Honoring Native American Heritage Month
To those of you we met at our kickoff this week: welcome! We’re grateful you’re here.
As we expand our circle and welcome other wanderers, travelers, questioners to our community, we wanted to ask you: What practices make you feel welcome? Is it faith practices? Secular ones? Physical objects, or perhaps people? Send us your messages and practices of welcome here so we may share them with our community.
Navigating Difference
I once got in a fight with a friend about Judaism. We were explaining Judaism to someone when I said that Judaism didn’t fully align with the categories of “ethnicity” or “religion.” My friend disagreed, loudly (in her telling, I disagreed, foolishly). For her, Judaism was fundamentally an ethnic category – not a national, racial, cultural, or religious one.
I remembered this argument when reading a book on the development of religious freedom. At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans Jewish leaders understood that defining Judaism or having Judaism defined by others as religious, national, or racial had consequences for their place in American public life. Arguing that Judaism was a religion helped enable assimilation. If Jews were a race, they might be perpetually excluded from the benefits afforded to fully white Americans.
The concepts of religion and race grew up together. In the early American context, for example, English common law prohibited the enslavement of Christians. As enslaved Africans and Native Americans attempted to convert, however, settlers developed the category of “race” to explain their continued difference, and justify their continued enslavement. “Race” became bodily, “religion” became internal. Simultaneously, enslavers argued that the state could not make laws differentiating between religious groups – i.e. it could not outlaw enslaving Christians. By developing new concepts of difference, settlers were able to legally justify enslavement.
The political implications of these categories have influenced American policy ever since. For instance, Pueblo Indians navigated U.S. colonial rule’s impact on their rituals. Pueblo leaders argued that some of their dances were “religious” and protected under the First Amendment. This argument both helped leaders continue their practices and changed the expectations around those rituals. Rather than being a public obligation, participating in these dances became an individual choice. Defining these dances as religious enabled the Pueblo to continue their rituals and required remake those rituals.
How we categorize difference has real world impacts. Defining a group as religious, ethnic, or otherwise is not the result of applying an objective test. Rather, it is the result of actors negotiating facts, political needs, and contemporaneous discourses. These categories can be both arbitrary and deeply important.
So, is Judaism an ethnicity? Is a Pueblo dance religious? These questions are less a matter of fact than an invitation to explore how a person thinks about their identities and how they hope to navigate the power structures of our world.
-Ben
In the News: Native American Self-Determination
Haaland announces effort to protect, improve access to Indigenous sacred sites by Emily McFarlan Miller
“Since time immemorial, the Earth’s lands and waters have been central to the social, cultural, spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. It is essential that we do everything we can to honor sites that hold historical, spiritual or ceremonial significance,” [Secretary Deb Haaland] said in a written statement from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Native Americans in court for broken promises by Red Lake Nation News
For many worshipers in traditional Native American faiths, religious practice centers on sacred land. In the Mount Hood area, indigenous people have used the land to fish, hunt, gather food and medicine, bury their dead, and perform religious ceremonies for centuries. But in 2008, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration refused to listen to tribal members' pleas about a small, less-than-one-acre sacred site and chose to demolish it, destroying the ancient sacred stone altar and burying ancestral gravesites to make way for a highway turn lane. Sadly, the government also chose to ignore the numerous alternatives for widening the highway, leaving the other side of the road untouched.
A Turning Point: Changing the way Native American history is taught in schools by Maureen Kyle and Meg Hambach
So [Dr. Star Yellowfish], along with other educators in the Native American student services department came up with a suggested new lesson plan -- one that focused on what actually happened historically. The pamphlet they drew up contains facts, like how Tisquantum, a member of the Wampanoag Tribe, became fluent in English, became an interpreter and taught the English to grow corn.
Photographers share reflections on their identity during Native American Heritage Month by Tucker C. Toole
“I’d like my work to be a tool to educate and help dismantle stereotypes that have plagued Indigenous peoples since Edward S. Curtis labeled us the ‘vanishing race.’ We haven’t vanished,” Irvine says.
Upcoming Event: 52nd Annual National Day of Mourning
Most Americans will be observing a holiday next Thursday—but not necessarily same one. Coinciding with Thanksgiving each year, the National Day of Mourning is an annual tradition in which Indigenous Americans gather together to mourn the loss of ancestors to an ongoing genocide and the violent theft of native land. The United American Indians of New England (UAINE) characterize the day as “solemn and spiritual,” but also a time to “feel strength in action.”
The National Day of Mourning was founded in 1970 by Wamsutta Frank James, a Wampanoag leader, following an incident where he was invited to speak at Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day but barred from giving his speech after it was found to be incendiary towards white Americans. Wamsutta’s censored speech (which can be read here) condemned the actions of the Pilgrims, from forced conversions to Christianity to falsified histories of European charity and brotherhood.
While remembrance for these profound losses happens nationwide, the National Day of Mourning is observed in a special way in Massachusetts (the homeland of the Mashpee, Mahican, Nauset, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, and Wampanoag tribes). Every year there is a rally held in Plymouth, MA—the infamous landing sight of the Mayflower—where Indigenous Americans gather to mourn their ancestors and march on Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower replica. According to UAINE,
“It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.”
If you’re in the Massachusetts area, we encourage you to try and attend and support the rally this upcoming Thursday, November 25th. If not, you can still tune into the livestream of the event (beginning at 12pm EST), donate to the cause, or check out this official UAINE list of ways to support the National Day of Mourning from afar.
Dinner Table Conversations
Most families abide by one golden rule at big family gatherings: don’t, under any circumstance, bring up religion or politics with family. Aunts and uncles questioning you about your relationship status and what “young people” are doing these days is fair game. Musing out loud whether the US is still a Christian nation as you pour gravy on your plate is somehow less socially acceptable. In an effort to challenge this sentiment, we at the Faith & Politics Project encourage you to start a conversation with one of the following universally appealing icebreakers:
What spiritual practices are you grateful for this year?
Who are you giving thanks to?
In what ways can we challenge the historical ties between Thanksgiving, Christianity, and colonialism?
Jobs
Director of Organizing and Campaigns - Faith in Texas
Associate Development Officer - Bend the Arc
Resettlement Program Manager - Jewish Community Family Services Chicago
Community Organizer - LA Voice (Faith in LA)
AmeriCorps VISTA - Muslim & Arab American Resource Corps
Staff Attorney - Council on American-Islamic Relations
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