Christian Missions And Indian Culture

By Rousas John Rushdoony [1]

Owyhee, Nevada

FROM Spengler’s day it has become common knowledge that Western culture has declined and is near death, and the analysis is echoed even from liberal pulpits. Peter Drucker has depicted in his works the end of the era of liberal economic man and portrayed German National Socialism as an attempt to create a new order on the dogma of heroic racial man. Belief in salvation by education, in the goodness of natural man, in progress towards an earthly paradise, and in economics as the foundation of true society has been savagely caricatured by many novelists since Huxley’s Brave New World. Ostensibly, if we are to believe Latourette, this is therefore the great opening for the Christian evangel. The church has, he declares, advanced precisely in the areas and periods of cultural collapse and hence from the beginning established itself in the culturally dying Roman Empire while failing to perturb India and China, both young and flourishing cultures at that time.

And yet American Indians today, holding loosely to the tattered remnants of their old culture and often with scant respect for it, show a marked disinterest in Christian missions, and the number of Christian Indians has declined since the 1890s. On the other hand, the church has shown a declining interest in Indian work, has found it difficult to man its stations and has been conspicuously unwilling to begin new work. A generation ago, the Moses of the Nez Perce, James Hayes, together with his band of fellow Indian evangelists, travelled, sometimes on horseback, from tribe to tribe throughout the West carrying the gospel as the one hope of his people in a changing, puzzling world. Today the once Christian Nez Perce nation has only a handful in its scattered churches, and the only travelling Indian missionaries the West sees are members of the degenerate peyote cult. Today many Western Indians are totally untouched by the church, unaware of the existence of Jesus Christ, whom they literally know only as a “cuss” word[2], and more indifferent than ever before to any approach.

The reason for this reaction against missions is in part due to the Indians’ realization of the decline of the West, naively apprehended but clearly seen, often with hatred and delight. The Indian identifies culture and religion, and historically, the humanist culture of the past three centuries has been unique in its separation of the two. Western culture is, of course, inexplicable except in terms of its Christian heritage and heresy, but it is not identical with it, a distinction difficult for the cultural outsider to grasp. He sees the relationship and assumes an identity. Even intelligent, well-read non-Christian Reservation Indians are unable to distinguish between Christianity and Western culture. Typical of this attitude of cynicism were the remarks made by a returning soldier on New Year’s Day, 1946. He talked at length of his experiences across the country, in and around various army camps, and commented with self-contempt that the Indian was fit only for Reservation life, as a constant government charge. But, he observed, the white man is “ripe for the Reservation”, waiting only for some superior man to drive him there. When I remarked that the increasing predilection for a dictated economy indicated that he was probably right and that the white man was bent on turning the world into a Reservation, he agreed heartily and documented it with his pungent observations. Clearly, the white man had lost his nerve and no longer believed in himself or in his heritage. At a Shoshone funeral feast in 1945, an old white-haired Shoshone medicine man preached passionately on this subject, and his concluding words were: “Let us go back to the old ways, the good old ways. Worship the wolf, for he is god. The wolf is our creator and grandfather, and the coyote our brother. Even the white man’s science tells us that we came from animals. Don’t listen to Christianity: even the white man doesn’t believe it now. They have proved it is false and the Bible wrong. Jesus is dead, and the church is dead: worship the wolf our father.” To most of his listeners, his analysis seemed true, but his paganism was hopelessly dead, while the white man’s culture and religion were only hand-me-down clothing rejected by himself and to be rejected by the Indian. Hence the dilemma: the Indian culture is dead, Western culture is dying, and the Indian lives on the dregs of both in abject spiritual poverty and degradation.

The government has often been more aware of this problem than the Churches, and despite repeated blunders and failures, has attempted to address itself to the Indian need. Its dealings with the Indian problem can be divided into three periods.[3]

The first period involved military conflict, control by local community diplomacy, by government treaties, and finally segregation and pauperization on reservations between 1871–87. The policy of segregation in reservations was the death-knell for Indian culture. Indian tribes were dependent upon wide areas of land for livelihood: even if some farming were practiced, hunting, fishing and food-gathering carried them far afield from the home site. To restrict Indians to a reservation was to destroy their economic life, and this the government knew. Many Indian leaders were ready to guide their people into the new culture and economy. The Sioux Shipto, for example, readily picked up the shovel and axe, although for a long time he hid his tools at the approach of anyone, for to the Indian warrior hunting and battle were manly, while agriculture and house-work were womanly duties.[4] Astute Indian leaders throughout the West realized that their day had ended and henceforth if they lived it had to be in a different world. The government, however, largely disregarded this potential and made scant attempt to lead the Indian, and, instead, restricted him to the reservation and made his nomadic life unnecessary by issuing a food and clothing ration. The Indian was compelled to report regularly for his dole, and the result was the rapid destruction of Indian independence and integrity and the creation of a pauperized and dependent people. Indian character could not have been more thoroughly undermined. The effects of this system are still dominant today, not in practice but in basic attitudes, both on the part of the Indian and the government. The answer to the Indian problem is not government help.

In 1887 control by legislation began, the policy being “Americanize the Indian”, carried out by the systematic destruction of Indian culture. This policy, which involved so many diverse means of dubious and meritorious character, cannot be discussed in detail. It did involve, however, a fundamental policy of cultural assimilation. It assumed that American culture was desirable and necessary to the good life, and that Indian culture was markedly inferior. Hence the Indian had to be systematically converted to this new way of life. Part of this program, which continued until 1934, involved the Christianization of the Indian, and in the early days of the policy this influence was prominent, but it receded steadily after 1900 until it involved only the now abandoned compulsory chapel at Indian Schools. Although this policy aided the growth of missions, it also injured them, even as State Church missions in European colonies and outposts have done, by identifying Western culture and Christianity. Conversion involved westernization, which in turn produced that hitherto unknown element, secularization. The weakness of the total Indian Service policy was its abstractness. It was indifferent to the realities of Indian life and concerned primarily with the potential, assimilation. Gradually, however, only lip service was paid to the policy, and the Indian Service became mainly a self-perpetuating body of civil “servants”, more interested in its own existence than in Indian welfare, an attitude still the prevailing one irrespective of the change of policy on the top level. Today, for every 32 Indians, there is one government employee.

In 1934 Commissioner Collier instituted a new policy, “Indianize the Indian”. His program, warmly supported by many anthropologists, denied the older assumption of American cultural superiority and insisted on the integrity and equal validity of Indian culture. This to the Indian was a token of the white man’s own loss of faith in himself. A policy of protection and development was announced, and it was aggressively pushed. The result was unhappy where it succeeded, producing such things as the abandoning of harvests to dance for tourists a pale, far-fetched version of the Sun Dance. It met with Indian resistance also, as witness the remarks of Geronimo Martin, a Navajo Christian youth: “It is just as though when you should come to the reservation to visit us we Indians would ask you about your buckskin shirts, your flintlock muskets, and your covered wagons. All these things belong in the past. Let them stay there.”[5] It was hard also to convince any Indian woman, Christian or pagan, of the values of her old culture once she had seen a washing machine or a modern range. Indian culture was either hopelessly dead or incurably and fatally diseased. Moreover the policy identified the Indian mainly in terms of the past, a static definition the Indian resented. Collier’s policy of restoring tribal self-government proved more successful and has contributed materially to Indian independence. The development of self-government has helped the Indians adopt precisely the policies the older regime so vainly sought to impose. As far as outward adoption of the skills, tools, and means of Western culture are concerned, Indian self-government has advanced this materially, but for the cultural problem no solution has been found, and quite naturally so, because it is in essence a religious matter rather than political or economic. It is a problem for the church, rather than the government, to answer.

The Indian reaction to Western culture has taken four dramatic forms. The first was military resistance, sometimes conducted with more ability and heroism than history text books acknowledge. When the backbone of military resistance was broken and the reservation policy imposed, the Ghost Dance was born. Although the Eastern Ghost Dance took place much earlier, the Western cult began shortly after the transcontinental railroad, an obvious symbol of Indian doom, was completed in May 1869. Beginning in 1870 and ending in October 1932 with the death in Nevada of Jack Wilson, a Paiute Indian and the last Ghost Dance shaman, the cult swept the West, contributed to Indian uprisings and emphasized the animosity of Indians to white culture. The Ghost Dance preached the return of the Indian dead, the change of this world into an earthly paradise, with the restoration of animals included, and the total destruction of the white race by supernatural intervention. The background of the cult was substantially pagan, although the expression was sometimes couched in the terms of Christian eschatology. Although in a few instances the cult preached the end of racial discrimination and peace with the whites, generally it solved the problem by visualizing their total destruction, together with the death of all half-breeds. Revived again and again, the cult petered out finally in hopelessness. From the beginning some Indians had been dubious, declaring as one did: “A white man looks at paper and talks to it and laughs. His skin is lighter. They are better than us. We can’t set ourselves up with them.”[6]

The peyote cult became a third reaction. Ritual use of peyote, a dangerous narcotic, is the essence of the cult, which finds an escape from every-day insecurity in the beautiful anti lulling visions produced by peyote. From 1934–44 the cult was given protection, anti defence from criticism, by Commissioner Collier, and peyote, although made illegal in many states when its use began to spread to the general population, is not prohibited to general use by any federal legislation. All attempts to gain such legislation have been blocked by the Indian Service. The constant defence that peyote is not habit-forming is called dubious by some Indian Service doctors themselves. It is without doubt psychologically habit-forming and may be physiologically so as well. The peyote cult embodied in its origin a realization of white superiority: God gave the white man a book, its preachers say, but to the poor ignorant Indian he gave peyote, which gives him everything he needs. Peyote is called Father Peyote and is the true deity. The Bible is called a peyote book, and by means of an elaborate symbolism is made an esoteric revelation of ancient peyote worship. Jesus was a user of peyote. Peyote heals all sickness and purges a man of all sin. Peyote people do not drink, fornicate, lie or steal, it is claimed. Since the use of peyote dulls the mind and all moral discrimination, peyote users are generally the worst offenders in all these things and more. With simple casuistry, this is explained by the declaration that the persons so guilty were not using peyote when the sin was committed. A peyote preacher can accordingly get drunk by explaining, “I’m off peyote now”. The essence of the cult is the use of a narcotic to find security in an insecure world, and it is a prevalent and growing reaction of the Indian to his cultural problem. The peyote movement is incorporated as the Native American Church and has been protected on the basis of religious freedom by the Indian Service.[7]

The peyote church began with considerable use of Christian symbols, hymns, the Bible, and trinitarian language converted into peyote esoterics. Some anthropologists saw in it a syncretism which would lead gradually to a Christianizing of Indian life, but the churches have uniformly been in opposition to it. The Christian borrowings of the peyote cult were prompted some years ago by the obvious recognition of white American triumph and superiority. Obviously then, the reason for the white’s victory had to be his religion. Its power was therefore borrowed and mixed with the power of peyote to produce what the Indian believed to be an adequate answer to his problem. Peyote still leans on the prestige of the white man and his religion in areas where the Indian tradition is strongest, but increasingly, in areas where the break-down is complete and the cynicism stronger, it rejects the Christian element for a forthright defence of pure peyotism. Peyote now asserts its superiority to Christianity, which it calls the religion of a book written only a little while ago while peyotism began with creation. Because of its spiritual, moral, and physical consequences, it has nothing positive to offer the Indians, and pagan non-peyote Indians regard the cult with hatred and contempt while shocked by its spread and power. Although some reservations are free of it, the peyote cult is widely prevalent.

A fourth reaction has been alcoholism, a major problem in Indian life on dimensions hardly visualized by an outsider. Its function is that of a constant source of relief from the cultural problem, that of being lost in an alien world with a useless heritage and unable to find an alternative anywhere. Alcoholism has always been prevalent in times of cultural crisis and in broken primitive societies. The closer the Indian is to his ancient culture, the less alcoholism his tribe reveals. The stronger the impact of Western life, the more acute is the alcoholism. As the Yale School has it, “alcohol solves the problem of anxiety reduction”.[8] Older Paiutes and Sho-shones quite accurately speak of it as “the whisky religion”.

What has been the answer of Christian missions to this cultural problem? Historically, the bulk of the work done can be described as the traditional evangelism of American piety. Its success in the early days was conspicuous, and what vitality there is in Indian Christianity is a product of it. Its power began to wane shortly after its decline from the forefront of the American scene, and since 1930 not even fundamentalism has shown more than scant interest in the Indian field. Liberal boards committed to maintaining the work begun by their evangelistic forebears have often felt it to be a poor investment and a hopeless field. It is generally manned with difficulty. In a day of grave shortages in the pulpit supply of the major denominations, the Indian mission has not fared too well.

The weakness of the evangelistic approach, despite its splendid vitality, was and is its total neglect of the cultural problem. It limited its work to “winning souls for Jesus”, which it did ably, but once an Indian was converted there was no cultural world or environment for him to live in between baptism and burial, at which time he resumed community life in the Church Triumphant.[9] This barrenness has been accentuated by the average Indian chapel: it provides the bare minimum for worship and there is a total lack of all facilities for Christian community. The Christian by his conversion is isolated from all pagan communal life but no parish activity takes its place to fulfill his deep tribal longing for community. “I’m not ready to die yet”, is a common Indian answer to Christian solicitation. This is a real difficulty which the evangelical tradition has not faced. White American Christians have grown so accustomed to living at peace with secularism in their neighborhood, and in social and personal relationships and friendships apart from the ecclesiastical circle, that they have no realization of how barren a convert’s life becomes when by his membership he is suddenly an outsider to his community and without any social life beyond attendance at services. He is faced either with a return to the paganism that resents his defection or a long and gradual absorption into the negative, barren and secular cultural world of white America. Pagan society was entirely religious in its background and in many tribes remains so. Christian society as such remains non-existent, and conversion is into an arid limbo lying between heaven and hell.

A second weakness of the traditional approach has been its preponderantly New Testament emphasis.[10] To the Indian, this presents Jesus as the great medicine man, and it was this element which drew thousands of Indians to Christianity in the early days, and then as quickly disappointed them. The total expectation was pagan, and the attraction to this day of some evangelistic appeals draws on pagan roots. Looking to Jesus as the great medicine man, thousands in Idaho and Nevada, for example, crowded into missions in the early days, and, on hearing such verses from John as 3:16, interpreted them to mean that all followers of the medicine man Jesus would never die. The first death led to cynicism and amused contempt. The need for a full biblical emphasis is therefore paramount, because without a conviction of the total pravity of human nature and the failure of human history, the Indian can never approach Jesus as other than a medicine man and a shaman.

Liberal Christianity has had almost no interest in Indian missions except when it has fallen heir to them and at times supplied them with a liberal pastor. Its effect has been deadly as well as confusing. Such Protestantism is more at ease in Canaan than in Zion, and the Indian realizes it and is bewildered at the white man’s confusion. Liberalism has attempted to provide for the need of community life but has failed signally by making it a substitute for sound theology. The distinction between entertainment and community has been missed. Thus its influence ends with the limits of an evening’s program or a month’s project, whereas community is a pervading, cohesive religious and cultural tie. Activity cannot bind. Liberalism has failed also to see any sharp distinction between community life and Christian community life, but it has been aware of a deficiency.

The Christian Reformed Church has maintained Indian work which has sometimes differed from the traditional evangelistic or pietistic approach only in being more sedate. It has not dealt with the cultural problem.

The Roman Church has practised syncretism, baptizing the local cultures, with conspicuous failure, and its interest in Indian work has also declined. Syncretism made admission easier but only postponed the conflict and gained no advance in the calibre of Indian life.

The church has therefore been peripheral to the Indian problem because it has had an incomplete or faulty comprehension of its own gospel. Niebuhr’s own unhappy experience in Detroit points to the same problem on the Indian field: “The Church is like the Red Cross service in war time. It keeps life from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. The Red Cross neither wins the war nor abolishes it.”[11]

The Indian stands today between two cultures and lives on the dregs of both. His society has often lost all the traditional elements of common grace, and human intercourse is limited to the demonic manifestations. Thus, on some Indian Reservations, there is now no traditional Indian means of public meeting between boy and girl, nor is there any adoption of alien American ways. As a result, for a young unmarried couple to speak, hold hands or walk together publicly is a scandal, but to meet after dark for sexual intercourse an accepted but a regretted commonplace. The most ordinary points of contact in Indian culture hinged on traditions of a religious nature. When the culture was destroyed, human relationships were severed, and nothing has replaced them. In some places there is now little society except in sin.

Cultural death began, of course, with the initial contact with the white man. Language in itself is a cultural product, and Indian languages were the first victims in many cases. Because there was no written language, Indian languages were often contractual. Speech was religiously binding, and a man did not speak except in expectation of a personal commitment to the consequences of his words. The “silent Indian” was thus a reality. The casual use of speech by the white man was misunderstood at once: tribes surrendered territories in verbal treaties which Congress never ratified, or, in some instances, ratified in recent years only or is attempting to ratify now. The first reaction of the Indian to this was contempt for the white man, his religion and his morals. The great Nez Perce chief Old Joseph tore up his copy of an abused treaty and then destroyed his long-treasured New Testament in a protest against the white man, whose culture and religion he assumed to be identical. He had been one of the first two converts of the Spaldings some years before, and the Testament, given to him then, had been his prized possession. He had gone forth, Testament in hand, in 1848 to face angry white troops bent on avenging the Whitman massacre. Heartsick of the white man’s treachery and unable to dissociate him from his religion, he turned his back on both. This incident was not an unusual one but all too common. The second reaction inevitably followed: irrespective of the Indian’s rebellion, his own language lost its contractual basis. It could not compete with the white man’s distinction between legal contract (in itself none too binding, the Indian found) and the license of ordinary speech. Indian language was demoralized, without anything supplanting it, and the result was the collapse of essential and binding communication.

The problem of Indian life is an acute one, therefore. When his nomadic life was broken, his cultural religion was destroyed. The wolf religion, for example, was natural to people who lived by hunting, for the wolf was a great hunter, but the same Indians, made over into sheep men and cattle ranchers, find the wolf an enemy and their religion ridiculous. Because the total culture at every point hinged on the religion, the culture dissolved with the religion. The white man still has a culture, albeit a dying one, while the Indian in some cases has virtually none. He is the utterly homeless man.

Hence Indian missions are of central relevance to the church. If contemporary Christianity has lost its relevance to the central problem of Indian life, it has lost its relevance to the developing problem of Western civilization. Crisis has then ceased to be its opportunity and become its defeat. It must be conceded that such is already the case. The weakness of Indian missions is merely the symptom which indicates the church’s ailment as well, while government policies simply communicate the contemporary failure of Western culture. Whether a change in the tenor of Christian missions is in prospect remains to be seen.

Notes

1. The conditions depicted are primarily those descriptive of Western Indians, although much of the data is equally valid applied to tribes east of the Mississippi.
2. One of our elders remarked that, before his conversion, he believed “Jesus Christ” was only something to say in whipping a horse. Such ignorance is commonplace in some areas.
3. See the analysis by Byron Brophy of “The American Indian and Government”, printed as an Extension of Remarks of the Hon. Harlan J. Bushfield in the Senate, January 30, 1946.
4. James McLaughlin: My Friend the Indian (Boston, 1910), p. 24.
5. G. E. E. Lindquist: The Indian in American Life (New York, 1944), p. 148.
6. Cora DuBois: University of California Anthropological Records, 3:1, “The 1870 Ghost Dance” (Berkeley, 1939).
7. Weston LaBarre: The Peyote Cult (New Haven, 1938); Omer C. Stewart: Washo-Northern Paiute Peyotism, A Study in Acculturation (Berkeley, 1944).
8. Donald Horton: “The Function of Alcohol in Primitive Societies” in Alcohol, Science and Society (New Haven, 1945), pp. 153–177.
9. J. H. Bavinck: The Impact of Christianity on the Non-Christian World (Grand Rapids, 1948), pp. 24 ff.
10. Ibid., pp. 133 ff.
11. Reinhold Niebuhr: Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Chicago, 1929), p. 113.