Indigenous Jesus

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 100
Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus

What is Christianity to a colonized people? Can Jesus reach the descendants of those who have been forcibly converted in His name? Reverend Steven Charleston asked himself these questions as a young seminarian; he heard God's voice telling him to keep working, and the answer would come to him. This book is the culmination of his life's work, and the resolution God has granted him.

Steven Charleston is an Episcopal priest and a citizen of the Choctaw nation. This double path colors his interpretation of Scripture. Half spiritual autobiography, half work of Christian theology, this book describes how Charleston came to understand what he calls "Native Jesus" by understanding the four times He took friends with him and undertook a classic Native American vision quest.

Charleston's people have been Christian since before Andrew Jackson chased them off their homelands. In his telling, the Choctaw invited Presbyterian missionaries into their communities, investigated their claims, and deemed their theology compatible with Choctaw beliefs. One suspects the history was somewhat rockier, but let's accept Charleston's account. His people know Jesus from the Native angle, a belief undimmed by subsequent violence, performed by Whites wearing sacramental vestments.

In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus left the crowds four times, accompanied by very few friends, to have an intimate and personal experience with God. Charleston names these times as the Wilderness, the Mount of Transfiguration, Gethsemane, and Golgotha. Each time, Jesus received an important message from the Father. And each time, he returned to share it with the People.

To understand Christ's vision quests through Native eyes, Charleston first had to unlearn Christianity's burden of European cultural baggage. So, he contends, must we. Too often, Christian missions have been tacit imperialism (the word "propaganda" comes from efforts to convert Natives in South America). But when we shed European blinders, Native Jesus teaches us something new and magnificent.

Native Americans, like Jews, were a covenant people with a sacred relationship to their land. But, like Jews, Natives were conquered by a foreign empire, forced into exile, and continue to live in Diaspora. Jews and Natives use rituals to maintain their identities, while striving to protect their language from assimilation. The last century saw both peoples driven to the brink of extinction.

Reverend (Bishop) Steven Charleston

Viewed this way, Charleston writes, Jesus comes as the fulfillment of both Covenants. His coming, prophesied by John the Baptist, reflects the relationship between the Clown and the Prophet in Pueblo and Plains tradition. His anguish at Gethsemane is His version of the Lakota Sun Dance. And His death on Golgotha open Him up to all the spirits of humanity combined.

Don't mistake this, though: Charleston clarifies that the Native and Jewish Covenants are not interchangeable. Natives don't believe humans sinned at the moment of Creation, for instance, so Jesus's death cannot be seen as substitutionary penance, as European theologians paint it. No, Native Jesus does something different in that moment, something so complex and revolutionary that I'm scared to cheapen it through synopsis.

From the beginning, Charleston identifies this as his personal theology, achieved through his own vision quests. He doesn't proclaim to speak for Native Americans generally. However, he cites diverse traditions, especially Lakota and Hopi; names the experience of historical figures like Sitting Bull, Pocahontas, and Wovoka; and justifies his Native Christianity through the various perspectives of North America. What he writes is both intensely personal, and applicable to others equally.

It's also eye-opening for non-Native readers. We've grown up surrounded by a Christian message that, at times, doesn't come from the Son of Man. We interpret Christ's mission through a cultural prism that certainly makes it comprehensible to ourselves, but distorts the real message when speaking across cultures. When we believe that we have uniquely universal understanding of what Jesus accomplished, we become arrogant, which can be the first step toward colonialism.

By paring the cultural sediment off Christ's actions, Steven Charleston doesn't create something new. Instead he reveals the glory that has remained unvisited underneath, reminding readers like me that we don't own Jesus. In creating a theology for Native Americans, Charleston also prohibits me from becoming comfy in a self-granted salvation. He reminds me that God, not I, decides what is Truth.

This book runs remarkably short, barely 160 pages plus back matter. Yet reaching the end, we feel we've undergone an intense journey, and emerged transformed. No, this book isn't a vision quest itself. But reading it, I feel Charleston prepares us for our quests, reminding us that our vision matters.

Rebecca Roanhorse's Bloody Homeland Blues

Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning: the Sixth World

Maggie Hoskie lives in a trailer on the margins of the  Diné (Navajo) homeland, nursing her hurts while awaiting… something. A former apprentice of her people’s most respected monster hunter, she lives at the dawning of the Sixth World, when gods and monsters of Diné myth return in force, so yeah, there’s plenty of monsters to hunt. She just doesn't feel ready. But duty calls, she steps forth, and she faces something all her training never prepared her for.

Native American myths occur frequently in urban fantasy, but usually as a side plot, driving themes of anti-modernism. Indians live in a supernatural time warp, unaffected by technology or, y’know, changing social mores. New Mexico author Rebecca Roanhorse takes a different tack: rather than the past, her characters occupy the near future, a dystopian hellscape familiar from recent novels and movies. Yet it also feels unfamiliar, because mose white readers don’t know Diné tradition.

Jolted from her maundering, Maggie confronts a monster that doesn’t resemble the past. It looks human. So she consults her people’s greatest medicine man. He saddles her with his grandson and apprentice, Kai, a handsome, urbane gentleman as alienated from Diné mainstream as herself. She doesn't want the partnership. But the monsters come from somewhere, and are clearly man-made, so she needs the help. So he holds her nose and proceeds.

Though this is her first novel, Rebecca Roanhorse is already an award-winning writer for her short works. That experience shows. She creates a fully realized alternate reality, which she describes to readers without that shopworn trope, the Respected Sage Explaining Reality To Everyone. Roanhorse eases us into the Sixth World, providing as much information as readers need, when we need it. it feels like we step into a story already happening, rather than getting the introductory data dump.

Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, didn’t rise against its subjugation so much as survive while the United States fell. When the Big Water happened, washing away North America’s major population centers, white government was unprepared, and billions drowned. Dinétah stepped into the vacuum, defended its people, and became a nation. Except then, the monsters came. The Diné found themselves thrust into a world of mythology, magic, and divine chess. Maggie is just another pawn.

Rebecca Roanhorse

Maggie doesn’t want to fight monsters anymore. But something has to pay the bills. So she commences a quest that takes her from Dinétah’s biggest city (which uncannily resembles Mos Eisley), to the fringes of her homeland, including regions she’s never seen before. Her journey has a Philip K. Dick-like quality of passage through dreamland, where ordinary rules of physics and society are suspended. Anything can happen, and often does. And Maggie bears awestruck witness.

Roanhorse does something I really appreciate. Before page thirty, she backs her heroine into a corner, where Maggie must do something desperate: she kills a child. Sounds bad when I say it, right? It’s even worse when it happens. Too many writers follow the advice to establish their characters’ heroism by doing something selfless, like saving a puppy, in early chapters. Roanhorse demonstrates her protagonist’s lack of heroic qualifications. Maggie doesn’t have virtues, only guilt.

This guilt motivates Maggie’s continuing journey, though. She clearly hopes to expiate her guilt through accomplishment, and possibly regain the attention of her former mentor, the immortal Neizghání. Maggie remains vague what that attention means. She isn’t the little girl who once waited patiently on her mentor’s teachings anymore, after all. Yet somehow, she remains fearful about the commitments that adulthood would entail. Like her people, she occupies a liminal space between freedom and colonialism.

Maggie attempts to discard Westernized standards of Good vs. Evil, and live her people’s traditional morality, but she can’t. She admits her language remains inflected with the vestiges of Treaties and other compromises with power. That makes Kai’s intrusion into her world especially confounding. He’s a medicine man, versed in his people’s tradition, but he’s also Westernized in his values. He represents admixture that Maggie, and the Diné generally, try to purge. They just can’t.

This combination of ancestry and modernism, of oral tradition and technological progress, characterizes the immersive reality Roanhorse has created. Her characters live the conflicts, and they invite us to join them. By the end, little is resolved; even the monsters prove less important than the human influences that let them into our world. Yet even without some pat resolution, we feel like we’ve undertaken a hard journey. Roanhorse’s characters brought us somewhere. But where, exactly?