These progressive sermons are available as
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October
23, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”
Bartolome De Las Casas
, a 16th century Spanish historian, abolitionist and one of the
first Europeans to settle in the Americas: “What we committed in the Indies
stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and
mankind and this trade (in American Indian slaves) as one of the most unjust,
evil, and cruel among them.”
A ritual recitation is written into the 26th
chapter of Deuteronomy and every Hebrew child learns it very early in life. It
begins, “A wandering Aramean was my father… it is a short history of how the
Jews became a people and how they came to live in what they called “The
Promised Land.”
‘A wandering Aramean was my
ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number,
and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6When the
Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7we cried
to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our
affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The Lord
brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a
terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he
brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and
honey.
In academic terms, that is called
the Hebrew Bible’s heilsgeschicte, it
literally means “salvation history”… it is a version of history that is told
from the perspective that asserts that God made these things happen for a
reason. The salvation history of the Jews is a symbol for the history of the
world that followed and the unwritten history that preceded it.
Jewish history begins with a small
band of people moving from one country to another in hopes of improving their
prospects of having food and a livelihood. Over time, being a part of a
non-dominant ethic group in Egypt made the living conditions bad enough that
they left in search of a better place. Their own version of that long trip was
that God gave them a land flowing with milk and honey, but a historian might
say that a group of former slaves who could not best the Egyptian army wandered
north until they found a land whose inhabitants were not as militarily well
organized and so they killed them and took their land.
Migrations have been taking place
since the first early humans wandered out of Africa to populate Asia, Europe,
the Americas, Australia and everywhere in between. Sometimes the migrations were forced, as when
the Assyrians carried Israel away to be slaves, or when Judah was carried away
to Babylon to be slaves, or when Americans and Europeans captured Africans to
take as slaves. Sometimes migrations were forced by famine, as when Jacob took
his tribe to Egypt, or when waves of Irish immigrants first came to America.
Sometimes those waves of
immigration were instantaneous, as people were forced to leave their land by a
foreign power or as refugees to escape a holocaust, as Syrians are now fleeing
their homeland or as Jews fled from Germany and Poland in the last century.
People move around, and not usually out of sheer boredom.
In the ancient world you might
pull off being a pathological land thief by blaming it on God. You understand
that the land wasn’t flowing with milk and honey all on its own don’t you?
Ask any farmer, left to her or his
divine management, there isn’t much milk and honey to be found. The Semitic
tribes took occupied land around a thousand BCE and episodically had control
over it for the next thousand years. They became refugees again when the Roman
Empire took their land and they got it back when the British and American
Empires stole it once again from people who had lived there for two thousand
years. And in my little church in rural Kentucky, the 20th century
recreation of Israel was a matter of Biblical proper land title. God promised
it to the Jews and now they have it back.
The fact that the sacred book of
the Jews gives them title to the land is not exactly evidence or justification
but seeing that requires a bit of critical thinking which didn’t often go on in
the Sunday School classes where I spent my youth.
A part of our American myth is a
poem we learned in grade school:
In
fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus
sailed the ocean blue.
He had
three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed
through sunshine, wind and rain.
He sailed
by night; he sailed by day;
He used
the stars to find his way.
The
poem continues…..
The
Arakawa natives were very nice;
They gave
the sailors food and spice.
Columbus
sailed on to find some gold
To bring
back home, as he’d been told.
He made
the trip again and again,
Trading
gold to bring to Spain.
The first
American? No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.
The poem is a myth, of course, with only some of
the names and dates to reflect history. The poem does not say that the
Spaniards captured and enslaved the Arawak and those who refused service were
slaughtered. There were those who spoke of the Americas as a new promised land,
promised by God to Christian invaders. That language survived right up to the
time of Abraham Lincoln and continued to inspire the wars waged against the
Indigenous peoples of this continent.
There are now about 300 million people in this
country but our white European forefathers did not find this place uninhabited
any more than the ancient Semitic tribes found Palestine uninhabited, as the
modern Jews did not find Palestine uninhabited at the end of WWII.
There are estimates as high as 90 million
American Indians living here when European settlers began their migration.
There are not many periods in history when you can say that the Holocaust pales
in comparison to what our ancestors did to take this land from its Indigenous
people.
Of course, it wasn’t entirely a military
occupation. European diseases that traveled across the Atlantic in those little
wooden ships were more lethal to the Indians than were the swords and muskets
of the settlers. Still, once early American settlers discovered the lethal
vulnerability of the Indians to those diseases, they did everything they could
to spread the germs to do what they did not want to do themselves.
At the end of WWII, Germans were put on trial
for war crimes and a number of steps were made to heal the sick mentality that
let to the Holocaust.
In Japan, a new constitution was written and an
ancient culture had to go back to the drawing board to recon with how they had
treated their Asian neighbors in their lust for power.
In Germany, there is no holiday to celebrate the
birth of Adolph Hitler. To even suggest it would be offensive to Germans. In
the United States, however, we are still holocaust deniers because we still
have an official Columbus Day to celebrate the first voyage of Columbus to the
new world to begin the legacy of slavery and carnage.
There is no way to put that 15th
century migration into reverse but we can start to be more honest about it.
Christopher Columbus was a part of modern history but not a bright and shining
part…. Oh, and calling Columbus brave and bright is pretty insulting to the
survivors of the American holocaust.
The state of Vermont and the cities of Denver
and Phoenix recently joined Seattle, Minneapolis and Albuquerque in the
decision to re-name the second Monday in October, “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” It
may seem like a small thing but I have to tell you that the dismissive view of
the plight of modern day Native Americans has convinced me that we need to
actively work to change the way our nation treats these people.
For the past few months the largest Indigenous
people’s protest has been going on in North Dakota and it has hardly been
mentioned in the mainstream media and the alternative news sources that have
tried to cover it, primarily Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, have actually been
arrested and threated with years in prison for just telling the story of the
Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Guards have turned vicious attack dogs loose on
peaceful protesters and the Dakota Access pipeline project has defiantly dug up
sacred burial grounds as they attempt to put an oil pipeline under the Missouri
River. More than one hundred different
tribes are now represented in the camped out demonstration.
The Indians prefer to call themselves
“protectors” rather than “protestors” or “demonstrators,” because their goal is
to protect the land and water from further destruction in the name of profit.
As recent history has taught us, it is not a matter of whether or not a
pipeline might have disastrous spills, we know that they do, it is always just
a matter of time.
Major news networks will almost never mention
opposition to a multi-billion dollar construction project, even when water,
land, and sacred Native American space is threatened.
I will leave you today with a modern saying
which I believe comes from the Osage tribe:
When the
last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned,
only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.
It is a small thing but I encourage you to sign
the petitions on the Daily Kos site to change Columbus Day to Indigenous
Peoples’ Day and the petition asking President Obama to stop construction of
the Dakota Access Pipeline.
