MISSIONARIES AND THE RELIGIOUS VACUUMONE OF THE major problems of the Indian people is the missionary. It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land. An old Indian once told me that when the missionaries arrived they fell on their knees and prayed. Then they got up, fell on the Indians, and preyed.
Columbus managed to combine religion and real estate in his proclamation of discovery, claiming the new world for Catholicism and Spain. Missionaries have been unable to distinguish between their religious mission and their hunger for land since that time.
The first concern of mission work was land on which to build churches, homes, storehouses, and other necessary religious monuments. Like the men from New England in Hawaii by Michener, missionaries on the North American continent came to preach and stayed to rule. Or at least prepared the way for others to conquer and exploit.
Sacrifices often matched mistakes. Missionaries did more to open up the West than any other group, but in doing so they increased the possibility of exploitation of the people they purported to save. Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American history.
While the thrust of Christian missions was to save the individual Indian, its result was to shatter Indian societies and destroy the cohesiveness of the Indian communities. Tribes that resisted the overtures of the missionaries seemed to survive. Tribes that converted were never heard of again. Where Christianity failed, and insofar as it failed, Indians were able to withstand the cultural deluge that threatened to engulf them.
The conflict between the Indian and white religions was classic. Each religion expressed the outlook and understanding of its respective group. Religious ideas of the two groups never confronted each other directly. The conflict was one of rites and techniques. Christianity destroyed many Indian religious practices by offering a much easier and more practical religion. It was something one could immediately understand, not a paving of the way for what ultimately confronted one.
The credal rhetoric of Christianity filled the vacuum it had created by its redefinition of religion as a commodity to be controlled. Although prohibited for several generations, Indian beliefs have always retained the capacity to return from their exile because they have always related to the Indian’s deepest concern.
Indian religion required a personal commitment to act. Holy men relied upon revelations experienced during fasting, sacrifices, and visions. Social in impact, most Indian religious experience was individualistic in origin. Visions defined vocations in this world rather than providing information concerning salvation in the other world.
Formulas of faith were anathema to Indian societies. Debate over implications of the existence of God and creation of subtleties related to deity were unknown. The substantial doctrines developed by Christian theologians to explain, define, and control deity were never contemplated in Indian religious life. Religion was an undefined sphere of influence in tribal society.
Tribes shared with the Hebrews of the Old Testament the concept of the covenant of the People with God. The majority of tribal names, when translated into English, mean the People, First Men, or Original People. From the belief that the tribe is the People of God to the exclusion of other peoples, it usually follows that tribal customs and religious ordinances are synonymous.
Laws as such did not exist within tribal societies. Law was rejected as being force imposed from without, whereas people-hood required fulfillment from within the individual. Insofar as there were external controls, Indians accepted only the traditions and customs which were rooted in the tribe’s distant past. Time itself became irrelevant because custom prevailed long enough to outlive any knowledge of its origin. Mystery and reverence gradually surrounded rites and ceremonies, giving them the necessary mysterium tremendum by which they were able to influence social behavior.
Most mysterious was the Indian reverence for land. When told to settle down and become farmers, most Indians rebelled. For centuries they had lived off the land as hunters, taking and giving in their dances and ceremonies. Earth, they believed, was mother of all. Most important was the land which their particular tribe dwelt on. The Crow are a good example of the Indian religious love for land. The Crow have a long prayer which thanks the Great Spirit for giving them their land. It is not too hot, they say, and not too cold. It is not too high and snowy and not too low and dusty. Animals enjoy the land of the Crow, men enjoy it also. The prayer ends by declaring that of all the possible lands in which happiness can be found, only in the land of the Crow is true happiness found.
Even today I have watched Indian people look sadly over the miles of plowed ground of South Dakota, wishing that the land were returned to its primitive beauty, undefiled and giving to man and animal alike the life only land can give. Instead of beauty one sees a dust storm in the distance, ribbons of dirty highway going west, and the earth cut into a giant perverted checkerboard with no beauty and hardly even any symmetry.
Contrast this living, undefined religion, where man is a comfortable part of his world, with the message brought by the Christian missionary. The Reformation had divided the world into two arenas: church and state. Morality of one was not necessarily related to morality in the other. Often acts of the state, immoral by any standard, were endorsed by the church in an effort to gain political power and influence. Other times the church, in striving to protect its economic base, would encourage the state to undertake projects it dared not conceive of in its own moral terms.
There is, of course, an analogy in the contemporary role of the late Cardinal Spellman in supporting the United States in the Vietnam situation and the original encouragement by the churches of possession of lands the different European nations had discovered.
At one time or another slavery, poverty, and treachery were all justified by Christianity as politically moral institutions of the state. Economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest businessman, was seen as a process approved by God and the means by which He determined His Chosen for salvation.
Exploitation of one’s fellows by any means became a religious exercise. Law became a trap for the unwary and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who understood how to use it. Public disclosure of wrongdoing was the only punishment society acknowledged either side of the grave, although religious sentimentalists talked vaguely about playing harps for an infinite number of years in some undisclosed heaven. Few mastered the harp before departing for that better life, however.
When the two religious movements came into conflict, the Christian religion was able to overcome tribal beliefs because of its ability to differentiate life into segments which were unrelated. When a world view is broken into its component disciplines, these disciplines become things unto themselves and life turns into an unrelated group of categories each with its own morality and ethics.
Missionaries approached the Indian tribes in an effort to bring them into western European religious life. Their primary message sought to invalidate the totality of Indian life and replace it with Christian values. Because Christian reality had been broken into credal definitions, all the missionaries could present to the Indians were words and phrases that had a magical connotation.
Missionaries looked at the feats of the medicine men and proclaimed them to be works of the devil. They overlooked the fact that the medicine men were able to do marvelous things. Above all, they overlooked the fact that what the Indian medicine men did worked.
Most activity centered on teaching and preaching. The thrust was to get the Indians to memorize the Large Catechism, the Small Catechism, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Ten Commandments, and other magic rites and formulas dear to Christianity. Salvation became a matter of regurgitation of creeds. In a very real sense, then, Christianity replaced living religions with magic.
And the white man had much magic. Blessed with the gun, the printing press, the iron kettle, and whiskey, it was obvious to many Indians that the white man’s god took pretty good care of his people. Since there were no distinctions made between religion and life’s other activities by the Indian people, the natural tendency was to adopt the white religion of recitation and forego the rigors of fasting, sacrifice, and prayer.
Missionary activity became an earthly parallel of what Christians thought was happening in heaven. Like the rich burghers of Europe, whom God bribed with earthly treasures, missionaries bribed their way into Indian societies. Once established, they began the laborious task of imprinting two thousand years of sterile dogmas on the unstructured Indian psyche.
Warfare between white and red solidified Indian religion in the persons of a few great leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Prophet (who was the brother of Tecumseh), Handsome Lake, and Wovoka, creator of the Ghost Dance. When these great leaders died, Indian religion went underground and became, like its white competitor, unrelated to the social and political life of the tribe.
By the middle of the last century few tribes were untouched by Christianity. When a tribe had been thoroughly subjugated, Army, trappers, and missionaries moved on and permanent personnel moved in to take control of Indian communities.
From 1860 to 1880, tribes were confined to reservations, as the West was in its death throes. Churches began lobbying early in the 1860’s at the Indian Bureau in Washington for franchises over the respective reservations. Thus one reservation would be assigned to the Roman Catholics, one to the Lutherans, one to the Methodists, and one to the Episcopalians. Other churches were prohibited from entry on a reservation once it had been assigned to a particular church and could enter only with permission from the other church. It always bothered me that these churches who would not share pulpits and regarded each other as children of the devil, should have so cold-bloodedly divided up the tribes as if they were choosing sides for touch football.
Many times rations due Indians were mysteriously late in arriving, until the tribes responded to the pleadings of the missionaries. Other times outrageous programs designed to farm desert land were equated with Christian missions. A crop failure was sometimes seen as comparable to a decline in converts because the two harvests were inseparable in the minds of the missionaries.
Indian religious life was forbidden. The Ghost Dance movement, a last attempt to bring back the old hunting days, was enough to convince the Indian Bureau and the Army that the sooner the Indian was Christianized the safer the old frontier would be. Soon the only social activity permitted on reservations was the church service. Signs of any other activity would call for a cavalry troop storming in to rescue civilization from some non-existent threat.
It always amuses me to hear some white missionary glamorize the reception of Christianity by the Plains tribes. He will tell how “two or three were gathered together and gladly heard the word of God preached.” The simple fact is that had the two or three not been talking about the white god they probably would have been shot down for fomenting an uprising.
It was no feat, therefore, to convert Indians to a new religion. No missionary ever realized that it was less the reality of his religion and more the threat of extinction that brought converts to him. Or if he did realize it, he never acknowledged it.
Some churches patterned their work after existing social traits within the tribal culture. They were able to translate older Indian ceremonies and rites into Christian celebrations. Like the Gothic arches which took the place of the oak groves under which the European tribes had worshiped, the traditional gatherings of the tribes were made into annual meetings of the mission fields.
Particularly among the Sioux in the Dakotas, the Sun Dance was reinterpreted as the annual convocation of the missions on each reservation. And this type of accommodation to Indian life gave churches that used it built-in advantages over their competitors. But Christianity was presented in such a dogmatic form to the Sioux that it became frozen into a rigid structure. The religion, as it was presented in the 1870’s, remains the religion of the Sioux today. This fact was brought home to me quite vividly in 1964.
That was the year that many church people became convinced that the Civil Rights movement was the only real Christian mission. Most of us secretly suspected that the opportunity for national publicity had more to do with this feeling than did God. But we accepted this message of the churches as valid.
Church officials from the East came out to the reservations to bring the new message and to get Indians involved in the struggle. A New Yorker attended a Sioux religious meeting in South Dakota and was treated to an evening of hymns and prayers sung in the Dakota language. And he was horrified.
Nowhere, he later stated, did he find the social concern for integration and equality which made up the bulk of the Christian message. God’s number-one priority, he felt, was Civil Rights and here he had been overwhelmed with missionary hymns that had no relevance to the great struggle.
When this message was later related to the Sioux they were more outraged than was our friend from New York. They insisted that the missionaries had come out to them in the 1870’s and taught them to sing “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” and had told them that this was God’s word, and that, by God, they were going to keep on singing “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” regardless of what the rest of the world was doing.
Where, therefore, Christianity was accepted, it became so ingrained in the social life of the people that it often became impossible to change. And the tribes generally accepted what they felt was important and disregarded the rest.
Today it is fairly easy to tell which churches had which reservations by the predominance of members of a certain church among the older Indians. Nowhere was the validity of one denomination over another demonstrated. It always causes me to wonder why the various church bodies fight over doctrines today when a century ago they were willing to commit the souls of their red brothers to pernicious doctrines on one reservation in return for the exclusive preaching franchise on another.
Various Lutheran bodies do not share communions or pulpits today. The Roman Catholics and Episcopalians are always engaged in a brawl over the Apostolic pedigree of their ministry. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists continually struggle over concepts of congregational sovereignty. Yet one hundred years ago these churches deliberately ceded various tribes to doctrines they considered heretical in order to gain a captive audience from the federal government.
What each denomination did share, however, was the Anglo-Saxon social forms. These modes of behavior were what they really taught and preached about on the various reservations. Churches struggled to make the Indians cut their hair because they felt that wearing one’s hair short was the civilized Christian thing to do. After the tribal elders had been fully sheared, they were ushered into church meeting, given pictures of Jesus and the Disciples, and told to follow these Holy Men. Looking down at the pictures, the ex-warriors were stunned to discover the Holy Dozen in shoulder-length hair!
Often rows of sullen former warriors filled rickety wooden chapels to hear sermons on the ways of peace. They were told that the life of war was the path of destruction. Eternal hell, they were assured, awaited the man of war. Then the service would be closed with the old favorite hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War.”
An objective consideration of missionary efforts would indicate that the major emphasis was not religious conversion but experimentation with a captive culture. Western religion had failed to influence the society within which it was created. It had become a commodity for export long before Columbus discovered America. It had no choice but to attempt to gain a stranglehold on other cultures to reinstate itself. But its influence on Indian culture was comparable to that of other trade goods. Where it was useful, it was used.
Indian people obediently followed the way of the white man because it was the path of least resistance. The Great Spirit was exchanged for Santa Claus with some misgivings. Substituting toys for spiritual powers created a vacuum, however, and the tribes secretly preferred their old religion over the religion of the Easter Bunny.
The years from 1870 to 1930 were prosperous times, producing record harvests of red souls. Indian congregations were established in nearly every reservation west of the Mississippi. Many became self-supporting in a short time. By 1930 the majority of the Indian people had a tradition of three generations of church life behind them. Religious controversy centered on doctrinal differences unsolved by the denominations during Reformation days. Missionary work concentrated on such glamorous exploits as stealing sheep from another missionary’s fold rather than the de-paganization which had characterized the early mission work.
The flower of tribal leadership served in the reservation chapels as laymen and helpers to the white missionaries. Many people hoped and expected that the mission status of Indian churches would soon be ended and they would receive full parish and congregational equality. Little did they realize that the Indian mission field had become a hobby in and of itself.
Church piety required that the “finest young men” take up the White Man’s Burden and go abroad to save the heathen from their great darkness. Indian missions provided the only opportunity whereby young white clergymen could serve God after the mandate of Kipling and still enjoy the comforts of home. To release the Indian congregations to their own devices would have meant closing the only field in which traditional heroics could be achieved. A state of inertia set in.
The white missionaries of the Depression years and later frantically tried to duplicate the exploits of Whipple, Whitman, Father DeSmet, and Charles Cook. There was still glory to be gained by being identified as the missionary to a certain tribe. This struggle meant an absolute rejection of Indian people as candidates for the ministry. Recognition of an Indian as an equal or possibly a superior in the missionary venture would have acknowledged that the Indian people had already accepted Christianity. Paganism, per se, would have ceased to exist and there would have been no need for white missionaries.
The Depression missionaries were succeeded by a generation in which the mission field had been the glory spot of Christian work. Many arrived out West with the idea of finally completing the task started by the heroes of the faith two centuries ago. The new breed contemptuously announced that nothing had really been done by their predecessors. There were still Indians around and Indians meant pagans.
The new breed was something to behold. Almost universally they expected the Indian people to come to them for spiritual advice. The older missionaries had made the rounds of their chapels faithfully. After a time, most of the old timers were converted to the Indian way of life and spent their declining years ministering in an Indian way to the people.
But the new breed felt that the Indians were damn lucky they had come. Universally they downgraded Indian laymen. Often they changed patterns of worship and services that had been established for nearly a century. Quite a few had “days off,” when they refused to do anything, and most spent a great deal of their time either on vacations or at conferences learning about the relevant new movements of the modern world.
The situation has not changed greatly over the past few years. Several years ago at a conference of missionary workers, a female missionary (somehow missionaries are able to achieve an asexual status) asked my advice on a problem she was having. It seemed that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her little Choctaw pupils in Sunday School to understand the “technical side of being saved.”
In her church, it turned out, there were seven steps to salvation. When one understood the seven steps to salvation and was able to recite the sequence correctly, he was saved. Then his task was to teach others the seven steps until Jesus came. Apparently the Lord would ask all people to recite the seven steps on Judgment Day.
Unfortunately I was not able to give her any insight into the task of getting six-year-old Choctaws to walk the seven steps to salvation, let alone memorize them. I asked her why, if it was so difficult to get them to understand, didn’t she move to a field which the Lord had spent more time preparing. She replied that the Baptists had had the children for some time and had left them terribly confused. Her first task had been to correct all the heretical theology the Baptists had taught them. She said that she wouldn’t dream of leaving and letting some other church come in after her and again confuse the children. On such incisive insights is Christian mission to the Indians founded.
The determination of white churches to keep Indian congregations in a mission status is their greatest sin. But it is more a sin against themselves than it is against Indian people. For the national churches do not realize how obsolete their conceptions have become and they continue to tread the same path they walked centuries ago.
The epitome of this blithe ignorance is the work of the Presbyterian Church among the Shinnecocks on Long Island. At a missionary conference two years ago, a Presbyterian minister, in charge of the Indian work for his denomination, described his church’s work among this tribe. Then he asked for questions.
I asked him how long the Presbyterians intended to conduct mission activities among a tribe that had lived as Christians for over three hundred and fifty years. His answer to my question was representative of Christian attitudes toward Indian people today: “Until the job is done.”
Christianity, which had laid the ancient world prostrate in less than three hundred years and conquered the mighty Roman Empire, has not been able in the same time period to subdue one hundred Indians huddled on Long Island. Needless to say, my faith was shaken to the core by this statement.
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The impotence and irrelevancy of the Christian message has meant a return to traditional religion by Indian people. Tribal religions are making a strong comeback on most reservations. Only in the past few years have the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux revived their ancient Sioux Sun Dance. And this revival is not simply a re-enactment for tourists. The dance is done in the most reverent manner and with the old custom of piercing the dancers’ breasts.
Pathetically, the response of the white missionaries has been to set up tipis and attempt to compete with the Indian religion by holding Masses and communions during the celebration. Nervously they try to convince the Indians that the Sun Dance and the Holy Communion are really the same thing and that Christianity is therefore “relevant” to the Indian people.
In the Great Lakes area the old Medicine Lodge religion has been making inroads with the Chippewas and Winnebagos. Two years ago at an annual conference of the Wisconsin tribes, a panel of Indians discussed native religions. Eagerly the younger conference participants listened to the old men talk. They left that conference with the conviction that Indian religion was for Indian people and Christian religion was for whites.
The Native American Church, famed for its use of the peyote button in its sacramental worship life, has doubled its membership in the last few years. It appears to be the religion of the future among the Indian people. At first a southwestern-based religion, it has spread since the last world war into a great number of northern tribes. Eventually it will replace Christianity among the Indian people.
When I was growing up on the Pine Ridge reservation before and during World War II, the Native American Church was something far away and officially “bad.” Few adherents to this faith could be found among the two large Sioux reservations in southern South Dakota. Today a reasonable estimate would be that some 40 percent of the people are members of the Native American Church there.
Indian people have always been confused at the public stance of the Christian churches. The churches preached peace for years yet have always endorsed the wars in which the nation has been engaged. While the missionaries have never spoken about this obvious inconsistency, Indian people have been curious about it for some time. So the element of Indian people who believe deeply in pacifism have looked to other places for a religion of peace.
From the Hopi reservation has come a prophet of peace named Thomas Banyaca. He stands within the old Hopi religion and preaches to all Indians of their need to return to a life of peace and purity before the world ends. In 1967 Banyaca and some members of the Iroquois tribes traveled throughout the nation visiting the different reservations, bringing a message based on the prophecies of the Hopi and Iroquois. In June of 1968 Banyaca, “Mad Bear” Anderson, a Tuscarora prophet, and many of the traditional leaders of different tribes had two National Aborigine conventions in Oklahoma and New York to discuss prophecies of their religion.
Banyaca’s message, and its ultimate influence, appears to me to be the most significant movement in religion in Indian Affairs today. Banyaca is very spiritual and highly traditional. He stands solidly within Hopi legend which looks at world history as a catastrophic series of events all of which the Hopi have been saved from. In the late fifties a Hopi delegation went to the United Nations to deliver a message of peace, as Hopi prophecies had required them to do. Legends said that should the Hopi delegation be refused entrance—as they were—the series of events foretelling the end of the world would begin. Banyaca’s message to other Indian people is to orient them as to the number of prophecies now fulfilled.
The best statement of Hopi prophecy is contained in Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi in which the end of the world as we know it is foretold. There is great similarity between Hopi prophecy and Iroquois prophecy regarding the end of the white man and the restoration of the red man to dominance on this continent. Many people, especially whites, laugh when they hear the Hopi prophecy, feeling that they are so powerful that nothing can overcome them. They forget that Indian gods still roam these lands and do not realize that the Hopi have incredible gifts from their gods which cannot be duplicated by any Christian missionaries; not even, people tell me, by the Pope.
Even in the Northwest, Indian religions are on the move. The Northwest was supposedly converted by Marcus Whitman, early missionary to Oregon Territory. But those tribes, by and large, did not succumb to the word as easily as did tribes in other regions. People from Shoshone country tell me that the medicine men are more powerful there today than they were a century ago. Among the Yakimas the old religion still holds an honored place among the people. If and when native religion combines with political activism among the small tribes in western Washington, they are going to become extremely active in the coming Indian religious revival that many tribes expect in the next decade.
Perhaps only in eastern Oklahoma has Christianity been able to hold its ground. Among the Five Civilized Tribes, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw—called civilized because they were most like white men a century ago and have surpassed them in whiteness today—the Baptist denomination exerts great influence. This strength is due primarily to the large number of native clergy among the tribes. The Creeks particularly seem to have taken the Christian doctrines and made them their own. Native preachers exert tremendous influence among the Creeks and Cherokees. If Christianity is to have an Indian base of survival, it will be among the Creeks.
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The dilemma of Christian missions today is great. National churches have committed two great mistakes, the solution of which depends upon their foresight and ability to reconcile themselves to what they have been preaching to Indian people for years.
The different denominations have, over the years, invested an enormous amount of money in mission buildings and property. In the closing years of the last century, churches could receive a piece of tribal land simply by promising to conduct certain operations such as a school, hospital, or mission station. Consequently many of them applied for and received a great deal of tribal land.
Now they are caught with property which is suitable only for religious use and with a declining religious following. What use has a church building other than as a church? National churches have continued to pour thousands of dollars annually into their mission programs simply to keep up the value of their investments. They must soon be prepared either to take a devastating paper loss as their congregations vanish or give the properties to the Indian people for their own use. Either solution is distasteful to the materialistic instincts of the churches.
Added to the question of property is the obvious racial discrimination of the denominations against the Indian people, which is becoming apparent to the reservation people. Try as they might, the churches cannot admit that an Indian minister speaking in his native tongue to his own people is more efficient and more effective than a highly trained white missionary talking nonsense.
The major denominations are adamant in their determination to exclude Indian people from the ministry. A number of devices, which skirt “official” pronouncements of concern for an indigenous ministry, are used to bar Indian candidates.
One church refuses to admit Indians to the ministry because it is afraid that someday an Indian priest or clergyman may want to serve in a white parish. Indian ministers would not, by definition, be able to serve in a white parish. Therefore, the reasoning goes, they are not suitable for work among Indian congregations either. While they are welcome, I have been told, they don’t seem to be able to qualify.
Other churches are frightened that when the sacred doctrines are translated into the native tongue, the subtle nuances created by theologians of the Reformation will lose some of their distinctions. A perfect example of this attitude happened at an orientation session for new missionaries which I attended in 1963.
A Navajo interpreter was asked to demonstrate how the missionary’s sermon was translated into Navajo. So the white missionary gave a few homilies and the interpreter spoke a few words of Navajo. The trainees cooed with satisfaction that meaning could actually be transferred into a barbaric tongue like Navajo.
One missionary was skeptical, however, and asked if there were specific words in Navajo that were comparable to English words. He was afraid, he said, that the wrong messages might be transmitted. So he asked what the Navajo word for “faith” was. Quickly the Navajo replied with the desired word.
“Yes,” the missionary commented, “that’s all very nice. Now what does that word mean?”
“Faith,” said the Navajo smiling.
Nevertheless, many denominations are skeptical about letting Indians enter the ministry because of the possibility that doctrine may become impure. So they continue to send white missionaries for posts in Indian country to insure that the proper theological distinctions be drawn.
With the necessity of keeping large missions open and by refusing to bring Indian people into the ministry, churches have had great difficulty in filling their mission posts. The glory of intrepid pioneering is now gone, and the glory seekers as well as the devoted have long since written off Indian country as the place for service and advancement. Staff positions go unfilled for months and often the first white who comes wandering in across the desert is hired to operate the mission stations.
Some churches have an incredible turnover each spring and try all summer to fill their posts. Eventually they find some white who is a former basketball coach, a retired editor, an interested layman, or an ex-schoolteacher and promptly hand over the mission lock, stock, and barrel without further inquiry. The fact that the new appointee is white is sufficient to cover any theological or professional shortcomings.
Thus the quality of mission workers is at an all-time low. Most are not interested in their work and regard it as a job rather than a calling. Generally they have great contempt for the Indian people they are supposed to be helping.
But probably worse, much mission work is done by white clergymen who are not capable enough to run white parishes. In most cases, the Indian field is their last stop before leaving the ministry altogether. They are hauled from pillar to post by frantic church officials desperately trying to shore up the sagging fortunes of their mission fields. A great deal of money is spent covering up disasters created by these white misfits. When they cause too much controversy in one place they are transferred to another and turned loose again. More money is spent on them than on recruitment and training of Indian people for church work.
Pay is not high in mission work for either white or Indian workers. But it is universally higher for whites than it is for Indians. In the past there was some justification for a pay difference. Many Indian workers were only part-time workers and had another source of income. Gradually, however, Indian clergymen were assigned to remote areas and received less compensation.
Often the pay scale is based primarily upon whether a man is white or Indian. Indians receive less pay, even with seminary training. And Indians are still assigned to the remote areas with the poorest housing and least facilities. Go out to any mission field today and examine the placement of church workers and clergymen. You will discover that white workers have the best assignments, the best houses, the best fringe benefits, and receive the most consideration for advancement from their superiors.
No other field of endeavor in America today has as much blatant racial discrimination as does the field of Christian missions to the American Indian people. It is a marvel that so many Indian people still want to do work for the churches.
Documentation of discrimination and favoritism would be fairly easy were it not for the fantastic ability of the churches to cover their tracks. Instead of forcing resignations from the ministry, church officials transfer incompetents from station to station in order to protect the good name of the church. Thus some tribes are visited with a problem missionary who should have been sent on his way years ago but who has managed to hang on to his ministerial status by periodic transfer and the lack of moral courage by church officials to take action.
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The Indian people have come a long way in the last generation. For a long time they accepted the missionary because he seemed to want to do the right thing. But there has always been a desire for the Indian people to take over their own churches. Now they no longer have the expectation that there will be native clergy in their churches. More and more they are returning to Indian dances and celebrations for their religious expressions. They now wait only for a religious leader to rise from among the people and lead them to total religious independence. Thomas Banyaca or Frank Takes Gun, leader of the Native American Church, or someone yet unknown may suddenly find a way to integrate religion with tribalism as it exists today and become that leader.
Indian religion appears to many of us as the only ultimate salvation for the Indian people. Religion formerly held an important place in Indian tribal life. It integrated the functions of tribal society so that life was experienced as a unity. Christianity has proved to be a disintegrating force by confining its influence to the field of formula recitation and allowing the important movements of living go their separate ways until life has become separated into a number of unrelated categories.
Religion today, or at least Christianity, does not provide the understanding with which society makes sense. Nor does it provide any means by which the life of the individual has value. Christianity fights unreal crises which it creates by its fascination with its own abstractions.
I remember going to an Indian home shortly after the death of a child. There was a Roman Catholic priest admonishing the mother not to cry because the child was now with Jesus. Automatically, he insisted, because it had been baptized. Grief, he declared, was unnatural to man ever since Jesus had died on the cross. He went on to tell how God had decided on a great mission for the child and had called it home to Him and that the mother could see the hand of God in the child’s death and needn’t wonder about its cause.
In fact, the mother had not wondered about the reason for the child’s death. Her child had fallen from a second-story window and suffered internal injuries. It had lingered several days with a number of ruptured organs and had eventually and mercifully died.
I could never believe that the priest was comforting the mother. It seemed rather that he was trying frantically to reinforce what had been taught to him in seminary, doctrines that now seemed shaken to their roots. The whole scene was frightening in its abstract cruelty. I felt sorrier for the priest than for the mother. His obvious disbelief in what he was telling her and his inability to face death in its bitterest moment made him the tragic figure.
That is why I believe that Indian religion will be the salvation of the Indian people. In Indian religions, regardless of the tribe, death is a natural occurrence and not a special punishment from an arbitrary God. Indian people do not try to reason themselves out of their grief. Nor do they try to make a natural but sad event an occasion for probing the rationale of whatever reality exists beyond ourselves.
Indians know that people die. They accept death as a fact of life. Rather than build a series of logical syllogisms that reason away grief, Indian people have a ceremony of mourning by which grief can properly be expressed. Depending on the tribal traditions, grief is usually accompanied by specific acts of mourning, which is then ended by giving a feast for the community. After the feast, there is no more official mourning. When expression of grief is channeled into behavioral patterns—as it is, also, in the Jewish religion—it can be adequately understood and felt. When it is suppressed—as it is in the Christian religion—death becomes an entity in itself and is something to be feared. But death also becomes unreal and the act of an arbitrary God.
When death is unreal, violence also becomes unreal, and human life has no value in and of itself. Consider the last talk you had with an insurance salesman. Remember how he told you that you would be covered “if” you died. An Indian salesman would have said “when,” but then an Indian would have known how to die and both “if” and “when” would have held no terror for him.
Many tribes have kept their puberty ceremonies, and these ceremonies are very much alive today in the Southwest. Childhood and adolescence are marked off by these ceremonies so that the natural growth processes are recognized and young people growing up will be sure of their place in society.
Contrast the value of these ceremonies with the confusion of suburban America where children are pushed into imitations of adults in their younger years and then later denied the privileges of adults. Certainly the pressures on boys in the Little League are comparable in intensity and form with those professional ballplayers face. But after ten years of being treated like adults, young people begin to demand adult status and they are clubbed into submission by police at Columbia University and in Chicago.
The largest difference I can see between Indian religion and Christian religions is in inter-personal relationships. Indian society had a religion that taught respect for all members of the society. Remember, Indians had a religion that produced a society in which there were no locks on doors, no orphanages, no need for oaths, and no hungry people. Indian religion taught that sharing one’s goods with another human being was the highest form of behavior. The Indian people have tenaciously held to this tradition of sharing their goods with other people in spite of all attempts by churches, government agencies, and schools to break them of the custom.
Christianity came along and tried to substitute “giving” for sharing. There was only one catch: giving meant giving to the church, not to other people. Giving, in the modern Christian sense, is simply a method of shearing the sheep, not of tending them.
Several years ago a Roman Catholic priest on the Wind River reservation complained bitterly about the Indian custom of sharing as being “un-Christian” because it distributed the wealth so well no middle class could be established. Hence “bad” Indians dragged the “good” ones down to a lower economic level and the reservation remained economically static.
The initial object of the Roman Catholic priest’s outburst was an Indian woman who had a telephone and let all her neighbors use it. The bill ran as high as one hundred dollars some months. Often the woman was behind on her bill. But she didn’t mind letting her neighbors use the phone when they wanted to.
The priest was furious when he reminded himself that of a Sunday the collection plate was not filled by the Indians. He felt that was intolerable and he wanted to teach the Indians “stewardship.” Stewardship meant saving money and giving a percentage of the savings in the plate.
There was no difference, for the missionary, between sharing one’s goods with the community and squandering resources. He preferred that the people give their money to the church, which would, in turn, efficiently define who was in need of help. Indians looked at the missionary’s form of sharing as a sophisticated attempt to bribe the Great Spirit.
The onus is not on the Roman Catholics alone. The Protestants have devised a scheme whereby sharing is reduced to a painless sixty minutes a year. It is called One Great Hour of Sharing. Once a year they remind themselves how lucky they are to be Protestants and call for an outpouring of money so that others might receive the same privilege. Tough social problems always go unsolved.
Sharing, the great Indian tradition, can be the basis of a new thrust in religious development. Religion is not synonymous with a large organizational structure in Indian eyes. Spontaneous communal activity is more important. Thus any religious movement of the future would be wise to model itself on existing Indian behavioral patterns. This would mean returning religion to the Indian people.
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The best thing that the national denominations could do to ensure the revitalization of Christian missions among Indian people would be to assist in the creation of a national Indian Christian Church. Such a church would incorporate all existing missions and programs into one national church to be wholly in the hands of Indian people.
Such a church would include all ordained Indian clergymen now serving as church workers in the Indian field. The actual form of the ministry would not be determined by obsolete theological distinctions preserved from the middle ages, but would rather incorporate the most feasible role that religion can now play in the expanding reservation societies.
Each denomination that has been putting funds into Indian work would contribute toward the total budget of the new church. Existing buildings and church structures would be evaluated by the new Indian church and the tribal council of the reservation on which the property is located. Congregations of the various denominations would be consolidated and reservation-wide boards of laymen would direct activities on each reservation.
With the religious function integrated into the ongoing life of the tribe, the Indian church would be able to achieve self-support in a short time as the role of religion clarified itself to the reservation communities. Religious competition, which fractures present tribal life, would disappear and the movement toward ancient religions might not be so crucial.
Such a proposal is too comprehensive for most denominations to accept at the present time. The primary fear of turning over the sacred white religion to a group of pagans would probably outrage most denominations, too few of whom realize how ridiculous denominational competition really is.
The best example I can mention of denominational competition existed at Farmington, New Mexico, a couple of years ago. The situation has probably changed since 1965. But that year there were twenty-six different churches serving an estimated Navajo population of 250. That’s less than ten Indians per denomination! Assuming each church had a choir of eight, the congregations must have totaled one or two people per Sunday. Which does not indicate a field ready for harvest.
I estimated that the total mission budget for the Farmington area that year was in excess of $250,000. Christianity, not tourism, was Farmington’s most profitable industry in 1965.
Churches face literal dissolution on the reservations unless they radically change their method of operation. Younger Indians are finding in Indian nationalism and tribal religions sufficient meaning to continue their drift away from the established churches. Even though many churches had chaplaincies in the government boarding schools, the young are not accepting missionary overtures like their fathers and mothers did.
As Indian nationalism continues to rise, bumper stickers like “God is Red” will take on new meanings. Originally put out at the height of Altizers “God is Dead” theological pronouncements, the slogan characterizes the trend in Indian religion today.
Many Indians believe that the Indian gods will return when the Indian people throw out the white man’s religion and return to the ways of their fathers. Whether or not this thinking is realistic is not the question. Rather the question is one of response and responsibilty of the missionaries today. Will they continues to be a burden or not?
Can the white man’s religion make one final effort to be real, or must it too vanish like its predecessors from the old world? I personally would like to see Indians return to their old religions wherever possible. For me at least, Christianity has been a sham to cover over the white man’s shortcomings. Yet I spent four years in a seminary finding out for myself where Christianity had fallen short.
I believe that an Indian version of Christianity could do much for our society. But there is little chance for such a melding of cards. Everyone in the religious sphere wants his trump to play on the last trick. In the meantime, Banyaca, Mad Bear Anderson, and others are silently changing the game from pinochle to one where all fifty-two cards are wild. They may, if the breaks fall their way, introduce religion to this continent once again.