Custer Died For Your Sins Read online

  Sometimes Farb’s anthropological references to the Plains Indians are irrelevant and ridden with historical mythologies in several respects. The Mandans, for example, are found to be extinct—which they will be happy to know about. Plains Indians in general are declared to be as make-believe as a movie set—which will make them welcome Farb warmly when he next appears in the plains.

  Most unforgivable is the statement that Sitting Bull was accidentally killed. For if Sitting Bull was accidentally killed, then President Kennedy’s death was merely the result of Oswald carelessly cleaning his rifle. The two deaths had the same motivation—political assassination.

  Man’s Rise to Civilization may have redeeming anthropological features; it certainly has sufficient footnotes to make it PURE rather than APPLIED research. The question for Indian people, and the ultimate question for Americans, is: What effect will it have over the lives of people?

  There should be little doubt that this book tends to reinforce the anti-Indian school of thought and to sidestep the entire issue of Indian society, culture, or what have you. Unless there is a frank understanding between the two people, red and white, so that the relationship between them is honest, sincere, and equal, talk about culture will not really matter. The white man will continue to take Indian land because he will feel that he is HELPING to bring civilization to the poor savages.

  Thus has it ever been with anthropologists. In believing they could find the key to man’s behavior, they have, like the churches, become forerunners of destruction. Like the missionaries, anthropologists have become intolerably certain that they represent ultimate truth.

  The rest of America had better wake up before their entire lives are secretly manipulated by the musings of this breed. For the time is coming when middle class America will become credit-card-carrying, turnpike-commuting, condominium-dwelling, fraternity-joining, churchgoing, sports-watching, time-purchase-buying, television-watching, magazine-subscribing, politically inert transmigrated urbanites who, through the phenomenon of the second car and the shopping center have become golf-playing, wife-swapping, etc., etc., etc., suburbanites. Or has that day dawned? If so, you will understand what has been happening to Indian communities for a long, long time.

  I would expect an instantaneous rebuttal by the “knowledgable” anthros that these sentiments do not “represent” all the Indians. They don’t TODAY. They will TOMORROW. In the meantime it would be wise for anthropologists to get down from their thrones of authority and PURE research and begin helping Indian tribes instead of preying on them. For the wheel of Karma grinds slowly but it does grind finely. And it makes a complete circle.

  5 MISSIONARIES AND THE RELIGIOUS VACUUM

  ONE OF THE major problems of the Indian people is the missionary. It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land. An old Indian once told me that when the missionaries arrived they fell on their knees and prayed. Then they got up, fell on the Indians, and preyed.

  Columbus managed to combine religion and real estate in his proclamation of discovery, claiming the new world for Catholicism and Spain. Missionaries have been unable to distinguish between their religious mission and their hunger for land since that time.

  The first concern of mission work was land on which to build churches, homes, storehouses, and other necessary religious monuments. Like the men from New England in Hawaii by Michener, missionaries on the North American continent came to preach and stayed to rule. Or at least prepared the way for others to conquer and exploit.

  Sacrifices often matched mistakes. Missionaries did more to open up the West than any other group, but in doing so they increased the possibility of exploitation of the people they purported to save. Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American history.

  While the thrust of Christian missions was to save the individual Indian, its result was to shatter Indian societies and destroy the cohesiveness of the Indian communities. Tribes that resisted the overtures of the missionaries seemed to survive. Tribes that converted were never heard of again. Where Christianity failed, and insofar as it failed, Indians were able to withstand the cultural deluge that threatened to engulf them.

  The conflict between the Indian and white religions was classic. Each religion expressed the outlook and understanding of its respective group. Religious ideas of the two groups never confronted each other directly. The conflict was one of rites and techniques. Christianity destroyed many Indian religious practices by offering a much easier and more practical religion. It was something one could immediately understand, not a paving of the way for what ultimately confronted one.

  The credal rhetoric of Christianity filled the vacuum it had created by its redefinition of religion as a commodity to be controlled. Although prohibited for several generations, Indian beliefs have always retained the capacity to return from their exile because they have always related to the Indian’s deepest concern.

  Indian religion required a personal commitment to act. Holy men relied upon revelations experienced during fasting, sacrifices, and visions. Social in impact, most Indian religious experience was individualistic in origin. Visions defined vocations in this world rather than providing information concerning salvation in the other world.

  Formulas of faith were anathema to Indian societies. Debate over implications of the existence of God and creation of subtleties related to deity were unknown. The substantial doctrines developed by Christian theologians to explain, define, and control deity were never contemplated in Indian religious life. Religion was an undefined sphere of influence in tribal society.

  Tribes shared with the Hebrews of the Old Testament the concept of the covenant of the People with God. The majority of tribal names, when translated into English, mean the People, First Men, or Original People. From the belief that the tribe is the People of God to the exclusion of other peoples, it usually follows that tribal customs and religious ordinances are synonymous.

  Laws as such did not exist within tribal societies. Law was rejected as being force imposed from without, whereas people-hood required fulfillment from within the individual. Insofar as there were external controls, Indians accepted only the traditions and customs which were rooted in the tribe’s distant past. Time itself became irrelevant because custom prevailed long enough to outlive any knowledge of its origin. Mystery and reverence gradually surrounded rites and ceremonies, giving them the necessary mysterium tremendum by which they were able to influence social behavior.

  Most mysterious was the Indian reverence for land. When told to settle down and become farmers, most Indians rebelled. For centuries they had lived off the land as hunters, taking and giving in their dances and ceremonies. Earth, they believed, was mother of all. Most important was the land which their particular tribe dwelt on. The Crow are a good example of the Indian religious love for land. The Crow have a long prayer which thanks the Great Spirit for giving them their land. It is not too hot, they say, and not too cold. It is not too high and snowy and not too low and dusty. Animals enjoy the land of the Crow, men enjoy it also. The prayer ends by declaring that of all the possible lands in which happiness can be found, only in the land of the Crow is true happiness found.

  Even today I have watched Indian people look sadly over the miles of plowed ground of South Dakota, wishing that the land were returned to its primitive beauty, undefiled and giving to man and animal alike the life only land can give. Instead of beauty one sees a dust storm in the distance, ribbons of dirty highway going west, and the earth cut into a giant perverted checkerboard with no beauty and hardly even any symmetry.

  Contrast this living, undefined religion, where man is a comfortable part of his world, with the message brought by the Christian missionary. The Reformation had divided the world into two arenas: church and state. Morality of one was not necessarily related to morality in the other. Often acts of the state, immoral by any standard, w
ere endorsed by the church in an effort to gain political power and influence. Other times the church, in striving to protect its economic base, would encourage the state to undertake projects it dared not conceive of in its own moral terms.

  There is, of course, an analogy in the contemporary role of the late Cardinal Spellman in supporting the United States in the Vietnam situation and the original encouragement by the churches of possession of lands the different European nations had discovered.

  At one time or another slavery, poverty, and treachery were all justified by Christianity as politically moral institutions of the state. Economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest businessman, was seen as a process approved by God and the means by which He determined His Chosen for salvation.

  Exploitation of one’s fellows by any means became a religious exercise. Law became a trap for the unwary and a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who understood how to use it. Public disclosure of wrongdoing was the only punishment society acknowledged either side of the grave, although religious sentimentalists talked vaguely about playing harps for an infinite number of years in some undisclosed heaven. Few mastered the harp before departing for that better life, however.

  When the two religious movements came into conflict, the Christian religion was able to overcome tribal beliefs because of its ability to differentiate life into segments which were unrelated. When a world view is broken into its component disciplines, these disciplines become things unto themselves and life turns into an unrelated group of categories each with its own morality and ethics.

  Missionaries approached the Indian tribes in an effort to bring them into western European religious life. Their primary message sought to invalidate the totality of Indian life and replace it with Christian values. Because Christian reality had been broken into credal definitions, all the missionaries could present to the Indians were words and phrases that had a magical connotation.

  Missionaries looked at the feats of the medicine men and proclaimed them to be works of the devil. They overlooked the fact that the medicine men were able to do marvelous things. Above all, they overlooked the fact that what the Indian medicine men did worked.

  Most activity centered on teaching and preaching. The thrust was to get the Indians to memorize the Large Catechism, the Small Catechism, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Ten Commandments, and other magic rites and formulas dear to Christianity. Salvation became a matter of regurgitation of creeds. In a very real sense, then, Christianity replaced living religions with magic.

  And the white man had much magic. Blessed with the gun, the printing press, the iron kettle, and whiskey, it was obvious to many Indians that the white man’s god took pretty good care of his people. Since there were no distinctions made between religion and life’s other activities by the Indian people, the natural tendency was to adopt the white religion of recitation and forego the rigors of fasting, sacrifice, and prayer.

  Missionary activity became an earthly parallel of what Christians thought was happening in heaven. Like the rich burghers of Europe, whom God bribed with earthly treasures, missionaries bribed their way into Indian societies. Once established, they began the laborious task of imprinting two thousand years of sterile dogmas on the unstructured Indian psyche.

  Warfare between white and red solidified Indian religion in the persons of a few great leaders such as Sitting Bull, the Prophet (who was the brother of Tecumseh), Handsome Lake, and Wovoka, creator of the Ghost Dance. When these great leaders died, Indian religion went underground and became, like its white competitor, unrelated to the social and political life of the tribe.

  By the middle of the last century few tribes were untouched by Christianity. When a tribe had been thoroughly subjugated, Army, trappers, and missionaries moved on and permanent personnel moved in to take control of Indian communities.

  From 1860 to 1880, tribes were confined to reservations, as the West was in its death throes. Churches began lobbying early in the 1860’s at the Indian Bureau in Washington for franchises over the respective reservations. Thus one reservation would be assigned to the Roman Catholics, one to the Lutherans, one to the Methodists, and one to the Episcopalians. Other churches were prohibited from entry on a reservation once it had been assigned to a particular church and could enter only with permission from the other church. It always bothered me that these churches who would not share pulpits and regarded each other as children of the devil, should have so cold-bloodedly divided up the tribes as if they were choosing sides for touch football.

  Many times rations due Indians were mysteriously late in arriving, until the tribes responded to the pleadings of the missionaries. Other times outrageous programs designed to farm desert land were equated with Christian missions. A crop failure was sometimes seen as comparable to a decline in converts because the two harvests were inseparable in the minds of the missionaries.

  Indian religious life was forbidden. The Ghost Dance movement, a last attempt to bring back the old hunting days, was enough to convince the Indian Bureau and the Army that the sooner the Indian was Christianized the safer the old frontier would be. Soon the only social activity permitted on reservations was the church service. Signs of any other activity would call for a cavalry troop storming in to rescue civilization from some non-existent threat.

  It always amuses me to hear some white missionary glamorize the reception of Christianity by the Plains tribes. He will tell how “two or three were gathered together and gladly heard the word of God preached.” The simple fact is that had the two or three not been talking about the white god they probably would have been shot down for fomenting an uprising.

  It was no feat, therefore, to convert Indians to a new religion. No missionary ever realized that it was less the reality of his religion and more the threat of extinction that brought converts to him. Or if he did realize it, he never acknowledged it.

  Some churches patterned their work after existing social traits within the tribal culture. They were able to translate older Indian ceremonies and rites into Christian celebrations. Like the Gothic arches which took the place of the oak groves under which the European tribes had worshiped, the traditional gatherings of the tribes were made into annual meetings of the mission fields.

  Particularly among the Sioux in the Dakotas, the Sun Dance was reinterpreted as the annual convocation of the missions on each reservation. And this type of accommodation to Indian life gave churches that used it built-in advantages over their competitors. But Christianity was presented in such a dogmatic form to the Sioux that it became frozen into a rigid structure. The religion, as it was presented in the 1870’s, remains the religion of the Sioux today. This fact was brought home to me quite vividly in 1964.

  That was the year that many church people became convinced that the Civil Rights movement was the only real Christian mission. Most of us secretly suspected that the opportunity for national publicity had more to do with this feeling than did God. But we accepted this message of the churches as valid.

  Church officials from the East came out to the reservations to bring the new message and to get Indians involved in the struggle. A New Yorker attended a Sioux religious meeting in South Dakota and was treated to an evening of hymns and prayers sung in the Dakota language. And he was horrified.

  Nowhere, he later stated, did he find the social concern for integration and equality which made up the bulk of the Christian message. God’s number-one priority, he felt, was Civil Rights and here he had been overwhelmed with missionary hymns that had no relevance to the great struggle.

  When this message was later related to the Sioux they were more outraged than was our friend from New York. They insisted that the missionaries had come out to them in the 1870’s and taught them to sing “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” and had told them that this was God’s word, and that, by God, they were going to keep on singing “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” regardless of what the rest of the world was doing.

  Where
, therefore, Christianity was accepted, it became so ingrained in the social life of the people that it often became impossible to change. And the tribes generally accepted what they felt was important and disregarded the rest.

  Today it is fairly easy to tell which churches had which reservations by the predominance of members of a certain church among the older Indians. Nowhere was the validity of one denomination over another demonstrated. It always causes me to wonder why the various church bodies fight over doctrines today when a century ago they were willing to commit the souls of their red brothers to pernicious doctrines on one reservation in return for the exclusive preaching franchise on another.

  Various Lutheran bodies do not share communions or pulpits today. The Roman Catholics and Episcopalians are always engaged in a brawl over the Apostolic pedigree of their ministry. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists continually struggle over concepts of congregational sovereignty. Yet one hundred years ago these churches deliberately ceded various tribes to doctrines they considered heretical in order to gain a captive audience from the federal government.

  What each denomination did share, however, was the Anglo-Saxon social forms. These modes of behavior were what they really taught and preached about on the various reservations. Churches struggled to make the Indians cut their hair because they felt that wearing one’s hair short was the civilized Christian thing to do. After the tribal elders had been fully sheared, they were ushered into church meeting, given pictures of Jesus and the Disciples, and told to follow these Holy Men. Looking down at the pictures, the ex-warriors were stunned to discover the Holy Dozen in shoulder-length hair!