Maintaining the confidentiality and anonymity of those we connect with has become increasingly difficult when writing articles for Adventist Frontiers magazine. The more souls we meet, the more we are trusted and confided in, and the more we understand the darkness that the reservation environment has on our friends. Although we have many stories we would like to share, for privacy’s sake, we cannot. Instead, I would like to share what I believe are some of the root causes perpetuating so many social ills on the reservation.
Few Americans are familiar with the ‘Jim Crow Laws’ of late 19th century America (the American equivalent of apartheid) or how those laws affected not only African Americans but Native Americans as well.
Hundreds of years before the Jim Crow laws, Plato espoused the idea of selective breeding to improve the human race. In Charles Darwin’s book Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, he applied the idea of selective breeding to the fields of horticulture and animal husbandry, coming up with what we call the evolutionary model.
When applied to the human race, the theory of evolution suggests that humanity has evolved biologically superior to other living organisms. If it is accepted that some races are further along the evolutionary ladder than others, then those near the bottom, judged by those presumably at the top, must somehow be fundamentally ‘less human’ than those near the top. This reasoning succinctly explains how some people can inflict atrocities on others with little compunction.
Recently I was challenged by a descendant of _______ heritage whose great-grandparents emigrated to the U.S. around 1850. “I cannot understand why the Indians have not assimilated into American culture. My great-grandparents could not speak English when they got here and yet graduated high school valedictorian.” Implicit is the question: How come my great-grandparents assimilated so well into American culture and Native Americans have not?
Most immigrants that came to America chose to come here. They came to escape the ‘old world’ of poverty, overcrowding, and an entrenched social structure that limited their prosperity and social status. To them, North America represented a land of freedom and opportunity. For Native Americans, the arrival of immigrants meant the loss of land, the loss of freedom, the loss of opportunity. Native Americans were given no choice but to assimilate. Most Natives I speak with say the flood of immigrants that came to North America were ‘invaders’ stealing their land and forcing them into internment-like camps called reserves and reservations.
I cannot blame Native Americans for wanting what was taken away. They lost a lot: their cultural identity, their language, their diet, their nomadic lifestyle, their community, their self-governance, their religious ceremonies, their ancestral burial locations, their sacred sites, their way of life, their freedom, their hope and their dignity. Western expansion caused a lot of pain for our Native neighbors. For the gospel to take root, we can not ignore that pain. Please pray Jesus uses us effectively as He heals our Native friends.
