cahokia
The second session of the three-part lecture series on US history from an indigenous perspective was just as fantastic as the first—even if it felt a little compressed. Greg covered, in his words, “annihilation and assimilation,” or roughly the period from 1790-1930, when native tribes were systematically marginalized and yes, there was an attempted genocide, and then whoever was left afterwards was forcibly assimilated into white, Euro-centric culture, being taught that everything about their indigenous heritage was wrong and undesirable (to put it mildly). It was a profoundly shameful and, well, evil period in American history. We have a lot to account for as a nation, and there’s still so much work to be done. It was a lot of ground to cover, and Greg did the best he could in an hour and a bit, but we could have been there for much longer.
During the Q&A session at the end, we discussed in more detail the philosophical underpinnings of these policies, concepts like the “doctrine of discovery” and “manifest destiny.” Greg pointed out how wrongheaded those concepts were from the standpoint of evangelism, assuming, as they did, that the native populations were completely in the dark spiritually, and only the enlightened Europeans could deliver the gospel on a silver platter. But, as he pointed out, the Holy Spirit is at work everywhere around the globe, and it’s the height of presumption to assume that missionaries are coming into cultures completely bereft of any kind of spiritual insight. Instead, he argued, it’s our job as believers to simply learn from the native populations, to recognize what the Holy Spirit is already doing, and to simply lean into that, and never in any kind of coercive or make-the-sale kind of way. Greg decried the motivation that underpins a lot of (most?) missionary organizations: The desire to hasten Jesus’ second coming because of a literal take on Matthew 24:14, and the quasi-mechanical missionary-industrial complex that produces. I pointed out one of the similarities between the indigenous genocide and the modern missions movement is that they both seem to be profoundly selfish and ignorant initiatives in search of philosophical or spiritual justification to prop them up. Greg roundly agreed. I can tell you, it really motivates me to be on the lookout for other ass-backward, cart-before-the-horse assumptions and mindsets. They’re SO insidious; the cultural air we breathe, and so destructive. Looking forward to the final lecture this week.