.. I think an attitude that says “I’m here to save these people from their own culture by making them more like me” is a major red flag and has the possibility to cause more harm than good.
Outside current secular/carnal gov policies, has this approach been at all common in Christian missionaries for .. 100+ years? At what point can criticisms of early missionaries be given a rest?
When they stop doing it. Change is happening, but it’s slow.
When I was in high school, I visited Ukraine with a German Baptist youth group. In Kiev, we met an American missionary who emphasized to me several times that missions in poor countries was easier because poorer people are more willing to accept whatever it is that missionaries are offering than wealthier people. Even at the time this attitude left a bad taste in my mouth because it felt exploitive.
Missiology has been dealing with some of these questions for the past twenty years. When I was in seminary, some of the most interesting things I read and studied was Missiology because it recognized and wrestled with this problematic history. And no, this kind of stuff is more recent than 100 years ago.
Unfortunately, theory and what happens on the ground are often two different things.
Last edited by Szdfan on Mon Sep 04, 2023 6:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
.. I think an attitude that says “I’m here to save these people from their own culture by making them more like me” is a major red flag and has the possibility to cause more harm than good.
Outside current secular/carnal gov policies, has this approach been at all common in Christian missionaries for .. 100+ years? At what point can criticisms of early missionaries be given a rest?
When they stop doing it. Change is happening, but it’s slow.
There are several forum members who are working or who have worked in missions. Do you object to their work?
i haven’t detected anything to criticize.
.. I think an attitude that says “I’m here to save these people from their own culture by making them more like me” is a major red flag and has the possibility to cause more harm than good.
Outside current secular/carnal gov policies, has this approach been at all common in Christian missionaries for .. 100+ years? At what point can criticisms of early missionaries be given a rest?
When they stop doing it. Change is happening, but it’s slow.
Past events always inform the present. And the consequences of those events can ripple forward for generations.
For example, how many conservative Anabaptist families still have volumes of Martyrs Mirror on their shelves? One might similarly ask at what point do we give those ancient stories of Martyrdom a rest? The events they recount are MANY centuries deeper in the distant past than even the oldest US government policy towards Native Americans.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
Szdfan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 12:06 pm
I haven't been to reservations in Canada, but I've been to reservations in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. I assume that some of the same problems that happen on reservations in Canada happen in the US as well. I've visited what used to be called the Hopi Mission School in Kykotsmovi Village, Arizona. The school is affiliated with MCUSA and I had a college friend spend a year in VS there.
While there are issues with HMS, I don't think it's in the same category as the residential schools. While the school does have some boarders, the majority of its students are from the community. That wasn't the case with the residential schools -- their intention was to separate children from their families and assimilate them. The most famous residential school is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which included thousands of children from the Lakota, Ojibwe, Cherokee, Apache, Cheyenne, Alaska Native, Iroquois Seneca and Oneida tribes. Why send children thousands of miles from their families to Pennsylvania unless the point is to intentionally sever and weaken their family relationships in order to assimilate them into another culture? Those policies fit the modern definition of genocide.
Your response reminds me of Richard Henry Pratt's (founder of Carlisle) motto: "Kill the Indian, save the man." Yes, the situations on the reservations are often desperate, but why are they that way? What happens to a people who have had their land stolen, their children acculturated and their culture repressed? What kind of trauma has US and Canadian policy inflicted on the native tribes over the past few hundred years that now manifests itself in the kind of dysfunctions you're describing? What role have Christian missionaries played in that trauma?
The residential schools were part of a genocidal policy by the US and Canadian governments to eradicate the indigenous cultures. That is a historical fact. We are now living with the consequences of those policies.
Sort of changing the subject, but this post reminds me of why conservative Mennonites are loath to send their young people to Universities. Very similar concerns. Cultural genocidal organizations indeed.
temporal1 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 6:02 pm
Outside current secular/carnal gov policies, has this approach been at all common in Christian missionaries for .. 100+ years? At what point can criticisms of early missionaries be given a rest?
When they stop doing it. Change is happening, but it’s slow.
There are several forum members who are working or who have worked in missions. Do you object to their work?
i haven’t detected anything to criticize.
I have already written in this thread that I don’t object to mission work. I’m a former missionary kid. My Dad continues to be involved in church and mission work for the Russian Baptists.
Here’s what I wrote in the post you quoted from:
Now I don’t believe this history means that Christians shouldn’t engage in missions today, but I do think that this history has to inform current approaches and methodologies. Send missionaries who are culturally literate in the culture they are working in. Whenever possible, partner with local indigenous churches and support their mission efforts. Be humble and try to learn as much as possible from the culture you’re serving in. Ask the question: what does church and a faith community look like in the culture you’re serving in?
Last edited by Szdfan on Mon Sep 04, 2023 6:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
RZehr wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 6:15 pm
Sort of changing the subject, but this post reminds me of why conservative Mennonites are loath to send their young people to Universities. Very similar concerns. Cultural genocidal organizations indeed.
I understand that concern and why CMs might not want their children to pursue higher education. However, I think there’s a huge difference between voluntarily choosing not to attend university and government policy that forces your children to attend boarding school thousands of miles away in order to acculturate them. Only one of these things is cultural genocide.
Szdfan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 12:06 pm
I haven't been to reservations in Canada, but I've been to reservations in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. I assume that some of the same problems that happen on reservations in Canada happen in the US as well. I've visited what used to be called the Hopi Mission School in Kykotsmovi Village, Arizona. The school is affiliated with MCUSA and I had a college friend spend a year in VS there.
While there are issues with HMS, I don't think it's in the same category as the residential schools. While the school does have some boarders, the majority of its students are from the community. That wasn't the case with the residential schools -- their intention was to separate children from their families and assimilate them. The most famous residential school is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which included thousands of children from the Lakota, Ojibwe, Cherokee, Apache, Cheyenne, Alaska Native, Iroquois Seneca and Oneida tribes. Why send children thousands of miles from their families to Pennsylvania unless the point is to intentionally sever and weaken their family relationships in order to assimilate them into another culture? Those policies fit the modern definition of genocide.
Your response reminds me of Richard Henry Pratt's (founder of Carlisle) motto: "Kill the Indian, save the man." Yes, the situations on the reservations are often desperate, but why are they that way? What happens to a people who have had their land stolen, their children acculturated and their culture repressed? What kind of trauma has US and Canadian policy inflicted on the native tribes over the past few hundred years that now manifests itself in the kind of dysfunctions you're describing? What role have Christian missionaries played in that trauma?
The residential schools were part of a genocidal policy by the US and Canadian governments to eradicate the indigenous cultures. That is a historical fact. We are now living with the consequences of those policies.
Sort of changing the subject, but this post reminds me of why conservative Mennonites are loath to send their young people to Universities. Very similar concerns. Cultural genocidal organizations indeed.
Sure. There is a parallel of sorts. But not many conservative Mennonite youth have been kidnapped against their will and sent to universities where they are stripped of their clothing, language, and roots. And punished for even speaking of it.
If the US government kidnapped entire generations of Amish youth, forbade them to dress or speak as Amish, forbade them from using their given names, punished and jailed their parents if they objected, and subjected them to physical abuse, forced labor, and sexual abuse you would be closer to the mark.
It is the coercion that people object to. If mission groups simply set up churches and schools on the edges of reservations or Indian towns that people could voluntarily attend if they chose to that would be one thing. But that isn't what happened. Yes times have changed. But we are still dealing with the effects of those policies. And there are still living generations of people who experienced that coercion and abuse first-hand.
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A fool can throw out more questions than a wise man can answer. -RZehr
ken_sylvania wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 5:08 pmThe Gospel of Jesus Christ, even when presented by imperfect humans, is better than spriritual ignorance no matter the culture. I'm not pretending that mission work has been done perfectly, but Christian missionaries did not develop the US policy to wipe out indigenous culture. Maybe you think that it would have been better for the native people to retain their spirit worship, sun dances, and all the rest of their cultural trappings, but I cannot agree.
One of the principles that this country was founded on was freedom of religion. Kidnapping whole generations of indigenous children and shipping them across the country to religiously run schools as part of a deliberate policy to eradicate indigenous cultures and religions flies in the face of everything this nation stands for.
If you would read again what I wrote, instead of projecting all kinds of other things into what I wrote, you should be able to understand that I am in no way condoning such a thing.
Also, FWIW, "freedom of religion" as a founding principle of this country needs a ton of caveats. "Individual" freedom of religion was certainly not a founding principle.
Szdfan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 4:44 pm
I don't disagree with that, but who decides that what is being offered is actually better? Was acculturating indigenous people to Western culture really offering them something better or was it confusing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Western culture?
I disagree. While I think Christian missionaries in the past were probably sincere in their desire to reach indigenous people, they also carried with them their biases and prejudices. There's plenty of documentation that Christians were directly involved in US policy to wipe out indigenous culture and they saw that acculturation as part of the mission to spread the Gospel. One of the things I noticed in seminary is that there has been a lot of soul-searching in missiology and an attempt to make corrections to the past by emphasizing culturally literate forms of evangelism instead of trying to force everyone into the same box.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ, even when presented by imperfect humans, is better than spriritual ignorance no matter the culture. I'm not pretending that mission work has been done perfectly, but Christian missionaries did not develop the US policy to wipe out indigenous culture. Maybe you think that it would have been better for the native people to retain their spirit worship, sun dances, and all the rest of their cultural trappings, but I cannot agree.
I’m not saying that Christians developed the policies (but those lines get blurry when one considers the argument that the US is a “Christian nation”). What I am saying is that Christians participated in those policies and that evangelism was used by the US and European colonial empires as a tool for imperialism.
(Sidebar: I live about 1.5 hours from the Sand Creek massacre site. On November 29, 1864 Colonel John Chivington led the the Third Colorado Calvary in a massacre of Arapaho and Cheyenne who had already surrendered to the US Army. Chivington was an ordained Methodist minister. How do you even begin to separate between the “real” and “fake” Christians in this history?)
Missionaries who were part of colonialism brought with them the assumptions and racism of the culture they were a part of — mainly that white European culture was superior to the culture of the people they were colonializing and that their role wasn’t just to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but also acculturation. Christian missionaries and institutions participated in the trauma of indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.
Now I don’t believe this history means that Christians shouldn’t engage in missions today, but I do think that this history has to inform current approaches and methodologies. Send missionaries who are culturally literate in the culture they are working in. Whenever possible, partner with local indigenous churches and support their mission efforts. Be humble and try to learn as much as possible from the culture you’re serving in. Ask the question: what does church and a faith community look like in the culture you’re serving in?
I think an attitude that says “I’m here to save these people from their own culture by making them more like me” is a major red flag and has the possibility to cause more harm than good.
I'm curious whether you would, if possible, use your influence to save me from my current arrogance and cause me to become more like you?
I have several thoughts that might be relevant.
1. The institutions that did these things often still exist and staff who committed acts of violence and disregard for human life are still living and the survivors are still living, so it sounds very dismissive to assign this to the distant past.
2. Motive is important for assigning criminal intent but not so much for declaring exoneration. Institutions built with good intent can still cause harm.
3. Why was it ever considered acceptable for residential schools to have its own graveyard. This alone should be an indication something was amiss.
4. Christian culture has my entire life been on edge about government interference on many issues related to their children, yet many of the same people find it normative that the government should mandate placement of someone else's children to institutions.
In general, I think we could offer more sympathy to people who survived this.