God Is Red

I spend considerable time reading about Native Americans. Since my two courses about Indians last year, I have felt compelled to explore them as a people and understand their issues. What I read is often challenging and intriguing. Here are some parts of Vine Deloria Jr.'s book God Is Red that made me think.

The tribal religions would serve to remind us that the scope of human history cannot be encompassed within a linear time sequence running from a creation event to the present-day world. The strong possibility that different societies recall in their religious traditions various geographical histories of the planet can lead us to remember the neglected dimension of religion that has appeared in nearly every religious tradition (pg. 144).

The concept of time is important. It is crucial for one to realize that different groups of people operate under different time systems. Not everyone in the world looks at life using the straight line of history.

It is quite possible, therefore, that as we look for the origin of peoples, we must discover religious experiences; as we look for the origins of religions, we must discover nations of people, and which ever way we look, it is to the lands on which the people reside and in which the religions arise that is important. This possibility is what has dominated the concerns of American Indian's peoples from the very beginnings. the chance that lands would be lost meant that religious communities would be destroyed and individual identities forsaken. As sacred mountains become secularized, as tribal burial grounds became cornfields, as tribe no longer lived on the dust of their ancestors' bones, the people knew that they could not survive (pg. 145).

It is the land that is sacred and holy. The consumerism and greed of many in the United States is contributing to the loss of holy native land.

Many of the genocidal acts the Westerners committed against the Indians can be laid directly on the doorstep of religious fanatics who saw conversion and death as the only viable solution to the Indian problem. Near Eastern religions had centuries of practice before and after Europeans came into contact with American Indians (pg. 170).

This is the sad and awful truth, plain and simple.

A warning light should flash when the Indian practitioners say that their elders told them to go out into the world and teach the traditional ceremonies. If one were to gather the great number of Indians now alleging this divine commission and listen to their patter, it would be clear that they all spent their childhood in the wilderness with traditional people who had never seen whites and they learned secrets that had been hidden for thousands of years. It would be exceedingly interesting to compare this roster with tribal employment rolls of two decades ago because a good many of the names would be the same. Yet this alleged background is so irresistible to many whites that, even what blatant frauds are exposed, most of them cling to the belief that they have met a real, traditional Indian (pg. 253).

As citizens of the United States, we need to take long, hard looks at how we view indigenous people and make sure our biases and images are not making them out to be something they are not.

We cannot conclude that our peoples spent centuries in a state of delusion simply because their experiences of God were radically different from those of Western peoples. That their experiences could not be either described accurately by Westerners or understood in Western categories of thought does not make them false. The least we can do is to understand that it is in the nature of religion to exert a profound influence within societies and groups and sustain the community or national group over a period of time. Having retreated even that much, the Western world must be prepared to analyze religion as a phenomenon that does not necessarily explain the unanswered questions posed by the philosophical mind but that may, in itself, cause such questions to occur to all manner of people in a great variety of situations (pg. 286-287).

Many people think they are smarter than they actually are, especially in the areas of historical and religious interpretation. Just because a view of history and religion happens to be radically different than yours does not mean it is false or inferior. Part of my life's work involves the philosophy of knowledge and addressing what people think they know and what they actually know.

This book is a trove of information regarding the indigenous framework of religion.