It's not too often at all that I post on matters relating, say, to Christianity. I do hold -- and always have, as did my father -- a set of religious beliefs that are a kind of synthesis of our traditional tribal religious views with Roman Catholicism [or, as we put it, "Jesuit Catholicism" -- from the Jesuit "syncretism" or blending which has always so troubled the more precious of the Vatican theologians.]
I have no problem carrying with me both my "Bear Medicine" [ certain very special things] and also my St. Ignatius of Loyola holy medal. We read the generally very liberal National Catholic Reporter faithfully -- have since the '60s -- and certainly support the ordination of women. In addition to the Old Beliefs in my own tribal settings, I'm quite at home indeed at other Native traditional religious ceremonials -- e.g., Navajo and Laguna and Hopi. I had no problem with my mother being an Episcopalian -- or a special uncle on her side an active Presbyterian layperson. I have a few LDS [Mormon] nieces and nephews. And I even have a ten year old grand daughter who considers herself [as she always has since practically birth] to be an atheist. "We don't exist because we want to exist," she said at age three in front of a number of somewhat surprised family members -- including myself. "We exist because we exist." No sweat on any of this. Faithful to my own beliefs, I try to be an ecumenical soul who takes a "live and let live" view of people's religious beliefs [or the lack of them.] But when missionaries push too hard -- religious [or political, as far as that goes] -- we Natives can get edgy. And downright resistant. And I don't like shoving, sanctimonious atheists, either. They chill me pronto. Not that all Christian missionaries [or atheists] are pushy. I have a very high personal regard for my Jesuit friends whose courageous and primary commitment to very substantive social justice -- and often to Liberation Theology -- is extremely strong. And I'm certainly with the radical Catholic Worker crew -- one and all. I certainly admired Dorothy Day, and Ammon Hennacy -- the Catholic Anarchist -- was always a good friend. Almost three hundred years ago [1724], Father Sebastian Rasle [S.J.] was murdered with over two hundred Abenaki men, women and children at their village on the banks of the Kennebec River in what is now Maine. When the English killed him as he stood behind his desk in the church, his blood flowed over his just completed life's scholarly work -- a dictionary of the Abenaki language. His head and those of the Indians were carried together by the English on pikes through the streets of Boston. Harvard still won't give Father Rasle's blood-stained dictionary back to the Native people. My wife, Eldri's, late uncle, Kristofer Hagen, an ordained Lutheran clergyman [ the liberal ELCA] and an M.D., and his wife Bertha, spent the whole of their lives doing medical missionary work in some of the most challenging sections of India -- and in poverty-stricken Ethiopia -- and on some Indian reservations. He wasn't involved at all in conversion. [He wrote widely on his medical work and one of his several consistently excellent books is Third World Encounters.] And we're certainly always pleasant to the very young [19 and 20] Mormon missionaries who come to our door over the decades. No matter where we are, we often find that we and they have a few Arizona people as mutual acquaintances and often friends. Here in Idaho, my oldest grandson [20], Indian Catholic of course, regularly plays on an LDS basketball team. No conversion pressure at all, by the way, But there's another kind of Christian missionary -- the pushy kind, the sort that tries to frighten folks. These are the ones, the really hard-core fundamentalist zealots, that you find on the outskirts, say, of Gallup, N.M., flagrantly attempting to frighten Native people into some sort of ostensible"Christian" conversion -- while dangling a sack of old clothing. And deliberately riding roughshod, say, over the ancient and very viable and vitally complex Navajo religious beliefs -- and especially very much over one of the most fundamental and sensitive of the Navajo harmony-preserving taboos: Chindee, involving the dead. You find this callous and self-serving missionary species in any of the predominately Anglo towns bordering any Native reservation anywhere. Our Indian family and Natives in general have never, never liked these kind of so-called "Christian" missionaries one damn bit. Never have, never will. Once several of us kids at Flagstaff High School were picked by a local radio station for a pre-recorded group interview on current issues. I was the only Native person in our little entourage and I attacked Christian missionaries -- these wrong kind, the scaring and scary zealots -- in and around Indian country. On the evening that program was due to air, my folks and I waited to hear my first Air Waves appearance. Instead, we got a half hour of "Tennessee Ernie." Dad angrily called the station and was blandly told that a "gremlin" had gotten into the works. I grew up with the Navajo in Northern Arizona and Western New Mexico -- and with close Hopi and Laguna connections as well. One of the very real things that built my fires high during that doomed Flagstaff radio interview was something that had happened on the nearby Little Colorado River -- on the southwestern edge of the vast [bigger than West Virginia] and almost completely rural Navajo reservation. There -- there was an Anglo trader and his wife. He was a rough sort of unshaven, somewhat unkempt man. But he was honest and his little trading post had a dependable flow of Indian business. One day a Navajo woman came, a stranger, with her small boy. Far from her relatives on the eastern end of the reservation, she had been stranded in a nearby border town and had made her way back onto the reservation, stopping at this trader's post. He and his wife gave her food and a few regular jobs to do. She and her child stayed in a hogan [Navajo dwelling] adjacent to his store and small house. Then one day, an Anglo missionary -- the wrong kind -- came by. Spotting the woman and shrewdly assessing her marginal and vulnerable circumstances, he began to work the "conversion" angle. She listened, was slowly, steadily, partly drawn into it all. He brought some clothes, came regularly -- early each morning. And she began to trust him. The Anglo trader did not trust the missionary. He was very skeptical of those motives -- but, as per local protocol, he didn't interfere. Not at that point. And then one night the woman's child suddenly died. And the missionary came for his morning, daily visit. Immediately, before he could commence any of "his things," she asked him -- the ostensible Man of God who she had come to trust -- for a horse. And he -- the missionary -- knew exactly why the grief-stricken and economically and emotionally destitute Navajo woman wanted a horse. Because he knew precisely why, he now berated her. His voice rising, he condemned her "superstitious beliefs" and threatened her, and very much the soul of her little boy, with Hell and Eternal Damnation. The unshaven, unkempt Anglo trader heard all of this. And now, with a rifle in his hand, he interfered. Dramatically. Walking to the nearby woman and her dead child and their would-be scourge, he told the missionary, simply and directly, "get the hell out of here and never come back here again." The missionary fled to his pickup and back to the security of the Anglo border-town world. Now the trader went into his own corral where he had several horses. There was a faithful, elderly horse for which he, in the fashion of the Navajo, provided good care in old age. With rifle in hand, the Anglo trader took his aging four-legged friend to the Navajo woman. Then he shot the horse - dead. And the woman, relaxing, cried with relief. The trader and his wife took her into the post and their home. Before many hours had passed, word had been conveyed by Indian grapevine to one of the always highly trained [17 years of rigorous training] traditional medicine men to come to burn the hogan, properly dispose of both the child's body and that of the slain horse, and perform the very extensive ceremonies so necessary to the preservation of healthy harmony in the Complicated Cosmos of the Navajo people. Later, when all of this was completed, the trader's wife took the Navajo woman to an off-reservation bus depot -- and purchased the ticket necessary for her return to her family on the far eastern edge of the Navajo country. The trader had known exactly why the distraught woman so desperately wanted a horse. He knew that traditional Navajo beliefs hold that the soul of the deceased must make a long trip into and through a kind of nether world -- it will take four days -- before it arrives at the mysterious, shadowy After World. Even though deceased kin will come to accompany the traveler, the boy was small. The Navajo woman could only see her lonely, little child trudging along -- on and on and on. That's why she needed a horse. A horse for her son. And the trader, the rough and unshaven and unkempt skeptic, gave her boy a horse to ride. Not long ago, my daughter, Maria, was sent via e-mail one of the most absolutely hideous Native-focused "Christian" missionary attack / tracts that I've ever seen. It's published by something called Chick Publications -- which has tracts for all Sinning ethnicities and other groups [even yours, whoever You are.] This is the link to their special "Indian missionary thing." If you took a strangling, suffocating swamp and sprinkled it liberally with cultural ethnocentrism and outright racism -- and then via some evil alchemy transposed all of that into a cyber/cartoon/print/tract -- this is what you'd get: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1710/1710_01.asp Yours, Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ] www.hunterbear.org ( social justice ) _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
