Ethnic Anxieties Over Native Concerns
Towards Charitable Communications

     There was a meeting in November 2007 with about a dozen Native Americans who were involved in some aspect of Church ministry and Native Concerns. This was hosted by a Catholic office, and various faith walks were represented. There were a few observers who were not indigenous, and who were given a chance to share after the main speakers were finished.
     The gathering was organized as a result of Pope Benedict XVI’s May 13th speech or the same year in Brazil. A few Native Catholics in this country (USA) fielded some serious questions to their pastoral leadership regarding some of the comments made about Indigenous culture, traditions and the history of European and Church encounters with Native People. Response was rather defensive and seemed to be rather anxiously grabbed at randomly by the pastoral leaders.
     Some of the early responses from non-Native Church leaders haphazardly tried to justify and explain the Pope’s message, in particular his inference that the missionary process in the Americas did not cause hardship to Native People. Those rapidly offered defenses were seriously compromised when, in fact, the Pope offered retraction days later in Rome stating that the Church does not take lightly the sufferings the Indigenous People incurred at the hands of Church Leaders in these lands.
     This prompted another set of questions: Who can Native Catholics access in the Church so as to address these issues without raising anxiety levels? Is there a forum that will discuss or investigate Native American concerns and inculturation issues? What is needed so that more Native Catholics can be active representatives in Church matters?
     The Pope’s reference to Native People in the Brazilian speech was brief. The requests of Catholic Native diocesan spokespersons were for a fuller explanation, not a challenge to the integrity of the Church. There was a positive purpose in seeking out a forum to discuss the issues, but the early response expressed undue anxiety that any person or group would dare ask the Pope about his speech. It appears, from his later clarification or retraction on some points, that the Pope is quite open to such questions and is not in need of having others to hastily defend, apologize, or to explain his words for him.

     I was asked to talk about the expressed anxieties of the Ethnic Americans when Native People raise serious concerns involving preservation and promotion of their customs within the Churches. Basically, my topic had to do with demonstrated resistance by mainline non-Indigenous pastoral leadership for full implementation of inculturation in accord with Vatican II directives. I think the anxieties, the upset, sometimes the anger and reprisals on the part of Non-Natives (Ethnic Americans) are a result of the historical conception developed by the earliest of the Conquistadores and their Missionary partners about the Indigenous People of the lands now called the Americas. Those bogus and negative conceptions have been perpetuated to this very generation. The new people needed a religious justification and purpose for the conquest of these lands and the genocide and enslavement that accompanied their arrival.
     The results are that Natives have been described as pagans, as a child-like race needing to be controlled and directed by the ethnic new comers. The Indigenous People were billed as savage and ungodly. The Ethnic institution of military, governments and Churches saw themselves as the saviors and benefactors of the First Nations. With that in mind and heart, they had an easy conscience to take what they wanted and a religious justification to do so.
     Any challenge or question Natives might raise was seen as a threat to the Ethnic Americans’ sense of moral and good spiritual order. They had things to teach Native People, but in their minds Natives were conceived to have had little if anything of moral or spiritual value to share with them. This iniquitous and negative pattern is still the norm. In some places and to a certain degree, this is changing. I believe things can continue to change in a positive manner. These issues need not be handed onto the seventh generation from now.
     Native People hung on to their traditional ways despite the attempts to eradicate their culture and to force change upon them. Many of them, perhaps a noted majority of Native People, have either accepted Christianity, or have had it coerced upon them; while the Churches attempted to eradicate indigenous traditions. Their cultures are not, and have never been, in conflict with true Christianity. The superfluous tensions are based in racism, attitudes, cultural slavery and a host of other now socially institutionalized policies and behaviors. Indigenous questions about biased Church policies, practices or conditions of intolerance are met with anxieties because the hardened veneer by which the now dominating ethnic majority painted over the realities of whom and what Native People are has cracked and is chipping away.
     They have gifts for the Church, but it is the responsibility of the Church to accept these gifts as living spirits, not shelve the offerings as if these are part of a nostalgic past. Non-Native Church leaders still discuss among themselves on how to make new policies for Aboriginals. They become anxious when they are told that the new policies are not to the liking of Aboriginal families and communities, and have nothing to do with who Native Americans are.
     Ethnic institutes, in particular the Churches for purposes of the meeting in L.A., feel threatened when Natives accept an invitation from pastoral heads to speak on their own behalf of who they are and what their ancestors have handed on to us. The Native speakers, more often than not, say what the Church leaders did not expect to hear; things they have never imagined existed. That is, if the non-Indigenous pastoral circles can even comprehend what has been said.
     These pastoral types might ask for a welcoming prayer and the Native prayer person says nothing of welcome in the delivery. Non-Native pastors and shepherds and lay leaders or religious ask for an expression of thanks for the blessings of the civilization they brought the Native People, but the Native elders look back in scorn over what has been taken from them and their families. The unexpected response raises anxieties of Ethnic Church leaders in this land by challenging their motives.
     This is because, according to the letter of St. James, the Church and the dominant society talks of reconciliation instead of establishing a first point of conciliation. The pastors did not receive what they were looking for, (e.g. a welcoming prayer from the Native Elders) because they asked wrongly, to perpetuate their passion for control of what is not rightfully theirs (cf. Jas 1).
     The average non-Native priest, vowed religious or other forms of lay pastoral leadership knows nothing about Native traditions, yet they act as if Indigenous ways are a step backwards. Many Native Catholic leaders have experienced the anxieties of Ethnic Institutional leadership whenever they have attempted to dispel the wrong imagery about Indigenous people, ways and customs.
     I had the opportunity on a few occasions to ask various Ethnic church authority figures who speak against Indigenous traditions if they could name and describe with some semblance of accuracy what they know about sacred Indigenous traditions. There are few Ethnic pastoral leaders who could name a single ceremony and explain its significance or history. They set themselves up as authoritative teachers in Native Communities, or over individual Native persons and families in the predominately non-indigenous parishes; yet, they do not learn anything correct about Native People from the Native People. Some have humbly accepted the need to learn from Aboriginals, most don’t comprehend the moral obligation to do so.
     Indigenous languages are alive and so are the stories of their walk with Creator and that walk of theirs remains very real today. Some Ethnic American Church Leaders have erroneously accused Natives of embracing their religious traditions (or accusing Natives of returning to those traditions) as a pre-Columbian utopia.
     This is not a return. Indigenous people in Oceania, Australia and in all the lands we can name that Europeans think they discovered have been incorrectly described and categorized and pigeonholed by a false sense of religious justification by the Ethnic conquerors. Native challenges to this status quo, by default, are seen as a challenge to the fabricated religious justification that resulted from the European conquest. There is no challenge to the Christian faith on the part of traditional Indigenous values and traditions. Those customs and concerns are not the cause of Ethnic anxiety. These things that are not understood cannot be condemned with any respect of justice.

     We, Native and Non-Native, need an ongoing cultural and theological forum that can honorably and respectfully discuss these issues. Successful ongoing discussions were tried in the past. The Jesuits held such a forum for a number of years with Lakota Medicine elders in the 1970’s. Jesuits met in traditional Anishinabe territory in 1993 on Manatoulin Island in Ontario Canada, and at the Jesuit hosted Anishinabe Spiritual Center in Espanola, Ontario. The results are published in Vol. 1, no. 2 of 1994’s Mission journal in a 347 page collection of documents from that meeting called, Wassean Danda (Let there be new light).
     [N.B.: Ordering information for that journal is on the Research & Resources page of this web site. The Pauline publication of That the World Might Believe, a study of Papal documents on the rights of Aboriginals is likewise recommended and is listed on that same web page.]
     More forums are needed. This time, I hope the results are not simply published and filed as have been done with so many other fine studies, but acted upon. Native People still need permission to hold special Church services once or a few times a year in accord with their inculturated worshiping traditions. Otherwise, it is as Pope John Paul II said, “It is absurd that Aboriginals are seen as intruders in their own lands.”
     There is not a single Church structure or institute in these lands in which the First People did not give the land and first blood and often times the labor to build them. Gratitude is more in keeping with the Christian teaching for these things Native People gave, not condemnation and anxiety if an unjust conviction is brought to question.
     It is wrongfully stated that this is a land of immigrants, leaving to the imagination by intent or default that this is a land of only immigrants. The past 500 and so years of immigration to these lands is only part of the story and a rather recent and conceitedly short chapter at that. The greater portion of the story of these lands lies with the Native People. Sr. Kateri Mitchell pointed out some years ago that, “The key to healing is in the hands of Native Spirituality.”
     This is not said as a challenge, but as a truth that can no longer be hidden away or denied. Well intended pastoral leaders, non-Native, will naturally draw from their own cultures to find solutions. However, reparation, healing, conciliation, or other forms of progress will result once the Churches become accustom to receiving Indigenous resolution on par to their own Euro-centric remedies, but not by subjugating the Indigenous proposals to the cultural norms of Non-Indigenous.


Link to the web site for The Order of St. James for more articles on this topic. This link, in particular, goes to my earlier article dealing directly with the Pope's speech in Brazil, May 13, 2007. There are additional links on that page that can take you to the Vatican sources and the actual full text of the Pope's speach.

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