MeyerBros

decolonization

Part of a comment I wrote today in response to Stance Analysis, a post by Tim Barr on TameTheMONSTER.org:

Find the book Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and check out the essay “A Centennial Minute From Indian Country”. It ends with this right-on paragraph:

Some may say there is great sympathy for the dreadful situation in which Indians find themselves politically and economically. Certainly that is true of many churchgoing people in the region, but they have developed no active intellectual position beyond the pledges of support illustrated at the beginning of this essay. To develop such a position would take real, coherent, harsh, and truthful self-criticism of the role of Christian churches in public Indian policy.

Also: George Tinker’s Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide.

I think we (Christians) need not only a critique of the ways that Christianity has been so easily turned to the service of colonialism and oppression (which I have heard some of, at least in Christian anti-racist circles), but a deeper critique of the ways in which our own understanding of our faith needs to be deeply “de-colonized”. Dealing seriously with questions like, “Is Christianity cultural appropriation?” “What does it mean for a spiritual tradition imported from halfway around the world via conquest and colonization to learn to really care for the land, in relation to spiritual traditions indigenous to that land?” Etc.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 2:11 pm by carl and is filed under anti-racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “decolonization”

mennonot Says:

April 29th, 2006 at 7:14 pm

Well said Carl. And I’d add something in there about being appropriated by empire for the last 1700 years or so. I’m on a campaign to expand this particular wikipedia article on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinian_shift

And I do like the photo.
carl Says:

May 1st, 2006 at 9:47 am

Yep, for sure. I also just noticed that the Wikipedia “Colonialism” article has a poorly written entry on European Colonization of the Americas - maybe you’ll get me into this Wikipedia maintenance thing after all…
mennonot Says:

May 1st, 2006 at 8:24 pm

Serendipitously, I just happened to pick up “Beyond the Promised Land” by David F. Noble this week.

In some ways it echoes the themes of Ishmael in questioning the myth of progress. But he specifically looks at the role of the promise of the Promised Land in underpinning the dominant progress myths (manifest destiny, technology, etc). He names it as a myth of a rootless people in exile. He contrasts this with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the book of Ecclesiastes, both of which he sees as saying you should stay home and enjoy what you have and don’t try to be immortal. He contrasts this traditional cultures and with the emerging global justice movement:

“The new outlook, rooted once again the particulars of place, recalls more ancient stores of wisdom from which the myth of the promised land took leave, and it does so in order to restore some balance to belief, for the sake of human and planetary survival.”

Another author along these lines is Fredy Perlman an Anarcho-primitivist from Detroit. In his book “Against His-story, Against Leviathan” (1985) he goes through the last 10,000 years of history and tracks the rise of the Leviathan of civilization in its various guises. Its really hard to believe that Daniel Quinn never cites him in any of his books.

He draws on Genesis and the biblical story from a mostly critical perspective and Ancient Near Eastern history. Its a strikingly poetic account that takes on the traditional Marxist myth of the march of progress as well. You can read an excerpt here.