Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery
S04E05: Rekindling Culture and Healing History: A Dialogue on Decolonization and Indigenous Land Connection
Embark on a profound exploration with us as S. Lily Mendoza and Jim Perkinson take us through the winding paths of decolonization and the urgent quest to reconnect with the land. They illuminate the suppressed histories and indigenous cultures that beckon us to re-evaluate the civilizational narratives we've long been fed. Witness how the act of returning land plays a crucial role in healing the historic wounds inflicted upon native communities, especially around Detroit, and join our conversation as we acknowledge our collective responsibility to this shared history.
Our journey doesn't stop at intellectual discourse; we immerse ourselves in the spiritual bonds that indigenous cultures, like the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, share with nature. These traditions, which treat water as a sacred entity and embrace radical diversity, inspire us to reflect on our own cultural roots and the devastating impact of colonization. Their experiences of cultural rediscovery, alongside the tragic loss of indigenous languages in places like the Philippines, serve as a vivid reminder of the rich cultural diversity that we need to preserve and celebrate.
Navigating the complexities of Christianity's history, we grapple with its darker legacy of violence and the rise of white nationalism. This includes a critical look at how institutions, such as the prison industrial complex, perpetuate racial injustice, and economic exploitation. We honor the resistance that has emerged from within religious traditions, highlighting the courageous alignment with indigenous peoples against imperialistic forces. Our dialogue, enriched by the Henry Luce Foundation, Syracuse University, Hendricks Chapel, and the Indigenous Values Initiative, underscores the vital collaboration between indigenous wisdom and academic research, aiming to foster a better understanding and respect for the myriad of perspectives that shape our world.
View the transcript and show notes at podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org. Learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery on our site DoctrineofDiscovery.org.
Hello and welcome to the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast. The producers of this podcast would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands, and now introducing your hosts, phil Arnold and Sandy Bigtree.
Speaker 2:Welcome back everyone to Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery. My name is Philip Arnold, I'm a faculty member in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, core faculty in Native American Indigenous Studies, and I'm here with and I'm Sandy Bigtree, a citizen of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.
Speaker 3:I grew up, however, just a couple miles north of the Onondaga Nation and live on the unceded lands of the Onondaga.
Speaker 2:And this podcast is sponsored by Henry Luce Foundation Really appreciate all their help and support in this important work. Today we have some really old friends and special guests. First we have and I'm going to ask you to introduce yourselves, because that's probably the best and easiest way for our folks here that listen to the podcast to understand who you are S Lily Mendoza and Jim Perkinson, both faculty members in Michigan, my old stomping ground and one of the reasons why I'm really interested in having this discussion today. But can you introduce yourself to our audience, lily?
Speaker 4:Maya Payabak Keikongan Diri nanda kayong. Maya Payatu Ako I Lily Mendoza, anak ng Horatio Mendoza, at Esperanza Luna. Good morning to everyone that is from my Kapampangan, native tongue. I was born and raised in the Philippines, in the land of the Aita peoples and in a province called Pampanga, by the riverbank, and I'm here in Wawiatanong, the crooked way of the river, home of the Anishinaabe people, swayan, the Turon Fox, miami, and so in Detroit and I teach. I'm a professor of culture and communication at Oakland University and also executive director of the Center for Babilan Studies, which is a movement among the esporic Filipinos committed to decolonization and indigenization.
Speaker 5:Thank you and Jim yes, jim Perkinson, I can only do this in English. I could improvise in Spanish, but that's about it grew up in Cincinnati, shawnee Territory, and now for more than 35 years here at Wawiakanaong, as my baby spoke just a minute ago in introducing herself. I won't reiterate that, but do acknowledge that ancestry here and struggling out of those 35 years of being rearranged by inner city black culture with Lily Mendoza in 2001 and having to engage a whole other rite of ongoing initiation into Filipino culture, the first official colony that settler, colonial state United States ever took elsewhere. And I teach at an inner city seminary that over my 25 years there has become more reflective of Detroit itself. It's located in the inner city and is now overwhelmingly African-American.
Speaker 5:And I have also taught part-time out at Oakland where Lily teaches race and communication, hip-hop, race in the city, et cetera. I do spoken word poetry. I'm an activist in the city, particularly in the last eight years pushing back on water shutoffs and the struggle over the human right of water and learning that water actually first of all belongs to herself. She is her own creature. So all of that is ongoing initiation, rearrangement for me as white male, being greatly gifted with all of that input and constant checking gifted with all of that input and constant checking.
Speaker 2:So full disclosure. Jim and I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago together. We've been, we've, you know, met up at various points in our career, although we're very, in very different kind of circles. In some ways We've kept in touch. And you know, both of you gave really thrilling papers at the conference, the Doctrine of Discovery conference, which was titled Religious Origins of White Supremacy no-transcript, and so the conference was really.
Speaker 4:it felt like home. It felt like home to me and I think it's for me in my own journeying. I find that there has to be a two-step process for those who are wishing to get on this path of not just decolonizing but being schooled by a different vision of how to be a human being on this earth, and that is, it's not just about learning from indigenous people and recovering our own sense of ancestral reconnection, but also understanding the civilizational narrative that serves as a log in our eyes in terms of understanding the radical difference between indigenous ways of being and what we have been schooled by, which is being thoroughly immersed in this narrative of progress and civilization, et cetera. As Charles Solomon has said, there is no word that is more vague and has been permitted to commit more crimes than that term civilization. And so, yeah, I was really heartened by the presentations that I listened to at the conference.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you.
Speaker 5:Yes, for me, being in Syracuse with Phil and Sandy and Steve Newcomb and the whole crew of folk was a real gift and not something I take for granted, a great honor and a responsibility to live up to, and I enjoyed the presentations, enjoyed getting to know some folk after hours. And where I think we need to go for me is pushing through white supremacy back to Christian supremacy. I would understand white supremacy as a kind of offspring of Christian supremacy, going all the way back to Roman times and even then back behind that to what Lily was talking about civilizational supremacy. What Lily was talking about civilizational supremacy and how to for me, how to do that here in Detroit. We'll talk about it as the podcast goes on, but most of my work up until meeting Lily was dealing with whiteness in relationship to blackness and pushing back on other white folk about that, about the white supremacy piece.
Speaker 5:With her, it's been a matter of pushing in a sense, underneath that to deeper history and deeper disappearance, the genocidal eclipse of native folk, three Fires, folk in this area, as well as Wendat Huron that still are present here, and the question about land return.
Speaker 5:That remains a throbbing, aching question that I think needs to be the lodestone for all of our activity of social resistance and pushing for a different world, and part and parcel of that is learning, relearning relationship with the more than human world. For me, when I go outside the door barefoot and wiggle my toes in the soil, I understand invisibly running between my toes and the soil is a river of blood that I don't have the right just to relate to the land where I am and recover ways of belonging to the land, as Winona LaDuke might say. But I have to first pay attention to the indigenous folk, in this case the Three Fires folk who were disappeared from so much of this land, and get in relationship to those who remain. And I'm only here by permission, not by any title or property right, and so I try to integrate that into my teaching and understand that as a huge ongoing agenda.
Speaker 3:It kind of connects to what Lily was saying. You just can't go back and experience being indigenous. It's like well, Charles Long would talk about digging through the history. You have to understand colonialism, and it's so much baggage there that there is no way you're going to ever experience indigeneity with the land. Right. But future generations may, and that's really an indigenous precept anyway that you live for seven generations, and so it's being actively involved in this process of decolonization and reconnecting with the earth. We're really doing this for the seventh generation to come. We may see very little of an effect in the work that we do, and it's difficult work and it's very upsetting work every day, right.
Speaker 4:And if I can jump in Sandy in response, part of the process for me own recovering of a sense of indigeneity is making visible the default conditioning right, because the narrative of modernity and civilization is so naturalized that we don't think about it. It's the default assumption of what it means to live a good life, of what it means to be a human being. And so when we encounter other ways of life and for example, when I was little, I would encounter the Aita people, and because they no longer live in their intact communities, I could only see them as pitiful, as primitive, as backward, as representing our past that we can no longer go back to and shouldn't even wish. We can't even imagine longing for that way of life. We ran away from it.
Speaker 4:But my own transformation came about when I was sitting in an ethnomusicology class and for the first time I encountered the richness of Indigenous life since that colonial lens. You know the amazing weaving designs, the architecture that doesn't use any nails right, the basketry, the dances, and that was what broke me open to that world and I said, wow, why then, if this were our people, why are we looked upon as backward and primitive? Where does that come from? And so that started me on that path of understanding. What are our default assumptions about what a human being is supposed to be?
Speaker 3:Well, it was a propaganda campaign that the United States implemented on the Filipinos in all over Southeast Asia to gain a stronghold at the turn of the 20th century, and they used much of the same kind of campaign propaganda campaign they used to settle the United States and portraying Filipinos as savages. They used similar iconographies and cartoon characters and teaching everybody about indigeneity being below human, subhuman. What's the book? The Imperial Cruise was a really excellent book to read on that subject, right.
Speaker 2:Teddy Roosevelt Traveled with.
Speaker 3:Chad and several congressmen were on this cruise and it was just ushering forth this smear campaign so they could acquire stronghold.
Speaker 4:That really helped us understand what was happening, and the foundation of that narrative is on a separation from the land, because living on the land is seen as merely being an animal, as if being an animal were an insult, were an insult right. And so people who are still living subsistence lives, lifestyles, are deemed as living like animals. That's why, when they came, they would say the land is empty right, because they're just part of the flora and fauna.
Speaker 3:Except for all the resources Right, exactly Even in that concept of natural resources Right.
Speaker 4:Exactly Even in that concept of natural resources.
Speaker 2:You have built in this idea of development and progress.
Speaker 3:And an indigenous way of living with the earth is in the way.
Speaker 5:It's a hind struggle with the shadow side of my ancestry and learning how to own that honor, that let it have space in my body but then open to another way of being a human, like Lily is talking about. Initially, for me, learned from African-American folk, ordinary low-income folk, using the memories and the continued bodily expression of their traditions coming out of West and Central Africa, using a percussive vocabulary, especially not just in musics but in everyday interaction on the street corner, on the basketball court, in the beauty salon. Ways of arranging fabric on the body that are right, primal colors juxtaposed that slap your eyeball awake from 50 yards away. All of that once. It took me eight years to get to the point where I could even start to see the incredible creativity of that way of engaging reality. A call response, communal ethos, probing an impossible situation, making desperation yield beauty in spite of itself. Once I saw it, I fell in love with it. It began to rearrange me. It comes out as spoken word poetry. But it's not mine to take, it's mine to, yes, participate in to the degree I have permission, but stay in relationship with actual black folk who can say Jim, uh-uh, you're going too far, halt, stop, don't steal. And that's been the deepest education in my life black anger and black humor that rearranged molecules.
Speaker 5:But then also learning from indigenous folk right here, a whole nother way, and then in the Philippines, yet another way of being a human being that is more embedded in land and learning from the plants and animals and soils and seasons and weather and waters.
Speaker 5:And, for me, being involved in pushing back on the water shut off episode in Detroit, starting in 2014 and then 2015, a walk to join the water struggle in Detroit with the water struggle in Flint, starting at Plaza on the Flint, starting at the Plaza on the Detroit River, where Mona Stonefish, an Anishinaabe water-walking woman, pulled up some water and talked to it and talked about her people's way of relating to water, where it is the sole prerogative of women, and that pushed me then to have to ask questions, not just about water as a human right but, as I said earlier, water as belonging to herself, as a living, spiritual creature, animate force.
Speaker 5:And then taking that to go back into my own Christian formation and my own Indo-European formation and going back to Ireland particularly, and learning some of the indigenous traditions there the only colony in Europe colonized by Great Britain or by England, really and learning some of the deep land relationships there that I can't claim immediately but they are there at some level back in my DNA, and learn the traces and the memories, the myths, the rituals, the foods, the songs that I can partially let rearrange me. And in all of that then it's not just an experience of dealing with shame and horror, but it's also astonishment and beauty and falling in love with something that's very different than I grew up with, and having that as an animating force. Fabulous, yeah, well put.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very well put and, um, you know, there's so many things to so many threads to take up here.
Speaker 2:Um, one of the things that has really struck me lately in teaching is how, how good indigenous people are at diversity, right, um, it's something that we don't do well, uh, with, in spite of our language, in spite of our constitutional reinforcements for religious diversity or, you know, ethnic and racial diversity, all those kinds of buzzwords don't do it as well as indigenous peoples, you know. I mean, you know, among the Haudenosaunee there is something called the edge of the woods ceremony. I mean, they're really finely attuned to welcoming people into their communities that have entirely different languages, entirely different worldviews, that live like 50 miles away. You know, I mean it's that kind of radical diversity, because those people over there, 50 miles away, they know their deities, they know their spirits and the, the spiritual beings that reside in that place, and whenever somebody goes and visits, as we always do, they have to, as the Taradajo says, wipe them down, really address their sorrows and their struggles, you know, and all of those things that we all carry with us.
Speaker 2:And so the Edge of the Woods ceremony, back in Boulder, colorado, that was one of the things that really attracted me to the Haudenosaunee, as an undergrad, that, and Sandy Bigtree, but we were, you know, that kind of way of grappling with the human condition as people present themselves, as people are in the world rather than as they should be, or something which you know I mean. It just becomes much more enlivening to have that kind of framework to work in.
Speaker 3:Well, when the earth identifies you through your clanship, you know you are the earth, the water you belong to the water. You belong to the earth. The earth is diverse and it's forever changing. The water's shifting Species move and, you know, interact with one another. So when you pay attention and you're of the earth, diversity is a natural way of being in the world.
Speaker 4:And that's what I realized is the stuff of real culture. Real cultures are not just human inventions. They're worked out in very intimate relationship with particular ecologies and they don't presume to universalize their local relationship, because they understand that other places require different edge of the. Did you say edge of the village different? You're having to negotiate that edge instead of imposing it, and I think, imposing your own to the other, and I think that's what Christianity did across the globe when it came, it had and it was particularly devastating in the Philippines, because we quickly learned English and, because of our modern education, had for its official language English right, and so the missionaries that would come didn't have to learn any of our indigenous languages.
Speaker 4:They couldn't do that in Indonesia or Malaysia, so there was not even an attempt at translation of trying to see how the spirit of Christianity could be incarnated within this context. There was no such, and so the colonization of Filipinos becomes rather profound, very deep, rather profound, very deep. They say that the Spaniards were more interested in catechism, they were not very systematic, but the states, the United States, the Americans, really, really built in the colonial ideology and the white supremacy within our modern education system.
Speaker 2:Absolutely and that's one of the reasons I mentioned diversity, lily, is because, you know, the Philippines are just this radically diverse place. Yes, culturally radically diverse place, culturally radically diverse.
Speaker 4:Over a hundred ethno-linguistic communities.
Speaker 2:It's amazing how do you navigate all of that? You know it must've been. There were these protocols that were in place before colonialism, before the? You know attempts at unification, which I think you're still struggling with there, and I you know attempts at unification, which I think you're still struggling with there. And you know, I don't know, I don't know if you can tell us a little bit about that, or there must have been all of these.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they were blood compact. You know when they would have peace treaties with each other. There has been a lot of inter-island trading that was going on even before the coming of Spain. But then, when you have an external power, come in and then impose its own requerimiento right, impose its own protocol and say this is the only way, then it runs roughshod all of this intricate negotiations that were already happening with one another. So there was really no one nation right.
Speaker 4:What brought about the Philippines as a nation state is the resistance to colonization distance to colonization, and it becomes a struggle today because now you have Manila they're talking about Manila, imperialism right where you have all of these ethno-linguistic communities with their own diverse ways of diverse languages, diverse cultures, and having to have a nationalized identity that's premised on the most urbanized, the center right, and the rest become periphery pretty much, and so the viability of a nation state I question even the viability of, because all nation states have their own internal minorities.
Speaker 1:Do you need help catching up on today's topic or do you want to learn more about the resources mentioned? If so, please check our website at podcastdoctrineofdiscoveryorg for more information and, if you like this episode, review it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And now back to the conversation.
Speaker 2:I think that, yeah, what we're talking about really is the radical democratic if you like, radical democratic framework of indigenous peoples. Right, you know that they're, and this is what inspired the founding fathers. Oddly enough, you know and you see that here in Haudenosaunee territory. So this whole colonial history is this chock full of these ironies you know of. You know, friendship, inspiration, those kinds of issues.
Speaker 3:It was radical when the first treaty with the Dutch was called the Two Row Wampum and it was that the colonist ship would sail down one row and then the Haudenosaunee would row down the other river in their canoe and they would never interfere with one another and respect each other down the river of life. And the colonists see that as well. You're going to stay out of our affairs and you know we can do what we want and we won't interfere with your way, not even talk to you as a matter of fact. We'll just like plow in there and take over everything.
Speaker 3:The concept they didn't understand the colonists was the river of life. You're both sailing in parallel, not interfering with one another, down the river of life. You're both sailing in parallel, not interfering with one another down the river of life. And if you don't respect being part of this force, then you're missing the whole concept of the two row. And that's what the Edge of the Woods ceremony is about. There's a certain protocol when you bring someone as close as a few miles from your territory into your territory, because you're still, your languages are still a little different, you have different ecosystems and you're not interfering with theirs. They're not interfering with you. So there's protocol when you meet and talk right but you have respect for the woods.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know the woods are the the basis of that relationship or you have respect for the water of the river of life, like Jim was talking about, right, so the water, we have to have this. There are certain kind of universals sort of built into this in a way, but they're not ideological, ideological frameworks, and I kind of wanted to pick up on that, jim, because your work on pushing back against white nationalism, white Christian supremacy, has been really inspirational to me and I think it's of my graduate students as a kind of setup here. One of my graduate students last semester came in with a shocking statistic that it's men like us, white cisgender men like us that are committing suicide at higher rates than any other ethnic racial group. That is, 60 and above. Right, that's us. So I mean know it's, it is personal, you know, and I'm I'm wondering you know how you work with that in your, in your work in the classroom?
Speaker 5:uh, you know, and uh, in the neighborhood, yeah, so the what you're saying about the edge of the woods ritual ceremony original diversity I would call it biodiversity is what I'm learning that indigenous folk understood that the more than human world was already modeling how to handle diversity and you needed to learn from that and collaborate with that, and that's exactly what I now try to do with Christianity. So, yeah, I'm a cisgendered white guy and, on some days, a Christian. Some days Christianity is 45,000 denominations on the face of the planet right now. So what is Christianity? Who says? And I'm not particularly interested in preserving Christianity per se. I am interested in preserving the memory that Christianity encodes in its root, which is actually not Christian but Jewish, and the memory that Judaism encodes in its root, which is not particularly place, which are valid there but not universalizable and not valid elsewhere, and to push for a Christianity that would recover down in there, back behind there, its own indigenous roots that have their own wonderment and their own incredible beauty, like the Sabbath Jubilee tradition of learning from the land, when Moses led the crew out from Egypt and they had to relearn how to be human and did so in relationship to Midianite.
Speaker 5:Pastoral nomads learned to eat aphid defecation that's called manna in Hebrew Aphids are scale insects that eat tamarisk leaves and poop 130% their body weight every hour. That puddles at the base of the tree that is scooped up by Arab Bedouin today in the area and called man. It's a carbohydrate to keep you alive. And so for 40 years they were having empire and urban aggression gradually debrided out of them and relearning the land through their herd animals and only in that way sort of re-indigenizing into the area there but that's only valid there and then joining up when they eventually crossed the Jordan River from east to west, with rebellious Canaanite peasants who were fleeing the city-state systems on the Mediterranean seaboard. And so they become this very mixed thing called Israel, and the L part of the name is a Canaanite high god, a storm god, a god of water, like Sandy was talking about, and the Sabbath jubilee tradition that's elaborated out of all that wilderness wandering experience probably was dictated to them by the rains, the rains that come and end the summer drought, regularly in September and October, celebrated in the Feast of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, which is a rain ceremony, originally longing for the Mediterranean storms to blow off the Mediterranean and end the Siroccoan drought coming up from the Hejaz in Saudi Arabia, coming up from the Hejaz in Saudi Arabia, and they do that regularly for about six years at a time, sometimes seven years, and then they go AWOL.
Speaker 5:It's like the rains say to the human community there we know you need us for your small-scale agriculture and your animal life, so we'll come regularly, we'll cooperate with you, but every seventh year or so we're going to do our own thing.
Speaker 5:We're going to go and be on our own rhythm and time and cycle and you'll have to deal with that by returning to a much more vulnerable relationship with the land, and then we'll come back and cooperate with you again for another six years. So this seven, this emphasis on seven days, seventh month, seven years, may well have been something the original folk there learned from the rain. So it's that kind of stuff that I try to now teach in the seminary and again to awaken astonishment but also to say but that only applies there. And if Christianity is going to go elsewhere, what it has to do is listen to the people who know their elsewheres, know the codification, the language, the culture, the deities, as you said, phil, of that place. The woods are different from the savannah and you don't have permission to enter into another space until you ask the people who know that space and then, even if you get permission, you need to learn the beauty, the spirituality, the creatures that are there.
Speaker 2:Well, I love Michigan and and you know, the urgency of our moment is to protect the water, and I grew up loving the lakes and the Great Lakes and being fearful of them and all that sort of thing. So what you're saying really resonates with me as a Michigander as well, really resonates with me as a Michigander as well. I think you're uniquely. Both of you are teaching very powerful topics, really demonstrating the value of religious studies in different kinds of ways and, to speak to the urgency of our moment as well, I've always felt, and with a greater sense of longing in a way, that we need to protect the Great Lakes, we need to protect those waters. That's what we have, that's our responsibility, and what you're both saying in different ways, is kind of like how we, in history of religions and theology, can participate in that work, what it means to be a water protector just where we are, and I think that's something we share because we're also, you know, among the Great Lakes here in New York State.
Speaker 3:It's difficult, though, when you're entering, like a Christian community. The first time I visited Phil's parents' cottage up at Crystal Lake. We're driving up there and I'm excited you know, anticipating this to see this beautiful lake they're all talking about, and as we're getting into the access roads, one is called Seychem Court, and then there's Ongweonwe, which is our word for the real people, and so we're driving down and already I'm like offset right. And then there's one mansion after the next mansion, log cabin, it's all varieties on the beautiful, beautiful access we reach the family. You know, log cabin it's the most modest, little you modest little lodging on the entire lake but it's beautiful.
Speaker 3:But you know I'm already set back and it's so hard to talk about anything once you go through that entry. There's there's no really welcoming you and respecting who. You are coming into such a place. You have to adapt coming into that place. And I felt all of that. You know, just with that first little drive like kit log cabin that still stands there.
Speaker 2:It's like one bedroom, you know a loft. It's probably, I don't know, 300, like 400 square feet right the year you were born yeah, right. So it was like I've been going up there my whole life, but now it's surrounded by mcmansions. You know like you know you've got because it's such a beautiful lake. The Frankfort area is a lovely place, but you know, our little log cabin still sits there. You know, I'm sure our neighbors hate us, but you know it's well kept.
Speaker 2:But it was originally this Disciples of Christ camp that was given to them by the railroad, you know just to kind of locate this in a way right, you know, right between in the kind of interlocking between Lake Michigan and Crystal Lake. So since then things have developed, but the camp remains, even though, for example, the disciples have repudiated the doctrine of discovery. I find that nobody seems to know what that means in our little world.
Speaker 1:Or really care.
Speaker 2:Or really cares, because it just sort of interrupts the. You know it's a little like hey, you get off my cloud. You know, remember the old Rolling Stones song, you know, it's like, it's like don't mess with my utopia. You know, and it's been interesting, having gone up there my whole life, to see this arc of these beautiful lakes, you know, and the things that they've gone through. But then also the people, just just I mean they're probably liberal, well-meaning people, you know, as opposed to many of the other rural counties in upstate Michigan, but still they just don't have a clue.
Speaker 3:They're so content with their beautiful lakeside cottages. They're beautiful lakeside cottages.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's a challenge, because I think the form of Christianity that you're talking about is just so foreign to them. But on the other hand, their idea of Christianity is dying. Like I said, we go to my parents' church in East Lansing and they're considering selling it, you know, because nobody's attending, nobody's coming there anymore. So even in the face of this kind of inevitable death that Christianity is going through in many denominations, there's not this sense that did we get something wrong?
Speaker 3:there's not this sense that. Did we get something wrong or you know? No, I'd like to clarify. We went to that church once in 10 years to be with your parents.
Speaker 2:We don't know yes, and now, and and there was a transgender woman that was the pastor at the, at the church, and my parents, who are in their 90s, are are just like they're, they're, they're. They had to sit us down and say, now, this is not the church you grew up in, phil. And then they said we have a transgender pastor. And then Sandy and I said we want to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like hallelujah right let's break this thing apart.
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I often say and I think Lily should weigh in here quickly too I often say that I think history would have been better off without Christianity traditions. There are more dead bodies at the feet of Christianity than any other major world religion on the planet. Other world religions, once indigenous religious traditions, get gathered up to serve an urban elite that is bent on aggression. They also have participated in all kinds of domination, violence, genocide, but Christianity, I think, takes the prize at this point in time.
Speaker 3:And maybe the most insidious. So sneaky, yeah, most insidious. They're so sneaky about it and brutal at the same time.
Speaker 5:So I teach that the Bible is the most dangerous book on the planet.
Speaker 5:It's authorized more genocide, enslavement, rape, pillage and plunder than any other book.
Speaker 5:And if you're going to be a Christian, the first thing you've got to do is learn that history, own it, understand it, be repulsed by it, be humiliated or humbled by it, and figure out what then to do. Coming out the other side of that kind of deep work and it's not just a matter of processing it in your head, it's a matter of letting it down in your belly and into your body, so that you are horrified and deeply disturbed by it all in relationship to some group of people who've suffered the other side of it. All in relationship to some group of people who've suffered the other side of it, because until it gets social in relationship, it's just an idea and the reality is the trauma is all around us, up inside us too. Like Bill was saying, now white men, particularly working and lower middle class men, are face to face with their utter emptiness, white supremacy having given them nothing to be proud of or to be astonished by. And what do they do? There's no way to communalize anything worthy. I think that's right.
Speaker 3:And grief is always seen as a weakness in this culture and Christianity. It shows a weakness in your faith if you're depressed, or it's just a no-win situation.
Speaker 2:Maybe you could talk a little bit about white Christian nationalism in the Philippines as well, because we know that. I mean it's on the rise everywhere, you know. But one of the things I like to tell my students is that if you don't understand religion and you don't understand the history that Jim is talking about, then you really don't know what's going on in the world right now. You know, I mean it's just literally everywhere. I mean yesterday we went by a pickup truck that was belching smoke. You know, and that's a symbol of, you know, the apocalypse. I mean somebody embracing this kind of apocalyptic idea of you know the world is going to end, so let's make it end sooner, sort of thing, right? And I think you know there's so many indicators of how white Christian extremism, nationalism, is expressing itself. I wonder if you can wade in on what's happening in the Philippines as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there are so many threads that I wanted to jump in on.
Speaker 4:But yeah, there is this notion in the Philippines that we don't have racism there just because we're all brown skin.
Speaker 4:You know, it's not your typical white settler colony like Australia, for example, or the US, but I actually wrote a piece on it questioning that notion that there's no racism Because our racism is through anda-vis, our indigenous people, and it's more in Kuwait in the sense that it's the civilizational supremacy that is embedded in the discourse of progress and development and modernity. So what is happening throughout the Philippines now is all the indigenous places are being turned into tourist places, places and like, for example, in my home province, they're building a new Clark City. This is where the US military bases used to be and that is the homeland of the Aita people, and so the Aita are saying we used to roam these places freely. Now they're saying we can't go there. They confine us to these marginal places. What are we supposed to do? And so I'm really my heartbreak is towards the way in which the same colonial logic that has been imposed on us by foreign rulers is being imposed on our indigenous peoples.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been suggested that we talk a little more about the criminal state, the violence against criminals and how that plays into a network of Christian domination and civilizational supremacy. And I know, jim, you've been working in that area of the incarceration state and you have to in your work and I wonder how those two things you know kind of kind of connect. You know white Christian supremacy and the, and you know, in the overwhelming numbers of incarcerations in the African American population.
Speaker 5:Yeah, be in effect a pre-police force militia, pre-police force militia, armed to be on the lookout for continuing to survive Native Americans and runaway slaves, enslaved Africans, and our modern day police force grows out of that in this country and this idea that a gun is a prosthesis of white male identity. I'm going to get my figures wrong here, but overwhelmingly the great percentage is white males and it's a continuing legacy of being on hunt for bodies that you're going to criminalize, in fact already have rendered property anybody who has dark skin. Yes, you initially, once you come over, clear native folk off the land genocidally, either by killing them, infecting them or pushing them west, and then reach into Africa and pull over the new labor force that you shackle. But you also work with language so that black skin becomes a shackle. You can't peel off if you get the iron shackle off, and then you monitor it with a gun on the part of all the white males, and that continues to be the valid form of enslavement in our culture. The Netflix video 13th runs through the way. The 13th Amendment eliminated slavery except in the case of committing a crime, and then it continues and legitimizes slavery in that instance. And so now, yeah, you have, you know, the civil rights movement and black power movements and the eruption of cities in the North in the 60s, black folk emerging in a new public dimension of assertiveness. And the response is to take the prison industrial complex from what it was doing in 1970, which is incarcerating 300,000 folk, to incarcerating 2.3 million by the early 90s, overwhelmingly dark-skinned bodies. And you then create an industrial complex around it so that all kinds of folk, particularly white folk, but not just white folk, have their livelihood connected with that serving that complex of incarceration. And so it's one more form of capitalizing on black and brown bodies and, yes, red bodies here, but also up in Canada. It's one more form of capitalizing on black and brown bodies and, and, yes, red bodies here, but also up in Canada, their version of it that continues the, the economic exploitation. So it's, yes, it's, it's criminalization in the sense of, uh, negatively perceiving broadcasting, a cultural habit of negatively perceiving dark skin, but then you make that yield economic benefit through this great big complex.
Speaker 5:One more time, the other thing I would say is that Christianity and Judaism, both are camped out on outlaws. All the major figures were outlaw. Moses was an outlaw. He had to go OG from Egypt having, you know, killed an Egyptian overseer and the process of advocating for a Hebrew slave. So he has to exit with a price on his head. John the Baptist beheaded, jesus crucified. All of the early the inner circle didn't make it to old age. Being criminal with respect to the political state that you are part of is the vocation of a legitimate Christianity. Now, if you're in an indigenous situation, that's not what you do. You learn. You sit back and shut up and learn from the people of the land, but if you're embedded in an empire, then you better be resistant.
Speaker 3:That's exactly what happened in Haudenosaunee territory. I mean, here they're consulting with the founding fathers about the great law of peace, another vision, another way of living, and then Washington, during the Revolutionary War, issues forth this scorched earth campaign to burn out all the crops and villages of the Haudenosaunee, and they had to flee their homelands. And then, when they return most, all of their land is taken. And then, when they return most, all of their land is taken and it's been assigned to all the military army right, the sergeants, the generals and everybody is allotted a piece of land. So in being paid off with land, washington establishes a military state in Haudenosaunee land. So that's the beginning of that police force, right, and they're all armed because they're soldiers.
Speaker 3:There's a reason why we're the empire state Exactly.
Speaker 5:Yeah yeah, maybe it looks like Adam has a question for you on this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm just reading his message here. In the Philippines, president Bombo Marcos has continued the policies of the Tertus War. Is there a civil rights movement in the Philippines fighting for abolition and against the prison industrial complex there? There? I wish I was really up on the politics in the homeland in this regard. I know that there are a number of progressive movements and feminist women's movements. I have been focused for most of my work on what is going on with Indigenous peoples, and so I wish I could speak to that.
Speaker 5:To what degree are Indigenous folks criminalized, babe?
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, Well, we have one of the highest extrajudicial killing rates next to Brazil or at some point I think we have surpassed Brazil in terms of the killing of indigenous land defenders, and that is still going on.
Speaker 4:We have Canadian mining companies, we have all kinds of corporations now logging companies that are in indigenous territories, and it's not stopping. It's not stopping. And a while ago I wanted to introduce a wrinkle in regard to Christianity being a curse, almost like a curse on the planet. Well, in the Philippines we actually have some progressive Jesuit and other priests who are working with indigenous communities to serve like some kind of a buffer, because there's a lot of red tagging, you know, indigenous land defenders being accused of being charged with being communists, and so some of the progressive priests put their bodies on the line and serve as some kind of a layer of protection for folks. They themselves became schooled in the people's ways, so that the education is not really toward missionizing right, but then themselves having to learn and to be tutored by indigenous communities. So that's just something that I know is is laudable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, being a buffer, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think one thing that we've come to appreciate doing this work over the last 15 plus years on the doctrine of discovery is how unifying it is right. So you know, in spite of the fact that we're visiting this terrible legacy, these awful events and occasions throughout history, I think you know that you know one of the signs of hope following your little wrinkle there, lily, is that you know it does bring us together in a variety of ways around a common trauma, common issue. Some of us are more aware of it than others, some of us feel it more keenly than others, and it's not always comfortable in our conferences, but it's always. There's a lot of energy, there's a lot of commitment. You know people are understanding this message and I want to thank you both. You're one of the kind of power couples I think of that are doing work across a kind of vast array of topics and issues in the history of religions and in indigenous studies, and I really appreciate you both, I think for both of us really appreciate this conversation and just thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having us For sure, the kind of power couples I think of in that are doing work across, you know kind of vast array of topics and issues in in the history of religions and and in indigenous studies, and I really appreciate you both, I think, for both of us really appreciate this conversation and just thank you, thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1:The producers of this podcast were Adam DJ Brett and Jordan Lone Colon. Our intro and outro is social dancing music by Oris Edwards and Regis Cook. This podcast is funded in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation, syracuse University and Hendricks Chapel and the Indigenous Values Initiative. If you like this episode, please check out our website and make sure to subscribe.
