Custer Died For Your Sins Read online

  No other field of endeavor in America today has as much blatant racial discrimination as does the field of Christian missions to the American Indian people. It is a marvel that so many Indian people still want to do work for the churches.

  Documentation of discrimination and favoritism would be fairly easy were it not for the fantastic ability of the churches to cover their tracks. Instead of forcing resignations from the ministry, church officials transfer incompetents from station to station in order to protect the good name of the church. Thus some tribes are visited with a problem missionary who should have been sent on his way years ago but who has managed to hang on to his ministerial status by periodic transfer and the lack of moral courage by church officials to take action.

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  The Indian people have come a long way in the last generation. For a long time they accepted the missionary because he seemed to want to do the right thing. But there has always been a desire for the Indian people to take over their own churches. Now they no longer have the expectation that there will be native clergy in their churches. More and more they are returning to Indian dances and celebrations for their religious expressions. They now wait only for a religious leader to rise from among the people and lead them to total religious independence. Thomas Banyaca or Frank Takes Gun, leader of the Native American Church, or someone yet unknown may suddenly find a way to integrate religion with tribalism as it exists today and become that leader.

  Indian religion appears to many of us as the only ultimate salvation for the Indian people. Religion formerly held an important place in Indian tribal life. It integrated the functions of tribal society so that life was experienced as a unity. Christianity has proved to be a disintegrating force by confining its influence to the field of formula recitation and allowing the important movements of living go their separate ways until life has become separated into a number of unrelated categories.

  Religion today, or at least Christianity, does not provide the understanding with which society makes sense. Nor does it provide any means by which the life of the individual has value. Christianity fights unreal crises which it creates by its fascination with its own abstractions.

  I remember going to an Indian home shortly after the death of a child. There was a Roman Catholic priest admonishing the mother not to cry because the child was now with Jesus. Automatically, he insisted, because it had been baptized. Grief, he declared, was unnatural to man ever since Jesus had died on the cross. He went on to tell how God had decided on a great mission for the child and had called it home to Him and that the mother could see the hand of God in the child’s death and needn’t wonder about its cause.

  In fact, the mother had not wondered about the reason for the child’s death. Her child had fallen from a second-story window and suffered internal injuries. It had lingered several days with a number of ruptured organs and had eventually and mercifully died.

  I could never believe that the priest was comforting the mother. It seemed rather that he was trying frantically to reinforce what had been taught to him in seminary, doctrines that now seemed shaken to their roots. The whole scene was frightening in its abstract cruelty. I felt sorrier for the priest than for the mother. His obvious disbelief in what he was telling her and his inability to face death in its bitterest moment made him the tragic figure.

  That is why I believe that Indian religion will be the salvation of the Indian people. In Indian religions, regardless of the tribe, death is a natural occurrence and not a special punishment from an arbitrary God. Indian people do not try to reason themselves out of their grief. Nor do they try to make a natural but sad event an occasion for probing the rationale of whatever reality exists beyond ourselves.

  Indians know that people die. They accept death as a fact of life. Rather than build a series of logical syllogisms that reason away grief, Indian people have a ceremony of mourning by which grief can properly be expressed. Depending on the tribal traditions, grief is usually accompanied by specific acts of mourning, which is then ended by giving a feast for the community. After the feast, there is no more official mourning. When expression of grief is channeled into behavioral patterns—as it is, also, in the Jewish religion—it can be adequately understood and felt. When it is suppressed—as it is in the Christian religion—death becomes an entity in itself and is something to be feared. But death also becomes unreal and the act of an arbitrary God.

  When death is unreal, violence also becomes unreal, and human life has no value in and of itself. Consider the last talk you had with an insurance salesman. Remember how he told you that you would be covered “if” you died. An Indian salesman would have said “when,” but then an Indian would have known how to die and both “if” and “when” would have held no terror for him.

  Many tribes have kept their puberty ceremonies, and these ceremonies are very much alive today in the Southwest. Childhood and adolescence are marked off by these ceremonies so that the natural growth processes are recognized and young people growing up will be sure of their place in society.

  Contrast the value of these ceremonies with the confusion of suburban America where children are pushed into imitations of adults in their younger years and then later denied the privileges of adults. Certainly the pressures on boys in the Little League are comparable in intensity and form with those professional ballplayers face. But after ten years of being treated like adults, young people begin to demand adult status and they are clubbed into submission by police at Columbia University and in Chicago.

  The largest difference I can see between Indian religion and Christian religions is in inter-personal relationships. Indian society had a religion that taught respect for all members of the society. Remember, Indians had a religion that produced a society in which there were no locks on doors, no orphanages, no need for oaths, and no hungry people. Indian religion taught that sharing one’s goods with another human being was the highest form of behavior. The Indian people have tenaciously held to this tradition of sharing their goods with other people in spite of all attempts by churches, government agencies, and schools to break them of the custom.

  Christianity came along and tried to substitute “giving” for sharing. There was only one catch: giving meant giving to the church, not to other people. Giving, in the modern Christian sense, is simply a method of shearing the sheep, not of tending them.

  Several years ago a Roman Catholic priest on the Wind River reservation complained bitterly about the Indian custom of sharing as being “un-Christian” because it distributed the wealth so well no middle class could be established. Hence “bad” Indians dragged the “good” ones down to a lower economic level and the reservation remained economically static.

  The initial object of the Roman Catholic priest’s outburst was an Indian woman who had a telephone and let all her neighbors use it. The bill ran as high as one hundred dollars some months. Often the woman was behind on her bill. But she didn’t mind letting her neighbors use the phone when they wanted to.

  The priest was furious when he reminded himself that of a Sunday the collection plate was not filled by the Indians. He felt that was intolerable and he wanted to teach the Indians “stewardship.” Stewardship meant saving money and giving a percentage of the savings in the plate.

  There was no difference, for the missionary, between sharing one’s goods with the community and squandering resources. He preferred that the people give their money to the church, which would, in turn, efficiently define who was in need of help. Indians looked at the missionary’s form of sharing as a sophisticated attempt to bribe the Great Spirit.

  The onus is not on the Roman Catholics alone. The Protestants have devised a scheme whereby sharing is reduced to a painless sixty minutes a year. It is called One Great Hour of Sharing. Once a year they remind themselves how lucky they are to be Protestants and call for an outpouring of money so that others might receive the same privilege. Tough social problems always go unsolved.

  Shari
ng, the great Indian tradition, can be the basis of a new thrust in religious development. Religion is not synonymous with a large organizational structure in Indian eyes. Spontaneous communal activity is more important. Thus any religious movement of the future would be wise to model itself on existing Indian behavioral patterns. This would mean returning religion to the Indian people.

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  The best thing that the national denominations could do to ensure the revitalization of Christian missions among Indian people would be to assist in the creation of a national Indian Christian Church. Such a church would incorporate all existing missions and programs into one national church to be wholly in the hands of Indian people.

  Such a church would include all ordained Indian clergymen now serving as church workers in the Indian field. The actual form of the ministry would not be determined by obsolete theological distinctions preserved from the middle ages, but would rather incorporate the most feasible role that religion can now play in the expanding reservation societies.

  Each denomination that has been putting funds into Indian work would contribute toward the total budget of the new church. Existing buildings and church structures would be evaluated by the new Indian church and the tribal council of the reservation on which the property is located. Congregations of the various denominations would be consolidated and reservation-wide boards of laymen would direct activities on each reservation.

  With the religious function integrated into the ongoing life of the tribe, the Indian church would be able to achieve self-support in a short time as the role of religion clarified itself to the reservation communities. Religious competition, which fractures present tribal life, would disappear and the movement toward ancient religions might not be so crucial.

  Such a proposal is too comprehensive for most denominations to accept at the present time. The primary fear of turning over the sacred white religion to a group of pagans would probably outrage most denominations, too few of whom realize how ridiculous denominational competition really is.

  The best example I can mention of denominational competition existed at Farmington, New Mexico, a couple of years ago. The situation has probably changed since 1965. But that year there were twenty-six different churches serving an estimated Navajo population of 250. That’s less than ten Indians per denomination! Assuming each church had a choir of eight, the congregations must have totaled one or two people per Sunday. Which does not indicate a field ready for harvest.

  I estimated that the total mission budget for the Farmington area that year was in excess of $250,000. Christianity, not tourism, was Farmington’s most profitable industry in 1965.

  Churches face literal dissolution on the reservations unless they radically change their method of operation. Younger Indians are finding in Indian nationalism and tribal religions sufficient meaning to continue their drift away from the established churches. Even though many churches had chaplaincies in the government boarding schools, the young are not accepting missionary overtures like their fathers and mothers did.

  As Indian nationalism continues to rise, bumper stickers like “God is Red” will take on new meanings. Originally put out at the height of Altizers “God is Dead” theological pronouncements, the slogan characterizes the trend in Indian religion today.

  Many Indians believe that the Indian gods will return when the Indian people throw out the white man’s religion and return to the ways of their fathers. Whether or not this thinking is realistic is not the question. Rather the question is one of response and responsibilty of the missionaries today. Will they continues to be a burden or not?

  Can the white man’s religion make one final effort to be real, or must it too vanish like its predecessors from the old world? I personally would like to see Indians return to their old religions wherever possible. For me at least, Christianity has been a sham to cover over the white man’s shortcomings. Yet I spent four years in a seminary finding out for myself where Christianity had fallen short.

  I believe that an Indian version of Christianity could do much for our society. But there is little chance for such a melding of cards. Everyone in the religious sphere wants his trump to play on the last trick. In the meantime, Banyaca, Mad Bear Anderson, and others are silently changing the game from pinochle to one where all fifty-two cards are wild. They may, if the breaks fall their way, introduce religion to this continent once again.

  6 GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

  PEOPLE HAVE FOUND it hard to think of Indians without conjuring up the picture of a massive bureaucracy oppressing a helpless people. Right-wing news commentators delight in picturing the Indian as a captive of the evil forces of socialism and leftist policy. Liberals view the bureaucracy as an evil denial of the inherent rights of a free man.

  It would be fair to say that the Indian people are ambivalent about all this. They fully realize that with no funds for investment in social services they are dependent upon the federal government for services which the ordinary citizen provides for himself and which other poor do not receive except under demeaning circumstances. Yet they are also fully aware that the services they receive are not gratis services. Many services are set out in early treaties and statutes by which Indians bargained and received these rights to services in return for enormous land cessions.

  Some Indian people want desperately to get rid of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Others want increased bureau services to help solve problems of long standing. In order to understand this ambivalence it is necessary to understand the history and present organization of the government agencies that provide services for Indian people.

  The bureau is a creature of history. It was originally an agency of the War Department because the early relations between the tribes and the government were more those of war than peace In 1819 Congress authorized the President to begin to provide services for the Indian people “to prevent their extinction” and from this statute the basic programs which are now found in the Bureau of Indian Affairs began.

  When the Department of the Interior was organized in 1849, the bureau was transferred to that agency. Fortunately Interior was able to take better care of the Indian than it subsequentlv did the buffalo and passenger pigeon, although some Indians would tell you that the policies which led to the demise of the other two species still reign supreme in Interior.

  For nearly a century the bureau struggled along, subject to the whims of Congress, churches, and pressure groups. It grad ually developed programs which covered all the possible needs of the Indian people. During the 1950’s, in the midst of the drive for termination, the Health Service was transferred to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. More recently proposals have been made to transfer the remainder of the BIA to HEW but these ideas have generally been rejected by both Indians and Congress, though for differing reasons.

  At present the Bureau of Indian Affairs is divided into ten area offices which are scattered throughout the country. Each area office provides supervision for a number of tribes in the different states. One day an Interior Department official told me that the area offices were scattered “strategically” to serve the tribes. If that is strategy, we should all be thankful these people are in Interior instead of the State Department.

  The area office in Minneapolis serves tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. In fact, that area office ignores the Michigan Indians, persecutes the little Indian settlement at Tama, Iowa, and muddles around in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The last Interior official to visit Michigan came in a covered wagon shortly before Custer organized his famous Michigan regiment. It is unfortunate for the Michigan tribes that he was too late to join the outfit.

  In 1968, after two years of loudly proclaiming that the bureau would have thorough consultations with tribes before changing any services, it abruptly closed the grade school at Tama, Iowa, without even mentioning it to the tribe. The tribe fought back and, at this writing, was beginning to get promises from the bureau that it could have its school a
gain.

  The area office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serves the tribes of the Dakotas and Nebraska. It is notorious for its inability to provide services to the tribes for land consolidation purposes. The reservations are all divided into small allotments and the people want to buy all of the land owned by individuals and put it into tribal ownership. During a hearing on the land problem in the 1950’s it was revealed that when the Rosebud Sioux tribe had been fairly successful at land consolidation the bureau area office in Aberdeen suddenly discovered that the process they had been using to provide land consolidation was not legal.

  The same hearing brought out that the same bureau office was advocating to the Oglala Sioux, the neighboring reservation to Rosebud, the same process of land purchase they had just denied use of to the Rosebud Sioux. Aberdeen is the most religious of the area offices. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing.

  Billings, Montana, area office serves the tribes of Wyoming and Montana. Although other area offices have been able to find means by which small groups of Indians could be organized under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, Billings has been unable to do anything with the landless Indians of Montana, a remnant of Chief Little Shell’s band of Chippewas who wandered into the state in the closing years of the last century. They have been lingering ever since.

  The state of Oklahoma has two area offices, Muskogee for the “civilized” tribes in the east and Anadarko for the “wild” tribes of the west. Somewhere in the operations of the two offices the tribes of Kansas and the Choctaws of Mississippi are handled.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, provides services for the Apaches and Pueblos of New Mexico. They also used to provide services for the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas, in the early years of the present century but one day they decided the trip was too long for them to make. So they simply forgot about that tribe. It took half a century for the Tiguas to get their status as Indians back, and then they had to become a state-serviced tribe, not a federal tribe.