Theological Perspectives for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Public Intellectuals for the Twenty-First Century

A. Isasi-Diaz, M. Fulkerson, R. Carbine, A. Isasi-Diaz, M. Fulkerson, R. Carbine

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137372222, 9781137371706
• eBook ISBN: 9781137372215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Rather than wield religion as a weapon or a ruse in irrational appeals, the book attempts to reimagine a shared American mythos and ethos, by reminding us of our shared stake in creating an America committed to the life of all peoples and species and to the full developments of our capabilities as an exercise of liberty.

PART I

Learning about “Our Nation” from La Lucha (The Struggle)

CHAPTER 1

The Indigenous Dream—A World without an “America”

Andrea Smith

Post 9/11, even radical scholars such as Judith Butler and Amy Kaplan framed George Bush’s policies as an attack on the US Constitution. For instance, Butler described Bush’s policies as a “suspension of law” (Butler 2004, 55) whereby the nation can, in the name of ”sovereignty,” act against “existing legal frameworks, civil, military, and international . . . Under this mantle of sovereignty, the state proceeds to extend its own power to imprison indefinitely a group of people without trial” (Butler 2004, 57). Essentially, Bush was accused of eroding US democracy and eroding civil liberties. Progressives were then called to uphold the law, defend US democracy, and protect civil liberties.

The question arises, however, what are we to do with the fact that, as Native scholar Luana Ross notes, genocide has never been against the law in the United States (Ross 1998, 15). On the contrary, Native genocide has been expressly sanctioned as the law. As legal scholar Sora Han points out, none of the post-9/11 governmental practices are actually extra-constitutional or extra-legal. In fact the US Constitution confers the right of the state to maintain itself over and above the rights of its citizenry (Han 2006). As Judith Butler has argued in her critique of “origin stories,” when we critique a contemporary context through an appeal to a prior state before “the fall,” we are necessarily masking power relations through the evocation of lost origins. In many even radical critiques of Bush’s war on terror, the US Constitution serves as an origin story—the Constitution is the prior condition of “democracy” preceding our fall into Bush’s “lawlessness.” The same is true of the genocide of indigenous people; the Constitution’s status as an origins story masks the genocide of indigenous peoples that is the foundation of the United States Constitution.

Native feminism provides a critical intervention in this discourse. Because the United States could not exist without the genocide of Native peoples, genocide is not a mistake or aberration of US democracy but is foundational to it. As Sandy Grande states in Red Pedagogy:

The United States is a nation defined by its original sin: the genocide of American Indians. . . . American Indian tribes are viewed as an inherent threat to the nation, poised to expose the great lies of U.S. democracy: that we are a nation of laws and not random power; that we are guided by reason and not faith; that we are governed by representation and not executive order; and finally, that we stand as a self-determined citizenry and not a kingdom of blood or aristocracy. . . . From the perspective of American Indians, “democracy” has been wielded with impunity as the first and most virulent weapon of mass destruction. (Grande 2004, 31–32)

Thus, the nation-state, particularly the United States, is not the bastion of freedom, with some of its ideals having been eroded under the Bush regime; the policies enacted during the Bush regime in fact are the fulfillment of the ideals of US democracy. While the United States claims to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all these are pursued at the expense of the Native nations that continued to be subjected to genocidal policies, the enslavement of Black peoples, and the exploitation of immigrant labor to enable this “happiness.” Rather than call for upholding the law, therefore, indigenous feminism calls on progressives to work against the law. Thus for those committed to decolonization, the indigenous dream for America would be its end. While it seems radical to call for the end of the United States, the fact that it seems radical to call for an end to settler colonialism demonstrates the extent to which settler colonialism has so effectively limited our political imaginaries.

Rethinking Sovereignty and Nationalist Struggle

In these “postcolonial” times, terms such as sovereignty and nation have gone out of fashion within the context of cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political theory, feminist theory, and so on. Nationalism and sovereignty, it is suggested, inevitably lead to xenophobia, intolerance, factionalism, and violence. All sovereignty or nationalist struggles, it seems, are headed down that slippery slope toward the ethnic cleansing witnessed in Bosnia. Conveniently, academics who live in countries that are not being colonized, and are thus sovereign, suddenly decide that the nations that continue to be colonized and from whose colonization they continue to benefit—for example, indigenous nations—should give up their claims to nationhood and sovereignty. The assumptions behind some of these analyses are that nations are to be equated with nation-states, or that the end goal of national liberation struggles must be the attainment of a state or state-like form of governance.

The colonial context under which indigenous women live provides them an opportunity to critically interrogate the contradictions between the United States articulating itself as a democratic country while simultaneously continuing to root itself in the past and current genocide of Native peoples. If we do not presume that the United States should or will always continue to exist as a nation-state, we create the space to reflect 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 interrelatedness and responsibility. These models of sovereignty are not based on a narrow definition of nation that would entail a closely bounded community and ethnic cleansing. For example, 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 acceptance 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. (Smith 2008, 259–260)

This approach to sovereignty coincides with a critique of Western notions of land as property. As Patricia Monture-Angus contends, indigenous nationhood is not based on control of territory or land but on relationship with and responsibility for the land.

Although Aboriginal Peoples maintain a close relationship with the land . . . it is not about control of the land . . . Earth is mother and she nurtures us all . . . it is the human race that is dependent on the earth and not vice versa . . . Sovereignty, when defined as my right to be responsible . . . requires a relationship with territory (and not a relationship based on control of that territory). . . . What must be understood then is that Aboriginal request to have our sovereignty respected is really a request to be responsible. I do not know of anywhere else in history where a group of people have had to fight so hard just to be responsible. (Monture-Angus 1999, 36)

It is within the realm of recognition in legal and cultural battles that Native peoples are forced to argue for their right to control to be recognized by the settler colonial state. In order to fight encroachment on their lands, indigenous peoples are forced to argue in courts that it is “their” land. What they cannot question within this system is the presumed relationship between peoples and land. That is, should land be a commodity to be controlled and owned by peoples? While arguing in the courts for “their land” might be necessary at times as a judicial strategy, it would be a mistake to presume that this is the most beneficial long-term political goal for Native peoples. As Glen Coulthard notes:

This battle for recognition can make even Native peoples forget that they have alternative genealogies than judicial decisions for their relationship to the land, relationships based on respect for land rather than control over territory, genealogies that fundamentally question nation-state forms of governance that are premised on control, exclusivity, domination and violence. The key problem with the politics of recognition when applied to the colonial context . . . [is that it] rests on the problematic assumption that the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples as distinct and self-determining agents is somehow dependent on their being granted recognition and institutional accommodation from the surrounding settler-state and society. . . . Not only will the terms of recognition tend to remain the property of those in power to grant to their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate, but also under these conditions, the Indigenous population will often come to see their limited and structurally constrained terms of recognition granted to them as their own. In effect, the colonized come to identify with “white liberty and white justice.” (Coulthard 2007)

Thus, thinking beyond “white liberty and white justice” necessarily requires a feminist analysis because the logics of heteropatriarchy fundamentally structure colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism.

To look at how heteropatriarchy is the building block of the US empire, we can turn to the writings of the Christian Right. For example, Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship Charles Colson makes the connection between homosexuality and the nation-state in his analysis of the war on terror, explaining that one of the causes of terrorism is same-sex marriage.

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-rearing 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. It’s like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who would use America’s depravity to recruit more snipers, more highjackers, and more suicide bombers.

When radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being “married” in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent—the kind they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. [We must preserve traditional marriage in order to] protect the United States from those who would use our depravity to destroy us. (Colson 2004)

The implicit assumption in this analysis is that heteropatriachy is the building block of empire. Colson is linking the well-being of the US empire to the well-being of the heteropatriarchal family. Heteropatriarchy is the logic that makes social hierarchy seem natural. Just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Consequently, when colonists first came to this land they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in Native communities because they realized that indigenous peoples would not accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not structured on the basis of social hierarchy, as was the case with many Native communities. In fact, colonists frequently complained about the lack of patriarchy within Native communities. Patriarchy in turns rests on a gender-binary system; hence, it is not a coincidence that colonizers also targeted indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model. In addition, gender violence is a primary tool of colonialism and white supremacy. Colonizers did not just kill off indigenous peoples in this land; Native massacres were always accompanied by sexual mutilation and rape. The goal of colonialism is not just to kill colonized peoples but to destroy their sense of being people. It is through sexual violence that a colonizing group attempts to render a colonized people as inherently rapable, their lands inherently invadable, and their resources inherently extractable.

Unfortunately, it is not only the Christian Right, but also our own progressive movements that often fail to critique heteropatriarchy. The issue is not simply how women are treated in the movement; rather, heteropatriarchy fundamentally shapes how we think of resisting and organizing in countless ways. Because we have not challenged heteropatriarchy, we have deeply internalized the notion that social hierarchy is natural and inevitable, thus undermining our ability to create movements for social change that do not replicate the structures of domination that we seek to eradicate. Whether it is the neocolonial middle managers of the nonprofit industrial complex or the revolutionary vanguard elite, the assumption is that patriarchs of any gender are required to manage and police the revolutionary family. Even feminist groups (including feminists of color) that claim to resist patriarchy often continue to work in hierarchical ways, as has been detailed in numerous women of color critiques of feminist organizing. As Rita Nakashima Brock has argued, being oppressed does not make one innocent of oppressive behavior (Brock 1995). Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy. Rather, as Cathy Cohen contends, such struggles will maintain colonialism based on a politics of secondary marginalization where the most elite classes of these groups will further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized within the community (Cohen 1999).

Today, indigenous and nonindigenous peoples are striving to operationalize non-heteronormative and less hierarchical visions of organizing through the process of revolution, through “trial and error.” That is, rather than presume a vanguardist perspective on revolution, the philosophy behind this work is that we all need to be part of the collective process of determining how we can create a more sustainable and just world by sharing our struggles, our successes, and our failures. We must be committed to our long-term vision, but we must also be flexible with our strategies, understanding that our strategies will change constantly as we strive together for a more just world. Following are some specifics about working toward a different politic. These are not definitive accounts of the work being done, but some reflections on what they are trying to do, they difficulties they face, and some of the lessons that can be gleaned from their struggles. These attempts to create power do not necessarily hold “the answer” for us, but they can be conversation partners within the global struggle for social justice.

Adjoa Jones de Almeida’s and Paula Rojas’s contributions to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, detail this organizing philosophy of “Taking Power, Making Power,” that is influential in indigenous-led social movements in Latin America and is spreading among many women of color organizing groups in the United States and Canada. On one hand it is necessary to engage in oppositional politics to corporate and state power (taking power). If we only engage in the politics of taking power, we will have a tendency to replicate the hierarchical structures in our movements. Consequently, it is also important to “make power” by creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are trying to create. These “autonomous zones” can be differentiated from the projects of many groups in the United States that often try to create separatist communities based on egalitarian ideals in that people in these “making power” movements do not just create autonomous zones, but they proliferate them. These movements developed in reaction to the revolutionary vanguard model of organizing in Latin America that became criticized as “machismo-leninismo” models. These models were so hierarchical that in the effort to combat systems of oppression, they inadvertently re-created the same systems they were trying to replace. In addition, this model of organizing was inherently exclusivist because not everyone can take up gu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Learning about “Our Nation” from La Lucha (The Struggle)
• Part II   Creative Practices that Emerge from Lo Cotidiano (The Everyday)
• Part III   The Significance of Fuerzas Para La Lucha (God-Given Strength for the Struggle)
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography of Suggested Readings
• Notes on Contributors
• Index