing. One of the boys from the confrontation, Nick Sandmann, later tried to sue CNN in a defamation suit.

History has tried again and again to silence Indigenous voices. We are pushed to the side, criminalized, or covered up. The New York Post published an article listing the “criminal record” of Phillips, putting his past mistakes on display in order to taint his reputation.2 This is a common theme throughout Indigenous history in the US, a theme that our ancestors faced and that we continue to face. The taunting faces of white oppression continue generation to generation, in small and large ways. They continue in the harassment of Indigenous children; they continue in forced assimilation and in accounts of toxic stereotyping. Our ancestors, in all that they had to endure, prepared us for this moment in time. They prepared us for an America in which Donald Trump could be president and discrimination could run freely across our computer screens, without anyone noticing how it affects Indigenous peoples. So, as always, it is the responsibility of those of us who are alive today to decide what kind of ancestors we will be to those who come after us.

Will we be the ones who stand up against injustice, or will we be the ones who leave them with raging fires and messes to clean up once we are gone?

This is how we get narratives about Columbus as a kind explorer or about the Pilgrims who arrived and cooperated right away with those they encountered. It’s how we have generations of adults who don’t know that there are currently 573 federally recognized Native tribes in the US.

When whiteness runs the narrative, we have to ask how and why.

Why aren’t stories of Indigenous resistance taught in schools? Why aren’t our cultures celebrated for what they contribute, even to modern-day society? Because the Indigenous story has been buried under the white story, it will take a lot of work to uncover it. It will take more than Indigenous peoples to do the work—it will take all people. Decolonization doesn’t mean we go back to the beginning, but it means we fix what is broken now, for future generations. If you’re a teacher, it means you read books by Indigenous authors and you teach differently. If you’re a church leader, it means you change the narrative about reaching Indigenous nations and other forms of missions and recognize that, often, evangelism is erasure, and a listening relationship is something altogether different. If you’re a professor, it means bringing resources to your students that will challenge them to look outside the white narrative. If you’re a business owner, it means you work to diversify the workplace and root out toxic masculinity. If you’re an activist, take to social media and begin listening and following Indigenous people, and let that influence your everyday life. If you’re a parent, introduce your children to the idea that Indigenous peoples are still alive, still thriving, still creating and contributing to the good things that happen in the world.

If we cannot begin where we are, we will have a hard time changing anything outside of us. Decolonization is always an invitation.

I am involved in many circles of people, especially on Twitter and Facebook, who are having conversations not just about deconstruction but about reconstruction as well. Reconstruction is asking how we rebuild community and life now that we’re adults, now that we are trying to make sense of the ways we may have grown up in toxic religious environments.

It’s a strange time we live in, because we have face-to-face community, but we also have this community we build with people all over the country, all over the world. The power of social media gives us an opportunity to be tethered to one another in a different way. It exposes us to those who are different than we are and gives us a chance to live as communal people. But often, deconstruction within the church ends up being very individualistic.

What does it look like to deconstruct and reconstruct as a people, as kin, to take on the work of creating a postcolonial church for the sake of all of us, for the sake of the oppressed, for the sake of the earth? Is it possible?

As Americans? As Christians?

We have this split between what it means to live communally, to practice our faith—the work of justice—on an institutional level and what it means to practice justice on an individual level. I think both are necessary, but if we cannot remember that we do the individual work because we are connected to each other, we’re going to miss out on everything. We will not work against systems that oppress.

In fact, we may, quite possibly, continue the work of colonization and oppression without realizing it.

Donald Trump, in a speech to the Naval Academy, said, “Our ancestors tamed a continent!”3 If a colonizing sentence ever existed, it’s this one, spoken by a president. In response, Indigenous peoples reminded him that we are not to be tamed. Our Potawatomi ancestors, who lived full lives in the Great Lakes region before being forcefully removed at gunpoint to Kansas, knew what it meant to live, and once they arrived in Kansas and later in Oklahoma, they continued to adapt, continued to find a way as America was building itself off of their oppression and the oppression of others like them. Our ancestors lived off the land. They asked permission to take what they needed from her. They prayed with tobacco, a gift given to us by Creator, as medicine and as a tool for prayer. They walked with Mystery, telling creation stories. But to the white, Euro-Christian psyche, this was not acceptable. Being “untamed” meant being uncivilized, and being uncivilized is just bad for business—the business of mixing God with empire. And so, after years of genocide, forced assimilation, Indian boarding schools, forced land removal, displacement, massacres, and history books covering up all of it, here I am, a woman who is a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, a woman of European descent, asking what it means to be who I am today. And there are so many others like me.

For so long, the only right way has been the American way, and the American way was always to assimilate into culture, to stop learning our language, to stop telling our stories, to fit in, to look as white as possible. It’s what my ancestors ended up doing in Oklahoma, and it’s why I grew up knowing nothing about Potawatomi culture but everything about Southern Baptist culture and about a white missionary Jesus. It’s why I grew up not knowing how to pray traditionally or how to speak our Potawatomi language.

What does it mean to be Indigenous and to have ties to the person of Jesus without being tied to the destructive, colonizing institution of the church? It is a constant decolonizing. It is a constant longing for interaction with others who, following the Universal Christ, as Richard Rohr calls it, can take on the hope of a decolonizing faith. It is sharing space with Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, and letting our experiences shape each other. It means interacting with my white friends, having really difficult conversations, and facing my own privilege in that conversation as well. Deconstruction and decolonization can be partners, along with grief and truth-telling. May we learn from this community that we are called to the bigger work ahead of us, so that, together, we know what it means to return to Mystery that has always wanted all of us. May we do this work together so that, each day that we move on, we are building a future that is made for everyone.