ABUNDANCE & THE RAVAGES OF SAVAGES A Service by Fritz Hudson & Jesse Griest Presented November 23, 2014

Transcription

1 ABUNDANCE & THE RAVAGES OF SAVAGES A Service by Fritz Hudson & Jesse Griest Presented November 23, 2014 Call to Worship All ye Pilgrims. Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forest to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience; now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye pilgrims, with your wives and little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November ye 29th, of the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, there listen to ye pastor and render Thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings. William Bradford Governor of Plymouth Colony, 1623 Chalice Lighting Hear me, four quarters of the world. A relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth. Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand. Look upon the face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet. This is my prayer; hear me. Black Elk, Oglala Sioux Song #349 We Gather Together Message for All Our Thanksgiving by Jesse Griest It was late Spring when the pilgrims set out, boarding a vessel which would cross the open water, seeking new freedom and understanding of the width of the world and the limitless possibilities that accompany understanding. 1

2 Upon Arrival in the new old world, the pilgrims sought refuge and worshipped together, bringing many of their treasured customs to this unfamiliar place There was an indigenous population of American Indians that had occupied the area for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of these pilgrims. Nevertheless, the newcomers were welcomed and they began to trade with each other, laying the groundwork for a shared experience. 2

3 There was much to be done, for nature offered harsh seasons and fierce storms that always threatened to break down doors and lay ruin to crops. Everyone got to work. There was wood to be cut and stacked There was land to work and plant. There were new herbs to learn about, care for, and cultivate 3

4 Sometimes there were hardships. Some of the tools they depended on would break When the weather was bad, and hurricanes came, floods would fill everyone s home up to here: 4

5 Life after the storms was difficult. But when the work was done, and the harvest was in, the Indians and the pilgrims prepared a feast together to celebrate. 5

6 This was their or should I say, our thanksgiving. Meditation We come together this morning to remind one another to rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives, to resist the headlong tumble into the next moment, until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude - Taking the time to look into one another's faces and see there communion, the reflection of our own eyes. This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope is hallowed by our presence together. Kathleen McTigue, USNH Minister, Sermon: "Abundance & the Ravages of Savages So here we are, three hundred and ninety-one years after Governor Bradford's proclamation, gathered again between the hours of nine and twelve in the day, in November, listening to "ye pastor". - Have we been given this year an abundant harvest of corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables? By the look of most of us, I'd say yes. Though 6

7 we've failed to distribute it as well as we could. - Does the forest now still abound with game? Does the sea now still abound with fish and clams? Well not so much as in that first year... and it is a matter of concern. But still for now the provision is sufficient. - Have we been spared from pestilence and disease? Well, here, yes, most of us. But we are so mindful today that our good fortune is not shared in Africa and elsewhere the world 'round. - And are still granted the freedom to worship according to the dictates of our own conscience? Yes, here in this sanctuary, perhaps more than anywhere in our land. Well, then to whom may we render thanks for all this abundance? A Great Father? Well at least as much Mother as Father, surely. Still an Almighty God? Well mighty to be sure, but one known best to us with very human hands and human faces, however foreign. And may we thank that God for protection from "the ravages of savages." Not completely, nor easily, I'll suggest. Savagery threatens us still, these many years removed from Governor Bradford's time. We feel its ravages. Our protection from them is tenuous, perhaps growing only more so. And to strengthen that protection, in our time, we must re-image our God, and reimage the savages that contest that God's power, in ways wholly unknown to those first pilgrims to New England. I invite you to explore such a re-imaging with me this morning, and to take it on, if you will, much as a pilgrimage. The savages, imaged in Governor Bradford's mind, I'm sure had skin he would call red. They were likely Narragansett warriors. Myles Standish, the pilgrim military leader, had alienated the Narragansett in attacks the prior year. Narragansett were the sometime enemies of the Wampanoag people, whose leaders Massasoit and Squanto the pilgrims had befriended upon arriving in Plymouth. I am a European American, 100% as far as I know. Who here can claim in your ancestry to descend, at least partially, from those here on this land we call North America began before the arrival of European Americans? My stock is natively English, Irish and German. Can you say what Native American stock you descend from, what tribal names? Who claims ancestry from neither European nor from Native American people? Thank you. We are diverse. The pilgrimage I invite you on today is my own, as a European American amidst Native Americans as a seeker of transformational connections, and a seeker of protection from savagery. Whether you've shared this pilgrimage with me or you've followed a wholly different path, my hope is that I can arouse you to wonder whether your image of God or your image of savagery might best change be transformed if you hope to feel more full thanks for this life that we share. Fellow European Americans: Who here grew up thinking of Native Americans as fearful savages? Clearly if you'd grown up in North America any time between 1620 and the early 1900's, particularly on the western frontier, you could easily have held that image. I did not. I mentioned last Sunday that, as a boy, I became an Eagle Scout. My deepest connection in scouting, though, came through what's called "the Order of the Arrow." Anyone else know the order? "Wemachtendienk Wingolausik Whitahemeuweh." Those words, we were taught, were in the Delaware people's tongue, the Lenni Lenapi. They closed the initiation rites of this order of "honor campers." By my 16 th year, five times at each summer camp, I was transforming myself into Kitchkinet, the Delaware guide, to lead the orders' initiates through the night forest 7

8 to seek admission to the council fire. Shepard Krech is an anthropology professor at Brown University. In his book The Ecological Indian, he traces scouting's outgrowth from the western tradition of "the Noble Indian" or "Ideal Indian." Christopher Columbus initiated the tradition in reporting that he'd discovered "The Islands of the Blessed." Michel Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, and James Fennimore Cooper each carried it forward in their writing. In the early 1900's Ernest Thompson Seton, scouting's first Chief Scout, infused this tradition into training boys for manhood through woodcraft and outdoor life. Then in the late 1960s, Krech says, this tradition took a much stronger hold on our culture. A picture is worth a thousand words. I'm hoping just a few words might recall one picture for many of you. They're Shepard Krech's words: Few forget his face. Not just the mournful expression and braided hair, but his liquid, tear-filled eye, welling up and brimming over. Clearly an American Indian. Visibly, an unexpectedly, crying. His direct gaze rivets the viewer, and his message is simple: "Pollution: It's a Crying Shame. People start pollution. People can stop it." (p.15) Who can see that face in your mind's eye? It belongs to Iron Eyes Cody. It looked at us of all, for years, preaching the gospel of Keep America Beautiful. If you can't see it, look it up through Google. For those of us whose spirit was formed in that turbulent time, that tortured, tear-stained face lit the fire of environmentalism in our souls. Today is not my first Sunday before Thanksgiving speaking on "Abundance and the Ravages of Savages." The first was twenty-three years ago. I had just begun my ministry in Phoenix, Arizona. I lived one mile from the Pima people's reservation, where I'd begun working every Monday cleaning debris from the Salt River's banks. I had Hopi people in my congregation. I looked forward to upcoming cross-cultural investments, all later made celebrating a Native Spirit Sunday every year, experiencing sweat lodge practice among the Navajo up on the Mogollon Rim, immersing myself in native music, ritual, instruments and art. That day's sermon drew sharp distinctions between Native American spirituality and European American spirituality. Red Jacket was Seneca Chief in Genessee Valley of New York. In 1805, he was evangelized by the Rev. Mr. Cram of the Evangelical Society of Massachusetts. Rev. Cram extolled the glories of conversion to Christianity. Red Jacket replied. Brother, we do not understand these things. We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also, have a religion which as given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us, their children. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all favors we receive; to love each other, and be united. We never quarrel about religion, because it is a matter that concerns each man and the Great Spirit. Standing Bear was Ponca chief in northeast Nebraska. At the turn into the 1900s, he wrote, The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled by primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastnesses not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountaintops. The man from Europe is still foreigner and an 8

9 alien... I'd long wondered whether European spirituality might simply bespeak the demands of its birthplace. I lived in Middle Eastern deserts in the Peace Corps. The Judeo- Christian vision of life's meaning grew out of that hostile land. Its myth imaged a garden of delight "in the beginning" which people lost because they couldn't keep themselves in tune with its creator's spirit. Their pathway back to "abundance" was imaged as a fight to subdue their own nature and the surrounding Nature which so often subdued them. Then in Arizona, as I became better able to appreciate the desert's abundance, I found another understanding of the Judeo-Christian alienation from nature. French philosopher Albert Camus, trying to understand rise of Nazism in a Christian culture, once wrote: Christianity, no doubt, was only able to conquer its catholicity by assimilating as much as it could of Greek thought. But when the church dissipated its Mediterranean heritage, it placed the emphasis on history to the detriment of nature, caused the Gothic to triumph over the romance, and, destroying a limit in itself, has made increasing claims to temporal power and historical dynamism. When nature ceases to be an object of contemplation and admiration, it can be nothing more than material for an action that aims at transforming it. These tendencies - and not the concepts of mediation which would have comprised the real strengths of Christianity - are triumphing, in modern times, to the detriment of Christianity itself. Luther Standing Bear, the Lakota Sioux Chief of South Dakota, a few years after his Ponca namesake, saw the contrast with his own people's spirit. He wrote: The blessings of Wakan Tanka flowed over the Indian like rain showered from the sky. The Great Spirit did not punish the animals and the birds, likewise did not punish humanity.... This was not a punishing God. There was but one ruling power... and it was GOOD. And the abundance, within which many native peoples lived, embued some with a familial sense of connection with their natural environs. Smohalla, the Dreamer, was shaman in the mid 1800's among the Nez Perce, of the Pacific Northwest. He protested any change in his relationship to Nature. You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under my mother's skin for her bones? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and be rich like the white man. But how do I dare cut off my mother's hair? In those days, the humanistic cast of my soul began taking on a stronger shade of naturalism, even mysticism. I found a prophet and model for my evolution. He was a Unitarian "missionary" of an earlier time. In the 19 th century, the federal government decided to contract with religious professionals to pacify native peoples of the west. Denominations were assigned different tribes and each was given money to send missionaries to mold native people in the European model. The Unitarians were assigned the Los Pinos Ute tribe in Colorado. The Rev. Jabez Nelson Trask was sent there to live to do this work. When he got there, however, Rev. Trask quickly decided he knew nothing that the Ute needed to learn. He deposited the governments $25,000 annual stipend in a Denver bank, and made it available to any Utes who happened to want to be educated off the reservation. But Trask then retired to a shack on the edge of the reservation. There he studied botany. He also studied Ute practices to see what he could learn from them. Word of Trask's "work", however, eventually made its way to 9

10 U.S. Secretary of the Interior in Washington. He promptly dismissed Trask from the government's employ. Rev. Trask reported to his Unitarian colleagues: "I was kicked out for doing my duty too well." Over the years since then, though, I've tried many times to learn more of Jabez Trask's path. I'd love to learn whether his pilgrimage might in any way have presaged mine. In my seven years in Arizona, I engaged with native peoples in many ways. There are 19 reservations there, 19 distinct cultures and further sub-cultures within them, peopled by over 350,000 souls. When I moved to Nebraska, I continued to engage with native peoples as I could there, though the reservation cultures were less strong and varied and the number of native souls spread throughout the state was less than 25,000. I will continue this quest as I can here in Connecticut, as well, among what I understand are 11,000 natives like the Mashantucket and the Mohegan - living both on and off eight reservations. I'm eager always to catch the spirit of those great spokespersons: Black Elk, Red Jacket, Standing Bear, Luther Standing Bear, Smoholla. There are those in our time who speak with their strength as well. Vine DeLoria, the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota, spoke so until his voice was stilled in the last decade. Winona LaDuke, the Anishinaabe of Minnesota, speaks so still. My pilgrimage, though, has been coming to know intuitively over these years, what Shepard Krech, so meticulously documents in The Environmental Indian. He writes "For every story about Indians... taking actions usually associated with conservation or environmentalism (there) is a conflicting story about them exploiting resources and endangering lands." Witness the conflict between two tribes on the northern slope of Alaska the Inupiat and the Gwinch'in. - The Gwinch'in have been the core opponents of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's the summer calving ground for caribou. The Gwinch'in say these caribou are "essential to meet the nutritional, cultural, and spiritual needs of our people." - The Inupiat are sea-oriented people living nearby. Their food source is seals and whales. So long as the drilling stays land-bound, they want the benefits of oil production. They proclaim, "thumbs up for development; oil is our future." The Environmental Indian teems with such stories We are threatened by the "ravages of savages" this week of Thanksgiving, perhaps even more than ever were the pilgrims of Plymouth. The ravages of hurricane Sandy still scar the shoreline communities to our south. The ravages of polar vortex snows almost buried the people of Buffalo, near where my son Eric lives this past week. The savages who wreak this ravages, however are not those "of the wood" as the root meaning of this word implies. The savages of our time are not even easily identified as "brutal or vicious" as the word now commonly suggests. The savagery of our time is only brutal or vicious in its effects, rarely in its intent. It is the collective failure of compassion to cross cultures. It is the focus on me and mine and (and hurry up about it) that blinds us to the broader human cost of our insistence that abundance be "ours", even if necessary not yours, more and more and more. Richard White, the historian, has written, that the idea that Indians left no traces of themselves on the land "demeans Indians. It makes them seem simply like animal species, depriving them of culture." ("Indians in the Land." American Heritage 37 (August 1986) p.20) 10

11 Shepard Krech reinforces the point "images of noble... indigenousness... are ultimately dehumanizing." (Ecological Indian. p.26) That's been hard for the boy scout "Kitchkinet" still alive within me to swallow. But swallow it I have. And assimilated it I have into my new image of savagery the savagery nascent in all human souls that tempts mightily to ignore our common bond with all real people, in whatever color or culture, in all our shared imperfections. Our youth, with Jesse, last year, clearly broke through that barrier of the soul. Their voyage across the great water, to do work and break bread with clearly less than ideal peoples, and yet still natives, real natives. That's my new image of God working. That s my cause to give thanks this day of for their days to come. Song #366 Heleluyan Benediction Grandfather, look at our brokenness. We know that we are the ones who are divided, and we are the ones who must come back together the walk the Sacred Way. Grandfather, Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, and honor, that we may heal the earth and heal each other. Ojibwa Nation of the Upper Great Lakes 11