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When Europeans came to America, they discovered cultures rich with tradition, spirit, and honor. Ignorant to the fundamental worth of Native lifestyles, Europeans cultivated the attitude that Indians were savages: less intelligent, less cultured, less human than whites. They faced the problem of how to manage the established Native population. New to the settlers, but home to the many Native peoples who occupied this vast, diverse land, America became a battleground where the organized, armed white forces assimilated or killed nation after nation of indigenous peoples. William Apess, an orphaned Pequot raised and educated by Euro-American Christians, writing in New England in the early nineteenth century, and S. Alice Callahan, a woman of mixed white and Muskogee heritage writing in Oklahoma later in the same century, illustrate the influences of the European invasion. Apess', A Son of the Forest and Other Writings, and Callahan's, Wynema: A Child of the Forest explore the erosion of Native cultures under the assimilation, oppression, and massacre of Native peoples by the "more civilized" (44) whites. Both authors discuss the roles of alcohol and Christianity in this cultural decline; both espouse the notions that alcohol kills and Christianity saves. Could these seemingly opposite influences be cyclically connected? Conceptualizing the time of European conquest is impossible. How can we imagine the horror of odd-looking strangers armed with bizarre and devastating weapons claiming our land for their selfish own? Our land: The place where we have lived peacefully with the earth since time began, and that we have attached no ownership value to in the past. If I survived such an invasion, or had been born into its echo, I would likely get drunk, first thing. Apess' and Callahan's writing illustrates this reality, fleshing out the contemporary American notion of the drunken Indian. Writer William Apess had first hand knowledge of the destructive force of alcohol. Rum ruled his parents' lives, and for a time in his youth, it ruled his own. In Son of the Forest, published in 1831, Apess describes an existence of drunken reeling, living in varying degrees of servitude to a master. He exchanges his earnings for alcohol, the great assuager of pain, consumer of sense. Later, Apess speaks of liquor as "a curse to individuals, to families, to communities, to the nation, and to the world at large," (47). He blames this scourge of the Indians on "the whites, inasmuch as they introduced among. . .[his] countrymen that bane of comfort and happiness, ardent spirits, " (7) that scattered his people and made them unable to care for their families, their land, their livelihood. Liquor exerted a terrible influence among Native peoples (Callahan 44). This widespread problem threatened to lay to waste their spiritual strength, to strip them of their ethnic pride, and addict them to the culture of capitalism. Many Native Americans were driven to alcoholism by the effects of white oppression: political disempowerment, loss of community and traditions, economic struggle, and a despairingly uncertain future. For many, salvation came from the same source as damnation. Natives like Apess, driven to the self-oppressing stupor of alcoholism by the Europeans' abuse, found refuge in another European influence, Christianity. In Son of the Forest, it is the Methodists who lead many Native people to believe in power of Jesus Christ to save them, to guide them to light everlasting. Apess said of his own conversion, "I lifted up my heart to God, when all at once my burden and fears left me. . . my soul was filled with love--love to God, and love to all mankind," (21). It is understandable that people so oppressed would find solace in a hope so beautiful, but ironic that so many were saved from the Euro-disease of alcoholism by Euro-evangelism. It seems a perfect coincidence and raises the question of whether there was some intent behind it. In studying Apess and Callahan, I see marginalized and fragmented people living under "a Government whose only policy is to exterminate. . . [their] race,"(Callahan 81). Whether assimilated into white society or "driven to a small spot, chosen by the pale-faces. . . watched over and controlled by agents. . . slain because they refuse to obey the commands of the military men," (Callahan 80-81), Christ's kindness and promise of a better life and heaven to come would have made Christian evangelists very attractive. I visualize a traceable method in the European conquest of Native North America. Invaders arrived and introduced the Native peoples to alcohol because it's easier to conquer a population in weakened condition. Invaders colonized and built churches, where many Native people like Apess were moved by the charismatic spirit of the congregation and the messages that salvation is universal, that every soul has value, and that all are equal in the eyes of the Lord. Newly Christianized, easily assimilated, and temperate: For what more could the invading culture have reasonably hoped? I acquiesce that there was probably no method in the madness of European oppression, assimilation, and marginalization of the Native peoples of this land, but it is an interesting puzzle to ponder. Certainly, from the point of view of Euro-Americans, the accepting of the Christian God was an important step toward "civilization" for the Indians. Even the whites sympathetic to the cause of Indian rights seemed to believe that assimilation into white culture was a great gift to the Natives. When, by the end of the nineteenth century, the battle to massacre or assimilate reached the western Indian nations, the cause of Christianity among Native peoples was secure. Evangelist preachers attracted Native worshipers to their churches and Christian missionary schoolteachers attracted Native children to their classrooms. Alice Callahan was one of the missionary schoolteachers. A Methodist educated at Wesleyan Female Institute, she taught Muskogee children at a private Methodist High School. Not much is known of her life, and I wonder if she appeared to be a good Christian white woman, effectively assimilated although considered somehow tainted by the blood of her Muskogee great-grandparent. In their writing, Callahan and Apess reveal their personal discoveries of the hypocracy of European Christianity. Raised within in the white religion, both became aware that the faiths of their Native heritages offered a joy and peace greater and truer that the false Christians could offer. Apess lived as a Christian, spreading the word of God and enjoying the "peace emanating from this Savior," (49) Jesus Christ. But living among whites he witnessed the bigotry within the church government, which denied him ordination because he was a Native. He witnessed professed Christians violating the commandment to "'love God and their neighbor as themselves--to love men, deal justly, and walk humbly,'" (33). In his "Eulogy on King Philip," delivered in 1836, he publicly spoke, "Let them rather fast and pray to the great Spirit, the Indian's God, who deals out mercy to his red children, and not destruction," (114). Responding to the massacre at Wounded Knee, Callahan wrote in Wynema, "The Indians have never taken kindly to the Christian religion as preached and practiced by the whites. . . the Good Father of all has given us a better religion--a religion that is all good and no bad--a religion that is adapted to our wants. . . The code of morals practiced by the White race will not compare with the morals of the Indians," (73). In the novel, Callahan assigns these words to Choe Hadjo, the wise Muskogee father of Wynema, but they are spoken by Gerald Keithly, the white missionary sympathetic to the Native peoples' cause, as he reads aloud from Choe Hadjo's letter. Perhaps Callahan intended us to understand her own belief that it is only with the help of whites, able to amplify the voices of Native peoples, that Native American traditions can be strengthened and preserved. These writers, Native people published in the white media, spoke from within the white religious culture to the hypocrisy and bigotry of their conquerors. They set out to enlighten white America about the Indians' oppression too late for those already assimilated, massacred, and exiled. The Natives were already defeated. Nations were scattered; rich cultures diminished. Today, alcoholism remains a scourge of existence for some Native citizens, and many Indians remain on reservations, caught between white culture and Native heritage. Many still find redemption from "rum" in Christian beliefs. Alcohol still helps diminish Native culture, and faith in Jesus still helps save them from alcohol. But even as it tried to take their own spirituality from them, Christian faith was perhaps a blessing. Without the promise of salvation, the Native Americans' extermination might have been more thorough, their spiritual and cultural devastation more intense. Often, from devastation springs power. The ghost dance is an apocalyptic religion that sprung from the ill effects of living, captive and marginalized, on the reservations. It grew from Christianity in the sense that it involves the belief in Wovoka, the Pauite who invented the ghost dance religion, as the messiah, the re-born Christ. He attracted disparate Native people to the idea that prayer, fasting, and ritualistic dance would connect them with the creator, and the creator would erase Europeans and all of their influences from Native lands, cover the whole of North America with new sod for a fresh start, and redeposit the Native peoples on cleansed and refreshed soil. The ghost dance may have provided hope, pan-Indian unity, and spiritual power to the people, but whites, fearing it as a ceremony to prepare for war, persecuted the dancers and illegalized the rituals. Today, we don't fear Indian ritual as we once did. Its influence upon white America ranges from entertainment to deep espousal. Many contemporary Christians are becoming disillusioned with the same hypocrisy Apess and Callahan revealed in their writing. Many flock to religions such as Unitarian Universalism, goddess based spiritual circles, or spirit quest through bountiful contemporary literature, all of which embrace the value of traditional Native beliefs, revering animal icons, practicing Native American chants and dances, and connecting with the spirit of the Earth. Columbus Day has taken on an angry, rather than celebratory, tone, as we recall the devastation of Indian cultures by ethnocentric Europeans. The spiritual mood of Native and non-Native of North America seems to support a renewal of pride in Native American lifespan spiritual traditions. Beliefs once feared are revered, as the Christian scriputures illustrate, "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. . . A time to kill, and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build up. . . a time of war, and a time of peace,"(Ecc. 3 :1-8). This cyclical nature of humanity is illustrated in a chant sung by Women with Wings, an earth-centered spiritual circle: "Cycles of life, seasons of the year, rhythms of the Earth, and my heartbeat." Perhaps it is because everything cycles in human experience that I draw this connection between the Indians' rum and religion. I have no answers. Only inquiries. |
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text © 2000 Wendy M. Blake, all rights reserved.