Kill the Indian, Save the Man
So, as it happens, I didn’t manage to keep writing throughout the week at San Jose or even give a report from the San Francisco conference. For that, I am sorry. If you are hoping for regular posts on this blog, I’m afraid I will have a hard time filling that bill on my own. If other voices want to add their two cents, we might get closer to regular posting. Sign up or email me if you want to share - kaleidoscope@bmclgbt.org.
I do want to share one little bit I found interesting during one of the presentations at the Mennonite Conference in San Jose. One of the items that the delegate body voted on was a resolution (pdf) in support of bill in the US Congress to “acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” Part of the presentation before this vote included some words by Steve Cheramie Risingsun, a Chitimacha Indian who leads Native Mennonite congregations in Louisiana and Alabama. You can read more about it at the Mennonite Weekly Review article.
The thing that I found particularly interesting about this was a comment made by Risingsun. He was talking about the various ways white colonizers mistreated Native Americans and tried to take away their culture and were generally pretty nasty. He said that there was a phrase that was often used by these white folks: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
I couldn’t help but notice how much this sounded like “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin” (or LTS HTS as we call it around here). We look back now at these attitudes towards Native Americans and we are appalled. But in its time, this would have been seen as particularly enlightened and charitable by the Good Christians who practiced it since it was in contradiction to the harsher practice of the day, which was just plain “Kill the Indian.”
These Good Christian folk knew that it wasn’t nice to kill people but they thought that “practicing Indians” were sinners, and they understood their Bibles in a way that supported this idea. If they could just “love the Indian out of the Indian,” then she/he could become a Good Christian like them. “Loving the Indian out of the Indian” tended to include things like kidnapping children and imprisoning them in boarding schools where their hair was cut and they were told that their identity, culture, and family were intrinsically sinful and they could only be acceptable if they left all that behind. They were abused in so many ways, all in the name of saving them from their “evil Indian ways.”
Unfortunately, the attitude lives on (though the behaviors don’t tend to be physically violent as much anymore). It lives on in the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonite Church and so many other denominations and faiths. Of course, Good Christians are enlightened enough to know that it’s not nice to be outwardly homophobic, to use gay slurs, to beat up lgbt folks, but “everybody knows that ‘practicing homosexuals’ are sinners.” What current Good Christians endeavor to do is find that nice middle ground between beating up “homosexuals” and “embracing homosexuality.”
This attitude is problematic because it continues to assume that there is something intrinsically wrong with being lgbt or q. Some say queer people are born that way, or choose to be that way, but really, it doesn’t matter because either way the attitude remains that there is something less-than or wrong about being queer. In the same way, the attitude used to be that there was something less-than or wrong about being (and “practicing”) Native American.
We look back at history and see acts of racism, classism, sexism, genocide, slavery, and abuse as related to ignorance about peoples’ identity. We all know that people of color don’t choose to be people of color and can’t change that, so therefore, white folks shouldn’t treat them badly because of it. This brings up the rhetorical question, “If they did choose or could change the color of their skin, would it be better for people of color to be white?”
We forget that while the oppression of Native Americans, African Americans, and women among others was occurring (and in most cases continues to occur in one way or another) the oppressors have always blamed the victim for their own oppression by saying it was their behavior which warranted whatever abuse was being committed against them. This is happening to lgbtq people now. Whenever a Good Christian tries to find that comfy moral middle ground between being a violent homophobe and celebrating diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity, it’s happening.
How will we all (or maybe a generation or two down the road) view that in the future? Will lgbtq folks be getting resolutions of apology in the next decades? Centuries maybe?
*this is a slightly edited version of one I also posted at young.anabaptistradicals.org.
