Roundtable - Native First Nation Theology by Andrea Smith and Respondents

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The JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION is a channel for the publication of feminist scholarship in religion and a forum for dis cussion and dialogue among women and men of differing feminist perspectives. The Journal has two communities of accountability: the academy, in

which it is situated, and the feminist movement, from which it draws its nourishment and vision. Its

editors are committed to rigorous thinking and analysis in the service of the transformation of reli gious studies as a discipline and the feminist trans formation of religious and cultural institutions.

FOUNDING EDITORS: Judith Plaskow, Manhattan College, Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, Harvard Divinity School

EDITORS: Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Drew University; Stephanie Y. Mitchem, University of South Carolina, Columbia

MANAGING EDITOR: Stephanie May EDITORIAL BOARD: Maria Pilar Aquino, University of San Diego; Ann Braude, Harvard Divinity School; Katie G. Cannon, Union Theological Seminary-PCSE; Carol P. Christ, Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, Athens, Greece; Mary C. Churchill, University of Iowa and University of Cblorado; miriam cooke, Duke University; Emily E. Culpepper, University of Redlands, California; Laura Donaldson, Cornell University; Naomi Golden berg, University of Ottawa; Rita M. Gross, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, emerita; Mary E. Hunt, Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual; Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California; Tazim R. Kassam, Syracuse University; Karen L. King, Harvard Divinity School; Kwok Pui-lan, Episcopal Divinity School; Vivian-Lee Nyitray, University of California, River side; Alicia Ostriker, Rutgers University; Judith Plaskow, Manhattan College; Elizabeth Pritchard, Bowdoin College; Kathleen Sands, University of Massa chusetts, Boston; Miranda Shaw, University of Richmond, Virginia; Nayereh Tohidi, California State University, Northridge; Emilie M. Townes, Yale Divin ity School; Ellen M. Umansky, Fairfield University; Traci C. West, Drew Uni versity; Deborah F. Whitehead, Harvard University

INTERNATIONAL BOARD: Tal Ilan, Beit Hamidrash, Israel; Kathleen Mc Phillips, University of Western Sydney, Australia; Maria Jose F. Rosado-Nunes, Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Melissa Raphael, Uni versity of Gloucestershire, England; Sharada Sugirtharajah, University of Birmingham, England; Lieve Troch, Catholic University of Nijmegen, Nether lands; Meyda Yegenoglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

COPY EDITOR: Heather Lee Miller


LIST OF CONSULTANTS FOR VOLUME XXII NUMBER 2: Marcella Althaus-Reid, Paula Arai, Grace Burford, Rosemary Carbine, Andrea Custodi, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Susan Farrell, Janet Gyatso, Mary Ger hart, Shahla Haeri, Rosemary Hicks, Jackie Horne, Sue Horner, Zayn Kassam, Beverly Kienzle, Nami Kim, Evelyn Kirkley, Karen Lang, Charlene Makley, Lyn Miller, Virginia Mollenkott, Esther Mombo, Laura Nasrallah, Nyambura Njoroge, Jennifer Rycenga, Susan Setta, Marilyn Sewell, Deborah Valenze, Pamela Walker, Ulrike Wiethaus, and Jasmin Zine

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JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION

Fall 2006 Volume 22 Number 2 D] Editors' Introduction Stephanie Y. Mitchem

Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza 1

D Articles New Scholar Award Winner:

Imperial Intersections and Initial Inquiries: Toward a Feminist, Postcolonial Analysis of Philippians Joseph A. Marchal 5

New Scholar Award Honorable Mention: Islamic Feminism in Iran: Feminism in a New Islamic Context Fereshteh Ahmadi 33

Buddhism and Gender: Reframing and Refocusing the Debate Alice Collett 55

D Roundtable Discussion: Native/First Nation Theology Dismantling the Master's Tools with the Master's House:

Native Feminist Liberation Theologies Andrea Smith 85 Respondents Michelene Pesantubbee 97

Dianne M. Stewart 103 Michelle A. Gonzalez 107

Sylvester Johnson 112 Tink Tinker 116

D In a Different Voice Caring for the World Penelope Scambly Schott 123


LX Living It Out: Period Piece

Positively Breaking Taboos: Why and How I Made the Film Period Piece Emily Erwin Culpepper 125

Respondents Gannit Ankori 140 Karen L. King 145 Sarah K Peck 148

Claudia Ann Highbaugh 150

Li Notes on Contributors 155


JFSR 22.2 (2006) 85-121

Roundtable Discussion

NATIVE/FIRST NATION THEOLOGY

DISMANTLING THE MASTER'S TOOLS WITH THE MASTER'S HOUSE: NATIVE FEMINIST LIBERATION THEOLOGIES Andrea Smith

I'm a feminist because I think anything else is unintelligent. And I just can't go with turning my brain into jello for someone else's fantasy fulfill ment. I also think it's ordained by God. I really do think I have divine power on my side in that regard. To me you cannot advocate sovereignty without advocating feminism because feminism should be at its heart the same what sovereignty is. I do see feminism as ordering right rela tions and I think that's what Native American traditions are all about, being in balance with one another. Being in balance with all creation, be it the environment, be it nation-to-nation, and I think feminism is that, but it does so from the particular vantage point that women are able to provide, and have always provided.'

Mavis Etienne, a negotiator at Oka during the Mohawk uprising, joined the struggle because she did not want her "land bulldozed to expand a golf course." Etienne says of her decision to join the struggle: "I wasn't afraid because I knew they [those opposing the Mohawks] were in the wrong, and I knew God was with me."2

Native women activists' utterances such as these provide a foundation for my analysis of Native feminist theologies. Through my involvement in organi zations such as Women of All Red Nations (Chicago), Incite! Women of Color

1 Andrea Smith, "Bible, Gender and Nationalism in American Indian Christian Right Activ ism" (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002), 314, 330.

2 Mavis Etienne, "A Mohawk Peace Maker," Indian Life 24, no. 1 (January-February 2004): 8.

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86 Journial of Femiiinist Studies in Religion

against Violence (www.incite-national.org), and various other projects, I have come to see the importance of documenting the theory produced by Native women's organizers as theory. I see this research methodology as intellectual ethnography. In my ongoing research projects on Native American feminisms, I focus on documenting and analyzing the theories produced by Native women activists that intervene both in sovereignty and feminist struggles.3 I believe these theories can then be part of a larger collective conversation to develop Na tive feminist theologies. However, before I begin this task, I must first address the theological project itself within Native studies and Native communities.

Is "Native Liberation Theology" an Oxymoron?

After five-hundred-plus years of colonialism, patriarchy, and white suprem acy, it is clear that Native communities could benefit from "liberation." How ever, Native religious scholars have expressed great skepticism about theology, including liberation theology, as a starting point for discussing Native religios ity. Vine Deloria Jr. has pointed out that liberation theology is grounded on a

Western European epistemological framework that is no less oppressive to Na tive communities than is mainstream theology. "Liberation theology," Deloria cynically argues, "was an absolute necessity if the establishment was going to continue to control the minds of minorities. If a person of a minority group had not invented it, the liberal establishment most certainly would have created it."4 According to Deloria, Native liberation must be grounded in indigenous epis temologies-epistemologies that are inconsistent with Western epistemologies, of which liberation theology is a part. "If we are then to talk seriously about the necessity of liberation, we are talking about the destruction of the whole com plex of Western theories of knowledge and the construction of a new and more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge and experience."5 Jace Weaver similarly argues that theology is inconsonant with indigenous worldviews, which hold that systematic study of God is both presumptuous and impossible.6 "Tradi tional Native religions are integrated totally into daily activity," Weaver remarks. "They are ways of life and not sets of principles or creedal formulation.... Na tive 'religion' does not concern itself-does not try to know or explain-'what happens in the other world.' "7 Even Native theologian William Baldridge states that "doing theology, thinking theologically, is a decidedly non-Indian thing to do. When I talk about Native American theology to many of my Indian friends,

3 Quotes that are not cited come from interviews from my research. These interviews are

derived primarily from women involved in Women of All Red Nations and the American Indian Movement. All are activists today.

4 Vine Deloria Jr., For This Land (New York: Routledge, 1999), 100. 5 Ibid., 106.

6 Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vii. 7 Ibid.


Roundtable Discussion: Native/First Nation Theology 87

most of them just smile and act as if I hadn't said anything. And I am pretty sure that as far as they are concerned I truly hadn't said anything."8

The challenge brought forth by Native scholars/activists to other liberation theologians would be, even if we distinguish the "liberation" church from main stream churches, can any church escape complicity in Christian imperialism? Deloria, in particular, raises the challenge that Christianity, because it is a tem porally rather than a spatially based tradition (that is, it is not tied to a particular land base, but can seek converts from anywhere), is necessarily a religion tied to imperialism because it will never be content to remain within a particular place or community. Adherents of spatially based religions, however, will not try to convince other peoples of the veracity of their religious truth claims. "Once religion becomes specific to a group, its nature also appears to change, being directed to the internal mechanics of the group, not to grandiose schemes of world conquest."9

Hence, all Christian theology, even liberation theology, remains complicit in the missionization and genocide of Native peoples in the Americas. Robert

Warrior's "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians" furthers Deloria's analysis. In this essay, Warrior argues that the Bible is not a liberatory text for Native peoples, especially considering the fact that the liberation motif commonly adopted by liberation theologians-the Exodus-is premised on the genocide of the indig enous people occupying the Promised Land-the Canaanites. Warrior does not argue for the historical veracity of the conquest of the Canaanites. Rather, the Exodus operates as a narrative of conquest-a narrative that was foundational to the European conquest of the Americas. Warrior's essay points not only to the problems with the Exodus motif but also to liberation theology's conceptu alization of a God of deliverance. He contends that "as long as people believe in the Yahweh of deliverance, the world will not be safe from the Yahweh the conqueror."'0 That is, by conceptualizing ourselves as oppressed peoples who are to be delivered at all costs, we necessarily become complicit in oppressing those who stand in the way of our deliverance. Instead, Warrior argues, we need to reconceptualize ourselves as "a society of people delivered from oppression

who are not so afraid of becoming victims again that they become oppressors themselves.""

8 William Baldridge, "Toward a Native American Theology," American Baptist Quarterly 8 (December 1989): 228.

9 Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (Delta: New York, 1973), 296-97. 10 Robert Warrior, "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians," in Natives and Christians, ed. James

Treat (New York: Routledge, 1996), 99. 11 Ibid.


88 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Comparative Study of Religion as a Colonial Project

As a result, many scholars argue that the appropriate discipline from which to study Native spiritualities is comparative religious studies.12 Religious studies does not rely on systematizing propositions about God, but instead explores the nature of religious experience on its own terms.13 These arguments are compel ling. However, they also fail to acknowledge religious studies as a colonizing dis course, particularly within Native communities. As one example, this coloniz ing discourse is evident in E1mile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religion, in

which Durkheim argued that the individuals best prepared to study a religious tradition are those who do not actually practice it.'4 Only the Western scientific

mind has the necessary power of analysis to ascertain the nature of indigenous religion correctly; indigenous people lack the appropriate "intellectual cultiva tion and reflection."''5

Durkheim's maxim continues to inform the discipline of comparative reli gions today. A recent exchange between Sam Gill and Christopher Ronwaniente Jocks in the Journal of the Arnerican Academy of Religion shows the influence.'6 Sam Gill, a prominent non-Native scholar in the study of religion, provoked controversy when he argued that Native communities had no notions of earth as mother, that Native religions actually derived the concept from non-Native peo ples.'7 Native peoples in the field of religion challenged this argument because, they argued, Gill did not know Native languages, nor did he have an in-depth understanding of Native religions, and hence was ill informed. In response, Gill wrote an essay in which he contended that because Native religious scholars subscribe to the religious beliefs they study, they were ill equipped for this type of scholarship. Like Durkheim, he implied that only those who stood outside Native religious worldviews were in a position to understand them properly.18 "The academic study of religion has often failed to acknowledge what it is. It is academic; it is Western; it is intellectual."'19

12 Weaver, That the People Might Live, vii. Weaver argues that his work is not theology, "but

a work in religious studies." He adds, however, "the two disciplines are closer than practitioners of the latter would like to admit" (viii).

13 For a book that combines both a history of religions approach with liberation theological reflection, see Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996).

14 Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religion, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 420.

15 Ibid., 81.

16 Christopher Ronwani?nte Jocks, "American Indian Religious Traditions and the Academic Study of Religion: A Response to Sam Gill," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (Spring 1997): 169-76.

17 Sam Gill, "The Academic Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Reli gion 62 (Winter 1994): 965-75.

18 Jocks, "American Indian Religious Traditions," 169. 19 Gill, "Academic Study of Religion," 967.



Romanticism about Native spirituality pervades our society. Religious stud ies promises the non-Indian voyeur that s/he too can understand Native religi osity. What often goes unasked, however, is, do Native communities want their religious experiences studied in academic institutions? Do Native communities

want non-Natives to know about Native spiritualities? These issues are relevant not only to non-Native scholars but to Native scholars as well, who are often accused by their communities of "telling too much."

Decolonizing Theology

In addition, rejecting theology (or any discipline for that matter) as inher ently "white" presumes that Native cultures have somehow managed to remain untainted by the dominant society, or that Native communities can completely untangle themselves from the larger colonial society. Muscogee activist Roberto Mendoza has noted that this kind of separatism does "not really address the question of power. How can small communities tied in a thousand ways to the capitalist market system break out without a thorough social, economic and po litical revolution within the whole country?"20 If a revolution is necessary, then it would seem wise for Native scholars and activists to use any tool that might be helpful in changing society "by any means necessary." Looking at academia, Warrior similarly argues:

We have remained by and large caught in a death dance of dependence between, on the one hand, abandoning ourselves to the intellectual strategies and categories of white, European thought and, on the other hand, declaring that we need nothing outside of ourselves and our cul tures in order to understand the world and our place in it.... When we remove ourselves from this dichotomy, much becomes possible. We see first that the struggle for sovereignty is not a struggle to be free from the influence of anything outside ourselves, but a process of asserting the power we possess as communities and individuals to make decisions that affect our lives.2'

Additionally, the anthropological focus of comparative religious studies lacks an explicit concern about ethics that is integral to the discipline of theol ogy, particularly liberation theology. It is not enough to understand or describe Native religious experience; it is also necessary to advocate for the survival of Native spiritual practices and an end to colonialism. Liberation theology brings to Native studies an explicit concern for the victims of colonialism. Liberation

20 Roberto Mendoza, Look! A Nation Is Coming! (Philadelphia: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1984), 8.

21 Warrior, "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians," 124.


90 Journal of Feminiist Studies in Religion

theology highlights the question, "What social movements, practices, and strat egies are required 'by any means necessary' for large-scale transformation?"22

As the utterances at the beginning of this essay suggest, Native women in volved in liberation struggles often participate out of a sense of divine purpose.

Whether or not they call themselves Christian, they are theologizing because they are articulating what they perceive to be the relationship among spiritual ity, liberation, and the vision of the world they hope to cocreate. Their theolo gies may not be concerned with definitive statements about faith and belief, but rather with exploring the possibilities about thinking about spirituality in light of our current political context. Furthermore, how do we release our theologi cal imagination to develop projects of indigenous sovereignty that envision the world we would like to live in. Such a theological reorientation is suggested by South African theologian Itumeleng Mosala's critique of Warrior's essay. Mosala responds that the Bible and other forms of theological discourse are never fixed and always subject to contestation. "It is not enough to recognise text as ideol ogy. Interpretations of texts do alter the texts. Contrary to Warrior's argument, texts are signifying practices and therefore they exist ideologically and perma nently problematically."23

Mosala's approach suggests that theological discourse is never simply libera tory or oppressive, but that oppressed groups can wrest it away from paradigms set up by dominating classes in order to further liberatory struggles.24 Or, to quote African theologian Emmanuel Martey, "Unlike Audre Lorde, who might be wondering whether the masters tools could indeed be used to dismantle the master's house, African theologians are fully convinced that the gun, in efficient hands, could well kill its owner."25

Liberation Theology beyond the Politics of Representation

As the proliferation of black, womanist, mujerista, Asian, and so on, the ologies indicate, liberation theologians in the United States have often relied on a politics of representation. That is, these theologies seek to represent the theological concerns of the communities from which theologians emerge. This representational strategy can in turn lend itself to totalizing and essentializing

22 David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta, Lois Ann Lorentzen, and Dwight Hopkins, eds., Lib eration Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas (London: Routledge, 1997), 17.

23 Itumeleng Mosala, "Why Apartheid Was Right about the Unliberated Bible," Voices from the Third World 17, no. 1 (1994): 158.

24 Rita Nakashima Brock offers a similar analysis of the Bible. "Since I am not an essential ist in my thinking, I do not believe the Bible is inherently patriarchal. It contains a multitude of voices. To identify it uniformly as hopelessly patriarchal gives too much credit to a few elite men" ("Dusting the Bible on the Floor: A Hermeneutics of Wisdom," in Searching the Scripture, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza [New York: Crossroads, 1993], 71).

25 Emmanuel Martey, African Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994), 46.



discourses about the communities theologians seek to represent. As one exam ple, Chung Hyun Kyung's thought-provoking book on Asian women's theology raises important challenges to Christian imperialism in the discipline of theol ogy; however, she frequently makes broad and rather unsubstantiated claims about Asian women's religious experiences. For example: "The most prevailing image of Jesus among Asian women's theological expressions is the image of the suffering servant. Asian Christian women seem to feel most comfortable

with this image of Jesus whether they are theologically conservative or progres "126

sive. However, the basis of her claims seems to be limited to an analysis of the writings of Asian women theologians and eleven interviews with them.27 It is unclear how her methodology allows her to make such broad claims about

Asian women in general.28 Many theologians, such as Chung, often assume an unproblematic relationship between their experiences in their communities and their knowledge about them. However, as Lata Mani argues: "The relation ship between experience and knowledge is not one of correspondence but one fraught with history, contingency, and struggle."29

In addition, the theologian's position vis-a-vis the communities they attempt to represent often allows theologians to become the self-appointed representa tives of their communities regardless of whether they seek this leadership role.

As a result, they may find themselves silencing the communities they wish to give voice to. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz reflects on some of these issues:

The ... issue to consider when dealing with the subject of presenta tion is that of "speaking for" others. I have insisted since the very first published writings about mujerista theology that this theology is but one theological elaboration of Hispanic/Latina women's liberation theology. I have in no way claimed to speak for all Latinas, nor have I claimed that

my elaborations are the only reflections of the beliefs of grassroots Lati nas. I have always been concerned not only about speaking "for" all La tinas but even as speaking "for" any Latina. But the fact is that because

mujerista theology is about creating a public voice for Latinas and cap turing a political space for that voice, there is no other way to proceed but to speak whether "as" or "for." . . . The issue, then, is not whether in elaborating mujeTista theology I speak for Latinas or not. Rather it is

26 Chung Hyun Kyung, Struggle to Be in the Sun Again (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), 51. 27 Ibid., 1-9.

28 Other examples of this tendency include Jon Sobrino's Spirituality and Liberation, which is filled with mass generalizations about the poor, such as "The poor accept, at least in fact. . . that true salvation comes only by way of their own crucifixion," but the basis of his broad-based claims

about the theological convictions of "the poor" is not explicated, other than through his personal experience. See Jon Sobrino, Spirituality of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988), 34.

29 Lata Mani, "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 392-408, quotation on 41.



this: Do I speak so as to control those Latinas or to provide a platform for their voices, which are not totally separated from my own?"')

This problem is particularly true for Native peoples; since many non Natives have so little contact with Native peoples, they often have a tendency to presume that the one book that they have read by a Native author tells the truth about all Native people. It is particularly challenging for Native theologians to write theology without unwittingly encouraging their readers to make broad assumptions regarding what all Native people think about political/theological issues. By not specifically and critically analyzing their positions vis-'a-vis the communities they seek to represent, liberation theologians sometimes uncon sciously assume the God's eye position taken by mainstream theologians whom they oppose. As theologian David Batstone argues: "How does one talk about the marginalized without . .. producing a reification of the victim, which is as condescending as any fixed concept? We must take care to attend to the mul tiple and fluid forms that victimization takes rather than reducing the victim to a new Other, and thus finding ourselves again representing others rather than attending to how they are self-represented.'

On the one hand, poststructuralist analysis points to the fragmentation and discontinuities among self, experience, and identity. On the other hand, many theorists have also adopted a kind of vulgar constructionism, arguing that be cause axes of identities (race, class, etc.) are socially constructed, they therefore do not "really" exist. However, as Kimberle Crenshaw states: "To say that a cate gory such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that category has no significance in our world."32 She notes that social constructionism is helpful in showing how naturalized categories exclude and exercise power against ex cluded groups. Yet these categories are still performative and help shape those who are defined by these categories. In other words, as long as many members in society define an individual as "Indian," this category will shape her subjec tivity, even if she is not comfortable with this identity. Lisa Lowe similarly con tests the "racial or ethnic" subject, without dispelling the importance of identity politics. She argues that "the cultural productions of racialised women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject."33 So, as long as the categories of race, gender, and sexu

30 Ada Mar?a Isasi-D?az, Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999), 6-7. 31 Batstone, Mendieta, Lorentzen, and Hopkins, Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and

the Americas, 16.

32 Kimberle Crenshaw, "The Intersection of Race and Gender," in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1996), 375.

33 Lisa Lowe, "Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics," in The Poli tics of Culture in the Shadow of Culture, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 363.



ality continue to shape institutional structures and our senses of selfhood, op positional politics on the basis of these identities is critical. As Crenshaw notes, "a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disem powered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate it and destroy it."34

Elizabeth Povinelli points to a possible strategy that allows Native women to theorize as Native women while relying less on essentializing discourses about Native women. As Povinelli has so aptly demonstrated, the liberal state depends on a politics of multicultural recognition that includes "social difference without social consequence."35 She continues: "These state, public, and capital multicul tural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation

waged against the modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as mo ments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken."36

Matsuoka sheds further light onto this problem, noting that cultural vali dation is not the most important fight. The dominant culture is prepared to accommodate a little "multiculturalism"-a pow wow here, a pipe ceremony there-as long as the structures of power are not challenged. Matsuoka states: "The central problems ... have to do, ultimately, not with ethnic groupings or the distinctness of our cultural heritages as such, but with racism and its mani festations in American economic policy, social rule and class relations."37

Thus, this critique suggests that Native feminist theologies could focus less on a politics of representation and more on the material conditions Native

women face as they are situated within the nexuses of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. That is, as Crenshaw would say, what difference does the difference Native women represent make?

Heteropatriarchy and the Nation-State

Since the theorizing of Native women's organizing and their contributions to a theological project of liberation cannot be summarized briefly, I will sim ply focus on the critical intervention that I think this theorizing makes. Na tive feminist theologies fundamentally challenge the givenness of U.S. empire and the nation-state form of governance. They further theologize possibilities of alternative forms of governance for the world. This theologizing also chal lenges male-dominated sovereignty and struggles for racial justice because they

34 Crenshaw, "Intersection of Race and Gender," 375.

35 Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 16.

36 Ibid., 29.

37 Fumitaka Matsuoka, Out of Silence (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1995), 93.


94 journial of Femiinist Studlies in Religioni

demonstrate that the building block of the nation-state is the heteropatriarchal family.

That is, social justice activists as well as U.S.-based liberation theologians often criticize U.S. policies, but they do not critically interrogate the contra dictions between the United States articulating itself as a democratic country, on the one hand, while simultaneously founding itself on the past and current genocide of Native peoples, on the other hand. That is, even progressives tend to articulate racism as a policy to be addressed within the constraints of the U.S. nation-state rather than understanding racism and genocide as constitutive of the United States. However, since the United States could not exist without the genocide of Native peoples, Native feminist interventions call us to question why we should presume the givenness of the United States in our long-range vision of social justice. These interventions provide a starting point for theologi cal reflection on what exactly is a just form of governance, not only for Native peoples but also for the rest of the world. Native women activists have begun articulating spiritually based visions of nation and sovereignty that are separate from nation-states. Whereas nation-states are governed through domination and coercion, indigenous sovereignty and nationhood are predicated on inter relatedness and responsibility. As Crystal Echohawk states: "Sovereignty is an active, living process within this know of human, material and spiritual relation ships bound together by mutual responsibilities and obligations. From that knot of relationships is born our histories, our identity, the traditional ways in which we govern ourselves, our beliefs, our relationship to the land, and how we feed, clothe, house and take care of our families, communities and Nations."38 This interconnectedness exists not only among the nation's members but among all creation, as well-human and nonhuman. As Sharon Venne states:

Our spirituality and our responsibilities define our duties. We under stand the concept of sovereignty as woven through a fabric that encom passes our spirituality and responsibility. This is a cyclical view of sover eignty, incorporating it into our traditional philosophy and view of our responsibilities. There it differs greatly from the concept of Western sovereignty which is based upon absolute power. For us absolute power is in the Creator and the natural order of all living things; not only in human beings .... Our sovereignty is related to our connections to the earth and is inherent.

The idea of a nation did not simply apply to human beings. We call the buffalo or, the wolves, the fish, the trees, and all are nations. Each is sovereign, and equal part of the creation, interdependent, interwoven, and all related.39

38 Crystal Echohawk, "Reflections on Sovereignty," Indigenous Woman 3, no. 1 (1999): 21-22.

39 Sharon Venne, "Mining and Indigenous Peoples," Indigenous Woman 2, no. 5 (1998): 23-25.



These models of sovereignty are not based on a narrow definition of nation that would entail a closely bounded community and ethnic cleansing. For ex ample, one activist distinguishes between a chauvinistic notion of "nationalism" versus a flexible notion of "sovereignty":

To me, nationalism is saying, our way is the only right way ... [but] I think a real true sovereignty is a real, true acceptance of who and what's around you. Sovereignty is what you do and what you are to your own people within your own confines, but there is a realization and accep tance that there are others who are around you. And that happened even before the Europeans came, we knew about the Indians. We had alliances with some, and fights with some. Part of that sovereignty was that acceptance that they were there.

These spiritually based alternative visions of sovereignty in turn challenge the heteronormative basis of nation-building. To see the relationship between heteronormativity and the nation-state, we can turn to Charles Colson, promi nent Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship, who explains why same sex marriage leads to terrorism.

Marriage is the traditional building block of human society, intended both to unite couples and bring children into the world... There is a natural moral order for the family.... The family, led by a married mother and father, is the best available structure for both child-rear ing and cultural health. Marriage is not a private institution designed solely for the individual gratification of its participants. If we fail to enact

a Federal Marriage Amendment, we can expect, not just more family breakdown, but also more criminals behind bars and more chaos in our streets. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America's decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.40

Similarly, the Christian Right World magazine opined that feminism con tributed to the Abu Ghraib scandal by promoting women in the military.4' When

women do not know their assigned role in the gender hierarchy, they become disoriented and abuse prisoners.4' Implicit in this analysis is the understanding

40 Charles Colson and Anne Morse, "The Moral Home Front," Christianity Today 48 (Octo ber 2004): 152.

41 Stephen Olford, "Nation or Ruination," United Evangelical Action 41 (Fall 1982): 8; Barry Ogle, "Churches Helping Children with Incarcerated Parents," Social Work and Christianity 22 (1995):115-24; Marshall Norfolk, "The Search for Gary," Moody Monthly 76 (1975): 114-16; Bonnie Greene, "These Christians Show the Way," Eternity (1973): 16-21; and Lee Grady, "Is the Future Safe for Our Children?" Charisma 16 (January 1991): 61-68.

42 Gene Edward Veith, "The Image War," World 19 (May 22, 2004): 30-35; Joel Belz, "No Preservatives," World 19 (May 22, 2004): 8; and Ted Olsen, "Grave Images," Christianity Today 48 (July 2004): 60.



that heteropatriarchy is essential for the building of U.S. empire. That is, pa triarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to dominate women on the basis of "natural" biology, so too should the social elites of a society naturally rule everyone else through a nation-state form of governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and control. Pa triarchy, in turn, is presumed a heteronormative gender binary system. Thus,

as Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the United States. Rather, Christian Right politics work through private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle class) to create a "Christian America." She notes that the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in

more public forms of social connection. In addition, investment in the suburban private family serves to mask the public disinvestment in urban areas that makes the suburban lifestyle possible. The social decay in urban areas that results from this disinvestment is then construed as the result of deviance from the white, Christian family ideal rather than as the result of political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed stated: "The only true so lution to crime is to restore the family,"43 and "family break-up causes poverty."44 Concludes Burlein, " 'The family' is no mere metaphor but a crucial technology by which modern power is produced and exercised. "145

Unfortunately, as Navajo feminist scholar Jennifer Denetdale points out, the Native response to a heteronormative white, Christian America is often an equally heteronormative Native nationalism. Denetdale, in her critique of the Navajo tribal council's passage of a ban on same-sex marriage, argues that Na tive nations are furthering a Christian Right agenda in the name of "Indian tradition."46 This trend is also equally apparent within racial justice struggles in other communities of color. As Cathy Cohen contends, heteronormative sover eignty or racial justice struggles will maintain rather than challenge colonialism and white supremacy because they are premised on a politics of secondary mar ginalization, where the most elite class of these groups will further their aspira tion on the backs of those most marginalized within the community.47 Through this process of secondary marginalization, the national or racial justice struggle takes on either implicitly or explicitly a nation-state model as the end point of its struggle-a model of governance in which the elites govern the rest through violence and domination as well as exclude those are not members of "the na

43 Ralph Reed, After the Revolution (Dallas, Tex.: Word, 1990), 231. 44 Ibid., 231, 89.

45 Ann Burlein, Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Con verge (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 190.

46 Jennifer Denetdale, "Chairmen, Presidents, and Princesses," Wicazo Sa Review (forth coming 2006).

47 Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).



tion." However, as the articulations of Native women suggest, there are other models of nationhood we can envision, nations that are not based on exclusion and that are not based on secondary marginalization-nations that do not have the heteronormative, patriarchal nuclear family as their building block.

The theological imagination then becomes central to envisioning the world we would actually want to live in. At the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated they know another world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past, and fu ture become copresent, thereby allowing us to engage in what Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer calls a racial remembering of the future. Native commu nities prior to colonization were not structured on the basis of hierarchy, op pression, or patriarchy. We will not re-create these communities as they existed prior to colonization because Native nations are and always have been nations that change and adapt to the surrounding circumstances. However, our under standing that it was possible to order society without structures of oppression in the past tells us that our current political and economic system is anything but natural and inevitable. If we lived differently before, we can live differently in the future. Thus, Native feminist liberation theologies can center less on repre senting Native women and more on calling all peoples to imagine and to help cocreate a future based on sovereignty and freedom of all peoples.

RESPONSE Michelene Pesantubbee

Andrea Smith is a leading voice in the development of Native feminist theory and Native feminist liberation theologies. Her analyses of oppressive structures that affect Native people and her attention to coalition building chal lenges scholars to critique and reenvision how they work with and study Native communities, as is evidenced by her lead-in essay. When I first read the invita tion to participate in a roundtable discussion on First Nations, Native American, or indigenous feminist theologies my thoughts immediately turned to conversa tions I had with Mary Churchill, a religious studies and women's studies scholar, on the applicability of the words "theology" or "theologies" to reference Native American discussions of traditional spiritualities or ways of life. Churchill also often ponders the complexities and political considerations of coining a repre sentative term (much like womanist or mujerista) for diverse Native American groups and interests. Many Native people have not embraced either theology or feminism for various reasons. However, I would argue both are needed for the well-being of Native people and communities. Thus, I was momentarily



taken aback as I read Smith's essay on Native feminist liberation theologies, not because the subject is unusual or irrelevant but because the title refers to, and assumes the reader will expect, a discussion of Christian theology, which I did not.

I should not have been surprised as the academy tends to equate theol ogy with Christianity and, in some cases, assumes that the academic study of theologies of other groups, such as Buddhists or Hindus, is not rich enough (or for some religions nonexistent) to warrant intentional inclusion within the field of theological study. The same tendency applies to Native American spiri tuality. Even when scholars address Native American theology/theologies that are "inclusive of all Natives (traditional, Christian, neo-traditional, syncretic)," as stated in the book A Native American Theology, they are attending to Na tive American Christian theologies. The intent is to facilitate a more inclusive, culturally relevant, Christian church by reinterpreting or revamping Christian symbols to express traditional Native American ones. For many Native Ameri cans who are Christian such adaptations are welcome and reaffirming of their identities. For non-Christian Native people who practice traditional ways these adaptations are interpreted as appropriation by a colonizing institution and those Native Americans participating in these adaptations as internalizing the

colonizers' message and as serving the colonizers.' In any case, Native American Christian liberation theology is an important

aspect of Native Christian experience that religious studies can help explain. Although religious studies traces its origins to theological studies and the field of anthropology, both of which have colonizing discourses, it is interdisciplinary in its methods and approaches. The interdisciplinary nature of religious studies has allowed the field to develop in response to new scholarship, including that of women's studies and feminist theory and praxis. As Ursula King explains, "increasing globalization, brought about by international networks, encoun ters, and conferences, has made scholars much more conscious of the rich and truly challenging diversity in the analysis, explanation, and understanding of religion in different societies and academic fields of discourse around the world." Such experiences have contributed to "a considerable amount of critical self-reflexivity" regarding religious studies' "disciplinary boundaries and trans

1 In one case, when a planning committee proposed including a green corn ceremony in an updated United Methodist Book of Worship, some Native people argued that inclusion of the ceremony represented exploitation and trivialization of the ceremony and could lead to appro priation by non-Indians. See Michelene Pesantubbee, "Culture Revitalization and Indigenization of Churches among the Choctaw of Oklahoma" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Bar bara, 1994), 161-62; and Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. "Tink" Tinker, A Native American Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001).



disciplinary possibilities, its methodological and theoretical orientations, and the extent of its objects of study."2

Religious studies scholars who specialize in the study of Native American life ways are aware of the colonizing discourse that permeates the field. As

Christopher Ronwaniente Jocks has written, "a handful of scholars with strong roots in American Indian communities ... quickly realized that a great deal of the 'literature' about our traditions in religious studies and in anthropology was based on inadequate foundations: textual studies based on flawed texts, employ ing alien and often incongruous theoretical models." Religious studies scholars

who have studied with Ines Talamantez keep in the forefront of their minds her mantra that we must theorize from Native cultures and not, as Vine Deloria Jr. put it, "pigeonhole it in the old familiar framework of interpretation, sometimes even torturing the data to make it fit." In other words, as Jocks indicated, we can no longer merely apply the same world religions-based models to Native American religious experiences.3

In addition, discussions among religious studies scholars of Native Ameri can ways of life, much like those of Native liberation theologians, often reflect concerns about intruding in Native lives in order to understand their religious experiences better. However, to have an "explicit concern about ethics that is integral to the discipline of theology," as Smith states, does not ensure ethical intent or actions on the part of theologians or church leaders. The intrusion into Native lives whether for proselytizing or reaffirming purposes is neither better nor worse than intrusion for academic study. Both represent and reflect colo nizing efforts. The question then is how can religious studies scholars minimize or balance their intrusions? Some scholars would argue that the right to knowl edge trumps Native people's freedom from interference in and divulgence of religious experiences. For Ron Grimes, the knowledge that Native Americans experience the academic study of their cultures as violation means that "the question is not 'What is a nonviolent way to study religion?' but 'What is the least violent way to do it?' "4 If, however, scholars do not agree with Grimes's conclusion, how then do religious studies scholars reenvision the study of Na tive American ways of life?

One possibility is to draw on common concepts among Native people. One such concept is the idea of striving for harmony and balance to offset the dis

2 Ursula King, "Is There a Future for Religious Studies as We Know It? Some Postmodern, Feminist, and Spiritual Challenges," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 2 (June 2002): 369, 367.

3 Christopher Ronwani?nte Jocks, "American Indian Religious Traditions and the Academic Study of Religion: A Response to Sam Gi\\," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 1 (1997): 170-71; and Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies (New York: Scribner, 1995), 231.

4 Ronald L. Grimes, "This May Be a Feud, but It Is Not a War: An Electronic, Interdis ciplinary Dialogue on Teaching Native Religions," in Native American Spirituality: A Critical Reader, ed. Lee Irwin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 81.



ruptive forces that exist in the world.5 Smith offers such an ameliorating or balancing approach to our scholarly intrusion. She writes that "it is not enough to understand or describe Native religious experience; it is also necessary to advocate for the survival of Native spiritual practices and an end to colonial ism." Religious studies scholars are engaged in conversations about the respon sibility scholars have toward the people they study. King, drawing on Leo D. Lefebure's work, writes that as an academic discipline, religious studies "can certainly contribute a great deal in helping people discover spiritual resources toward grounding their identity, for building community, and for social and po litical action, as well as for mediation, reconciliation, healing, and overcoming violence in the world."6

There is no question that for Native, and in some cases non-Native, scholars the driving force behind their work in religious studies includes facilitating the revitalization and survival of Native spiritual practices. These scholars recognize their responsibilities to their communities and, like Jocks, who says he seeks "to

maintain and build relationships with my own and other Native communities," work to promote their own communities' knowledge of their histories through collaborative work with these communities.7 Jace Weaver has called this proac tive commitment to Native community and the" 'wider community' of Creation itself' "communitism," a term formed by the combination of the words "com munity" and "activism." He explains that "in communities that have too often been fractured and rendered dysfunctional by the effects of more than 500 years of colonialism, to promote communitist values means to participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them."8

Native American religious studies scholars are all too aware that they are both academy and community. Lee Irwin explains that this dual positioning means "that every scholar faces the demanding challenge of locating himself or herself according to both the concerns of the communities they study and those they inhabit professionally."9 Although these two positions are often in conflict, they do not necessarily have to be incompatible and separate. And, as Smith

5 For example, Di?? (Navajo) concept o?hozho or the Cherokee ideal that Robert K. Thomas named "harmony ethic." For a discussion of Cherokee recognition that contact with abominations or anomalies are not only an unavoidable part of life but also may be necessary for well-being of life, see Mary C. Churchill, "Purity and Pollution: Unearthing an Oppositional Paradigm in the Study of Cherokee Religious Traditions," in Native American Spirituality, 205-35.

6 King, "Is There a Future for Religious Studies as We Know It?" 382; and Leo D. Lefebure, Revelation, the Religions, and Violence (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2000).

7 Christopher Ronwani?nte Jocks, "Spirituality for Sale: Sacred Knowledge in the Consumer Age," in Native American Spirituality, 63.

8 Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xii-xiii.

9 Lee Irwin, "Response: American Indian Religious Traditions and the Academic Study of Religion," Journal ofthe American Academy of Religion 66, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 888.



points out, "rejecting theology (or any discipline for that matter) as inherently 'white' presumes that Native cultures have somehow managed to remain un tainted by the dominant society, or that Native communities can completely un tangle themselves from the larger colonial society." Native American religious studies scholars can draw on both worlds to facilitate better understanding of Native religious experience and the healing of Native people. In her study of Cherokee literature, Mary Churchill writes, "I believe it is possible to develop academic tools that privilege Cherokee values, conceptions, and orientations yet draw on and make parallels to Western scholarship as well. The scholar ship of feminists and people of color has already laid the groundwork for the development of theories, approaches, and models based on a particular group's experiences, locations, perspectives, or worldviews."'l

As scholars and advocates of Native communities, religious studies scholars can participate meaningfully in the study of liberation theology. Vine Deloria Jr. wrote in his 1977 article "On Liberation" that not only was liberation theol ogy the latest gimmick that merely changed the manner in which oppression manifests itself but that also by seeking "a new synthesis that draws information from every culture," including Native American visions, can we conceive of new solutions to obtaining liberation."

Interestingly, thirteen years later, Deloria suggested in "Vision and Com munity" that the potential solution to liberation lies among those Native people he described as the new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs. These are those who have some degree of experience with traditional tribal religion, who have significant knowledge of and experience with the white people's world of ma terialistic capitalism and commodity markets, "and who now insist that they have been commissioned to bring the tribal religions to the aid and assistance of the non-Indian." Deloria argued that it is these new Indian missionaries/ entrepreneurs who can contribute to liberation because of their vision of a uni fied experiencing of humanity and their emphasis on the living nature of the universe.'2 However, most Native traditionalists and Native American academ ics question the legitimacy of the new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs be cause of their lack of focus on their traditional reservation or tribal communities and their tendency to charge for their services.'3 How then are we to make

10 Mary C. Churchill, "Out of Bounds: Indigenous Knowing and the Study of Religion," in Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations, ed. In?s Hern?ndez-Avila (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2005), 259.

11 Vine Deloria Jr., For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 100,105.

12 Ibid., 111-12.

13 My comments on new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs are specific to those Native people who have ties to reservation communities and who may or may not continue to live on their reservations. I also refer only to Native followers (and not non-Native followers) who may or may not have connections to reservation communities or urban Indian organizations. My comments are


102 journial of Feminiist Studies in Religioni

sense of Deloria's suggestion that the new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs may be part of the answer to Native liberation?

Deloria posited that people will not change their "oppressive activity by intellectual reorientation alone." Attention to experience is necessary. However, the framework of interpretation, the assumption of the basic structure of reality, has to be challenged, reexamined, and reconstructed in order for Native people to be liberated. He further argued that Christian traditions and "purist reserva tion traditions are bound in the same way, using the old images and visions as a framework within which present realities can be judged."''4 In other words, whether Christian or Native, attention (or adherence) to oppressive structures and ideologies cannot lead to liberation.

These new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs evoke negative responses because they do not adhere to purist ideas except perhaps in specific ritual contexts. Their spiritual gatherings are open to people of all colors and religious heritages. For many Native people, such mixing and selective appropriating of songs, dances, myths, or rituals by Native and non-Native people is dangerous and disrespectful. For some Native people, many who are disenfranchised from their traditional practices or communities, these new spiritual melting pots offer connections to other Native people and ways to reinforce Native identity. Some of these Native participants are seeking spiritual experiences outside Christian churches they may have rejected. Others maintain connections to Christian churches but seek a sense of community with people and nature that they don't get from the church. And other participants have grown up without any orga nized religious associations. They are all, to some degree, seeking a place of healing free from a world of religious and ethnic conflict.

These hybrid religious groups hold both possibilities and dangers for lib eration of Native people. On the one hand, the composition and purpose of the groups mean they do not adhere to one particular religion or religious authority. Although these groups do not speak of theologies per se, their discussions of spirituality, "the spirit," and ritual practices are theological. On the other hand, as these new groups move from a state of openness to diverse people and similar religious ideas to that of established religious groups, they are in danger, like many new religious movements, of developing oppressive, hierarchical struc tures. They may be open to challenging patriarchal ideas that Native people have internalized after hundreds of years of colonization or they may incor porate these same patriarchal ideas into their groups based on the notion that they derive from prereservation or precontact traditions. In either case, these groups hold possibilities for facilitating liberation because they bring people of various ethnicities and religious backgrounds together in search of a meaningful

generalized impressions of informal conversations and interactions I have had with members of such groups and are not documented in notes or recordings.

14 Deloria, For This Land, 101, 111.



life. Native religious traditions do not have to be justified among these groups because Native practices constitute the foundation of these groups' existence.

If, as Smith writes, "Native feminist liberation theologies can center ... more on calling all peoples to imagine and to help cocreate a future based on sovereignty and freedom of all peoples," then scholars might do well to assess the impact of these new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs on sovereignty and freedom of all Native peoples (Christian, traditional, and followers of the new Indian missionaries/entrepreneurs). Are these groups initiating changes rele vant to the experiences of Native people? Can these new Indian missionaries/ entrepreneurs, as Deloria suggested, be part of the answer to Native liberation? In order to answer these questions scholars need to analyze the framework of interpretation or system of logic they are using to interpret the impact of these groups.

RESPONSE Dianne M. Stewart

Focusing my mind's eye on the scholarly prose of Native activist and theo logian Andrea Smith is both a challenging and consoling exercise. To use meta phors from an indigenous African context, Smith ponders the black and red sides of Esu's face.' And if Vine Deloria Jr., Jace Weaver, Robert Warrior, and

William Baldridge come down on the right side, Smith ends up on the left, cautioning us that no disciplinary home we may claim as the foundation for our "liberationist" research is immune to the colonizing grip of modern Western epistemology. Furthermore, Smith argues for the ethical merit of liberation the ology in Native studies because she is able to do something most theologically trained scholars scarcely consider or are unwilling to do. Smith divests the term "theology" of its assumed Christian identity and the disciplinary baggage asso ciated with theological studies in the Western academy. "The anthropological focus of comparative religious studies," writes Smith, "lacks an explicit concern about ethics that is integral to the discipline of theology, particularly liberation theology. It is not enough to understand or describe Native religious experi ence; it is also necessary to advocate for the survival of Native spiritual practices and an end to colonialism. Liberation theology brings to Native studies an ex plicit concern for the victims of colonialism."

That Smith locates the "advoca[cyl for the survival of Native spiritual prac tices" within the conceptual purview of liberation theology is indication enough of her strategic position within the master's house. Having taken up occupancy

1 Awo Fa'Lokun Fatunmbi, Esu/Elegba: If a and the Divine Messenger (Plainview, N.Y.: Original Publications), 1-4.



in the master's house-a house that was erected only after Native houses were demolished and displaced-Smith looks around, familiarizes herself with the floor plan, finds it unsuitable, and proceeds to construct a new home from the debris of conquest.

I think what we are really debating here is the interior design of houses, houses whose architectural styles convey the shades of meaning human expe rience and exchange foist on any structure of human life. On the question of "theology" I agree with Smith. Her discussion of the different tasks intrinsic to anthropology/comparative religious studies and theology reminds me of a criti cal time during my doctoral studies when I wrestled with the idea of exchang ing my focus in theological studies with a focus in cultural anthropology. This crossroads emerged for me after coming to the realization that I had no interest in adding my name to an already extensive list of Christian apologists. I decided to remain within the field of theology primarily because I wanted to "advocate for the survival of [African] spiritual practices and an end to [Christian theologi cal] colonialism" in the academy and society. Liberation theology demands such advocacy, and there is much to ponder concerning this topic in the context of the African diaspora.

My resolve to do theology against the norm was only strengthened after I visited the late Leonard Barrett, pioneer scholar of African Jamaican religions, at his home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, prior to my dissertation research trip to Jamaica in 1996. As we discussed the contribution I hoped to make in this research area, Dr. Barrett turned to me and said: "Now, don't let them push you out of theology into sociology. That's what they did to me. They said that I was not doing theology because I did not want to study Christianity; they forced me into sociology." "They" were the academic gatekeepers with parochial un derstandings of theology and ready-made classifications for religions devoid of special revelation."

For now, I am still willing to claim a meaning for theology that is not be holden to apologetic Christian discourse. Speaking theologically allows me to engage Christian traditions of belief and practice as well as indigenous African spiritualities, and Islamic and Hebraic religious thoughts. It is meaningful for me to interrogate the fluid and dialogical spaces among African diasporic reli gious traditions as well as the distinct features of those traditions-the Spiritual' Shouter Baptists, African American Christian denominations, Yoruba/Orisha traditions, Hebrew Israelites, Rastafari, Kumina, Nation of Islam, and a host of other vibrant religious expressions. Christian theological training remains indispensable in this kind of work because the cultural and ideological sway of Christian faith confession is ubiquitous among "victims of colonialism," war ranting credible scholarly attention.

But even black theologians who hold tightly to Christian paradigms for theo logical construction will have to access comparative religion's tools if our schol



arship is to remain current with the overlapping and forever evolving trajecto ries of black religious experience in America. We can take, for instance, James Cone's critical deconstruction of white supremacy in African American Christian experience. We should not forget though that Cone was deeply inspired by the black (religious) nationalism of Malcolm X, whose consciousness was cultivated within the "theological house" of the Nation of Islam. As professor Cone noted in the Malcolm and Martin course I took with him during my doctoral studies at Union: "King kept me Christian and Malcolm kept me black."2 Cone and other black theologians may or may not embrace Elijah Mohammad's signification of blackness as sacred. However, I would argue that black theology was able to emerge with an authoritative and influential liberation agenda largely because Malcolm did. No scholar demonstrated a clearer understanding of this synthesis of black consciousness and theological imagination in African American reli gious institutions, movements, and discourses than Gayraud Wilmore, who, as Smith suggests, "combines both a history of religions approach with liberation theological reflection."' In my view, Smith correctly perceives the demand for a more nuanced and flexible scholarly orientation in examining the religious experiences of the colonized and theologically/spiritually oppressed from both confessional and nonconfessional locations.

With this said, I do not wish that all scholars of religious and theological studies writing from the underside of history should embrace the notion of in digenous "theologies." The discipline needs scholars who will forever alert us to the dangers of "theological construction" through their rejection of the very concept of theology. Inevitably, such voices of protest expand the frontiers of liberation theology by establishing homes outside the master's domain. They can never be satisfied with redecorating or redesigning the master's house; they must build their own structures that they can call home.

My own ethical preoccupation with the cultural genocide perpetrated against people of African descent as a result of our lethal encounters with the Christian West places me in good company with those championing alterna tive approaches to recovering indigenous epistemologies from the shadow of

modernity. Indeed, "the challenge brought forth by Native scholars/activists to other liberation theologians [is], even if we distinguish the 'liberation' church from mainstream churches, can any church escape complicity in Christian im perialism?" I often marvel at the fact that, with negligible exception,4 there is no

2 Also see James Cone's statement about his approach to black theology: "My Style of Doing Theology Was Influenced More by Malcolm X Than by Martin Luther King, Jr.," in A Black Theol ogy of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990), xiv.

3 See Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Nationalism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1998). 4 Josiah Young and Sylvester Johnson are two theologically trained scholars who engage the

problem of Christian imperialism in the African American experience. See Josiah Young, A Pan Af rican Theology: Providence and the Legacies of the Ancestors (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press,


106 journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

corpus of scholarship among theologians of the African diaspora devoted to this question. It is irrefutable that far too many people of African descent just don't want to trouble Jesus. Nevertheless, I have yet to understand why theological scholars persist in equating critical justice-seeking inquiry about anti-African Christian imperialism with the dismantling of our tools and our houses as op posed to the master's house and tools.

Perhaps our widespread indifference to the deconstruction of Christian ex clusivism has deeper roots in manufactured anxieties about homelessness, anxi eties characterizing the "soul-life"5 of a people fashioned from the negation6 of racial slavery. We seem to be trapped inside a primordial prison of collective spiritual vexation when challenged to redecorate or redesign the master's house. And we undoubtedly lack the collective consciousness, creativity, and imagi nation to abandon the master's house, to build our thoughts and to structure our lives on enduring spiritual principles and traditions derived from our pre Christian African heritage. The opposite seems true, however, when it comes to Native thinkers. Smith's essay sheds light on this poignant distinction between Native and black theological reflection. Native feminist theology is able to challenge the "givenness of U.S. empire" because Native theologians/religious thinkers write from the presumption of the "givenness" of their people's hu manity. They know themselves not as the negation of the "given" ethos or race but as authentic, primary, human agents whose being-in-America/in-the world is no consequence of history.7

Out of this rich tradition Smith appeals to our imaginative powers in envi sioning the manifold ways in which Native peoples apprehend and express the majesty of the sacred in their spiritualities. She calls those who would sympa thize with her project to be in solidarity with the imaginative practices of Na tive women activists whose organic theologies "[explore] the possibilities about thinking about spirituality in light of our current political context." I, for one, await the outcome of Smith's Native feminist liberation theology, especially be cause she aims to move beyond theological projects of representation and cul tural preservation toward important conceptual work of community building and social governance.

Smith's intellectual ethnographic approach might provide a methodologi cal advantage for feminist/womanist liberation theologians attempting to cap ture and present rather than mute and represent the voices of female activists and practitioners. I am also persuaded by Smith's approach because I am not

2002); and Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

5 W. E. B. Dubois, Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 221. 6 I use the term "negation" here as a noun. See Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Sym

bols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). 7 Ibid.



solely concerned about the wellness of black Christians; I am concerned about the wellness of black people. I want, most of all, to acknowledge the contribu tions of communities that, "whether or not they call themselves Christian ... are theologizing because they are articulating what they perceive to be the re lationship among spirituality, liberation, and the vision of the world they hope to cocreate."

Smith is confident that Native women are capable of addressing a serious lacuna when it comes to the constructive task of liberation theology. Native

women come to and from activism with tangible solutions and organic mod els of governance and sovereignty. They are prepared to suggest how humans should live as social and interactive creatures on this earth.

By starting with Native women's activism (praxis), Smith aligns herself with classic liberation theological method. Additionally, the ethnographic approach to data collection allows room for those on the ground to design and redesign the theological frame Smith will use to present their theories and practices. The resultant solutions-oriented feminist theologies Smith envisions beg our attention but also our participation. Whether we come as theologians, religious thinkers, comparative religionists, or scholars/activists, we have each squatted in the master's house and, as Native scholars continue to demonstrate, only through our givenness, our humanity, will we dismantle the master's tools.

RESPONSE

Michelle A. Gonzalez

As a Cuban American I approach Andrea Smith's essay as a fellow U.S. minority woman who is engaged in theological reflection from a feminist stand point that takes seriously questions of race, culture, and social location. As mi nority women, we are too often placed in the position of representing our entire people for a broader theological audience, aware that our work may be the sole entry point outsiders have into the worldview we represent. Therefore, I enter into this dialogue with Smith's essay as a Latina theologian, well aware of the limitations and the essentializing nature of this claim. Smith's essay offers an important contribution to theological studies, in particular to the fields of U.S. minority and feminist theologies. Her work continues the vital conversation on the role and function of marginalized discourses within theology. As Smith notes, the voices of Native women problematize the viability of liberation the ologies and the ethical implications of the theological task. The inclusion of Na tive women organizers as the starting point of her work is a vital methodological gesture, grounding her work in the grassroots activism of the communities that her writing represents.



My response to Smith's work focuses on the themes that a dialogue between Native feminist liberation theology (as represented by Smith) and Latina femi nist theology (as represented by me) provoke. I explore three areas in response to her essay. The first is the presentation of indigenous identity in her piece, es pecially as it is constructed in contrast to Christian and/or nonindigenous iden tity. The second is the role of the minority theologian herself and her relation ship to the community she represents within the academy. Last, I explore the role of theology in Smith's essay. My comments emphasize those areas that are the most salient dialogue points among these theologies, and highlight where Latina and Native feminist theologies best challenge and consequently support each other's critical voices within the theological academy.

Smith recognizes the importance of the politics of representation within U.S. liberationist theological discourses. Indeed her essay offers a construction of Native identity, whether intentional or not, which depicts a community that (1) is epistemologically distinct from Western communities, (2) has a land-based spirituality, (3) connects spirituality and liberation, and (4) is concerned with questions of sovereignty. It is the first of these characterizations that I would like to address from the perspective of Latina theology. Since its inception, Latino/a theology has defined Latino/as (and consequently Latin Americans) as mestizo and mulatto peoples. This mixture of Spanish, African, and indigenous cultures has been the clearest marker of Latino/a racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. Mestizaje, in particular, has come to be synonymous with Latino/a cultural hybridity. Anthropologically, mestizaje functions to name the ambiguity and in-between-ness of Latino/a identity. Within mujerista theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz's scholarship, these terms function at various levels: as descriptors of the Latino/a condition, as ethical standpoints, and epistemological categories.

Mestizaje and mulatez are theological locations for her mujerista theology and function as a hermeneutical tool and paradigm that reveal the nature of Latino/a epistemology. They contribute to a new understanding of plurality, diversity, and difference. In Isasi-Diaz's words, "Mestizaje/mulatez is the Hispanic/Latino incarnation of hybridity and diversity."'

This new conceptualization of mestizaje/mulatez, Isasi-Diaz argues, opens up avenues for discussions with other marginalized groups and grounds an un derstanding of difference that is not exclusive or oppositional. Within Smith's definition of Native identity, however, mestizaje would not function as a viable category. This is due to her construction of Native identity as essentially non

Western. This dualism of Native-non-Native, however, is a rigid construction of identity that excludes the nepantla that is Latino/a identity. Building on the work of essayist Pat Mora, Latina church historian Daisy Machado has used the

1 Ada Mar?a Isasi-D?az, "Burlando al Opresor: Mocking/Tricking the Oppressor: Hispanas/ Latinas' Dreams and Hopes," in La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), 137.



category of nepantla, the Nahuatl word for "place in the middle," as a descriptor of the ambiguity of Latino/a identity. "Mora," Machado wrote, "tries to put into words what it is like to live in that 'place in the middle,' that place so familiar to millions of Latinos and Latinas who live there."2 It is in nepantla that Latina/os live, labor, and search for identity. Nepantla speaks to the both/and, in-between ness, difference, and mestizaje/mulatez of Latino/as. Nepantla emphasizes the elasticity of Latino/a identity. It also presents a notion of Latino/a identity where the indigenous, African, and Spanish are not oppositional but coexist as consti tutive of Latino/a identity. This is seen directly in the sources of Latina theolo

gies. Whether it is Jeanette Rodriguez-Holguin's use offlor y canto as a starting point for her Latina feminist theology or Ana Maria Pineda drawing from Na huatl oral tradition and aesthetics as a source for hers, Latina theologians do not reduce Latino/a identity to nonindigenous and exclusively Western.3

A second area is the relationship between the minority theologian and her community of accountability. As alluded to in my introductory remarks, too often U.S. minority and Third World theologians are forced to represent their entire community through their work and voice. As Benjamin Valentin notes, this is linked to the essentializing of U.S. minority groups within theological discourse that can lead to the effacing of diversity and particularity within these communities.

There is legitimacy and even profit in the use of an all-inclusive term such as "Latino" or Hispanic" to speak about the experiences of those people in this country who can in some way trace their ancestry to one or more Spanish-speaking countries. Nevertheless, we must acknowl edge that these terms are ethnic labels that lump together the histories and racial cultural idiosyncrasies of different peoples.... Simply put, the problem that may arise with the prolonged and unnuanced use of a term such as "Hispanic" or "Latino" is that it could divert attention away from the varied historical, racial, class, linguistic, and gender experi ences of the different nationalities to which it refers.4

There also has to be an awareness of the elitism involved in the role of the theologian in relationship to the community she claims to represent. Carmen Nanko insightfully notes that there is a great divide between Latino/a theolo gians as an economic and educated elite and the very Latino/a poor whose expe

2 Daisy Machado, "Kingdom Building in the Borderlands: The Church and Manifest Des tiny," in Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, ed. Ada Mar?a Isasi-D?az and Fer nando F. Segovia (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1996), 63.

3 Ana Maria Pineda, "The Oral Tradition of a People," in Hispanic/Latino Theology, 104 16; Jeanette Rodr?guez-Holgu?n, "La Tierra: Home, Identity, and Destiny," in From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Systematic Theology, ed. Orlando O. Espin and Miguel H. Diaz (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1999), 189-208.

4 Benjam?n Valentin, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity, and Difference (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2002), 9.


110 Jouirnal of Feminist Studies in Religioni

riences they attempt to represent. This creates an uncertainty for the Latino/a theologian in relationship to her or his community of accountability and the academy. "Hispanic theologians need also be cognizant of both the privileged (if not uncomfortable) position we occupy in the middle by virtue of our educa tion and employment and the marginalization we encounter in the academy, the society, and the churches on the basis of the voices and experiences we attempt to bring to the table."5 Smith highlights this in her recognition of how Native authors often come to represent the entire Native voice uncritically, because of the little contact non-Natives have with Native peoples. Therefore, Smith argues, Native feminist liberation theologies should emphasize the material conditions of Native women versus identity politics. I would argue, nonethe less, that this does not let the Native theologian off the hook in terms of Nanko's critique. All U.S. minority theologians occupy that ambiguous space as elite and oppressed simultaneously.

The final point I wish to highlight opens Smith's essay: the relationship between Native religiosity and theology. As Smith points out, for many Native religious scholars, theology, liberation theology in particular, is not the most appropriate starting point for discussing Native religiosity. This is due to the

Western epistemological foundation that scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr. claim is the foundation of these theological perspectives. Similarly, the field of com parative religious studies does not fare much better under Smitlh's pen. In spite of these critiques, however, it is clear that Smith's work is best situated under the heading of liberation theologies, as her title readily asserts.

Questioning the viability of liberation theologies for minority peoples is not exclusive to Native communities. Latino/a theologians define themselves as bridge people, straddling the First and Third Worlds. Caught between two cultures, the dominant Anglo culture of the United States and Latin American Latino/a culture, Latino/a theologians are also trapped between two different understandings of the theological task: European/Euroamerican theologies and Latin American theologies of liberation. For Manuel J. Mejido this creates a fundamental problematic within Latino/a theology in its attempt to reconcile these radically different discourses and their accompanying worldviews.6 The former discourse is rooted in the European Enlightenment and modernity, the latter informed by Latin America's marginalization to the underside of moder nity. While Mejido is perhaps too strong in his dualistic presentation of these worldviews, he nonetheless raises the important point of the tensions within

5 Carmen Nanko, "Justice Crosses the Border: The Preferential Option for the Poor in the United States," in Religion and Justice: A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, ed. Maria Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodr?guez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 196.

6 Manuel J. Mejido, "The Fundamental Problematic of U.S. Hispanic Theology," in New Horizons in Hispanic Latino (a) Theology, ed. Benjam?n Valentin (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2003), 172.



Latino/a culture, where the mestizaje and mulatez of Africa, indigenous, and Spanish create a worldview that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, Smith argues, one cannot claim that Native cultures have not been "tainted" by

the dominant society. Smith emphasizes the ethical demands of liberation theology. She also

argues that theology is important because Native women activists theologize when "they are articulating what they perceive to be the relationship between spirituality, liberation, and the vision of the world they hope to cocreate." In spite of this claim, however, I find little theology in Smith's essay. Yes, it is clear that her work is situated within the political and ethical concerns of liberation theologies, most notable on the question of empire and identity politics. Yet I find scant theological content to this piece and instead a heavy emphasis on the theoretical. If Native feminist liberation theologies want to make a concrete contribution to theological discourse in general and liberation theologies in par ticular, these theologies must explicitly engage the field of theology, which, in

my eyes, entails addressing the classic loci and themes of theology through Na tive eyes. I realize Smith may accuse me of asking her to become too Western in her thought.

Nonetheless, if one self-names as a theologian then one must do theology, albeit challenging and transforming the discipline through one's particular social location. The question of identity politics is vital, for, as Ada Maria Isasi-Dfaz notes, "to be able to name oneself is one of the most powerful acts a human person can do. A name is not just a word by which one is identified. A name also provides the conceptual framework, the mental constructs that are used in thinking, understanding, and relating to a person."7 This moment of critical self-disclosure must be followed by constructive theological work. If not, I fear, Native feminist liberation theology will not impact the theological academy and will be read solely for insight into identity politics.8

A conversation between Native and Latina feminist theologies is a vital proj ect that dares both theological voices to further their theological work. Were I to reverse my theological gaze, I would offer the following areas as challenges

7 Ada Maria Isasi-D?az, "Mujeristas: A Name of Our Own," in The Future of Liberation Theology: Essays in Honor of Gustavo Guti?rrez, ed. Marc C. Ellis and Otto Maduro (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 410.

8 This emphasis on identity comes at a cost. Valentin's warning to Latino/a theologies is one all liberation theologies should consider. He argues that given Latino/a theology's strong empha sis on culture, identity, and difference, it has "given too little attention to the critical scrutiny of the multifaceted matrices that impinge upon the realization of a broader emancipatory political project and energy. As important as it is, I believe that the emphasis on specific localization that undergirds much of our liberationist discourse, which lends itself to an insular enchantment with matters of culture, identity, and difference, is too narrow to foster the kinds of overarching and harmonizing emancipatory visions that the goal of social justice requires in our time" (Valentin, Mapping Public Theology, xiv).


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the Native voice poses to Latinas: the uncritical and ad hoc manner in which Latina theologians appropriate indigenous culture; the notion of mestizaje as a manner of diluting indigenous history and culture; and a neglect of the func tion of power within Latino/a identity making, where the Spanish is always the dominant. I hope such questions and more can be addressed as these theologi cal voices continue their journeys, ones that are not parallel but which intersect and overlap perhaps more closely than one would initially suspect.

RESPONSE Sylvester Johnson

Smith invites us to observe critical features of colonialism and what these imply for Native studies. Among these is the fact that colonialism has been integral to the U.S. nation-state. The genocide of Native Americans has been essential and integral to fulfilling the imperatives of U.S. nationalism and ex pansion.' At the same time, the nation is a sacred principle, and it should come as no surprise that well-meaning liberal critiques of U.S. imperialism do not problematize the roots of violence in America itself but rather seek to portray imperialism and colonial violence as quintessentially un-American and foreign to the history of an American ethos, as a betrayal of a genuine American patrio tism. To paraphrase E1mile Durkheim, to do otherwise would mean violating the taboo against desecrating the totemic nation.

Yet breaching such a taboo is precisely what Smith calls for. I believe Smith is right to recognize the value of Native feminist responses as theory and as radi cal, insofar as Native women's activism and careful analysis have made visible the roots of hatred, genocide, and brutality within the U.S. nation-state, as part and parcel of an American ethos, not as a deviation from this ethos. In her effort to infuse Native studies with the critical orientation proffered by the theology of Native feminist activists, Smith aims to locate the analytical terrain of this theology on the map of theory.

I want to respond particularly to Smith's central contention that theology (the master's house) is a useful means by which to dismantle the colonialist im plements of heteropatriachal nationalism (the master's tools, if I have correctly parsed her analogy). Smith insightfully explains why Native American feminist theology makes a difference in the interpretation of power, religious belief, and the nation-state. "Liberation theology," she says, "brings to Native studies an explicit concern for the victims of colonialism."

1 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Con quest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976).



This open commitment to postcolonial victims is the dominant impetus for articulating ethical norms and an interpretive framework in Native American liberation theology. Smith implies that the discipline of comparative religious studies, by contrast, foregoes articulating an explicit ethical agenda allied in the interests of such victims, opting instead for intellectual neutrality and objectiv ity. This latter implication is more often than not the case, but important excep tions are patent.

The decisive issue, it seems to me, is the analytic that governs assessments of power and the scope of inquiry. This is evident in a number of academic dis ciplines. Whether in cultural studies, religious studies, or theology, for instance, African American intellectuals have attempted to foreground the strategies whereby racial supremacy has obtained in dehumanizing forms of represen tation, physical death or violence, and psychological terror. The same pattern is evident with feminist theory, Jewish studies, or postcolonial discourses. All demonstrate some explicit commitment to examining social suffering as a problem. Such studies also assume an ethical orientation patently condemn ing violence and openly identifying with victims of such violence. All of these analytics have emerged in direct relationship to empirical histories of violence, genocide, repression, terror, and so on. The body of theory represented in the works of Judith Butler or Michel Foucault, for instance, is not theology, but their writing explicitly condemns heteropatriarchal violence and has direct ethi cal implications.

What determines the analytical vectors in these discourses, then, is not the ology versus religious studies but rather an intellectual stance toward social suf fering that might feature in any discipline or discourse. Such a stance examines violence as a subject meriting keen intellectual attention and critical explana tion that aids solutions to social problems. For this reason, I think Smith is correct to argue that "the master's house" of theology (with its analytical inflec tion as articulated by Native feminist activists) has much to contribute toward dismantling the veritable problems of nationalism.

This same point might become obvious by recognizing, conversely, that theological discourse is not innately or inevitably committed to victims of social suffering. From Abiel Abbot's sermonic defense of Native American genocide to John Saffin's vigorous theological promotion of slavery to contemporary para church movements aiming to outlaw homosexuality in America, it is evident that theological discourse has often suppressed the rights of victims or rendered invisible the reality of human rights abuses.2 This is, I surmise, the point of

2 Abiel Abbot, Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to An cient Israel (Haverhill, Mass.: Moore and Stebbins, 1799). For a discussion on John Saffin, see Paul Griffin, Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999), 31. For discus sion of contemporary para-church movements, see Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).



Smith's emphasis on liberation theology, which is characterized by its emphasis on addressing social suffering.

Smith's effort to incorporate Western discourses or disciplinary orientations for decolonizing work is related to another important point she makes. She ad dresses the reticence of some Native American writers who reject theology as a hopeless, irredeemably Western exercise. In sharp departure from this stance, she rightly notes that the comparative study of religion (often embraced vis-a vis theology) has been no less entangled in the problems of colonizing strate gies. The practice of studying religion actually emerged as a means of adminis tering colonial authority over conquered peoples, fundamentally depending on categories such as "primitive" and "archaic" that derive from a racist semiotics of "non-whites" and supremacist characterizations of non-Western peoples.3

It would be misguided, however, to assume that religious studies is merely a tool of colonial oppression that renders no valuable insight into histories of power or genealogies of violence. One need only devote cursory attention to the myriad studies of religion that make visible the problems of colonialism itself and Western hegemony in order to appreciate the fact that actually studying re ligion is regularly, if not consistently, a vital part of the array of critical responses to social suffering imposed through nationalism and colonialism.

On a different note, Smith also examines the difficulty that arises when writers who address issues affecting peoples of color are viewed as the official voices of a racial or ethnic community. There is no easy solution to this conun drum. On this score, I would offer that the expectation to speak out on issues of human rights and social justice without being identified by various audiences as a spokesperson or representative of a particular social group is an unfair and unrealistic burden. Clearly, it is imperative to maintain the autonomy of various communities and to aid, not suppress, the complex views and interests within any social group. No interlocutor should promote herself or himself as spokes person for an entire body of people. At the same time, no person genuinely committed to confronting social problems should forego doing so out of fear of being seen as an interpreter for his or her "people."

Smith raises a challenge that is no less than radical insofar as she makes visible the roots of violent systems in the United States. To date, the intensified demands for purifying American society of foreign elements, (re)establishing a Christian state, and elevating a heterosexist notion of "family" to constitutional law have become the most visible manifestations of zealous nationalism.4 The nexus between the modern nation-state and the hatred and violence rooted in heterosexism urgently demands careful analytical attention, and the alternative

3 David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottes ville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

4 Goldberg, Kingdom Coming, 62-66.



arrangements of power and identity attested among Native nations should serve as an important corrective.

We must shed the myth of innocence that attends popular conceptions of marriage and the violence of patriarchal, heterosexual identity. Contrary to popular sentiment, marriage is not a gift from any God or gods. It is a sys tem of human origin applied to configure arrangements of human power and provision. Insofar as marriage is a heteropatriarchal institution, the system has routinely compromised the ability of women to control their own lives.5 Only

when individuals have taken liberty to modify traditional arrangements, so that women have greater control over reproduction and economic power, has this effect been mitigated.

I take Smith's directives concerning theology of Native feminist activism and Native studies to be instructive for all of us across disciplines. We must re ject the misguided essentialisms embedded in a West-versus-the-rest binarism in order to embrace a more honest and earnest approach to solving social prob lems. The scholarship, activism, and public policy initiatives generated within

Western institutional contexts or discourses, as empirical data, should put to rest any claims that nothing is to be gained through recourse to Western strate gies or institutional structures.

Most valuable, I think, is Smith's challenge to speak honestly and forth rightly about American nationalism. Textbook writers should dispense with the mythological na0vete attending most narratives of the American past. James Loewen has persuasively argued that American students are routinely unfamil iar with the horrific violence that has been a central part of America's past (such as the genocide orchestrated by the federal government against Native Ameri cans).6 After being told throughout their schooling that America's history has been ceaseless good with no major problems, most Americans are ill prepared to recognize the function of extremist violence in the nation's past, and they rou tinely equate colonialism with dreamy images of brave explorers merely making the world a better place.7

U.S. America is marked by a complex history of progressive democratic ide alism, on the one hand, and strategies of hatred and violence, on the other. And these seemingly opposed legacies, as Orlando Patterson has ably demonstrated, are often linked (for example, freedom has often meant the liberty to dominate or enslave others).8 I would echo, however, Smith's contention that destruc

5 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

6 James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1996).

7 Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004).

8 Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1998).


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tive patterns are neither natural nor inevitable. Given a willingness to address historical problems, it is possible to learn from these problems and to promote corrective strategies in the future.

RESPONSE Tink Tinker

Andrea Smith touches on some of the complexities inherent in a long-term colonial arrangement such as characterizes the American Indian/euro-White relationship.' Indeed, one idiosyncratic particularity of indigenous peoples over other kinds of liberation movements is that the master's tools, particularly the tools of euro-western discourse and its ensuing political structures, belong to such a different worldview and realm of human experience that they tend to be destructive for American Indian peoples, even when we learn to use them ourselves with some fluidity. Native sovereignty, and hence Native liberation, mandates that we tread very carefully down the path of analytic discourse and in our own creation of political structures. I am deeply appreciative of Smith's essay and hope that my own thoughts will push us a little further down the road toward a legitimate Native expression of sovereignty.

In late summer 1994, the president of the United States invited all the American Indian national ("tribal") chairpersons to an event in the Rose Garden at his White House residence. This was a liberal president by some accounts, and this was an extraordinary event at such a late moment in the colonialist/ capitalist dominance of the continent. At the height of the gathering, the presi dent spoke and graciously reassured the national chairpersons that the United States fully intended to respect its government-to-government relationship with

1 My use of the lower case for such adjectives as "english," "christian," "protestant," "catho lic," "european," and "american" is intentional. While nouns naming religious groups might be capitalized out of respect for each Christian?as for each Muslim or Buddhist?using the lower case "christian" or "biblical" for adjectives allows readers to avoid unnecessary normativizing or universalizing of the principal institutional religious quotient of the Euro-west. Likewise, I avoid capitalizing such national or regional adjectives as american, amer-european, european, euro western, and so on. It is important to my argumentation that people recognize the historical artifi ciality of modern regional and nation-state social constructions. For instance, who decides where the "continent" of Europe ends and that of Asia begins? Similarly, who designates the western half of north America as a separate continent clearly divided by the Mississippi River, or alternatively the Rocky Mountains? My initial reasoning extends to other adjectival categories and even some nominal categories, such as euro, and political designations like right and left. Quite paradoxically, I know, I insist on capitalizing White (adjective or noun) to indicate a clear cultural pattern in vested in Whiteness that is all too often overlooked or even denied by american Whites. Moreover, this brings parity to the insistence of African Americans on the capitalization of the word Black in reference to their own community. Likewise, I always capitalize Indian and American Indian.



Indian "tribes."2 While the gesture was deeply comforting to the White Ameri can left, many Indian activists were appalled that "our" political leaders, the chairpersons of each Indian nation, swallowed this gambit hook, line, and sinker

without a whimper. When, they asked themselves, had Indian sovereignty been reduced to a government-to-government relationship-not unlike, I suppose, the relationship of the U.S. government to that of Dade County, the city of

Miami, or the state of Florida? Whatever happened to the nation-to-nation re lationship that every treaty signed between the United States and any Indian nation legally affirmed? Yet, as far as I can remember, not one of these Indian leaders objected to the language at that moment. Rather, all were enamored

with the possibilities of finding new avenues for making what Smith calls het eropatriarchy work in the interests of their "tribe." With minds fully colonized, they bought into the very system that engaged in genocide against our peoples in order to steal the continent from its aboriginal owners. And now, our duly elected leaders look to that same system for some measure of equity, hoping this time to make it work for Indian peoples.

Perhaps the greatest challenge lying in the path of Native sovereignty is the extent to which too many of our people have had their minds thoroughly colonized, including (perhaps especially) those of us who have earned Ph.D. degrees.3 A common result is that we cannot see much further beyond the nor mative givenness of the discourses of heteropatriarchy than can the White lib

2 The "government-to-government" language continues to pervade U.S. federal government jargon with regard to their responsibilities to Indian peoples. It is a most artful way to sidestep real responsibilities and to maintain the old colonial relationship. "Memorandum on Government to-Government Relations with Native American Tribal Governments," http://www.cr.nps.gov/ nagpra/AGENCIES/Clinton_Memorandum.htm (accessed June 16,2006); "Government-to-Gov ernment Relations with Native American Tribal Governments," Federal Register (May 4, 1994), http://www.epa.gov/indian/clinton.htm (accessed June 16, 2006); "Government-to-Government Relationships," http://www.alaskanativeresources.com/gtog.html (accessed June 16, 2006); http:// www.hud.gov/offices/pih/ih/regs/govtogov_tcp.cfm (accessed June 28, 2001); and Mel Martinez, Secretary, Executive Order 13084 of May 14, 1998, http://www.senate.gov/~scia/13084.htm (ac cessed June 16, 2006). A simple Google search will demonstrate the depth of U.S. government use of the rhetoric. Indeed, government-to-government language is largely limited to U.S. govern ment texts. A Web search for nation-to-nation usages will demonstrate an equally large number of usages, but it is completely absent in U.S. government language.

3 Early postcolonial theorists who described the extent to which many colonized people have been swallowed up into the discourses of colonial political structures, psychology, economics, academics, and even the arts include Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Londres: Heinemann, 1986). Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota) addresses the concern from an American Indian perspective in her volume Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth (Urbana: University of Il linois Press, 2001). Taiaiake Alfred (Kahnaw?ke: Mohawk) names the colonizing reality in native "self-government" and points to a genuinely liberating struggle in Was?se: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005).


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eral left. Our Indian politicians want a new policy here and there to address one inequity or another, seemingly unaware that they are merely strengthening the metanarrative of heteropatriarchy and the modern state's suffocation of all indigenous values and cultural practices. Indigenous academics all too often think they must mirror the discourses laid out in Indian studies by our colonial

masters in anthropology, theology, or even comparative religious studies.4 Al bert Memmi, commenting on the simultaneously destructive and constructive bond between colonizer and colonized, rightfully recognized that, "in order for the [colonizer's] legitimacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave [dispossessed, disenfranchised, or reduced to "civilization"], he must also accept his [sic] role."5 As Lumbee legal scholar Robert Williams has said so eloquently, the conquest will never be complete until all normative divergence on the part of the colonized ends.6 We Native peoples seem forever to oscil late between resistance and compliance. To this extent then, too many euro

western-educated American Indians have learned to use the master's tools but are simply helping the master to build (remodel?) his own house-trying to make sure, albeit, that there is a decent nook for Indian folk (in other words, what's left of our cultures and the superficial mouthing of our values) some where in back of the house.

If we are to revision native sovereignty, attention to a few critical agenda items is absolutely necessary:

1. We need to understand that there can be no change in the native enact ment of sovereignty without a concomitant shift in the euro-american vision of their own sovereignty and the privileging of White men that comes with that notion of modern nationalism and statehood. That is to say that White American males must radically challenge the heteronormative privileging of the patriar chic nuclear family. To think that somehow Indian communities can live out a new sense of our own sovereignty without radical change in the ways that the artificial nation-state around us conducts its affairs is simply shortsighted. Smith

4 Smith's critique of comparative religions as a new modality for investigating and describ ing Native peoples and their traditions is again right on target. While the device is new in some re spects, the colonial enterprise is just as pronounced along with the explicitly presumed superiority of White academic analysts as somehow objective in ways that Native practitioners are incapable. I would press the issue even further. Comparative study of religions still introduces its own particu lar euro-discourse about religion. It may not do this in a strictly theological framework. Indeed, it uses a more pseudoscientific modality with a discrete set of category signifiers. In any case, as long as the euro-scholar has the privilege of finally naming the Native practice, belief, or categories of cognition, they, the presumed objective outsider and not Native peoples, are in control, perpetuat ing the colonial relationships through a new device.

5 Albert Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 89.

6 Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).



makes this point, but I would emphasize it even more strongly. It is time to radi cally and fundamentally challenge the givenness of the modern nation-state.

To borrow African American historian Vincent Harding's striking meta phor, it will never suffice simply to remodel the master's house to make room for those of us who have been historically excluded or marginalized. Merely to remodel (or reform) the colonizer's house continues to build on the colonizer's architectural imagination as somehow the normative expression of social struc ture at a metanarrative level. The modern state, then, becomes an immutable given, even though it is fundamentally predicated on heteronormative princi ples, on the deeply rooted existing racial-gender-class structures that have per vaded the emergence of politics, economics, intellectual thought, and human relationships in the modern world of late colonial capitalism.7 The question is, how can we design and build a new house, one in which everyone is fully in vested, instead of simply finding ways to give the colonized Other some room in the existing big house?

2. After more than five hundred years of european colonization in the Americas (and in most of the world), native people will have to pay explicit and careful attention to the extent to which our own minds have been co-opted by the discourses of the colonizer. Too often, our own solutions tend to be new policy strategies that concede the validity of the heteronormative colonial sys tem now in place.

3. We need to become more focused in our attempts to recover the best of our own historical cultural values and traditions rather than create some new language based on the discourses of our colonizer. In this regard, I probably have a somewhat different take on liberation theology than does Smith and find myself somewhat closer to the perspectives expressed by Vine Deloria Jr. which, of course, Smith herself in no way disavows. Liberation is imperative if native peoples are to survive in the future in ways that may prove useful both to Indians and to the colonizer settler population that surrounds us today. The question may be whether liberation theology is the focus on liberation or free dom that can best capture the liberatory needs of our folk. Does theology name a category that can be useful in our decolonization struggle? Or is the category so co-opted by colonial Christianity (in its postmodern liberal manifestation) as to disallow its use outside of that religious community?8 Since I use the word

7 It should be obvious at this point that I count myself among those who find talk of a post modern moment to be a ludic absurdity, a simulacrum of rationality. Of course, the world is chang ing. But the structures that are generating what is new are still those that established heteronorma tivity and its continuing metanarrative.

8 One key problematic, of course, is that the word "theology" is predicated on the greek word theos, a word that very early came to signify a concept foreign to all Indian peoples in north America. In another venue, I will argue that neither god nor God is an appropriate translation for the Osage concept o?wakonda. See Viola F. Cordova, "The European Concept of Usen: An Ameri



myself, I simply want to leave the questions on the table and move to another, clearer inference that I have outlined and defended elsewhere. Namely, in terms of christian liberation theology, I have argued that liberation for Indian peoples may ultimately and necessarily involve Indian people saying no to Jesus in favor of reclaiming the ancient traditions of our peoples.9

4. We need to broaden the discourse about native understandings of gen der in the American Indian world, particularly with regard to the balancing of gender identities inherent in most north american tribal communities. Without overessentializing either Indian women or Indian communities, Barbara Mann has taken us a long way down this path with her Iroquoian Women.'0 Most communities historically had devices intended for balancing gender power and privileging women in ways that the advent of colonialism and conquest thor oughly disrupted.

Churches, in particular, through their missionizing efforts and schools, tried explicitly to destroy Indian cultures and their ancient ceremonial (religious) tra ditions. Implanting notions of male dominance was high on the curricular list, along with the destruction of Native languages and the conversion of children to english-only speakers. Boarding schools were not only patently racist institu tions for Indian children, but they also intentionally impressed Victorian gender and class structures in the young minds of their wards. For instance, young In dian girls were taught to be subservient to men generally and White women; in other words, to buy in to the sexist structures that had already long insured that

White women live a defined subservience to their men." What we know is that the fundamental structures of existence in the tra

ditional Indian world have made it possible (and even imperative) for women to participate in a more balanced structure of power within their communities than has colonial Christianity.'2 To provide just one example, let me describe

can Aboriginal Text," in Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods, ed. Jace Weaver (New York: Orbis, 1998), 26-32. Cordova is Mescalero Apache; usen is the Athabascan equivalent of the Osage concept wakonda.

9 I wrote the essay under the title "American Indian Liberation: Paddling a Canoe Up stream." Miguel de la Torre was constrained to change the title to fit his own editorial project so that it appeared as "American Indian Traditions," in The Handbook of U.S. Liberation Theologies, ed. Miguel de la Torre (St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press, 2004), 330-46.

10 Barbara A. Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2000).

11 See Smith's chapter "Boarding School Abuses and the Case for Reparations," in her Con quest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2005), 35-54. Also see my preface, "Tracing a Contour of Colonialism: American Indians and the Trajectory of Educational Imperialism," in Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, by Ward Churchill (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2004), xiii-xli.

12 It is not inconsequential, as Smith notes in another publication, that some 40 percent of White women taken captive by Indians in New England chose to remain in those Indian commu



briefly the foundational religious imagination of wakonda in an Osage tradi tional context, a concept that might roughly be thought to reference a "sacred Other" in euro-theology.13 Among the Osage peoples the concept was a con crete experience, but one that certainly did not create a privileging of males over females. Rather, wakonda was experienced first of all as a bi-gender re ality, as both male and female. Instead of a "father god" who dominated the textual and experiential world of religion for euro-western Christians, Osages historically experienced wakonda as wakonda monshita and wakonda udseta, as Above and Below, as grandfather and grandmother.14 Thus the unknowable becomes an experiential known, but it is terribly important that it makes itself known as a reciprocal duality of both female and male and does not impose a religious structure that narrowly privileges one gender over the other-or others!-since Indian peoples certainly did not limit themselves to the binary gender duality of the euro-west.'5

nities when they had the opportunity to return home. See June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); and Smith, Conquest, 20.

13 "Sacred Other," of course, works no better in Indian cultural contexts than does the ubiq uitous euro-theological referent "god" or the more technical theological word "theos." I will ad dress more fully the difficulties involved in using the english word "sacred" as a translation cipher for Indian concepts such as the Osage wakon in a forthcoming book.

14 See Tink Tinker, "Osage Religious Traditions," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 15 vols., ed. Lindsay Jones (New York: Thomson-Gale, 2005), 10:6916-19.

15 American Indian communities typically did not engage in the homophobia typical of the euro-west. Rather, our social structures carefully made room for those biological males and fe males who are usually marginalized in euro-western and especially amer-european societies as gays and lesbians or, more broadly, GLBT. Not only can we speak of "third and fourth" genders, but the construction of these four genders also allows for more fluidity in personal gender identity options. Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998), is one of the few lucid writers on the general phenomenon among north American Indian peoples and offers a fairly balanced and nuanced interpretation. Most aca demic treatments of the berdache or "two-spirited" person in the Indian world seem to be written by White gay and lesbian writers who finally have little more breadth or depth of understanding of Indian people than just seeing them as what Terry Tafoya calls the "anthropological keepers of knowledge." Terry Tafoya, "M. Dragonfly: Two-Spirit and the Tafoya Principle of Uncertainty," in Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, ed. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 195. The literature on berdache is quite extensive and can be sampled from Roscoe's Bibliography of Ber dache and Alternative Gender Roles among North American Indians (New York: Haworth Press,

1987); Will Roscoe, "A Bibliography of Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles among North American Indians," Journal of Homosexuality 14, nos. 3-4 (1987): 81-171; or from sampling the citations in the more recent collection of essays in which Tafoya (above) published.


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Roundtable - Native First Nation Theology by Andrea Smith and Respondents

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