Onward Christian Soldiers

 “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 ‘4^th’ 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