Since boyhood, my heart has beaten compassion for Native Americans. My mother told stories of our great great grandmother, Sarah Bond, who was a Native Pawnee. Grandma Sarah had dark beautiful eyes with prominent features of the plains Natives of North America. Sarah was born in 1841 and died a century later. Mother spoke of her raven hair woven in a thick braid flowing to her waist. Grandma Sarah lived during the aftermath of the Native American genocide called the Trail of Tears, the forcible government removal of Natives from the south east to Oklahoma. 4 thousand men, women, and children were killed by the United States Government through exposure, disease, and starvation. Forced to march nearly 1000 miles through the worst winter of the era, two generations perished .The young and the very old did not survive.
My grandmother did not march on the Trail of Tears. She witnessed other atrocities. Her Pawnee community declined from 12,000 in 1830 to 3400 by 1859 when she was 18 years old. By the time she turned 60 her proud nation numbered only 633. Grandma Sarah witnessed the decline of her people and culture by 94.725% during her lifetime. Think about 9 of 10 of your friends and family perishing without a next generation to carry on.
Sarah Bond
What did my Pawnee ancestors do with out the joy of boyhood wonder and belief?
How do I transform politically correct compassion to justice for the genocide of our family members? How do I personally move from heart felt empathy to cultural redemption? How do I conduct myself with the knowledge of murder and injustice at epic levels?
Cultural shift begins with compassion and belief. A great leader once said, “You must have the belief of a child.” The wonder of a boy, the passion of a man, and the belief in a God who brings truth and redemption change culture.
So, let’s examine our collective story with compassion and belief.
Understanding the genocide and dehumanization of Native Americans does not begin in the New World at Plymouth Rock. The wince of pain began in Europe. Our forefathers who sailed to and formed the 13 Colonies fled genocide and dehumanization in Europe at the hands of…political Christian parties. I enjoy writing, but I fear that my own bias and pain may dictate the following. So, I will cite the historical narrative with quotes.
“The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst. In some areas Catholics persecuted Protestants, in others Protestants persecuted Catholics, and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists. Although England renounced religious persecution in 1689, it persisted on the European continent. Religious persecution, as observers in every century have commented, is often bloody and implacable and is remembered and resented for generations.”
Do you see it? Theological exclusivism of political Christian parties imposed the saving of souls through violence.
A warrior from the Viet Nam war era said to me, “You must first dehumanize your enemy before you do what you do to them.”
I suggest that the theological exclusivism of European Christianity drove a violence fueled by dehumanization. Again, let’s examine the historical narrative.
“David van der Leyen and Levina Ghyselins, described variously as Dutch Anabaptists or Mennonites, by Catholic authorities in Ghent in 1554 were strangled and burned. Van der Leyen was finally dispatched with an iron fork. Bracht’s Martyr’s Mirror is considered by modern Mennonites as second only in importance to the Bible in perpetuating their faith.
Jesuits like John Ogilvie (Ogilby) (1580-1615) were under constant surveillance and threat from the Protestant governments of England and Scotland. Ogilvie was sentenced to death by a Glasgow court and hanged and mutilated on March 10, 1615.
On October 31, 1731, the Catholic ruler of Salzburg, Austria, Archbishop Leopold von Firmian, issued an edict expelling as many as 20,000 Lutherans from his principality. Many propertyless Lutherans, given only eight days to leave their homes, froze to death as they drifted through the winter seeking sanctuary. The wealthier ones who were allowed three months to dispose of their property fared better. Some of these Salzburgers reached London, from whence they sailed to Georgia. Others found new homes in the Netherlands and East Prussia.
The slaughter of Huguenots (French Protestants) by Catholics at Sens, Burgundy in 1562 occurred at the beginning of more than thirty years of religious strife between French Protestants and Catholics. These wars produced numerous atrocities. The worst was the notorious St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, August 24, 1572. Thousands of Huguenots were butchered by Roman Catholic mobs. Although an accommodation between the two sides was sealed in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, religious privileges of Huguenots eroded during the seventeenth century and were extinguished in 1685 by the revocation of the Edict. Perhaps as many as 400,000 French Protestants emigrated to various parts of the world, including the British North American colonies.
Huguenots at least matched the harshness of the persecutions of their Catholic opponents. In a period propaganda piece, a priest is disemboweled, his entrails wound up on a stick until they are torn out. In another illustration a priest is buried alive, and Catholic children are hacked to pieces. In another propaganda piece, alleged to have occurred in the village of Mans, was “too loathsome” for one nineteenth-century commentator to translate from the French. It shows a priest whose genitalia were cut off and grilled. Forced to eat his roasted private parts, the priest was then dissected by his torturers so they can observe him digesting his meal.
Irish Catholics of approximately one hundred Protestants from Loughgall Parish, County Armagh, at the bridge over the River Bann near Portadown, Ulster were slaughtered. This atrocity occurred at the beginning of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Having held the Protestants as prisoners and tortured them, the Catholics drove them “like hogs” to the bridge, where they were stripped naked and forced into the water below at swordspoint. Survivors of the plunge were shot.
Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform and purify the Church of England of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Roman Catholicism. In the 1620s leaders of the English state and church grew increasingly unsympathetic to Puritan demands. They insisted that the Puritans conform to religious practices that they abhorred, removing their ministers from office and threatening them with “extirpation from the earth” if they did not fall in line. Zealous Puritan laymen received savage punishments. For example, in 1630 a man was sentenced to life imprisonment, had his property confiscated, his nose slit, an ear cut off, and his forehead branded “S.S.” (sower of sedition).
Beginning in 1630 as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America from England to gain the liberty to worship God as they chose. Most settled in New England, but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were “non-separating Congregationalists.” Unlike the Pilgrims, who came to Massachusetts in 1620, the Puritans believed that the Church of England was a true church, though in need of major reforms. Every New England Congregational church was considered an independent entity, beholden to no hierarchy. The membership was composed, at least initially, of men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could prove it to other members. Puritan leaders hoped (futilely, as it turned out) that, once their experiment was successful, England would imitate it by instituting a church order modeled after the New England Way.”
A little boy who survived the 911 terror attack on the Twin Towers colored a picture of the macabre scene. He drew the towers, the smoke, the planes, and victims leaping to their deaths. He also approached the horror with compassion and belief. At the bottom of the Twin Towers where the victims fell to their deaths, he drew…trampolines. His reason? Compassion and belief. He felt empathy with belief in the future. If this pain were to happen again, the afflicted survive. Childlike compassion and belief possess the power to heal.
The perpetrators of genocide and dehumanization were victims of the same atrocities they inflicted on Native Americans. Bessel van der Kolk states that our bodies remember trauma. This sensory information stores within the immune system, specifically in memory neurons. Our bodies never forget atrocity. The trauma re enacts so the body can process the pain and recover. The murder and injustice inflicted upon European immigrants repeated against Native Americans.
What you also did not see in the drawing of the tiny 911 survivor was revenge against the terrorists. His boyhood compassion beat for the victims. His belief created a new ending. Changing culture requires compassion. Redeeming injustice with healthy belief changes the human heart. Boyhood compassion and belief begin to heal the hurt within.
http://www.pawneenation.org/page/home/pawnee-history
Post Traumatic Re enactment: Christian Persecution Re enacts in Native American Genocide and Persecution
Hope Experience 