"INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' DAY"

 “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY”

Last Sunday Caroline and I went down to the Decatur City Square to join in an Indigenous People’s Day Celebration and Call to Protest.  It was the day before “Columbus Day,” and it was sponsored by the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights.  The Alliance is seeking to build a coalition of groups who have been oppressed and exploited by the continuing white supremacy of our history and our time.   The gathering was primarily driven by the passion and vision of Decatur High School students, a great sign!  We were standing on land previously occupied by Muscogee Creek people, and the city square at Decatur had previously served as an informal boundary and trading place between the Cherokees to the north and the Creek in Decatur and to the south.  We were gathered to celebrate the heritage of the Creek nation and the heritage of Indigenous People in general.

We were also gathered to protest the continuing presence of a monument in Decatur Square, a monument  to the killing and oppression of the Creek people.  It is a cannon on top of a small monument, put there in 1906 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, remembering the “Indian Wars of 1836.” These were not really wars at all – they were the genocide and removal of Indigenous People from the Southeast.    Over 21 million acres of Creek land had already been taken by the US government in 1814 to seek to open land for those classified as “white” to come in to get the land at little or no cost.  This past summer the Alliance had been instrumental in getting Dekalb County and the City of Decatur to remove the huge obelisk memorial to the Confederacy by the UDC in 19098, but the cannon celebrating the “Indian Wars” still remains. We were there that day to ask the City of Decatur and Dekalb County to remove it, as they had previously moved the Confederate monument.

We heard in Native American songs and stories a different kind of relationship to the land, to the earth, and to one another.  We heard about a reverence for the land, the air, the water, the living creatures (including human beings)which inhabit all of these areas.  We heard a sense of the power of the idea that the ancestors are inhabiting a different sphere of all of these areas.  Thus, the modern Anglo idea of pouring deadly chemicals into the air and land and water in order to get more “stuff” seemed to be the foreign and deadly process that we all now know it to be.  In these days of rapid climate change, it is vital to all of us that we recover and hear the truth of these Native American visions of our life together.

We also heard from John Winterhawk, a Muscogee Creek whose ancestors had been forced off the land in Georgia and forced to go on the “southern” leg of the Trail of Tears.  He is now a potter and a storyteller.  He noted the great suffering of that journey to Oklahoma, where the lands promised to the Creek and other Indigenous Peoples were dry and hostile to the agricultural life that the Creek had developed in Georgia and Alabama.  Some of the Creek made their way back to Alabama and Georgia, and his ancestors were among them.  He urged us work for justice for Indigenous Peoples and for all those who have been oppressed by the machinations of white supremacy.  He also gave thanks for those traditions and insights from Indigenous Peoples which continue to give us visions for a way out of the current destructive cycle that Anglo domination has imposed all of us.  

     The primary difficulty, of course, is our captivity to white supremacy, and especially for those of us classified as “white.”  We simply do not want to acknowledge or even imagine the truths that we heard on this day in Decatur Square.   A recent example may help us to understand the depth of our captivity.  I gave a lecture at Princeton Seminary in the summer of 2018 at the Karl Barth Pastors Conference.  In that lecture, I suggested that Barth had needed to emphasize the power of the neighbor as one of the primary sources of revelation from God.  I used my story and the power of race in my life and in the life of American culture as primary examples of God’s sending the neighbor to us to help us understand the depth of our captivity to sin as human beings.  

After the lecture a middle-aged white man from Canada came up to talk with me.  He indicated that he did not grow up in the white, racist culture of the American South, and because of that,  he was not sure that my examples applied to him or to Canadians.  I responded that some of the best writings and descriptions of encounters with race that I had heard came from First Nations peoples of Canada.  He then proceeded to tell me that one of his best friends was a person of native origin, and their friendship was evidence that he himself was not captured by race.  I replied that I had heard such disclaimers all of my adult life in America, whenever a white person was confronted by the power of race in our lives. 

 I then asked about the issues of the land in Canada and the need for reparations there.  He replied again that he thought that was a complicated issue, but that in the end, “God owns the land.”  I asked him if he had deeds to some of the land, and he replied that he did.  I said, “If God owns the land, why not give your deed to the church or some non-profit mission group to be used for God’s work?”  His reply was:  “I’m tired of feeling guilty about this kind of stuff.”  I urged him: “Then open your eyes and your heart to recognize your captivity and see where God takes you on this.”  He went away after that, but I hope that he begins to have the stuff of recognition.  Indeed, I hope that we all do.