Can Christianity and Indigenous Worldviews Ever Be Reconciled?

This article is adapted with permission from Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec. © 2022 Broadleaf Books.

I WAIT AT the back of the stage, behind the curtains, holding my hand drum and listening to the low buzz of a theater filled with people. My friend Karl stands in the darkness at center stage, waiting for me to start singing and make my way to where he stands. We are providing an opening for the Niagara Performing Arts Center’s season preview. It is not a Native event. The center is a public arts venue that showcases a wide range of performers, and the artistic directors include Native artists throughout the regular season. They have asked Karl and me to open this particular night as an acknowledgment that this and future events take place on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe land.

It is fall 2017, 150 years since Canada’s confederation, and I’ve made a ribbon skirt to wear at this event. Ribbon skirts—long cotton skirts embellished with rows of ribbon and sometimes with appliqued designs—are a contemporary innovation of an older style of clothing that we wore before settler contact. The ribbon skirt I’ve made for this evening is black with wide ribbons in the colors associated with the medicine wheel: red, black, white, and yellow. I have appliqued red maple leaves falling down the front of the skirt until they are covered by ribbons. I like the imagery of Canada being absorbed by Indigenous ideas. Later, during the gathering after the event, a couple of women will come to speak with me. They will comment that the leaves are upside down. A nation in distress flies their flag upside down, I will tell them. And Canada, like the United States, is a nation in distress.

There is the beat of the drum in that darkened theater and then my voice coming from the back of the stage. I move toward the front, singing each verse louder as the lights come up. When I finish, Karl speaks the words of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address in Oneida. Then we simply leave the stage. Not explaining the song or our actions or our words is deliberate. We let the audience sit for moment and consider that what feels profoundly alien to them is not alien at all. For one brief moment, they are surrounded by the sounds of this place.

That evening before we go on stage, Karl and I talk about whether Christianity and Indigenous worldviews can ever be reconciled, if there is any common space. He doesn’t think so. Karl is Oneida and part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Hundreds of years ago, when it became evident that the newcomers were going to stay, he says, the Confederacy made a treaty with the settlers called the Two Row. This is written in the form of a wampum belt made of oblong purple and white beads, with two white rows on a purple background. The agreement was that we would travel together, the Indigenous peoples and the settlers, each in our own boat but on parallel paths in a relationship guided by peace, honesty, and respect.

The principle of noninterference lives at the root of many Indigenous philosophies and is exemplified in treaties like the Two Row: We would live according to our ways, and the newcomers would live according to theirs. Although colonization is clearly a violation of this treaty, the Haudenosaunee people I know remain committed to it and continue to try to live within these principles.

I agree with Karl’s analysis of the newcomers and their religion. As a foreign religion and perpetrator of colonization, Christianity is part of the other boat. He sees Christianity as it exists broadly across the Western world—a faith disconnected from land and strangers, ideas imposed by white Europeans who arrived as guests but almost immediately began to act as autocratic hosts.

But as I understand them, the two rows—those of the Indigenous peoples and the settlers—aren’t meant to completely isolate us from each other; they are meant to guide our relationship so that we can live together. And what I know of the worldview of the Anishinaabe is not completely inconsistent with what Christianity could be. I see other possibilities: the original instructions of connection, relationship with land and people. The original instructions as recorded in the Bible are frequently disregarded or redefined in service to settler-colonial ideas about how a society ought to be organized. I think Christianity has the potential to liberate, to actually help us reject those colonial ideas. I offer Anishinaabe stories and Indigenous knowledge not so that you can claim them as your own but so that they can provide a lens through which you can see your own stories differently. How can we read these histories differently and find a way to live together in peace, honesty, and respect?

How can we find a way to live in the knowledge that we are all related? How can we become better kin?

The difference between moving and being moved

THE STORY OF colonization is one of displacement, of disruption, of ghosts left behind and of those who make flutes of their bones. The early colonists made deals for land, paying tribute and living in often uneasy peace with their Indigenous neighbors, but this period did not last. European hunger for land was insatiable. They just kept coming.

For 400 years, settlers swarmed over the continent, following waterways and trails they carved into mountains. They burned across the prairie like a wildfire consuming the deep-rooted grasses and leaving thirsty crops like wheat and corn in their wake. Creative and innovative, they used whatever strategies they could to push us aside. The missionaries often came first, then traders and settlers, all with the protection of the military and laws that justified theft and displacement. By the late 19th century, the West was won. Manifest Destiny rested on Enlightenment beliefs about correct land use, racial hierarchies, and a certainty that their authority was derived from ancient roots, if not from God himself.

The story of America as a nation of proud immigrants is a myth, one that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks in her book Not “A Nation of Immigrants.” Put simply, immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Settlers come to a place and impose a political order. Those who came here by force—such as African people who were enslaved—or those who come through desperation— such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war—are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness. Those seen as threats are contained in prisons and migrant detention centers, just as Native people were contained in reservations. The United States has never been “a nation of immigrants.” The Haudenosaunee offered settlers a kind of immigration—a way to join with the existing political order through the Two Row Wampum. Instead, the United States chose to become a settler-colonial nation, imposing a new order.

Natives, Africans, Europeans, and more all have migration stories. We all moved. We moved across oceans and land. But there is a profound difference between moving and being moved. Between being welcomed and being used.

In this new way of organizing the world, when you separate people from land, all you are left with to distinguish difference is race. Willie James Jennings makes this point in The Christian Imagination, in which he talks about the early theologians’ attempts to fit the new world into their Christian theology. The Christian world began in the Middle East and fanned out from there, disconnected from the place of its birth, uprooted and unmoored. Christians are identified by their beliefs, not their place. But when I say that I am Anishinaabe, I am not only making a claim to who I am; I am making a claim to a place. I am claiming a land that claims me back. When I say that I am Ojibwe Anishinaabe, I am making an even more specific claim. I am claiming the lands from where Paddle-to-the-Sea began his journey. When my mother says she is Ukrainian, she is also making a claim to place. But when you disconnect people from place—when they become white or Black or Indian—there is no longer any such claim.

The land responds with joy

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OFTEN speak of belonging to the land. We say that the land owns us. It was into this kind of relationship that God invited the Israelites, and it was into this kind of relationship that the Haudenosaunee invited the Dutch when they made the Two Row Wampum treaty. The Year of Jubilee was more than an economic reset to prevent the accumulation of wealth; it restored each family’s relationship to the land of their forebears and reminded the people that they did not own the fields that they purchased.

The land mourns, but it also responds with joy. The same prophets who describe a land fasting and covering herself with dust in response to human wrongdoing and harm also describe beautiful scenes of rejoicing and jubilation upon the return of the people. “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom,” the prophet Isaiah says.

Remember the two paths of the Seventh Fire—one parched and blackened and the other green and lush. How we prepare now will determine what comes next: either a healing fire that brings wild strawberries and lush pathways or a charred landscape that cuts our feet. For Indigenous people, that means holding on to the knowledge of our ancestors. For the light-skinned people, that means making the right choices about how to live.

These governments that make decisions? They are your model, not ours. This economic system we live under? This is your model, not ours. The Doctrine of Discovery that declared our lands were empty? That is your framework, not ours. You have choices to make.

Songs connect us

A SONG IS where we started this journey—a song that contained grief and hope, loss and possibility. We began with footsteps walking onto a darkened stage, where a friend waited with me to remind people that we are still here, that we are still connected to this place through song and language. The wooden stage and the concrete sidewalks do not separate me from the Earth; they are part of the Earth. Taken and reshaped to another purpose, the Earth is still there, and I can feel her beneath my feet. The asphalt made of oil is, as my friend Zoe Todd reminds me, the remnants of dinosaur relatives. In this way, even the roads connect me to a distant past, although the making of these roads was certainly not a respectful way to treat our ancient relatives.

Songs connect us to each other and across time. My drum group has sung for a friend’s Native studies class, sitting around a fire with trees overhead and rocks beneath our feet—beings that perhaps remembered older songs. This is also connection. The call and response of our songs is a kind of reciprocal relationship, one that I hope you have heard. Together we hear the call of history, and the future anticipates our response. We are related.