“The
Great Evil – Christianity,
the Bible and the Native American Genocide,” by Chris Mato Nunpa, 2020
Nunpa, a local author, spent time in “Indian” schools in the 1940s and 1950s, having religion shoved
down his throat. He learned it well, to
the point where he saw all the bloody, vicious and colonial implications of the
Bible and the missionaries who mobbed his reservation in western Minnesota. Intent on obliterating native religion, which
is actually far more progressive than Christianity, they trained their charge
well, to the point where he rejected it all.
Every
‘movement’ needs an ideology.
Colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Euro-American supremacy and private
property needed justifications. They
found it in Catholic logic and Protestant moralism, Bible quotes and a
cruel God, Papal Bulls and preachers’ sermons, backed by guns and genocide.
This was their approach to the indigenous over the world, in U.S., Canada,
Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia,
New Zealand, the edges of
Europe and Africa. The cultural side in North
America involved “Indian” schools where children were separated
from their parents, their hair cut, their clothes changed, used in child labor, their former
religion and language suppressed and as we know now, some buried behind schools by Catholic nuns.
In 2016 the
U.N. charged the Catholic Church with enabling this indigenous holocaust. No word from the Vatican yet, which is still a
respected and integral part of capitalism, even though it is presided over by
the hippie Pope. In this book, Nunpa
gathers innumerable quotes from the Bible’s books, mostly from the Old
Testament, about slaughtering or converting multiple ‘heathen’ tribes, the
non-Israelites, the non-believers in God and Christ. He shows how this was extended into an
ideological motivation behind Sand Creek, Wounded Knee and the deaths of 16
million native peoples (“heathens!”) in the U.S., leaving about a quarter of a
million left in 1900. Of course the
benefit to ranchers, farmers, railroad barons and mining concerns was more
concrete than that delivered to missionaries and churches, but the latter also
gained in materiel ways. Nunpa does not
focus on the material benefits of genocide to the ‘winners,’ but this issue is
essential for Marxists.
CHURCH
and STATE
Nunpa
identifies the Catholic edicts of the 1400s and 1500s as instrumental in
setting the ‘legal’ stage for colonization, slavery, conversion and
extermination – the Romanus Pontifex of 1455; Inter Caetera of
1493; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas; the Requirimento of 1513
and Sublimus Dei of 1537. The U.S. Supreme Court used some of these edicts in
legal decisions; one made native Americans ‘wards’ of the U.S. government.
Nunpa’s point
here is the intimate connection between religion and extermination; church and
state. He chronicles Columbus’s
destruction of perhaps 8 million indigenous people in the Caribbean over 21
years – Caribs, Arawak, etc. - under the illusion he was one of the ‘chosen
people’ in the ‘promised land,’ a ‘new Israelite’ dealing with new Hittites. He
discusses the killing of a Roanacs leader in North
Carolina who refused to convert, even with the entreaties of a St.
Francis of Assisi
monk. Or the 1637 murder and burning of
900 Pequot natives in their village in Connecticut,
celebrated by Protestant leaders as a fire sacrifice to God. Mysterious plagues killing the indigenous were
celebrated as an instrument of the Lord, something that also 'smote' the heathens of the Bible.
 |
| Idyllic picture of Sand Creek Massacre |
KILL
EVERTHING THAT MOVES
Andrew
Jackson massacring 800 Muskogee; Sheridan saying the only
‘good’ Indian was one that was dead; Chivington, of Sand Creek infamy,
comparing native Americans to lice and nits.
The mass hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato
in 1863 after they rebelled against starvation. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the
Humbolt County, California massacre, the Trail
of Tears, the Bad Axe Massacre in Illinois, Texas indigenous scalp
bounties and on and on. Even the cuddly Frank L.
Baum, writer of the Wizard of Oz, recommended extermination.
All of
this is a familiar story. Nunpa looks at
the ‘4th’ level of genocide too, which is to ‘impose an ideology’ on
the conquered. Indian ceremonies were
deemed ‘offensive.’ Boarding schools
were built. Native religious and
cultural symbols were burnt by Protestant leaders. He concentrates on the barbaric treatment of
the Dakota people in and around Minnesota
by the government and church, as he is Dakota.
Scalp bounties, a concentration camp, hangings, starvation, a forced
march, ethnic cleansing by forced removal – all in Minnesota, another ‘land of milk and honey.’ Nunpa shows how many acts were inspired by Christian
ideology, giving a Biblical base to Manifest Destiny, ‘killing
everything that moves’ of those who stand in the way of the ‘chosen people.’
This
book will deepen your understanding of the religious connections to ethnic
warfare and extermination, which is still going on across the world – not just
through Christianity, but every religion.
Theocracy and fundamentalist religion pose a bulwark for reactionary
ruling elites, which they use to increase their power, profits and wealth.
Prior
blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate
our 14-year archive: “Deadwood,” “Lewis and Clark,” “Indigenous People’s
History,” “Loaded,” (both by Dunbar-Ortiz); “Indian Country Noir,”
“There There,” “The Heart of Everything There Is,” “Empire of the Summer Moon.”
And I
bought it from May Day’s excellent indigenous section!
Red Frog
September
3,2021
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