Table of Contents Chapters and Questions Chapter 1: Questions of Identity and Background 1. Who are you; who are your people? 2. Which is the more proper designation: Native American or American Indian? 3. What do you mean by traditional as pertaining to American Indian people? 4. What are the major or most important differences between European American and American Indian cultures? 5. Your tribe is not federally recognized. Isn t federally recognition very important to American Indian tribes? How can you say you are really an Indian if your tribe is not federally recognized? 6. There are no real Indians anymore, are there? I mean, no American Indians actually live as they did before European contact, do they? 7. How much Indian are you; are you full-blood? 8. Do Native Americans accept "mixed-bloods" as part of their family or group or do they discriminate and see "mixed-bloods" as "wannabe Native Americans" whose percentage of Native blood doesn't count?" 9. Do you speak your language fluently or partly? What is your mother tongue? 10. Doesn t an American Indian person have to be fluent in their language in order to call themselves traditional? 11. What do you mean by indigenous? 12. Were you raised traditionally or following tribal traditions? 13. Did you grow up on a reservation or in an urban area off the reservation? 14. Have you self-identified as an American Indian all your life or only in recent years? 15. What are your thoughts on DNA mapping to determine degree of American Indian ancestry? 16. Who is the perceived audience for your writings? Chapter 2: Religious or Spiritual Questions 17. Could you please describe your worldview? 18. How would you describe your faith in God? 19. Is the one you call Creator/Apportioner the same as the God of the Bible? 20. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? If so, how would you describe your belief in Jesus Christ? How and when did you come to faith in Jesus? 21. What church experience have you had? Have you had any formal Bible training or education? 22. You were a Baptist minister? Could you describe or relate your call to that ministry? How did you go from being a Baptist minister to where you are today? 23. Do you regularly participate in worship with others? 24. Since you have Baptist supporters, is Mid American Indian Fellowships a Baptist organization?
25. Why do you no longer attend church? 26. Would you say that you have incorporated Indian cultural expressions into your Christian worship? 27. You say you do not engage in Christian worship, but isn t Mid American Indian Fellowships a Christian organization? 28. Since Mid American Indian Fellowships is not a Christian organization, why do you continue to use or make reference to the Christian Bible? 29. Do you believe the Bible? 30. Do you believe the Bible is the Word of God? 31. If the Bible is not the inspired word of Creator in its entirety, how do you decide which parts to discard and which to keep? So, how do we determine which parts of the Bible, if any, are the absolute word of Creator? 32. Do you believe the Bible to be necessary and sufficient for salvation? 33. Don t you believe American Indians are better off by having the Bible? 34. Can you biblically support your return to traditional cultural ways? 35. Do you think there may someday be a Native American Bible put together from the various writings or books that are considered spiritually important to Native Americans? 36. What is meant by the Mid American Indian Fellowships statement following Jesus within the context of our Native cultures? 37. Isn t it semantically dishonest to make the assertion "Jesus never became a Christian, since Christian literally means "follower of Christ"? 38. Does Mid American Indian Fellowships share the Gospel of Jesus Christ? 39. What is the moment like when an Indian accepts Christ and becomes a Christian? 40. Is Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior? 41. What does the Cross mean to you? 42. If Jesus is not the way, the truth and the life, why should anyone bother indigenous cultures with his gospel? 43. If God will judge those who never heard the Christian gospel according to the natural or cultural law that they lived under, why bother preaching the gospel to them at all? Aren t missionaries diminishing their opportunity for "getting into heaven" by introducing a completely different standard by which they are to be judged (acceptance of Jesus as savior)? 44. If Jesus of Nazareth is not unique and exclusive as the Son of God, why would his gospel have any value to any indigenous culture other than his own? If Jesus does not offer something unique and exclusive to all cultures, why would anyone want to be a "Cherokee follower of Jesus"? Unless "follower" is watered down to the level of a devotee, and Jesus was just a great teacher who said some good things worth considering and living by? 45. It is said that Jesus was either THE Son of God or he was a madman; there is no middle ground. Jesus is either relevant to all peoples for all time or completely irrelevant. How would you respond to this? 46. You have made statements to the effect that Christianity s exclusive claim to truth inevitably leads to violence and should be laid aside. Isn t your objection to the exclusive truth claim simply another exclusive truth claim?
47. Without absolutes, anything goes, yet you do not accept any exclusive truth claims, not from the Bible or even from your own oral traditions. So, from where do you draw your absolutes? 48. Do you believe that all gods of different religions are the same god just with different names? 49. Would you say that all paths lead to Creator? 50. Is Mid American Indian Fellowships part of the contextual ministry movement? 51. Exactly how traditional are the Mid American Indian Fellowships people? 52. Can traditional spiritual practices be put alongside of Christian belief without conflict? 53. Were you encouraged by church leaders to practice your traditional ways? 54. Can you describe the process or put a timeline to your return to traditional cultural ways? 55. Can you point to specific sources of inspiration or understanding that have encouraged you in your return to traditional practice? 56. Is your thinking the result of figuring things out on your own, apart from others, or have you been connected to a kind of network? 57. Have you ever experienced criticism or rejection as a result of returning to your traditional cultural practices? 58. Didn t Cherokees voluntarily accept Christianity a long time ago? Isn t your return to traditional Cherokee spiritual practices disrespectful to your Cherokee ancestors who renounced those practices in preference for Christianity? 59. What do you think of the idea that American Indians descend from the Lost Tribes of Israel? 60. If I gave you a copy of the Book of Mormon, would you read it? 61. Don t we all descend from Adam, from Noah and from those who were dispersed at the Tower of Babel? 62. Don t you want your part in the inheritance of the sons of Abraham? 63. Do you think the person referred to as White Otter in some Cherokee stories was a type of Christ, or do you think White Otter is the same as Jesus? 64. What about the Pale Prophet? Didn t Jesus walk among the Native American tribes after his crucifixion and resurrection? 65. Aren t American Indian traditional spiritualities primarily characterized by occult rites and pagan practices? 66. Don t American Indian tradition beliefs basically amount to idolatry? 67. You speak of Creator embodied by creation. Are you a pantheist or a panentheist? 68. According to your indigenous spirituality, is Creator exclusively male? 69. In your traditional ways, do you have any understanding of an afterlife? If so, do you believe in heaven and hell? 70. Would you say that Cherokee spirituality includes a superstitious fear of animal spirits? 71. What does an eagle feather symbolize?
72. What do you Indians smoke in your pipes? Is it pot or peyote? 73. Is there a traditional Indian understanding of sin and atonement? 74. Doesn t this idea of oneness of all that is result in the extinguishment of self? 75. What are your views on syncretism? 76. There are Christian Indians who have grown up on reservations and who maintain that Indian spirituality is at best unwholesome superstition and at worst demonic or satanic practice. What do you say to that? 77. Do you think pre-columbian American Indian spiritual understandings might be understood as a type of Old Testament, given in preparation for the eventual coming of the story of Jesus Christ? 78. Do you think there is now or will ever be an indigenous American Indian Christianity? 79. Some prominent Evangelical Christian speakers and authors have said the next Great Awakening will begin with American Indians. What are your thoughts about this? 80. Do you think there is still a place for white people in American Indian ministry? Chapter 3: Societal or Social Justice Questions 81. Are you involved in any activity regarding social justice? 82. In view of its carcinogenic properties, why do American Indians continue using tobacco? 83. Do American Indians have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism? 84. Why do Native Americans insist on calling their tribes nations? By what stretch of the imagination can an Indian tribe be called a nation? 85. Weren t Indians pretty uncivilized before Europeans came to the Americas? I mean, there were a few Indian civilizations, such as the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru back before discovery, but most were pretty uncivilized weren t they? Just look at those Indians in South America whose cultures are basically untouched by civilization. 86. What s the point of rehashing the supposed crimes against Indians? We can t go back to change the past, nor can we superimpose 21 st century standards of morality onto 15 th and 16 th century people. 87. Aside from the quest for freedom, didn t Europeans come to the Americas because Europe was overcrowded? 88. What if there had been no encounter between Europeans and American Indians? How do you think things might be different today? 89. Do you think the level of respect or disrespect shown American Indians is different from that shown to other ethnicities in the United States? 90. Don t you think that what you call Indian-hating or racism against American Indians is mostly just a question of ignorance? 91. How do we get over it? How do we heal from the metaphysics of Indian-hating? 92. Don t you think the movie Dances With Wolves marks a favorable change of attitude of toward Indians in America? 93. What s the deal with Indians and long hair? 94. Why do you think cultural restoration is important?
95. Do you want to go back to how things were before Columbus came? Aren t Indians better off now than they were then? 96. Do you think America was like the Garden of Eden before Columbus? 97. Aren t you anti-american and anti-christian? 98. You talk about all these crimes against American Indians. Well, I didn't have anything to do with that. It's in the past. We can t change the past, so why can t you just get over it? 99. You talk about empire building as if that s a bad thing. Isn t empire building just the natural result of human progress and civilization? 100. Do you think Indians are still stereotyped today? 101. Do Indians also stereotype white people? 102. Do you admit that American Indians are racist against white people? 103. Does the public school system challenge or perpetuate what you call Indian-hating? 104. Why did you and your wife remove your children from public school? 105. How do you feel about American Indian themed youth programs? 106. Why can t Indians get over the past, just forgive and forget? 107. People all over the world see America as the land of opportunity. They come here, work hard and better themselves. Isn t the American Dream as open to American Indians as it is to anyone else? Don t American Indians enjoy the same freedoms that are afforded anyone else in this country? Are Indians confined to reservations? If not, why don t they just leave the reservations and take advantage of the opportunities of living the U.S.A. like the white people and immigrants who come here each day? 108. What is the difference between the struggle of American Indian people and the struggle of other minority groups? 109. Where you live, what are your greatest advantages or assets for indigenous cultural restoration? 110. What is your greatest discouragement as pertains to indigenous cultural restoration? 111. What are Mid American Indian Fellowships sources of funding? 112. Since Mid American Indian Fellowships is not a Christian organization, do you think it is wise and proper to accept funding from Christian churches and denominations? 113. How do you feel about reconciliation events? Do they help? 114. What will it take to have real reconciliation between white Americans and American Indians? 115. What can non-indians do to join in the American Indian struggle for decolonization and cultural restoration? Chapter 4: Miscellaneous Questions 116. Don t Indians believe the world is coming to an end in 2012? What do you think about that? 117. Why didn t American Indians develop more of a material culture before contact with Europeans? My goodness, they remained in the Stone Age and didn t even have the wheel!
118. Why didn t Native Americans domesticate animals as Europeans, Asians and Africans did? 119. Do you hope your children will marry Indians? 120. Could you provide a list of books that have been most helpful in your own process of decolonization?