What I Learned While Writing a Paper on Lakota Theology

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 10^th of November, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to worship,
to let the light of the world's deeper wisdom
do for us what the light of the autumn sun
does to November maples:
kindle them like candles on a feasting table.

Song and silence, music and word
come now, restore us to ourselves….

(together) And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

A woman, a member of this church who lives on King Ave, is still shaken and sad today as she gets ready to come to church. Many of the candidates she voted for lost this week. But she knows deep inside her that the loss of elections is not the same thing as the loss of her ideals or principles, and, as she remembers that, she manages a small smile.

Two women, also members of this church, are relaxing after a long day of swimming at the Gay Games in Sydney, Australia. The stars in the sky over them do not shine over Columbus, but they feel "at home" in Sydney anyway.

A minister of this church who lives on Rich St. prepares to join a Muslim friend tonight for a Ramadan supper as soon as the sun has set.

Over at First Community Village, or down at Grant hospital, or in homes and convalescent centers around the city, there are other people of this church community who cannot be here today with those in this room. Some are in duress. Some are waiting for news. Others have colds. But all of them are part of our community. All of them are one with those here. And we are thankful for them all. For as the Lakota people say: Pilamaya ye. Mitakuye Oyasin. Thank you, all my relatives. And as they also say: Thank you, Wakan Thanka, thank you, Great Mystery, that I live to trust in sacred space, that pause between breathing in and breathing out which is where the silence lives. Let me breathe in that sacred space right now. Let me dwell in the tent of silence….

(silence)

Remembering we are all relatives, not just to each other, but with all creatures that fly, crawl, run, swim or leap, we name those whom we love, and who love us, those who, as Chief Sealth once said, "take away our loneliness."

We remember them, we name them, we uplift them in our hearts or in the common air.

(naming)

Blessed is the earth which nourishes us, the air which sustains us, the fire which warms us, the water which cleanses us; and especially blest is the music which lets us soar like eagles.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a transcription of a recordin, made at the turn of the last century, of the memories of a woman of the Hidatsa Nation, named Maxidiwiac, or more commonly, Buffalo Bird Woman.

I am an old woman now.
The buffaloes and black-tail deer are gone, and our Indian ways are almost gone.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived them.
My son grew up in the white man's school.
He can read books.
And he owns cattle and has a farm.

He is kind to me.
We live in a house with chimneys.
My son's wife cooks on a stove.

But for me, I cannot forget our old ways.

Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the cornfields and sing to the corn as I hoe, as I did when I was young.
No one cares for our corn songs now.
Sometimes in the evening I sit and look out on the big Missouri.
The sun sets and steals over the water.
In the shadows I see our Indian village of earth lodges, with smoke curling up, and I hear the laugh of little children as of old.

It is only an old woman's dream.

Again I see only the shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come to my eyes.

Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is taken from two sources in the Tanaach, the Hebrew Bible, which Christians commonly call the Old Testament. Both sources date within a century of each other

First, from Yehoshua, or the Book of Joshua:

Joshua said to the people: "Shout for joy now!

For YHWH our god is about to give you the city. The city with all inside it is to be considered a burnt offering to God. Only Rahab the Streetwalker is to be spared, she and her family members are exempt."

So the people shouted, and the trumpets sounded, and the walls of Jericho crumbled flat, so that the Israelites were able to go directly into the midst of the city. They massacred everyone in the city, men and women and children alike, as well as the domestic animals. But Rahab the Streetwalker and her family were spared, for she had collaborated with the Israelite spies who had been sent into Jericho to search out their weaknesses.

And hear this beautiful poem from Second Isaiah, which has been set to music in our hymnbook

With joy you shall leave this place,
and you shall feel secure in the land.
The mountains and hills before you
shall burst into song, and all the trees of the wild
shall clap their hands.
Cypresses, not the thorns!
Oak trees, not the briars!
These shall be understood as the presence of the Eternal,
a symbol that can never be cast down.

Sermon: What I Learned While Writing a Paper on Lakota Theology [Next][back to top]

When I was serving as chair for the Hymnbook Commission, congregations and districts often flew me to their meeting sites so that I could talk about the work we were doing.

I got so used to "stumping" for the Hymnbook Commission that I didn't even blink when I was asked to come to Sioux City, Iowa to deliver the Judy Lecture, a special event at the annual District Meeting of the Prairie Star district of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I was told by the coordinator that the event was a year and a half off. I told her that my calendar didn't have that many pages, but that I thought I was free. Nevertheless, the very next week, someone sent me a text that was to serve as the theme of the district meeting, the famous Tewa Indian prayer with the sweet line: "Weave for us a garment of brightness!"

Now, two months before I was supposed to fly to Sioux City, the conference director called to arrange the plane flight times. Then she asked me cheerily how my lecture on Lakota Religion was coming.

"My paper on what?" I asked.

"On Lakota Theology."

"You asked the chair of the Hymnbook Commission to talk to you on Lakota Indian theology? I don't know anything about it. I know something about songs and readings for hymnbooks, but not Lakota religion. Look, why not ask a Lakota shaman to do that? And why did you think that I would be doing such a paper in the first place?"

"Well," she said, somewhat nonplussed by my agitated response. "The meeting is being held in Sioux City, and Sioux is the old word for Lakota; and we did send you that Indian text which we are using for the theme, so we just figured…."

I thought to myself, "Thank God we aren't meeting in Diagonal, Iowa; I'd have to lecture on triangles and the spirituality of the hypotenuse."

So I argued with her. I argued for her going out and finding a genuine Lakota shaman, but to no avail. So eventually, she prevailed and I agreed to do the paper. I figured that, if nothing else, it would be a great learning adventure for me.

So I started reading. And reading. And reading. I even interviewed a Miwok shaman who lived down the street from the church. The Miwok are not the Lakota, but at least he was an authentic shaman. With luck I found an excellent book on Oglala Religion, Oglala being another name associated with the Lakota people. (Sioux, by the way, is a word, in another Indian language, that means "snakes in the grass," and it obviously was a term of clear contempt, so I think it best to use the word they used for themselves, Lakota.)

I found out that the Lakota religion, like all Native North American religions, was complex, not simple, theologically convoluted, not easy.

As I plowed through the book, I found myself comparing it favorably to the philosophical Christian theology of Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. This surprised me, for I had heard many well-meaning white people talking about Native Religion as being a sort of nature religion where the Spirit is found in everything that blooms or flows. And surely, this is part of the picture. But I was surprised to find out there was so much more. There is a complexity and ornate language inherent to the Lakota Religion.

So I read about the sacred sites, the elaborate rituals, the theology of life beyond death, and the social structures. I read books by Native North Americans and Euro-American anthropologists. And I found one particularly interesting book describing the train journey our own Henry David Thoreau took from his beloved Massachusetts to Minneapolis, a very long journey in those days, as you may well imagine. He went there to learn from the Lakota people first hand. It slowly became clear to me that Thoreau's famous hut on Walden Pond was an experiment to see if white folks could learn how to see things through the eyes of the Indians, instead of the other way around. I was amazed at his humility and desire to be taught. Not many were like him in those days, when it came to the Natives of this land.

When the first Anglo-European settlers arrived here, most of them had their Bibles with them. We were told most charitably in High School that they wanted religious freedom on these shores. Many of them did, I suppose, but for themselves alone. Most of them were frightened of these wild lands and the inhabitants here, and they certainly didn't think that Native religion was "real" religion. And so time after time they turned in those Bibles to the stories like the one I read to you this morning from Joshua, filled with terror and control. Yes, they did have the Gospels teaching them about love, and they had the Hebrew prophets warning them about justice, and they had poets like Second Isaiah who wrote about God and Nature in a way most Indian religions would have praised and accepted immediately … the trees clapping their hands, the mountains singing. But they studiously neglected those passages. Within short years of their arrival, many of the Anglo colonists had decided that this was "the promised land," they were the new "Israelites," and the natives, whom they called either simply "Americans," or just "the savages," were suddenly the biblical Amorites, Amelikites or the Canaanites, indigenous peoples that needed to be wiped out, their cities and villages torn down and plowed over.Now, of course, not everyone thought this way. And certainly the greatest portion of deaths among the American Native population resulted from diseases brought to this land from Europe.

For example, fully half the population of what is now Georgia was wiped out in this way in just six years. But the cruel attitude toward the Native American populace got into the blood stream of the colonists, and kind men like William Penn and later, Thoreau, come across now as sublime exceptions to arrogant rule.

After I read the books in preparation for my paper, I examined the text of my own life, for there are stories in me like there is breath in me, as we learned this morning. All I knew about the indigenous population of North America, growing up in industrial Detroit, was from television, to wit, the Indians, Tonto and Ching Ach Gook, the Last of the Mohicans. It appeared to me that Indians were grunting sidekicks to white heroes. These Indians were benign characters. But in the movies at the theaters, it was burning wagon trains, deft horseback riding and scalping which signed the presence of the Indian in many cases.

When I dipped into the well of my memory as deep as I could, I did remember some vague story of the Iroquois League from grade school, and that corn, peppers and potatoes and tomatoes (then called chokecherries) were the cultivated vegetables of the Indian nations, but that is about all.

In 1977, I was privileged to take a week-long trip as a sort of adult chaperone with Sunday School kids of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockford, Illinois, where I was serving as an intern. We participated in an archeological dig in Illinois, a dig sponsored by Northwestern University. We were digging up the remains of a farming town that served the needs of what the chief archeologist called "The great walled city of Cahokia."

"The great walled what?" I asked.

"Cahokia. It was a city built at the time of what Europeans called 'The Middle Ages.' It had wooden walls, thousands of thatch-roof houses, huge earthwork pyramids for ceremonial use, and a circular calendar like Stonehenge, except made of wood, for ceremonially aligning with the equinoxes and solstices of the sun. In the year l100 it had a population of over 40,000 people, making it bigger than the Paris or London of that same time period. This little town we are digging up helped to provide food for the huge population."

I was dumbfounded. In all of my education I had never heard of such a place, nor had I heard of the city of Aztalan in Wisconsin, or any other fortified Indian cities in the Midwest.

I saw hide tepees and buffalo hunts on television. I was taught about squash and corn and feathers. But somehow they neglected to tell me about a city of 40,000 people? With an earthen pyramid larger than the pyramid of Khufu at Giza, Egypt? This was totally amazing to me. After thinking about it, I decided that such omissions cannot be an accident. What… "Oops, we forget"?

I really believe that what got into the blood of the Anglo-and Hispanic-colonists, the idea that the Natives were all "savages," persists in subtle form to this day, even in how we choose to educate our young in the schools. After all, using European criteria alone, Cahokia is an example of a "high civilization" comparable in every way to what was going on in Europe at the same time, and, in many ways, better. And we moderns get away from civilization by camping in tents in the wilderness; thus, there can be no civilization for us where there are tents or teepees.

Thus "savage" was the usual word used in congressional documents, on the lips of presidents and even, sadly to say, in the pulpits of churches. Thomas Jefferson himself, usually considered a very civilized human being, constantly used the language of "savage" in his writings about the Indians. It was the liberals, in the hundred and fifty years after the Revolution, who were the ones who wanted to get the Indians to "assimilate" into white Anglo-culture, or Hispanic-culture. It was the liberals who wanted the Native North Americans to become Christians, living in homes with chimneys, as Buffalo Bird Woman wrote about so beautifully and humanely in the first reading.

This meant a giving up of culture, spirituality, religion, ways and means, language, customs and thus, ultimately, their identity. Such a loss is hardly different than death, as far as I am concerned.

The liberals within the U.S. government believed thoroughly that assimilation was just a matter of time. Let me read you the 1880 writing of a liberal congressman, Henry Doss. "It is true we have not assimilated the Indians, but it also true that we have absorbed the Indian. The state can bring the Indian into…civilization. The Bohemians of Chicago, the Polish Jews in New York were absorbed into our culture, though they speak no English and live in squalor. Assimilation is another and better thing, and it is the step that follows absorption."

One of the most popular books in the 19th century was a text called Applied Eugenics by professors Paul Popineau and Roswell Johnson. Here's what they have to say (and this won't be pleasant): "(Almost) all the natives, who have died in the New World since Columbus, have died because the evolution of their race has not proceeded so far in certain directions as that of their conquerors. The reason they died off was because of a civilization (their civilization) which was inferior to our civilization. They didn't deserve to have their civilization." Let's go to 1920, less than a hundred years ago.

Some in this room may even have memories back to those days or close to it.

So here are the words of Walter N. Camp, a so-called expert in the ways of the Native North American, who wowed congress with these words, which I think tell more than he intended. I have left his gender exclusive words intact.

"I am about to express my own conclusion as to the fundamental difference between the so-called 'civilized man' and the so-called 'savage.' The savage is concerned only with the immediate necessities of life. The civilized man looks not only to the future, but beyond mere subsistence. In other words, the Indian is not a capitalist. It matters not which way this fact is stated. One might (also) say he is lacking in industry. Whichever way one puts it, the fact remains that it is not in the nature of the Indian to accumulate either property or forms of goods as a reserve against adverse conditions."

I could make your blood run cold with plenty more quotations like this, enough for a week of sermons, or ten. And I have precious little else to offer you by contrast, except Thoreau in his hut on Walden Pond, William Penn, and a few modern pro-Native American organizations.

Now I am aware, by people telling me so, that there are many people in this room who are part Native North American, or Indian, or First Nation. (And by the way, all of these terms are acceptable to most Indians that I have talked to, although they were originally called simply and interestingly, "The Americans.") Also, perhaps by coincidence and perhaps not, every single one of my African American friends is also part American Native, often by half. My friend Oliver's mother speaks Diné, or Navajo, and my friend Roy was raised on the Spokane Nation Reservation up in Washington State. But all of these folks I am talking about are either seen as black or white, not Native. Thus the extent of Native presence in North America is largely hidden. Hidden like Cahokia in our textbooks, or in our historical memory. Hidden like the Iroquois roots of the United States Constitution. Hidden like the outrageous misuse of the Hebrew Bible by the great European settlers we often call to mind at this season.

What also hides, however, is our grief. You see, sometimes when I preach sermons on topics like this, folks will come up and say, "Gosh, now I feel guilty." I will come back every time, "Grief is a better use of your time than guilt. You are just hiding in your guilt, that's all. Come out and grapple with reality and work to change it." I learned to be tough about this liberal retreat into guilt from one of my interns. He was a young man who was born and raised in Germany, although his English was better than mine, I have to say. He was about 25 when he came to serve with me at the Hayward Church. On the long road-trip to a minister's retreat once I had the temerity to ask him how the whole World War II era was being treated in German schools.

He said it had not been treated at all, for many years. Germany history stopped with the Kaiser in the early Twentieth Century. But he told me that, at the University level, things were changing quickly, and that new programs were being developed to help younger Germans to deal with their horrific ancestral history of horror and holocaust. He told me that the pulse behind this change was a single book, a book everyone was reading at college. It was a book with a title he translated as "Our Inability to Grieve." This book was asking the whole German people to admit that the whole sad history really happened. It asked them not to enjoy the paralysis offered by guilt or denial, but to move forward on the wings of grief. By doing so, the book suggested, consciousness of the human capacity to do terrible things to those who are different from them remains to the fore. Consciousness of how good people can turn others into demons or pathetic people, with a few twisted words and innuendoes wrapped in unreflective confidence and bravado. The book suggested ways to move from the consciousness-raising of grief to new energy, giving us power to turn things around for the present era in such a way that the past will not be repeated.

Sure it sounds idealistic, but can you really tell me that hiding out in a cave of delicious guilt is a better way? Or can you tell me that the obviously true statement, "I'm not like those stupid congressmen talking about 'savages!" exempts any one of us from self-examination and study? I hope not. For self-examination is one of the greatest gifts we have as human beings, no matter what our cultural heritage. And as for study, school is not over yet. Ever.

When we more liberal United States citizens talk about the Palestinian people having their own nation on their own land, or when we speak out for the indigenous people in African nations having a political say greater and more authentic than that of the colonial governments, we always stop short. You will never hear anyone here in the States go on to suggest that the same issues might apply here, and that whole States, not tiny reservations, but whole States, might be returned to the people of the Nations who first lived on those lands. But the concepts are parallel.

I wonder, what would have happened if our European ancestors learned the Native Religions to the degree the American Natives learned the imported Protestant and Catholic religions? Would our ecological policies be different if every maple was a divine spirit? Would our family life be different if we gathered every night and stopped to thank Wakan Thanka, the Great Mystery of All and Spirit of Life, before we ate our meals? What would have happened if the non-capitalist Indian idea of the potlatch, a feast of extravagant generosity and gift giving, met and amended the capitalist approaches to the sharing of goods?

Now, I am not romantic about this, please. I know that a few of the Native religions, especially in Mexico, but also among the Cahokians, supported the idea of human sacrifice. And war was practiced here, not less than in Europe. And I learned, while working on my paper, that the patriarchy of Lakota religion was every bit as sexist as the Christian missionaries' religions were. I say that both the cultures and religions of European derivation and the religions of the Native cultures have things about them that are good, and things that are, well, undeniably questionable.

But I am convinced that our present civilization in this country would be far greater than it is if the two different and distinct civilizations of the Native North Americans and the European colonists had embraced each other and learned from each other, and respected each other, and corrected each other, and celebrated with each other, instead of the way it actually happened. You know, the invading cultures overwhelming the native ones. I, for one, am grieving about what actually happened, even as I am hopeful that what we could still learn is not as entirely lost as Buffalo Bird Woman lamented.

Looking back, it was the right decision to accept the task of writing that paper in Sioux City. Researching the paper on Lakota theology turned out to be a great gift to me. I am still no expert, of course, on Lakota theology or Indian civilizations. But I am chastened and somewhat enlightened by all I have learned, and when I think about it, I can think of few things better than that for my life.

Navajo Diné Prayer (first recorded in 1905) [back to top]

Daltso hozhoni
Daltso hozho'ka
Daltso hozhoni

Beautiful and balanced.
Everything indeed,
may it indeed be beautiful and balanced.
Beautiful and balanced.

Now Mother Earth and Father Sky
meet each other, companions forever.
Beautiful and balanced.

Now the Night and the Day
meet each other, companions forever.
Beautiful and balanced.

Now the white corn and the yellow corn
meet each other, companions forever.
Beautiful and balanced.

Now the life that never ceases
and the happiness in all things
meet each other, companions forever.
All is beautiful. All is balanced.

Daltso hozhoni.
Daltso hozho'ka'
Daltso hozhoni

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