South Dakota Synod: Keep your face on the gun and bridge the gap.

During the week after Easter, I attended the South Dakota Synod's Spring Theological Conference.  The theme of the conference was "Bridging the Cultures."  Specifically, the focus was on bridging the Euro-American culture to the Native American culture.  Dr. Kent Nerburn, the author of Neither Wolf Nor Dog, The Wolf at Twilight, Wisdom of Native Americans and many other books, was the key speaker for this event.  Nerburn is of Euro-American descent and wrote these books after his experiences with different nations of the indigenous people.

I read Neither Wolf Nor Dog prior to beginning my internship as a way to learn more about the culture that I was going to be experiencing.  One of the things that has stuck with me from this book was something Nerburn said about culture.  I can't find exactly where in the book it is, so I won't quote him directly, but it was something along the lines of acknowledging who you are and what your culture holds is key for entering into dialogue with people of other cultures.  And, once you know who you are, you need to maintain that in those dialogues.  Nerburn gave the example of non-Native people who like to come to a reservation and don themselves in turquoise jewelry and talk about the Indian people as if they are one of them.  As I've lived and worked in Pine Ridge, I've get this in mind.  Granted, the Lakota people aren't the turquoise type, but I've seen plenty of wasichu people come through who think that if they dress the part, that they will be accepted as Native.  I'm not Lakota though and I will never be Lakota.

At this conference, Nerburn spoke at a few sessions, but invited local Native people to present as well.  One of the most powerful things that Nerburn shared, to me anyway, was this:

"Do you stare at the blood on the ground or do you look at the common humanity?"

As a person whose skin looks like the early Christian colonizers, I represent the oppressor.  As a United States citizen, I am still the oppressor.  When I lived in Palestine, I was able to write it off and blame Israel as the oppressor of Palestine.  I could see the US funding and involvement in Israel's politics, but my country wasn't the one doing all of this.  My country was and is funding the Occupation, whether or not we want to believe.  Here, on the reservation, my country is still oppressing.

I've struggled with this, since I am only third and fourth generation American.  My brother often speaks passionately about how our people, the Irish immigrants, were oppressed and stigmatized during the major immigration area.  I appreciate this, Chip, I really do.  I also believe that we need to acknowledge how the US government affects and has affected the First Nations.

I can't remember who said this quote, since Nerburn quoted someone, but this person said:

"I am responsible not for the house I built, but for the house in which I live."

Boom.  That's where we respond as humans of 2013.  See, we can wax poetically about how it "wasn't me" or it "wasn't my ancestors" that committed the worst genocide of human history.  Adolf Hilter studied the US Government's mass-murder of the Native people for his work in Nazi Germany.  Similarly, though I don't know as much as I should about this, the key players in the Apartheid in South Africa also studied the work of the United States.

When we claim that it wasn't us, we deny that it happened.  We're staring up and avoiding that there is blood on the ground, the blood of thousands and thousands of people who were forced off their land, into boarding schools, away from their beliefs, values, culture, livelihoods and humanity.  We stripped people of their value, whether we were here or not.  One member of the Spirit Lake Reservation said, "I've learned good English, I'm a good Christian, but I'm now somebody else."  This man was stripped to look like the conqueror.

Now, don't go getting all white-guilt on me, because that's not helpful either.  While we have to acknowledge the blood on the ground, we also have to acknowledge the human beings sitting across from us at the table.  We have to read news articles with the wisdom to discern where the implicit racism lies.  We have to think critically about the statistics of people who are incarcerated.

Furthermore, we need to acknowledge the humanity in each individual.  By saying that Oprah is a successful black woman, we say that she is a "credit to her race" and her sex, because she is successful.  She then becomes the exception, rather than the norm.  Do we say that Bill Gates is a successful white man?  Generally not.

Someone asked, "What do we do in the face of this experience?"  My friend Jonathan, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said, "We have to make damn sure that it never happens to anyone again."

Because, friends, the last step in genocide is the denial of genocide.

This conference allowed important conversations happen and important voices to be heard, but it merely scratched the surface of bridging the cultural gap.

On a completely different note, one of the ways that I bridged a cultural gap at this conference was to participate in a South Dakota cultural activity.  I went trap shooting.  And, I'll be honest, I got pretty good at it.  The first rule of trap shooting though?  Keep your face on the gun.  For you city folks, trap shooting is when you use a shotgun to shoot at clay disks.  This vegetarian didn't shoot anything living.