Kyle Thorson The Pretense of Dogma The Aftermath of the Christian Indoctrination of Native American Tribes Dogma is the doctrine of a religious group put forth as authoritative without being questioned or doubted. Pagan is the “religious” belief in nature or the sun as true divinity and higher spirituality. When these two beliefs collide, it has historically been rich with conflict and the extinction and silence of pagan beliefs for an entire culture and people. Postmodernism is an attempt in literature to shed a light on the “silences” (erasure or expunction of the history associated with the non dominant society and culture) created by modernity without simply “stating the facts”, but eluding to the conditions created. Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 post modern novel Ceremony, is in an exploration into the healing process of Tayo, a WWII veteran, as he deals with post traumatic stress syndrome, the beliefs of his Native American culture and obstacles he faces in a contemporary western culture. An obstacle Tayo faces throughout the novel is his tribe’s (Laguna) pagan beliefs in opposition to the historical Christian dogma indoctrination and its continuing effect on Native American tribes and their culture in the 1930s and 40s. Through Tayo’s struggle and the microcosm of the Laguna tribe, Silko illuminates and epitomizes the nearly ubiquitous experience of Christian dogmatic practices in the expansion of the United States and the proliferating effects on Native American culture continuing into the 20th century. The history of the Christian indoctrination of Native American tribes can be summarized as an endeavor of the American government and Christian churches to suppress and supplant Native American culture and beliefs. During the 19th century the federal government provided funding for Christian missionaries to practice the policy of Christianizing the various tribes of America. For nineteenth-century Native Americans, the free exercise of religion meant freedom to practice the Christian religion. The government was deemed to have the authority to suppress traditional religious practices and establish Christianity among the Indians, the Constitution notwithstanding. (Dussias 775) This indoctrination of Native American tribes was un-Constitutional and unquestioned for the greater part of the 19th century. As early as 1776 the government set up policy to fund and pay Christian missionaries as they taught Christianity to American Indians. However, it was not until the end of the Civil War when the dogmatic policies became overwhelmingly abhorrent. As the United States expanded its borders during this time, the resistance of Native American tribes was met with many “Indian policies” meant to conform these people to the laws of America and subdue any upheaval. More or less, the American government through policy intended to steal land, exterminate any opposition, and indoctrinate those who would conform to the manifest destiny of American values and life. The results of this manifest destiny are many and Silko references the issues and problems created throughout Ceremony. From the very start of the novel we can find these references to “silences” created by modernity. “Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused of forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then” (Silko 2). This passage describes how the Christian dogma was used to “destroy” the stories and pagan beliefs of the tribes. The Christian missionaries would attempt to educate young Native American children to believe that their culture’s beliefs and way of life were savage and barbaric and that to believe and uphold Christianity was civilized and peaceful. If Native Americans adopted these beliefs, they would become docile and cultured, therefore allowing white settlers and the American government to control and manipulate the native tribes, destroying their way of life. The destruction of the Native American way of life is a main theme in Ceremony and the effects of dogma on Tayo is at the root of his battle with his native culture and the pressure of western culture. The juxtaposition of these two cultures is contemplated when Tayo recalls his life prior to WWII. He believed then that touching the sky had to do with where you were standing and how the clouds were that day. He had believed that on certain nights, when the moon rose full and wide as a corner of the sky, a person standing on the high sandstone cliff of that mesa could reach the moon. Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. (Silko 19) This passage illuminates the reader on the cogitative understanding of how the world works for many Native Americans. The attachment to the earth, sky and nature were one in the same and were not independent of the human or in of themselves. All things were experienced symbiotically. In this same paragraph, we find how Christian dogma and western culture challenged Tayo as a youth. “He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of ‘nonsense’” (Silko 19). From a young age Tayo is meant to question his culture and denounce pagan beliefs as balderdash. While Tayo is forced to contemplate Native American beliefs as nonsense, other characters in the book had long succumbed to the Christian dogma. Tayo’s aunt referred to as Auntie is a pure blooded Laguna Indian woman who fully believes in Christianity. However, despite what could be considered her “white” beliefs she has a strong disdain for Tayo because he is half white, half native. Auntie is concerned with appearances and vanity, and concerns herself with upholding the image of her family amongst her church peers. Auntie uses Tayo’s struggle and posttraumatic stress sickness as a means to show her struggle and plight, to prove her Christian faith. “But advantages wear out; she needed a new struggle, another opportunity to show those who might gossip that she had still another unfortunate burden which proved that, above all else she was a Christian woman” (Silko 30). The problem with Auntie being Christian is not obvious. Silko is trying to show how the Christian dogma could separate a family, if the majority of the family upholds traditional beliefs a schism is created when one member chooses another belief system. The family unit cannot act as a united social structure that can nurture and help each other, instead opposing factions resist each other and the casualties can be the children, in this case Tayo. This division in the family goes against all the tribal beliefs that helped unite the tribes and create serenity in their culture. With the proliferation of Christian dogma, the tribes loose their identity and are forced to choose different belief systems that alienate one another. An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years from the oldest times when the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were…the people shared the same consciousness. The people had known, with simple certainty of the world they saw, how everything should be. But the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name. Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the single clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul; Jesus Christ was not like the Mother who loved and cared for them as her children, as her family. (Silko 67-68) This passage exemplifies the argument Silko is making. Modernity, colonization, and Christian dogma meant to “civilize” the world, marginalized entire groups of people. Native Americans were forced to learn a new language, forget their own, and reclassify their world as Europeans saw fit. Entire histories, often orally transmitted among the native tribes, were lost. The American government had succeeded in conquering the American Indian tribes, and with it, destroyed a culture and way of life that had flourished and prospered for thousands of years before white settlers ever set foot on the American continents. Many policies were used to gain control over the Native American tribes in the 19th century, but at the core of each policy, Christianity was a tool to be used. Before the late 19th century expansion of political and physical borders of the United States the idea that “indigenous communities were heathen and without religion” (Gooding 160) had long been proliferated in the psyche of American citizens. During pre-expansion, Christian missionaries visiting Native American communities were willingly accepted by the tribes as a means for practicing peace. When tribes had begun to incorporate some of these Christian ideals into their religious practices, congressmen assumed the notion that tribes could be converted as a means to control the Native American populations resisting the colonization of the American frontier. These practices became known as “Peace Policies”. The first such policy was promulgated under President US Grant’s so-called peace policy, when in 1869 Indian agencies began being assigned to various religious denominations. Between 1869 and 1872 all of the then recognized Indian Tribes were apportioned among the 13 Christian denominations recognized by the federal government, and Christian boarding schools for Native American children were institutionalized on a national scale. (Gooding 160) The utter disregard for the First Amendment and religious beliefs and practices of Native American cultures was an incorrigible and irreparable offense to an entire population of people. The offense given by the United States government would manifest into more deplorable acts as Native Americans resisted the invasion of Christian missionaries. Within 10 years it became obvious that it was neither the acceptance of Christian beliefs by Indians not the beliefs of Indians at all that were of concern to representatives of the US, but the eradication of indigenous ceremonial practices. In 1883, at the request of Secretary of Interior, Henry M. Teller, so-called Courts of Indian Offenses were instituted on all Indian reservation to ensure the discontinuation of what he regarded “as a great hindrance to the civilization of the Indians, viz, the continuance of the old heathenish dances, such as the sun-dance, scalp-dance, etc.” (Gooding 161) The resistance of Native Americans to Christian dogma was no less than human nature, but at the time of the institution of the peace policies and relocation practices of the American government it was regarded as heathenish and savagery. It was the attempted eradication of the ceremony (the ceremony Silko uses as a literary tool) that was a final attempt to deracinate the Native Americans from their customs, cultures, and environments. It is this history of dogma, eradication, deracination, extinction and genocide that forms the background for Silko’s novel. Without understanding, or at the very least, acknowledging this history of the clash between religion, government and people, it would be difficult to truly appreciate Silko’s work. Using the post modern writing approach of understanding the past as continuously affecting the present, Silko provides an insight as to why the past and present are one in the same and not independent of each other. There is no present if there is no past and visa versa. It is the past policies and indoctrination that affect Tayo in the present as well as his community. There is no escaping the reality of the world created through modernity that the Laguna tribe and Tayo are forced to live in. And as Silko would suggest, the after affects of modernity, and more precisely the Christian indoctrination of Native Americans, that continue to proliferate and manifest themselves in the present “post modern” world. Bibliography Dussia, Allison M. “Ghost Dance and Holy Ghost: The Echoes of Nineteenth-Century Christianization Policy in Twentieth-Century Native American Free Exercise Cases.” Stanford Law Review 49.4 (1997): 773-852. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2014. Gooding, Susan Staiger. “At the Boundaries of Religious Identity: Native American Religions and American Culture.” Numen 43.2 (1996): 157-183. JSTOR. Web. 8 Aug. 2014. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986. Kindle.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 02:38:38 +0000
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