The Aboriginal Worldview and Christian History: Excerpts from GOD is RED
The Aboriginal Worldview and Christian History: Excerpts from GOD is RED
by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Pub. 1973)
The simple story of mankind growing out of the Garden of Eden and populating the world might have been sufficient for all men in their own times. The world did not remain as the early prophets conceived it. Bt 300 BC Alexander the Great had shown the Near Eastern peoples the wonders of India. Explorations by Europeans over a 1,000-years period indicated that the globe was much larger than the writer of Genesis had figured. Columbus demonstrated that it was indeed a globe.
The trauma of discovery of the New World for the Christian theologians was immense. It had not yet been adequately understood by then. What were devout thinkers to make of the existence of millions of people living on lands larger than Europe? What was their status with respect to Christianity—the one true religion? Did God have a purpose for these people? Could Jesus return until all these nations had been preached the Gospel? What was the responsibility of God’s chosen nations in the face of this revelation of the tremendous scope of mankind?
The reaction of the Christian nations to the Discovery of the New World and its potential riches was one of unmitigated greed. Having been repulsed by the Muslims in their effort to subjugate the Near East, and nearly prostrated after the wars to establish the divine right monarchies, the kings of Europe badly needed an inexhaustible source of income to maintain themselves. Visualizing a steady stream of wealth from the Indies, which would allow them to avoid giving benefits to the rising commercial classes in return for financial support to the Crown, the heads of European states saw in the New World the only hope of maintaining themselves.
What this pious language meant in practical terms was if confiscation of lands were couched in quasi-religious sentiments, the nations of Europe could proceed. In an immensely practical gesture the Pope noted that he did thereby “give, grant, and assign forever to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, all singular the aforesaid countries and islands … hitherto discovered … and to be discovered … together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same.”
The lands and villages were not, of course, the Pope’s to give, unless the understanding of the universe, history, and the planet promulgated by Christianity were correct. If that were the case then it would have followed that, that the entire planet being a franchise of the Holy Father, he could distribute it to whomever he found in need of rewarding. Regardless of the later totally secular exploitations of the native peoples conducted by the secular governments of Europe, this papal bull of 1493 marked the attitude of Christianity toward peoples it had not previously thought to exist.
The controversy over the place of newly discovered natives continued to rage, however, as more information on the New World was made available to the people of Europe. The Treaty of Tordesillas in the following year [1494] divided South America neatly between Spain and Portugal, allowing each primacy over portions of the continent which neither had explored or conquered. Plainly the Pope was supervising not the divinely ordered division of the world’s lands but national hunting licenses for rape and pillage.
Again the use of Christian doctrines served to justify the actions of Christian nations. For centuries Christian theologians debated the conception of the nature of the “just war,” in much the same manner as Protestant theologians debate the morality of killing people trying to get in your home bomb shelter during an atomic attack back in the days when America was paranoid over Russian missile attacks. The natives refusing to accept the gospel were thus made subjects of the just Christian war, since they had refused to accept truth which had been revealed some 1,500 years before.
In 1526 Francisco de Vitorio at Salamanca attacked the use of Aristotle to deny Indians of the New World their rights to property and liberty. Vitorio denied the right of the Christians to convert the natives forcibly, since he was aware of the mistreatment that had been the lot of the natives resisting conversion. But he justified conquest of the natives and their lands on the basis of Christian trade rights, finding that God had intended all nations to trade with one another. Any nation or group that prevented trade could then be conquered so that uninhibited trade might continue. [think NAFTA, and TPP] Preventive conquest to protect commercial rights was then the basis on which the Spanish and Portuguese made complete their mastery of the new lands and their peoples.
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By the time other European nations got into the business of discovering lands and peoples in the western Hemisphere, the struggle for recognition of native legal rights had for all practical purposes vanished. The European nations were more concerned with their wars for control of distant lands than they were in acknowledging the rights of the peoples over whom they asserted control. The doctrine that the pope had been given total control over the planet by God was soon secularized into justification for European nations, definitively Christian, to conquer and subdue the peoples of the lands which they entered. Once the doctrine became secularized, it was impossible for anyone to question its validity; its impact was obvious, and the results were satisfactory to European political heads of state. [The Doctrine of Discovery]Gradually, then, the colonizing European powers began to define their rights with respect to other nations of non-Christian peoples. The natives had rights to occupy the lands on which they had traditionally lived, until such time as those lands were needed by the invading Europeans. At that time the Europeans could extinguish the natives’ title by purchase or conquest. With respect to each other, the European nations respected the claims of the nation that first explored new lands and had sufficient military power to protect its claim. With respect to the natives who happened to occupy the lands, they were completely at the mercy of the claiming Christian nation.
The wars for control of the North American continent saw the claims of the various European nations dwindle as England consistently defeated the other nations and succeeded to their claims as each gave up its territory on the continent as part of the peace terms. While European wars raged between England and France, Spain, Holland, and other countries, the natives’ legal rights were bounced back and forth as concessions made in wars that had little to do with the people of the continent. England had no sooner achieved dominance in North America than the English colonists revolted against the mother country. Aided by France, which was still smarting over the defeat handed them by England a decade before, they succeeded in freeing themselves from England.
Almost the first claim put forth by the new nation after the successful break with England was that the colonies had succeeded to the claims made by the mother country under the Doctrine of Discovery. The United States was therefore under no obligation to deal justly with the continent’s interior tribes. Rather it stood well within the tradition of Christian nations that had previously looted Central and South America and were then in the process of conquering India and Africa. The basic policy of the United States government became one of tentative recognition of the Indian interest in the land combined with the assertion that the lands could be taken from the people at any time they were needed by the federal government.
***
This story is not simply that of the American Indians, however, since the history of Christian nations around the globe has been less than religious. England and France fought titanic struggles for control of the Indian subcontinent, for parts of Africa, and for trade rights in North Africa and Asia. As late as the First World War the nations of the planet were being given to dominant European nations as League of Nations “mandates” and “protectorates,” and colonialism has still not vanished. It now shows itself as the American political crusade against Communism, [today this would be terrorism] or as the operational results of the giant supranational corporations of Western peoples. ***
The responsibility of Christianity for this state of affairs must certainly be heavy. Without the initial Christian doctrines giving Europeans free reign over the rest of the world, much of the exploitation would not have occurred. It was only when people were able to combine Western greed with religious fanaticism that the type and extent of exploitation that history has recorded was made possible. Even today the Christian missionaries search the jungles of the Amazon looking for Indian tribes to convert. In their wake come the professional killers to exterminate the tribes, and following them the government bureaucracies and road builders to subdue the lands of the interior for world commerce.
In almost every generation trade and conversion for religious purposes have gone hand in hand to destroy nations of the world on behalf of Western commercial interests and Christianity. Where the cross goes, there is never life more abundantly—only death, destruction and ultimate betrayal.
***
The average Christian when hearing the disasters wreaked on aboriginal peoples by his religion and its adherents is quick to state: “But the people who did those things were not really Christians.” In point of fact they really are Christians. In their day they enjoyed all the benefits and prestige Christendom could confer. They were cheered as heroes of the faith, enduring hardships that a Christian society might be built on the ruins of pagan villages. They were featured in Sunday school lessons as saints of the Christian Church. Cities, rivers, mountains and seas were named after them.
And if the exploiters of old were not Christians, why did not the true Christians rise up in defiance of the derogation of their religious heritage and faith? If Pierre Trudeau is today not a Christian in his attitudes toward the Indians of Canada, where are the Christians in Canada who prophetically denounce his actions? If the leaders of the Brazilian government are not Christians, where are the Christians coming forth to disclaim their actions? If exploitation of the Amazon for commercial purposes by American investors results in the un-Christian activity of poisoning thousands of Indians, why are not the true Christians demanding the resignations of the heads of American corporations supporting Amazon development?
T this point in the clash between Western industrialism and the planet’s aboriginal peoples we find little or no voice coming from the true Christians to prevent continued exploitation. Instead we find rhetorical assertions that the Christian God is controlling history and fulfilling His divine plan for all mankind. In the face of world events this assertion is fraudulent at best, an insult to the intelligence of mankind at worst. It is time to call a halt to the unchallenged assumptions of the Christian conception of history.
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We have already seen a multitude of tears fall over the demise of Dee Brown’s Indians, [Burt My Heart at Wounded Knee] without a corresponding change in attitude or treatment of American Indians. Further confession of sins is useless and avoids the central question of history: Why must man repeat past mistakes? Being guilty for remote sins is easy, accepting responsibilities for current and future sins is difficult. It is this contemporary attitude toward aboriginal peoples that must be changed rather than compensation for past wrongs.Christians must disclaim the use of history as a weapon of conquest today. In doing so they must support the fight of the aboriginal peoples wherever it exists. They must demand new status for natives and around the planet. They must demand protection of natives and their lands, cultures, and religions.
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The present state of affairs cannot conceivably be justified. It cannot be justified at least religiously, and one must conclude then that in Christianity mankind has at best been deluded. While the religion appears to give comfort and solace to people in all ages, its resultant impact on the world as a whole has been anything but comforting. It has been used by its followers to justify their most dastardly deeds, and it has focused our concern on the life hereafter, so that we have refused to believe what our experiences tell us to be true. We must now undertake to find a more profound explanation for ourselves and the planet on which we live.
***
The planet was not given to the pope, and his subsequent division of it to his favorite European kings may have ultimately been illegal in the most fundamental sense of the term. Present unhampered exploitation of lands and peoples of the world by post-Christian supranational corporations may have been the logical result of Western history, but it does not have to be its final result.
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