zzshem@acc.wuacc.edu (sheldon mary) writes:
> wasicuwin@aol.com writes:
>
>> I would appreciate some clarification on this subject. In all the material
>> I have ever read on this subject (forty-five years worth), I have never seen
>> the Methodist church implicated in the slaughter at Sand Creek. . . .
>
> [I wrote a whole history here (who is surprised?) and ended] Time for
> class. Otherwise I would add on (oh no!) examples of
> exploitation by Catholic and Protestant mission leaders in the US today.
>
> Mary Dog Soldier
Some wrote and wanted me to finish up. Well, considering another thread
on "newagers," let me finish up on a sidetrack. I write a lot on the net
in support of traditional indigenous peoples. My Lakota husband likes
when I write because he says I see too much and the wrong people already
know it so I might as well speak up before I'm hung in silence anyway.
(He's says that because he know I already believe it.)
When I went to work in an American mission in Guatemala in 1984, I would
not have understood what I write now. Then, I saw the world as it had
been presented to me in years of education and at home. Then, I could
only see the world from the worldview which I was born into--a
European-American framework. I went to work in mission because I
believed (age 32, M.A. American Studies, Ph.D. Literature) what the
Catholic church taught--the Mayans had converted centuries ago and these
were Catholic people who fought the oppression of the Guatemalan
dictatorship. And true Christians were called to align themselves with
the poor of their faith . . . and true Christians did. I conceived
missionaries as true Christians, and I admired them.
I volunteered in this American mission in Guatemala in 1984 (three
months) and 1985 (one month), and in that time I so felt the deep truth
of Christian liberation theology that I assumed everyone else must too.
When I encountered examples that I was mistaken--hard facts--I was
incapable of taking them in. A Mayan child died of malnutrition in a
nutrition center the day after I was given money to buy bones for their
meal (a soup). An American sister (an alcoholic--and that shocked me)
cried for the priests would not give her money for meat, and though I
knew what was on the priests' table for dinner because I ate there, I
judged that she did not understand: if the priests didn't eat,
wouldn't they get sick and die, too? Who would be helped by that?
Surely, surely if they had money, they would feed these children! Anyone
would know that! (Though they put all my money in a safe on the first
day and refused to allow me to spend any on the people as a condition of
service.) A Mayan seminarian came to me and broke down in tears: "Please
get my people help! Please tell what you know! They hate my people!
They [the missionaries] hurt my people!" Rafael, too, must not
understand, you see. I judged he was unable to look at the missionaries
work fairly: the wealth he had seen studying in the US was affecting how
he was seeing these very different and dedicated people. Surely, surely
they would do anything they could to help his people! Why else would
they be there? It is so hard to stand in relation to one reality and
ever see another's--even if I listened, I could not hear; even if I saw,
I could not see. Truly, it took American sisters and priests directly
telling me to my face that they purposefully and coldly sent away from
the orphanage a child I love, my heart's son, before I could see; truly,
they had to put me (and a retired volunteer white farm couple) under
death threat (rape, death, imprisonment on return to the US) before I
could hear. My own people had to almost destroy my mind before I could
enter into the deeper truth of indigenous people that made my old
reality a sham hiding the truth: the conquest continued in the present;
the church was too often the arm of the military. The child I loved had
to be disappeared before I could see or hear.
I know I write some hard things on here: I think, someday someone else
white (newage or not) will break through the sham and see they are as
naive about exploitation and oppression as I was (in Christianity, in the
marketing of New Age products "from" Native America, etc.). Maybe, if my
words are as hard as I can make them, someone else white will see and
hear without having to be utterly destroyed before they can stand in
relation to an indigenous worldview. After Miguel was disappeared, my
Mayan seminarian friend said, "Now you are really in serious trouble.
Don't take the bus out because they [American missionaries] can have you
taken off and killed." I heard him then. May others journies to hearing
and seeing be less filled with anguish and blood.
Mary Dog Soldier