We’ve been doing Native American work, serving our own Indigenous peoples, for over thirty years. I consider those years the most valuable times among all my learning experiences. I’m going to share a story with you from those years because I know Canada has a wonderful practice of recognizing the host peoples of the land. Wherever we went to speak, we always sought the blessing of the host people whose land we were on because that’s what we were taught by our elders. So we were going to the Ojibwa reservation near Hayward, Wisconsin. When I got there, I asked the group that had invited me, the YWAM Native leadership base, “Who welcomed you on the land?”

They had invited us to come up for a week and teach an Indigenous Leadership course, so I wanted to be sure all was being done in a good way. Unfortunately, no one had really invited them on the land, so I said, “Well then, we can’t speak.” This type of problem has actually happened a couple of different times, but we’ve always been able to work through it. Creator has always made a way for us to receive the local blessing and speak. But in Hayward, we had just learned of the problem, so we had to tell our host that we won’t speak unless the host people welcome us somehow.

Now, it just so happened that day that this young Ojibwa kid from Seattle, not yet in his twenties, was hitchhiking on the reservation. The young man and his brother were adopted out when he was about two years old and were raised in Seattle by a White family. He had recently experienced an LSD trip where he saw Jesus, and Jesus told him, “I want you to go back to your reservation.” The young man knew he was from a reservation somewhere, way out in Wisconsin. Well, it just so happened that the director of the YWAM base saw him hitchhiking on the road and picked him up. The director asked him if he knew who his people were, but he did not. He told Dave, the director of the YWAM base, that while on LSD, Jesus told him to come out here. Then Dave asked if he had any place to stay. He did not. Dave told him he could stay with them, so they fed him and gave him shelter. We got there later that same day.

Naturally, I took the opportunity to include this Ojibwe young man and had him stick with me all that day so he could learn something from it. I knew enough to know that he wasn’t there by accident. “I want to teach you some things,” I told him, and he said, “Okay.” I told him whenever we go to some- one else’s land, even now, my elders told me, even when driving down the road, to stop and put tobacco down, because that is someone else’s land and we need to respect it. But to be completely honest, I need to tell you that when driving I haven’t always done that, just because we travel through so many places, we’d be stopping constantly. But we have asked for permission wherever we teach or exercise any sort of spiritual influence. And so it was important that we do this right that day, especially now that we had a young person trying to find himself and his Indigenous identity. After some thought was given to this, we figured out who the elder was we should speak with. He was one of the two leaders of the Midewiwin Lodge, their tribal religion, and he was also a tribal elder and elder representative to the tribal council.

We went to the local store, and we made a traditional elder basket that consisted of flour and tobacco, a flashlight and coat hangers, sugar and coffee, fresh fruit, and all the kinds of things that elders like. After tracking down his address, we went to his house and knocked on the door, and his wife answered. I guess people visit him often for advice so she very naturally said, “Oh, come in and set the basket down, he’s on the phone right now.” Finally, he came back and asked respectfully, “Who are you guys and what do you want?” So I explained to him who we were and that we were going to be teaching on spiritual matters to Indigenous leaders there. He said, “Well, what are you going to be teaching?” I explained how we do things according to our traditional teachings, but we follow Jesus. We were calling it “contextual Native ministry” at the time, but I don’t really think of it like that anymore. We just live the life we are supposed to be living. Now we’re just Indians being Indians.

Then he started telling us some pretty interesting stories. He said, “You know what you all believe and what we believe is not that different?” Then he told us of a couple of subtle differences concerning hell and the devil. He said, “You know, when I was a younger person, I wanted to find out what you Christians believe, so I enrolled for a semester in this college. It’s called Moody Bible College, you ever heard of that?” We were surprised and talked about that for some time. But every now and then he would keep interrupting his own story, which meant he was trying to get a point across, and he said, “You know, my uncle told me to never disrespect Jesus, because Jesus is a great spirit and I talk to him.” And he would go on and he’d tell us more and more, and then he would say this thing about his uncle again. He told us about how he had just come back from a big meeting of Gichi Dowan, big medicine people from around the United States and Canada. These Ojibwa spiritual leaders were all trying to decide how they could get along better with the Christians. And he told us some stories about all this.

We sat there for maybe two hours, and at least six or seven times he said this thing about his uncle and respecting Jesus. Then at one point he said, “My uncle trained most of the spiritual leaders around this area. He lived to be over a hundred years old, and my uncle would tell me all these stories about Jesus. So I asked my uncle one time, I said, ‘Uncle, how do you know all this about Jesus? Did you go to residential school?’ He said, ‘Oh no! No! I never did that.’ Then I asked him, ‘Did the priest teach you?’ And he says, ‘No, I have never been to church.’ Then I said, ‘But you tell me all the stuff about Jesus. Have you been reading the Bible?’ My uncle said, ‘No, just remember what I told you in the past: don’t disrespect Jesus ’cause he’s a great spirit, and I talk to him.’ I said to my uncle, ‘Well yeah, you talk to him, but how do you know all these things he’s done?’ You know my uncle looked at me so quizzically, and then he said, ‘Well, when I talk to him, of course he talks back.’ And then the elder said, ‘I’m going to pray for you now,’ and then our time was over.”

The message was simple to understand: It’s just like when I used to pastor and I would tell the children’s sermon before the regular sermon. I would tell them, “If you understood the implications of what I just said in the children’s story, you don’t have to stay for the adult preaching—you can go on home.” If you understood the story I just told about the visit with this elder, you understand my message, because it holds the core of it.

Content taken from Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview by Randy S. Woodley, ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Academic.

Worldviews are not immutable, but they are difficult to change because they are “caught more than taught.” But as much as possible, they may also be taught.

Worldviews are primarily taught through what I call, “bad narratives.” Bad narratives uphold the fallacies listed above. As I stated earlier, perhaps the best way to correct a bad narrative is to provide a better, more true narrative.

Today, it is Indigenous people, women, people of color, the poor, the marginalized and other oppressed peoples, who are able to offer up a better, more true narrative than those for whom the West has justified as heroes in pursuit of capitalistic and imperialistic goals.

The Western worldview has not only helped to destroy tribes, nations, and whole people groups, but it is destroying the earth itself. In the Pacific Northwest, the area in which I live, this destructive worldview was obvious from first contact.

In the early days of the fur trappers in the Pacific Northwest, my wife’s people group, the Shoshone, inhabited much of Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, and parts of Montana. They made their living primarily by hunting big game such as deer, antelope, bison, and bighorn sheep. In the early part of the 19th century, fur companies from Britain, the United States, and Canada began sending out fur trappers and establishing forts as centers for business. As these Europeans traveled the Indian trails and followed rivers and streams, the Shoshone (and other Indians) could not believe what they saw. The malicious destruction of big game for no other reason but sport was inconceivable to the Shoshone and other tribal peoples who, themselves, depended on nature’s abundance for their survival. But for the Westerners, as long as there were animals left to kill, they would kill them all the day long and leave the majority of the meat to rot on the prairie. The Shoshone and other tribes understood the disruption and knew, if left unchecked, eventually such practices would lead to starvation. Their attacks on the newcomers were most often simply to preserve their own survival.

This same pattern was repeated in various forms throughout history and regardless of geographic location. However, due to the hubris of the Westerners, only false narratives were constructed framing the Indigenous peoples as blood-thirsty, homicidal savages. The tribes became the bane of the settler’s reports simply for trying to ensure their own survival. In the words of Major James Mcloughlin, “I have never known an Indian to kill a game animal that he did not require for his needs. And I have known few white hunters to stop while there was game to kill.” The same wonton attitude toward our natural environment still exists today in the Western worldview.

There appears to be a correlation between treating nature as the “other” and treating people in a similar manner. These practices, effectively stemming from what we would later call “white supremacy,” began with the earliest explorers and pilgrims in the Americas and in most parts of the world.

One local Northwest example is that of a fur trapper, Jim Beckwourth, who recorded his party taking 488 Bannock Indian scalps in one day, of all ages and genders, leaving not one man, woman, or child alive. Beckwourth, wrongly assumed, he had wiped out the whole Bannock tribe. This pattern of the destruction of Indigenous peoples has been repeated both before and after Beckwourth all over the world. When Indigenous people resist their own destruction, subjugation, or the theft of their lands, they are considered to be a problem.

Those who oppress others create narratives that justify their own actions, and these narratives become myths which inform the worldview of the colonizer. The attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples naturally incited resistance and retaliation. The West and the Western Church must own its horrible participation in the history of genocide of various people groups, attempted genocide on the community of creation, the oppression of women, etc.

Time for restoring our place on earth is running out.

Today, all creation is demonstrating that the enemy of the Western worldview is more formidable than the Indigenous tribes, and this enemy does not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. The Western worldview and its pattern of destruction has created so much damage that it has caused the earth herself to fight back — to defend herself from humanity and from all the current damage taking place on earth, in the waters, and in the skies. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and forest fires are all increasing in frequency and severity because humans, who up until recently have been only tertiary consumers of energy, are now the primary consumers.

In order to save herself, the earth must destroy those who are attempting to destroy her. What I believe we are witnessing is our Mother Earth “spitting out her inhabitants,” similar to what is described in Leviticus 18:25. This complete imbalance must be corrected quickly and drastically. This is where the earth wisdom and people wisdom of Indigenous peoples is so needed.

Indigenous people of the world offer traditional knowledge and wisdom that have helped to sustain them on the earth for untold millennia. I am reminded that we are all Indigenous from somewhere, at some point in history, but much of the insight that was gained in the past has been lost. Among many Indigenous peoples of the world, this insight in still intact. We must avail ourselves to it before this gift to humanity is eventually lost to the planet. Not only should Indigenous peoples be shown “special care,” but they must be restored to become the West’s primary teachers.

Most of the capital which the West — including the Church — now possesses, comes as a result of the oppression and attempted destruction of Indigenous peoples. The debt owed to Indigenous peoples not only includes “special care” but empowerment to positions of authority. The concern now goes well beyond Indigenous sovereignty, restitution, and restoration, as fundamental as these issues are, and without which makes the process meaningless. Indigenous peoples must be placed in positions of decision-making when it comes to securing humanity’s privilege as the primary caretakers of the earth and in helping to solve the other problems humanity faces.

Randy Woodley and his wife Edith are co-sustainers of Eloheh/Eagle’s Wings, www.eloheh.org in Oregon. He has written several books including Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. The Woodleys are currently campaigning to “Resurrect Eloheh” so they can purchase land in the American Southwest for the new Eloheh Farm, an Indigenous learning center and spiritual community. Please consider supporting their efforts at www.gofundme.com/ResurrectEloheh.

• Read PART I of this series on “The American Way”
• Read PART II of this series on “Worldview Distinctions”
• Read PART III of this series on “Embedded Fallacies in the Western Worldview”
• RELATED READING: “How Making Friends with Indigenous People Changed My Life”

Dualism: Dualism is perhaps the foundational fallacy of the Western worldview and is directly linked to many of the other fallacies present. A dualistic worldview causes people to invest in the ethereal (in the spiritual/metaphysical realm) or abstract (as in academia) to a higher degree than the physical realm. Our thoughts and our theologies become disembodied.

In dualistic theologies, we neglect the importance of seeing Christ at work and being Christ at work in our earthly cultures. We tend to view certain areas of life, especially those outside the church, as secular, when in fact, Jesus taught that all of life is sacred, including both heaven and earth. In his words in Matthew 5:34 Jesus was quoting Isaiah 66:1, “Thus says the LORD, “Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for Me? And where is a place that I may rest? (c.f. Matthew 23:22; Acts 7:49; James 5:12).

Can the Creator of all be contained in any building or any space? Dualism especially causes us to believe that God is at work uniquely in the church more than God is at work in the world which God also created. This often leads to inactivity through complacency brought on by our own pride.

Dualism causes us to neglect the truth found in Jesus’ words to do God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.” Physical/mental or physical/spiritual dualism results in there being no certainty of one whole reality but rather living into the parts as if they were the whole. Dualism creates blindness to the needs of those outside our own group or even our own selves.

In dualistic systems, abstract reality is thought of as more real than physical reality such as land, or even one’s own body, which is considered abstract and less important. Western dualism is also apparent on the plane of morality. Western thinkers tend to think in binary positions like either right or wrong; either legal or illegal; either heaven or hell; either sin or holiness; success or failure; civilized or primitive; introvert or extrovert; saved or lost; clean or dirty; weeds or plants; animals or varmints, et.al…This dualism makes it difficult for Western thinkers to hold two seemingly incompatible things in tension without having to find a resolution, and it creates the false assumption that all things may be understood and every problem solved.

Compartmentalization: Similar to the Sacred/Secular split mentioned above, compartmentalization stems from dualism, in that it allows Western thinkers to create extrinsic, often unrelated categories that are only parts of the whole of reality. This reductionism divides and classifies life into many parts with little attention to whole. Again, the parts can often become a false reality.

One example of compartmentalization is the inability for North Americans to understand how the economics of extracting natural resources from the earth affects climate change. They simply classify them into two realities, neither of which is whole without the other.

Another example is that of medical specialization. A patient may have a General Practitioner, a Cardiologist, a Gastroenterologist, and a Podiatrist but if each only relates to the patient from their own area of specialization without regard to the others, the patient will be the poorer for it. In the Apostle Paul’s words, we are members one of another, each making the body whole.”

Compartmentalization can be a great asset under certain circumstances. To use the last analogy, a physician who specializes in cardiology may be able to offer help that other medical professionals don’t see, but she chooses to ignore the rest of the body at the patient’s peril.

Hierarchy is another major fallacy of the Western worldview. Western thinkers, including Western systems of governance, appear to believe equality is wrong or at least not a preferred system, even if they call it democratic. The results of historical Western structured systems have created de-humanization by class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, etc. Because of structured hierarchy, the Western worldview is able to classify persons and people groups one above the others.

This classification of rank does not mean leadership must be absent nor anarchy present. Jesus himself exhibited great leadership but seemed to understand only one form of hierarchy, namely, Creator God has the innate right to regulate all creation. When asked about the hierarchy of his kingdom, Jesus taught that his followers should not Lord over one another like the Gentiles but instead serve one another.

Anthropocentricism: Borrowing thought from compartmentalization, dualism, and hierarchy, anthropocentrism allows classification of humanity outside of the created order to the point where human beings are seen as over creation and apart from creation. An anthropocentric view understands humans as having the right of supreme rule over all creation to the point where all creation is subject to humans. Anthropocentrism allows human beings to view the resources of the world as commodities made for their pleasure or for extraction, without thought of the whole of the eco-systemic reality. An anthropocentric worldview misses the intimate relationship we share with all creation in the web of life. In the words of Indigenous activist and planter Winona LaDuke, “Regardless of whether or not they have roots or fins or legs or wings, they are all my relatives.”

In a recent book by biologist George David Haskell, The Song of Trees, the author gives an example of the Waorani people in the Amazon rainforest. When asked to describe specific trees by their general type, they could not do it. In order to describe the tree, it was necessary for the Waorani to also describe the tree’s ecological context. In the minds of the Waorani, like many indigenous peoples, the tree does not stand alone in creation. Each tree, like every other creature, exists in relationship to its surroundings. We are all intricately linked to all of creation. We are related to the world around us as necessary family.

Racism: White supremacy, another fallacy that developed through the mythologies of Greece and Rome, et. al. (i.e., the savage, the barbarian) and was propped up by Western European and American pseudo-science, is related to the fallacy of hierarchy. European hierarchical worldviews understand white people as deserving ultimate control of all knowledge, wealth, resources, and power. White supremacy and its modern expressions of white normalcy and white privilege are particularly embedded in the history of the formation of the North American soul.

Individualism: North America exhibits perhaps, throughout all of human history, the height of an individualistic worldview. This is especially apparent in theological understandings. Americans interpret scripture primarily applying it to themselves individually rather than corporately/communally. The problem being that the writers of scripture did not write from an individualistic worldview, but rather from a communal one. Thus, the result is misinterpreting the scriptures at almost every turn.

Binary Thinking & Competition: In the Western mind, things are generally true or false, off or on, this way or that way, and holding two seemingly divergent thoughts in tension without a resolution seems uninteresting. These binary classifications become a great platform for judgement: weed or plant; animal or varmint; heaven or hell; right or wrong; etc.

Competitiveness stems from the binary thinking and is much preferred to Western thinkers over cooperation. For example, the model of governance where majority rule trumps consensus. Whereby, the first church in Jerusalem in Acts 15, we see that the body politic makes the major decisions with input from everyone. “Buy-in” is more concerned about the welfare of the community or group moving forward together than 51% being right and the 49% deemed wrong. This is directly related to our current political climate.

Intolerance: Intolerance of others who are different is the norm of the Western worldview, and it has ancient roots, as stated earlier, going all the way back to Greece. Intolerance becomes the catalyst for creating unjust laws or to carry out unequal justice, and even creating wars to preserve the American myths of hierarchy and white supremacy. Diversity is shunned or seen as a bonus, not as essential.

Utopianism: Utopianism is a centrally shared myth or vision of the Western worldview that believes its end results in the perfect form of human existence. Most often future oriented, utopianism often has meant that a particular goal must be obtained by using any means necessary. The end goal, considered sacrosanct, is worth any price paid and is justifiable given the right end goal. Utopianism most often emphasizes the eschaton (in religion) or, in civil government, the perfect society (i.e., law and order). The end justifies the means.

Greed & Control: Greed in our global system has often become a zero-sum game. For Westerners to want more, often means someone else in the world must have less. Greed is not just about personal reward, but it also spins off other systemic maladies. The West’s ability to control the narrative justifies the greed, and too often, becomes a means to obtain it.

Control stems from the hierarchical view that certain people, class, race, intelligences, etc. are made to be in charge. Social theories and theologies are created to maintain psychological control using theories of rewards and punishments in order to maintain control. Force is often used when other means fail. Perhaps control’s greatest harm is not the control of others but the attempted control of God, including assumptions of how God views others. In the Western worldview, greed and control feed each other.

Randy Woodley and his wife Edith are co-sustainers of Eloheh/Eagle’s Wings, www.eloheh.org in Oregon. He has written several books including Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. The Woodleys are currently campaigning to “Resurrect Eloheh” so they can purchase land in the American Southwest for the new Eloheh Farm, an Indigenous learning center and spiritual community. Please consider supporting their efforts at www.gofundme.com/ResurrectEloheh.

• Read PART I of this series on “The American Way”
• Read PART II of this series on “Worldview Distinctions”
• Read PART IV of this series on “Shifting Worldviews and Indigenous Empowerment”
• RELATED READING: “How Making Friends with Indigenous People Changed My Life”

There are glaring differences between the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and those whose worldviews developed with the influence of Western Europe. The “age of discovery” brought the Europeans to our Indigenous shores and while many of the theologians and discoverers attributed their discoveries to God, they immediately acted in the most ungodly manner. These so called “discoveries” created not only wealth by extraction in previously co-sustained Indigenous lands, but along with the exploited slave labor and capital resources came perverted national myths and twisted theological accounts of conquest.

These myths have continued to be told time and time again, and with each generation they are reified, built upon and codified into our society’s collective mythologies and memories. I am willing to concede that Creator had a hand in the meeting of the two worlds, but I think it has been largely misinterpreted by the Western nations and religious bodies. I think the Europeans were brought to our shores to listen and to learn, not to teach.

The Europeans came to many of our Indigenous shores at a time when their natural resources were fading away. Their oak forests were decimated in order to satisfy their desires for projects like castles, forts, and churches. Western Europe was experiencing serious land concerns with unhealthy soil as a result of poor agricultural practices. Their fisheries from local bays and rivers were becoming fished out through overconsumption. Fresh water was rare because their springs and streams had become largely despoiled. Classism, caused by feudalism (a failed system of hierarchy) was causing constant political unrest, and maintaining hierarchical systems in both church and state were a constant concern of the ruling class. Cities were overcrowded. Waste and refuge lined the streets of European cities creating unsanitary conditions followed by disease.

Western Europe had become a political hot zone and an ecological dead zone that was in desperate need of a new worldview, but instead, they convinced themselves they only needed new lands.

Creator is loving, merciful, and vulnerable. If God brought the Europeans to our Indigenous lands, the purpose was for the Europeans to observe, listen, and learn a new way of life compatible with co-sustaining the earth, God’s community of creation, and how to treat all people with respect and dignity.

God’s purpose was never for Europeans to rule over Indigenous peoples nor to subjugate our lands. In my estimation, the Europeans who invaded our shores, blinded by theological hubris and greed, could not accept the said terms God had in mind. What has been dubbed “the Columbian Exchange” was for Indigenous peoples and their lands, the beginning of “the Apocalypse.”

The level of Europeans hubris was already stacked high through wrongly held theological formulas of the “Indigenous Other.” Our Indigenous people were seen by the Christians as lacking not only Christianity, but civilization. These wrongly held theological views are today still persistent in the Western world’s view of us and the community of creation. To Westerners, Indigenous people and the whole of creation continue to be viewed through an anthropocentric lens as “the other.”

At the time of European invasion, Indigenous peoples were not living out a utopian vision of perfection. We, too, still had much to learn. But the Western worldview that was so devastating in Europe — depleting the community of creation there of its natural abundance — did not fare well in our lands because, unwilling to learn and unwilling to change, they repeated the same mistakes of the past. One noted difference today is that because of the spread of the Western worldview, we now find ourselves in global peril.

Indigenous peoples continue to have the solutions to our current climate maladies. Indigenous peoples remain on earth, holding on to traditional land and people knowledge and the wisdom attained from millennia of trial and error. A bandage will not fix our current crisis. Moral teaching and preaching alone will not heal us. It will take a new view of the world to restore harmony on the earth.

The Myth of the West as savior of the world; solver of all the world’s problems, which is endemic to the Western worldview, has passed its expiration date. Perhaps the best way to dispel a false narrative is to tell a better, truer narrative. Who best to make that corrective than the Indigenous peoples of the earth who have been observing the bad narrative brought by the Europeans, and whose mistakes they have noted for hundreds of years. Our Indigenous cosmologies are written in the land, and they guide us in our responsibilities toward the land and to the community of creation.

To Indigenous peoples, the problems of a Western worldview are obvious and conclusive. The way of life demonstrated by Western peoples leads to alienation from the earth and from one another. It creates a false bubble called Western civilization of which the West feels will protect them from calamity. This false hope is built on age-old philosophical ideas handed down from Greece, Rome, England and other Western civilizations. They consist of Dualism, Hierarchy, Compartmentalization, Anthropocentrism, Racism, Individualism, Competitiveness, Intolerance, Utopianism, Greed, and Control which are now all embedded into the Western worldview.

Randy Woodley and his wife Edith are co-sustainers of Eloheh/Eagle’s Wings, www.eloheh.org in Oregon. He has written several books including Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. The Woodleys are currently campaigning to “Resurrect Eloheh” so they can purchase land in the American Southwest for the new Eloheh Farm, an Indigenous learning center and spiritual community. Please consider supporting their efforts at www.gofundme.com/ResurrectEloheh.

• Read PART I of this series on “The American Way”
• Read PART III of this series on “Embedded Fallacies in the Western Worldview”
• Read PART IV of this series on “Shifting Worldviews and Indigenous Empowerment”
• RELATED READING: How Making Friends with Indigenous People Changed My Life

The American, Western way of thinking and living, though replete with problems, is not completely evil. Unfortunately, though, the “American Way” (the current social-religious-economic systems in operation and the foundations that undergird those systems) is incapable of leading us past the current major hurdles we face such as climate change, racial strife, and assumed patriarchies. What is the root problem? The problem is moral and spiritual but even more, it is one of worldview.

Our current American, settler-colonial, cultural morality and spirituality are developed from a particular worldview. For example, how we understand nature is firmly rooted in the particular ways in which we view the world. From a Western worldview, nature is to be studied, harnessed, developed and exploited. From an Indigenous worldview, humanity is formed by nature — not the opposite. In an Indigenous worldview we are intricately related to all other parts of creation. This worldview, when it was the dominant worldview on Turtle Island (America), generally produced harmony and a relatively light impact on the earth, at least up until the spread of settler-colonialism and modern capitalism.

When considering the damage done to Indigenous peoples by settler-colonialism, there is an informed historical critique to be made. Colonial powers throughout the world disregarded the human rights of Indigenous peoples, committing murder, rape, and untold atrocities. Both the government and settlers alike stole our lands, extracted the earth’s resources, and framed the Indigene as either noble and naïve at best, and as godless savages in the worst cases.

The attempted genocide committed against Native Americans was rationalized and defended, oftentimes, from the Christian scriptures. Christians — both Protestant and Roman Catholic —
were often not only complicit in these acts but even served as the engine driving genocidal crusades against Indigenous peoples. To say the very least, the church benefitted momentously from our Indigenous misery and justified it all through the Doctrines of Discovery and other theological-social rationale such as Manifest Destiny, Residential Boarding Schools, and harmful Indian policy.

White supremacy and “cowboy theology” isn’t something just of the past. My family and I established Eloheh, an Indigenous learning center, community and farm in 2004. We were bursting at the seams hosting weekend schools for about 50 people, running job training for Native people, recovery groups, leadership, etc. All that came to an abrupt end. Within a few years, we were driven out by a group of white supremacists with a .50 caliber machine gun. We lost everything and are just now beginning to fully recover, relocating again, and restoring the Eloheh/Eagle’s Wings vision of an Indigenous learning center, regenerative farm, and spiritual community.

The weapon of colonization was driven primarily by the sin of greed. Today, with the same genocidal trends, capitalism — especially as fueled by modern industry and the practices of corporate extraction on a global level — has been the preferred weapon of warfare against Indigenous peoples all around the world.

More so, this underlying anti-Christ philosophy has become a weapon of mass destruction aimed at the earth itself. Blaming an abstracted causality such as humanity or blaming humanity through theological justifications such as sin is easily and often flippantly done. And perhaps, in some ways, it is just as dismissive for Indigenous peoples to blame the church for its complicity. If harmony is to be restored, we all must assume responsibility.

What is at stake now is not one person’s problem nor one organization’s task to fix; not the churches alone, nor even the responsibility of one individual government. The problem to solve now belongs to all humanity.

READ: How Making Friends with Indigenous People Changed My Life

Humankind must rethink what it thinks it knows, and act differently than it has in the past. We must see things as they are; namely, that the whole community of creation is our relative, as is each race and gender on earth. Our relationship and our concerns go even deeper when we consider the present status is not one consisting primarily of love, but one expressed through the acts of genocide, fratricide, patriarchy, and ecocide. These weaponized philosophies are not acts of love and do not reflect the God of love.

Humanity must stop denying our culpability in our present relationships and face reality. To the earth and our eco-systems, for example, we must begin to accept our current status as it is. In the eyes of the earth and all her creatures, we are criminals of the worst kind. We are the rapist of the earth, and we are complicit in the murders of whole species of plants, insects, birds, and animals at a widespread and unprecedented rate.

Men must treat sisters as equals. White folks must treat people of color with the same dignity they afford themselves. The wealthy must give to the poor and empower them as needed. This is not about socialism or capitalism or any particular system; it is simple love, and it is what Jesus taught.

While there is plenty enough room for blame to go around, I do not wish to dwell on that; only to say, the dire situation demands we must all accept responsibility now if we intend to make a change. We must see beyond the self-reflecting mirror pointing to our culpability and be willing to see the monster standing behind us, namely, the monster of the Western worldview.

Incremental successes are not nearly enough to make the drastic changes needed now. We must seek radical change and enact it immediately. In order to not make the same mistakes of the past, we must examine the DNA of the worldview that made us captive to our genocidal tendencies. We must ask ourselves, what monster would turn those who say they follow Jesus, those whose life and death may be understood as the very definition of love, to kill, steal and destroy in his name?

Randy Woodley and his wife Edith are co-sustainers of Eloheh/Eagle’s Wings, www.eloheh.org in Oregon. He has written several books including Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. The Woodleys are currently in a campaign to “Resurrect Eloheh” so they can purchase land in the American Southwest for the new Eloheh Farm, Indigenous learning center, and spiritual community. Please consider supporting their efforts at www.gofundme.com/ResurrectEloheh.

• Read PART II of this series on “Worldview Distinctions”
• Read PART III of this series on “Embedded Fallacies in the Western Worldview”
• Read PART IV of this series on “Shifting Worldviews and Indigenous Empowerment”

Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to appear to be racists nor back racist policies, but the truth is we have never come to grips with our country’s racism. America was built on a long legacy of white supremacy. More often than not, the Church in America has simply bought into this racist myth. I don’t believe we can deal effectively with whether our policies and practices are or could be racist until we all admit that America was built on a foundation of racism, as expressed through white supremacy.

Inheriting a long legacy of presumed superiority in Anglo-Saxon mythology, passed down from the Greeks and Romans, Euro-American white folks have both consciously and unconsciously adopted the myth of white supremacy by creating power over the cultural other. The original inhabitants of this land were simply in the way of the “superior race,” so centuries of policies vacillating between genocide, cultural assimilation, mass removals, and ethnic cleansing all became necessary to “make America great!”

READ: Truth in the Mirror: White America’s First Encounter with Indians

After the ethnic cleansing of the Indigene, came the gifts, grants and wholesale pricing of land intended only for white males. Then large swaths of the land needed tending. Production, as seen through the Western worldview lens, would prove to the world that European ideas of progress showed the blessedness of God’s favor on white people — regardless of who else got in the way.

African slaves, therefore, replaced Native American slaves. Gold and silver mining operations were largely replaced by tobacco, indigo, and cotton plantations in the south. The North benefited as well by purchasing bulk southern agriculture to supply northern mills and factories, thus, bringing America into the age of the Industrial Revolution. America had become great…at least according to avaricious principles. Capitalism became the reigning philosophy with white people on top and all the “cultural others” beneath them.

Socially codified rules and governmental regulations were made to keep the cultural other in their place. The Black Codes/Jim Crow, Indian Reservations, the Chinese Exclusion Act, deportation of Latinx workers, school-to-prison pipelines, etc. were all created to maintain America’s white supremacy. As long as the cultural other knew their place, and didn’t mention the inequality, everything would go smoothly. If people of color would have just kept silent, we could all pretend to live by the myth of American exceptionalism, which was propped up exclusively by white supremacy.

READ: Black History Month for A White Guy

In reality, American exceptionalism and American white supremacy are twins, born from the same birth mother. But now, these myths are beginning to deteriorate. They are failing, because some white people no longer want to subscribe to them. These myths are being rejected by people of color, because they are rising up out of self-hatred and internalized racism to embrace their own God-given place in America.

The truth? We are all equal, regardless of race, but our land can never be great until we admit we have, as a country, rejected truth for lies. The truth being that any claim to greatness was built on the backs and the blood of people of color.

American exceptionalism, in the eyes of Jesus, can only be possible when we allow the truth to set us free and when we, as a country, treat our neighbor as ourselves.

1. White sympathizers for the Native elder were so disgusted with what they saw
2. White defenders were so quick to place the blame on others

I think this incident was like a quick look in the mirror for White America.

I mean, honestly, how often do White Americans really get interested in what is justice for Native America? How often do White Americans ask Native Americans to speak truth to them? Honestly, do you really want to hear the truth of history if it makes your people look bad? Do you really want to know the truth of America’s Indigenous people’s current situation if there is a chance you might be complicit in its perpetuation? Not really, right?

But perhaps our faith, and even our common humanity, require us to go back to that image, that mirror, if you will, and take a longer look at what is really happening inside us.

The video went viral! For a brief moment, many White people were able to see the reality of the contempt present toward America’s Indigenous people. White Americans looked at the video just long enough to see the injustice of it all — to feel how wrong this past relationship has been.

By reflection, White America was able to vicariously defend the Native elder from being shown disrespect and from tokenization. Broadminded White folks could, for a moment, be the “good guys” by expressing their disgust with not just the one individual smirker, but somehow on a grander scale, engage in what seemed to be just and fair for all Native America.

On the other hand, more conservative White folks took the usual course of defense whenever there is a negative encounter between People of Color and Whites — that of White fragility. They sought their own version of truth, which is to take the “high road” (just the facts) and find out there is “more to the story.”

They searched every aspect of the video, finding hopeful glimmers that could somehow be pieced together, absolving the young White, Red-capped Christians from any guilt. They blamed it on the foray with the “Black Israelites.” They blamed it on the Native elder. They blamed it on the chaperones. But in their White fragility, above all else, the young White, people must be seen as the real victims of the story.

In actuality, I believe truth is the victim of this story. I don’t mean truth as facts, such as who did what, when, how, and why. There are many versions of that going around the internet. I’m talking about the deeper truth that I think caused this video to go viral. I mean, get real, Native Americans suffer worse degradation and humiliation every day than a smirk. Poverty conditions, disease, lack of housing, poor health, missing and murdered Indigenous women, unemployment, toxic chemical exposure, post-traumatic stress and post-colonial stress, etc. are the daily fare of Native America. Why get so upset about a smirk?

Perhaps the smirk on the young man’s face, as he faced-off with the elder, reminded us all of something more, something deeper, something perhaps forgotten? Something that White America has still yet to face?

I think both White Native sympathizers and White defenders had at least one thing in common. They were all reacting to a feeling that ran much deeper than the brief video clip. Perhaps by seeing themselves in the mirror in that video, they caught, for a brief moment, a glimpse into the history of our two people groups?

And, there was something else. I think White America looked at these young, White, conservative, Christian Red-cappers and realized, this is the fruit of injustice. This is the progeny of genocidal oppression and settler-colonialism. As we all viewed the video clip, no one liked what they saw.

The disdain toward an American Indian elder was a result of centuries of cultural genocide and truth suppression — in direct contrast to the American Myth of White Supremacy. Now the real question is still about truth, and the truth is this: If you go back to that mirror, and look at it long enough and deep enough, what will you do about it?

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it — not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it — they will be blessed in what they do.  (James 1:22-25)

“Certainly there were many needy widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the heavens were closed for three and a half years, and a severe famine devastated the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them. He was sent instead to a foreigner—a widow of Zarephath in the land of Sidon. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, but the only one healed was Naaman, a Syrian.” – Luke 4:25-27

Why would Jesus conclude a perfectly good sermon by pointing out the racism of his own people? It is common knowledge that at minimum, duplicity and hypocrisy has accompanied the dominant White cultures’ past mission practices, especially as it has been applied to Indigenous peoples. We have experienced a kind of double-mindedness that says “Jesus loves you just as you are — as long as you are just like us.” Although there were individual missionaries who attempted to do mission in humane ways, they, being a part of the dominant society and its White Western cultural influence, primarily did mission from a place of power over and presumed superiority. Despite good intentions, without regarding the cultural other as equally human, there can be no mission — not Christ’s mission anyway.

Mission, by its nature, demands a sense of equality of all. Jesus came to all humanity, emptying himself of his superiority over us, while becoming the least among us. Influence, wielded from the dominant Euro-American society, prescribes mission from a place of presumed Western values. “Our assumption of superiority does not come to us by accident. We have been trained in it. It is soaked into the fabric of Western religion, economic systems and technology. They reek of their greater virtues and capabilities” (Mander 1991, 209).

Contemporary missionaries may be tempted to view themselves as immune from the sense of entitlement and superiority that their historical counterparts exhibited. People tend to look at the past as moving from less progressive to more progressive, especially if they are the people writing the “new progressive” history. This is simply a part of the Western myth of progressive civilization that houses a misguided Christian utopian vision. The fact remains that in the midst of continued centuries of harmful mission policy, Indigenous people are still fighting for our survival today. This is true physically, concerning health, welfare and our land-rights, but it is also true in the realm of public perception that continues to plague mission. Racism, stereotypes, mascots, and hate crimes are just a few of the attitudinal pressures today that Indigene and the cultural other continue to face. In other words, White supremacy, White normalcy, and White privilege.

Racists and foolish missional policies and practices among Indigenous peoples continue to show little regard for Indigenous values. But, despite the long history of mission among Indigenous Americans from the place of Western colonial values, our Indigenous cultures still reflect much of our core Native North American values that await empowerment.

No one can deny that our cultures have been eroded and our languages lost, that most of our communities exist in a state of abject economic dependency, that our governments are weak, and that white encroachment on our lands continues. We can, of course, choose to ignore these realities and simply accede to the dissolution of our cultures and nations. Or we can commit ourselves to a different path, one that honours the memory of those who have sacrificed, fought and died to preserve the integrity of our nations. This path, the opposite of the one we are on now, leads to a renewed political life and social life based on our traditional values. (Alfred 1999, xii)

Colonialism and colonial missions have introduced and reinforced systemic changes among colonized Indigenous peoples that have attempted to replace our traditional values. This supplanting has occurred at the most basic levels of society but we, as Indigenous people, cannot simply blame the White man. We must become the agents of our own change. But caution is warranted for any proposal of mission renewal. Even when the current paternalistic missional systems are replaced with Indigenous forms, they can remain laden with the values of the dominant society, merely prolonging colonial missionary oppression.

In spite of our bereaved history, ill health, poor education, inadequate housing and social marginalization, our Indigenous peoples retain a residual set of values that are a repository of true wealth. These values, if utilized properly, may have the potential to co-create untapped missional models resulting in true well-being for Indigene and the settler-colonial alike. Both our healing it seems, as much as we may not want to admit it, is entwined together. For such a model to find footing among Indigenous people, a major missional paradigm shift must occur.

READ: Missions: Is It Love or Colonization?

An old Indian joke describes the paradigm shift needed: One day Coyote (the Trickster) was asked to visit the president. The president and Coyote strolled along the Rose Garden together and finally the President asked Coyote if he could give him any advice on “the Indian problem.” “Sure,” Coyote said, “What’s the problem?”

The reality of the joke suggests that Indigenous people are primarily viewed as a problem to be solved by the government, and I add, by the Western church. We are rarely considered to be an asset by either agency. This prevailing attitude in America has a long history and is tied into the legacy of colonialism. According to Maori author Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Problematizing the Indigenous is a Western obsession” (1999, 91). Says Smith,

Concern about “the indigenous problem” began as an explicitly militaristic or policing concern.…Once indigenous peoples had been rounded up and put on reserves the “indigenous problem” became a policy discourse which reached out across all aspects of a government’s attempt to control the Natives.… Both “friends of the Natives” and those hostile to indigenous peoples conceptualized the issues of colonization and European encroachment on indigenous territories in terms of a problem of the Natives. The Natives were, according to this view, to blame for not accepting the terms of their colonization.…The belief in the ‘indigenous problem’ is still present in the western psyche. (1999, 91-92)

In summary, while today’s mission models clearly are a more humane approach than in the past, they do not make enough room for the possibility that Indigenous North Americans are people who are gifted by God and have much to teach the dominant society. The church continues this discussion on both a spiritual and pragmatic level. After more than 400 years of active mission efforts, including untold millions of dollars invested and untold human hours sacrificed, very few Native Americans claim to be a part of the Christian church; and given the history and state of the church, why should they? Even more discouraging is the overall spiritual health of these few existing Indigenous churches. Many Native Americans continue to practice a faith nurtured in colonial patterns that resulted in self-hatred and misguided loyalty to their colonial handlers; truly becoming a poor imitation of a bad model.

One measure of a successful Indigenous church, credited to Anderson and Venn, is the idea of healthy churches as self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. Later, renowned missiologist David Bosch suggested that self-theologizing be added to the three-self paradigm. Even when using the Western four-self model as a measurement of Native American church success, we find a gloomy incongruous reality most often characterized in their respective denominations as being small in numbers, poor in giving, divisive, mixed in denominational loyalty, non-ministering, non-reproducing and embarrassingly dependent upon the denomination’s funding, leadership, and approval. Self-theologizing is still almost completely unknown.

Perhaps the current ill state of Indigenous churches could correct itself if denominations and other mission sending agencies were to strategize mission efforts among Native American Indigene in mutual partnership with the Native communities and by using Native American core values. New attitudes, robust with true humility and an appreciation for Indigenous cultures, are desperately needed. New appreciations of the gifts and necessity of the marginalized other is mandated. And, the seemingly powerful White mission agencies must make themselves small, as junior partners, in a land they do not know, and only with the expressed permission of Indigenous communities.

Past sacrificial models of White missionaries speaking up for Indigene are deeply appreciated but they only went so far. Today, the dominant sending agencies are being called to give up their theological and missiological strangleholds on Indigenous people, along with the decision-making power they possess, and then they must turn over the “keys to the kingdom,” (along with the keys to the land and buildings) to the people they are trying to reach. The conversion of the denominations and the mission sending agencies is the first conversion that must take place in mission — and this is exactly what Jesus is addressing in Luke 4:25-27. Then came verse 28: “And the crowd became furious…”

The cultural hubris of the Western missionary enterprise is a symptom of a greater problem of the Western worldview. This presumed superiority is ever-present in North America, affecting everything from the way we do mission and how we structure our churches; to the wars we enter; to domestic and foreign policymaking concerns in areas such as economic trade, politics, civil rights, etc.

It leaves me begging the question: What is Jesus saying to us as people of faith exercising so much entitlement — entitlement that only God has a right to? And yet, God took the form of a servant, learning from and becoming one of the most marginalized in society. And here is Jesus, rebuking those in his own faith system that were so far-removed from its founder.