Facing up to colonialism and its consequences
by Steven Charleston

Several months ago, I was invited by Michael Peers, Primate of Canada, to participate in a dialogue between the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada and representatives from the Anglican Council of Indigenous People, the representative body of indigenous members of the church. The subject of this conversation was the impact of recent court decisions brought by the victims of both physical and sexual abuse in church-operated boarding schools. These judgments, which held the church liable for the abuse, raised the real possibility of financial disaster for several Anglican dioceses and, perhaps, for the church as a whole. The stakes were high and both the bishops and the indigenous people felt the tension. While the church had accepted responsibility and offered a public apology to the indigenous community, and while the First Nations members of the church had expressed their hope for a spiritual renewal in the aftermath of the tragedy, it was clear that true reconciliation would be a long and intricate process. In the end, however, the outcome of this particular meeting was enormously positive. Both "sides" in the exchange exhibited a genuine Christian desire for understanding and healing. They committed themselves to continue the process in partnership, whatever the financial future might hold. They reaffirmed that the gospel mission of the church would go on, in fact must go on, if the sad legacy of their shared past was to be redeemed.

I left the gathering with great respect for the church in Canada, for its indigenous leaders and its bishops. But most of all, I left with a fervent prayer that the church in this hemisphere would finally take its own colonial history seriously.

What does the Canadian experience teach us?

First, it graphically demonstrates that colonialism is not an historic artifact. The past is not gone and forgotten, even though some of us may pretend otherwise. Colonialism is historically radioactive. It has a long half-life that continues to poison the relationship between human beings even generations after the fact. The colonization of the Americas by European imperialism, aided and abetted by the Christian church, continues to haunt this hemisphere. Indigenous people, who are the survivors of one of the most systematic efforts at "ethnic cleansing" in the history of the world, remain in the shadow of what I believe must be named the American Apartheid.

In North America, this apartheid accounts for what happened, what is still happening, in Canada. It explains why indigenous communities in the U.S. continue fighting in the courts to protect themselves, to protect their treaty rights, to protect the remnants of their ancient homeland. The struggles of the Gwich'in people, for example, who are faithful members of the Episcopal Church, illustrate this point. If there had been no legacy of colonial racism in Alaska, if Gwich'in culture had been respected from the outset as integral to the social and economic future of all the people in Alaska, and if the indigenous vision of the Earth as a sacred creation of God had been honored by the Christians who colonized Alaska, then the legal battles over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would never have occurred. The fact that indigenous people in both Canada and the U.S. go to court year after year is testimony to the legacy of the American Apartheid. It is evidence of the toxic effects of colonialism, racism and the inability of any society to honestly confront its own past.

South of the Rio Grande, in nations throughout Central and South America, what I describe as apartheid against indigenous people is far more obvious and deadly. In Guatemala alone, thousands of indigenous people have been killed in massacres conducted by state-supported terrorists. In the Chiapas region of Mexico, indigenous communities remain under the armed occupation of the Mexican military, existing in a constant state of siege. In both cases, the "crimes" of the indigenous people were to name the American Apartheid for what it is, to expose the truth that colonialism and racism in the Americas is ongoing and virulent, and to demand their basic rights as human beings.

Poverty, illiteracy, disease, hunger, oppression: The truth is just beyond the border. And yet, the life and death struggles of the indigenous people of the Southern Hemisphere remain invisible to the majority of North American Christians. Only as if in a mirage do we catch a glimpse of the suffering which occurs daily in what we, with such casual arrogance, have defined as "our own backyard." If the North American media pays scant attention to Central and South America, it pays almost none at all to the original inhabitants of these nations. At best they are only colorful "extras" for nature specials on the rain forests or the condor, not real people with a legitimate civilization still in peril to colonial greed. North America's media does not register them on the radar screen of global concerns. For all practical purposes, for all political purposes, they simply do not exist.

This leads to the second lesson the church must take to heart: Our blindness to the American Apartheid has consequences. In Canada, those consequences may be measured in both the human terms of broken relationships and in the monetary terms of a church in bankruptcy. In Alaska they may be measured by the loss of a natural beauty, the Arctic tundra, that can never be restored. In the South, they can be measured by tombstones.

When I describe our colonial history as radioactive, I mean to imply that it is lethal. It infects us. It permeates both ends of this hemisphere. It creates a pathology, which we pass from one generation to the next. A key aspect of this pathology is the inherent inability of the descendents of European colonizers to "see" those they have colonized. In the North, indigenous communities are still categorized in the most blatant stereotypes. They are dismissed as the historical leftovers of the Wild West myth created by colonialism as a macho justification for slaughter, brought into contemporary ridicule as the "casino Indians" who don't deserve the money they make for playing the game taught to them by European greed, or trivialized as the shaman gurus for white suburban fantasies of spirituality. In the South, indigenous people are only a backdrop to the "real" stories, which concern North America: the war on drugs, NAFTA, the flight of economic refugees crossing our borders.

In the end, the vast majority of Christians living in the privileged centers of power in this hemisphere have virtually no idea of the suffering of their faceless neighbors living under the American Apartheid. They are not conscious that their self-imposed glaucoma perpetuates the colonial tragedy of the past. Therefore, they are usually shocked when they discover the implications of this kind of racism. Whether the consequences come to them in financial, ecological or moral disasters, the blind managers of the American Apartheid are caught off guard by the sudden realization that the illness they have carried in the genetic structure of their own history has suddenly activated. The cycles of pain begin again. The pattern of struggle, oppression and denial runs its course through the courts or in the hidden places of the Americas where indigenous people pay with their freedom, their hopes or their lives because European Americans fear the truth. And eventually, when the stark light of that truth fades under the long shadows of America's guilt, the eyes of the privileged public turn away, the indigenous people slowly dissolve before them, and the silence of shame descends to smother the cries of justice.

In this issue of The Witness, we are confronted with two lessons: colonialism and consequences. Through the stories of indigenous people of the Americas, The Witness seeks to remind us that the truth of our own colonial past is all around us if only we have eyes to see. You can catch a glimpse of it in the struggles of the Canadian church to redress the abuses of the boarding schools. You can observe it as the subtext of the fight of indigenous Christians to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. You can be startled to see it so clearly in the faces of the people of Chiapas or Guatemala. With these many images of truth, The Witness calls all of us to open our eyes, recognize the cost of our complicity in not being able to "see" one another, and then to respond by breaking the cycles of pain which fuel the American Apartheid. Ultimately, this issue offers the church a chance to learn a third lesson, one that is filled with the hope of faith and with the power of liberation.

When I flew home from Canada after the historic encounter between the survivors of colonialism and the inheritors of its moral burden, I returned with a stronger sense of hope than I had ever known before. I had seen with my own eyes that men and women of faith can face their past, confront its consequences and still work together toward a future of justice and reconciliation. I knew that if this were true, then the days of the American Apartheid were numbered. I knew that none of us are condemned to be the repetitive victims of the blind cycles of racist colonialism. We can, and I believe we will, break free of the shame and fear. We will finally bring justice to the indigenous people of the Americas. The lesson learned last is often the most important. We have much to do. It will be a difficult job. In the South, it will be a dangerous job. But it is a task we have put off far too long. The gospels tell us that Jesus Christ came to heal the blind and to set the captives free. Between the descendents of the conquerors and the survivors of the Western Hemisphere, we cannot do one without the other. Now is the time to do both.

Steven Charleston, of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and the former Bishop of Alaska.

Trying to live up to our name

More often than I care to say, I have wished The Witness had a different name. Usually for no better reason than to spare me the momentary discomfort of having people who have never heard of us think that we are affiliated with a well-known conservative religious denomination (with "Witnesses" figuring prominently in its name) whose theological perspective I find highly suspect. At such moments I wish for a name either less or more obscure -- Progressive Anglican, say, or 2tru (you decide which might be which).

But I am glad to share in our vocation of bearing witness to the world-as-it-is, whether plagued by evil and suffering or blessed by compassion and beauty. Enlarging perspectives is a crucial precondition for the deepening of spiritual and political understanding. And such deepening, in turn, is a critical precondition for thoughtful and faithful decisions about how to choose on behalf of life.

In this regard, we here at The Witness are especially grateful for the enlarging of perspective working on this issue on native peoples in the Americas has given us. Guided in our choice of stories by Steven Charleston and Owanah Anderson, both of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, we've truly benefited from getting a native perspective on the powers and principalities at work in our own hemisphere -- and in our own country and church. Less happily, but equally beneficially, we have found ourselves bumping with alarming frequency into our staff's mostly unexamined Western mindset (which included the embarassing assumption that the people we'd want to interview would surely speak English, or that our "straightforward" questions must not have been understood if the answers we got didn't seem straightforward to us) -- and the obvious limits this imposes on our work.

So, as we begin our 84th year of publication, we've decided to make some changes. One small, simple way to deepen our solidarity with the peoples whose lives form the content of this issue is to begin making room in our budget for offering as many articles as possible from this and future issues in Spanish, the language of so many of this hemisphere's indigenous citizens. We've also decided to begin giving the people we interview (as, in this issue, Felipe and Elena Ixcot) the chance to say everything they'd like in answer to a question, even when space doesn't allow in the magazine. We'll use our website (www.thewitness.org) to make these downloadable articles available worldwide, and we'll provide hard copies for duplication wherever electronic link-ups are lacking.

We're also committing ourselves to working hard to rapidly expand our website's "A Globe of Witnesses" section to provide a place where testimony of things seen and unseen can be offered from a wider array of witnesses than we've been able to provide space for until now.

I may not always like our name, I admit, but we here at The Witness are committed to living up to it. We appreciate your support as we attempt to do so.

-- Julie A. Wortman, editor and publisher