Decolonize the Concept of Neighbor - part 1
A review of Becoming Kin and thoughts on Indigenous concepts of "neighbor"
A number of years ago I posted a hypothetical on social media concerning one of the most famous bible verses - John 3:16.. In this post I speculated that since the verse cites the motivation for Jesus saving the world as “For God so loved the world” - that the earth, plants, and animals must be a part of God’s motivation. Given that the verse didn’t say “for God so loved people”, it seemed like a strong indicator that the verse saying “the world” must include the earth, plants, animals, etc as a part of God’s motivation for saving the world - and not just because God loved people. As one might expect in White American Evangelical circles, I had several white men from my church jump on and correct me (one of them a prominent church leader). Telling me that the verse absolutely couldn’t hold the implications that I came to. They couldn’t consider that they’d been reading this verse through very colonized western eyes. To them only humans could be their neighbor.
I bring up “neighbor”, because in Luke 10:36, Jesus challenges some of the Jewish experts of the law about their concept of ‘who is their neighbor’. After a man if beaten and robbed, passed up by some religious leaders and then eventually helped by a Samaritan man, Jesus says “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
This story came to mind as I was reading the book Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec - who is an Anishinaabe scholar. In this book she outlines the devastating harm that colonization causes. How colonization kills relationships (between humans, non-humans, etc) and replaces it with isolated identities. The parallel that struck me was how isolated the white church men, who jumped onto my hypothetical, were from the rest of the world. They had cut off their non-human relations and only believed that humans really mattered.
Becoming Kin is desperately needed in our highly colonized world (speaking as a white American). For white people like myself, I hope you listen and start your journey of decolonization. I suggest you read the book. But in the meantime, I’ve written about it below and tied in a few thoughts as I processed through it. Keep in mind that the book covers a lot more than I can bring up here, this is just what stood out to me.
To me, this book is a fantastic challenge that echoes Jesus’s challenge to the Jewish experts of law. This book challenges us to expand the colonized understanding of “who is my neighbor?”
Creation Stories and Worldview
I grew up in very conservative Christian circles. The type of circles that believe without doubt that the creation story in Genesis is fact!! It’s not a story about identity that contains truth to be learned from.. It is a collection of facts like one would find in a courtroom, things that literally happened exactly as described.
Most (if not all) Native nations also have creation stories. These creation stories aren’t seen or used as facts, but as a way of building communal identity. They are seen as stories that contain truth to be learned from, but not as facts.
Krawec says the following in the book:
“Creation stories, whether Christian or Hebrew, Anishinaabe or Hopi, aren't meant to be histories - not in the sense that the Western world has invented the idea of history as an unbiased set of facts.”
“They are meant to explain who we are and create a communal sense of self.”
Have you ever had a conversation about Genesis with a conservative christian and felt that it was giving them (or a group of people) a communal sense of self? It doesn’t. Their fact driven interpretation gives them a sense of superiority because they see mankind as more important than all other pieces of creation and a sense of superiority because their creation story is more widely believed. It also gives them arrogance because they see stories as facts and not truth to be learned from.
In the book, the author discussed how colonization doesn’t like dealing with multiplicity. It always works to absorb and dominate (ie. the western interpretation of humans having dominion over the earth). Krawec says:
“Having a single creation story not only made ours wrong; it created a power differential that placed European Christians, who knew the truth, above the Indigenous peoples, who lived in darkness. Europe, dominated as it was by Christians, had a single creation story and had previously dealt with difference by eliminating or absorbing it. But the Americas had many; we had learned to live with multiplicity.”
All of this goes back to worldview. The western colonizer worldview doesn’t seek truth and relationship. It seeks homogeneity, control and power. You can see this when you suggest the following to a conservative Christian - suggest to them that when God created humans, he created original people in different areas of the world. Adam and Eve were the original people in Mesopotamia. And there were different original people created in other parts of the world. If I would have suggested this to the group I grew up with, I would have been quickly corrected and/or ostracized. It isn’t something they would even remotely consider because the bible only has two people as the original people - and therefore, those are the facts..
In comparison of worldviews, Krawec says the following about Anishinaabeg creation stories. This communal sense of identity also speaks to purpose and responsibility. It speaks to relationships.
“From our earliest creation stories, the Anishinaabeg (plural of Anishinaabe) understood themselves to be related not only to each other but to all of creation. Our language does not divide into male and female the way European languages do. It divides into animate and inanimate. The world is alive with beings that are other than human, and we are all related, with responsibilities to each other.”
The Anishinaabeg worldview sees humans as a part of the living world. And values life and responsibility in a way that the GOP can only dream of (even though they believe they are champions of those values). Even things that are inanimate are seen in this worldview as a part of us (as people) and therefore each of these beings have responsibilities to each other.
This all shows how deeply a communal sense of identity and responsibility plays in people groups. The conservative christian group of people (which are just a part of the colonized western world) built their worldview out of their belief from their creation story (or at least their interpretation of it). They get their sense of responsibilities from the same. You can see this in their actions as a group where there is little room for searching and learning truth and a large amount of time given to learning facts. There is little to no interest in considering possible interpretation outside of their own because that would be seen as conceding defeat. The outlook to the world is one of caring for it - on some level. But ultimately humans are supposed to rule the world. In many ways, the Annishinaabeg worldview appears to be the exact opposite. Humans are seen as a mere piece of the life on the planet. A planet where all beings have responsibilities to each other. There is an outlook where truth is sought above facts.
My overall point here is that one's creation story can drastically shape your worldview and therefore your relationships to all things. In Native outlooks, all of creation is our neighbor.
Colonization
The United States is NOT a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of settlers and colonizers despite the entrenched myth that we are a nation of immigrants. The author outlines this thought well by saying:
“Put simply, immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Settlers come to a place and impose a political order. Those who came here by force-such as African people who were enslaved - or those who come through desperation— such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war—are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness.”
Practically none of the Europeans that came to North America came as immigrants. They didn’t join the existing political order that the various Native nations had. They came to North America and created their own political order and they brought their colonizing worldview with them. They didn’t see relationships with all living things. They saw the land as something they could own. They saw it only as something useful.
The Native nations definitely were not useful to the United States. In actuality they were quite the hindrance because they were in the way of the US from taking all of the land it wanted. So, the US government did it’s best to commit genocide on all of the Native Nations. One of the ways the US government did this was by attempting to break up the relationships that Native peoples had with the land and each other. Speaking of Native people, the book says:
“They had a school, hospital, and bicameral system of governance. Nobody did without. According to Dawes, this was socialism. There was, he said, "no incentive to make your home better than that of your neighbor. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization." This propensity for collective ownership confounded settlers, who understood the buying and selling of land as the basis of wealth and civilization. The Dawes Act was their solution. It broke up reservations and divided Indian Country-that land west of the Mississippi to which Andrew Jackson had marched dozens of tribes—into allotments. Those allotments were then distributed to tribal citizens as individuals rather than as tribal groups.”
Colonization always has an underlying sense of selfishness. It needs this in order to motivate taking over something else and controlling it. The attempt at breaking up the land and the sense of communal ownership has had a devastatingly negative impact on Native communities. Fortunately Native people and their worldviews have stood strong and relationships to each other and the land have been maintained. But it’s a good reminder of how devastating the individualization of colonization can be.
Animate and Inanimate
The colonized mindset, outlook, and worldview unfortunately goes as deep as language as well. We can only describe things as well as we have words to do so. The author outlines the ways that Annishinaabemowin (the language of the Anishinaabe people) has a different worldview built into its very fabric. The language divides things into animate and inanimate and is verb based. Things are what we observe them doing and not some inherent quality we assign.
In contrast, in the western colonized view, things are described with some inherent quality that we as people assign to them. This is done to things as well as to people. This can be seen in the conservative christian circles that I grew up in. In these circles people’s identity (inherent quality) was defined by what one does or did. For instance, many may be familiar with Ray Comfort. Comfort’s outlook and way of evangelizing was to ask people if they had ever told a lie (among other similar questions), even a white lie. If they said yes, he then told them that they were a liar. The person’s inherent/core identity was defined by what the person had done (even if the person stopped doing that thing). Comfort needed this sense of core identity corruption to then sell his view of Jesus’ death on the cross (all done in a very penal substitutionary way) - more an the issues on the problematic interpretation of the atonement call “penal substitutionary atonement”.
Becoming Kin, in contrast, outlines how the Annisinaabeg way is far more dynamic.. Krawec says the following (bold is mine):
“Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being, he writes about the Anishinaabe language being more suited for quantum physics than English because it understands the dynamic nature of creation, particle and wave. It is a verb-based language, which talks about what things do rather than what they are. We are not human beings; we are humans being.”
We are Humans being.!!
This worldview goes further when you consider relationships between people. The author outlines this by saying (bold mine):
“Lawrence Gross suggests that the Anishinaabe worldview is something like quantum physics. If you'll stay with me a moment, you'll see why this matters to our consideration of apology and reconciliation. As I told you, Anishinaabe is a verb-based language. In the Anishinaabe way of seeing and naming the world, we are humans being. But this applies elsewhere too. In Anishinaabe, my shirt is not blue; it is being blue. The rock is not hard; it is being hard. The things that we observe are not the inherent qualities of whatever we are looking at; the shirt or the rock is simply what it is being in this moment. This is a very quantum-mechanics way of thinking. Remember: light, depending on how you look at it, is both particle and wave. This applies to people as well. That boy who vandalized the store is not a vandal. Vandalizing the store is something he did, not who he is. As I understand the way our language works, we could describe what he had done to the store, but we would not have a noun to attach to his identity as a result. What he did to the store is an action he took, not a core identity. Because his action in one place and time does not define”
“Vandalizing the store is something he did, not who he is”... This is the complete opposite of what the worldview of Ray Comfort teaches and is built into the language itself. The way we talk about things affects how we treat people. If you take Comfort's approach, then people are seen as liars and thieves at their core - it is who they are. They are all a part of the mission field. And it’s difficult to have a relationship with something that you are only seeing as a potential convert. However, when we see each other as Humans Being, then you can see the depth of responsibility we have to help each other in whatever capacity possible. Colonized language leads to colonized actions.
Who is my Neighbor?
As the Jewish experts of the law asked Jesus in Luke 10, who is my neighbor?
As lined out in the book Becoming Kin, I hope you realize that your neighbor is not just the people you like. It’s not just people that look like you. Hell, it’s not even just humans.
There is truth to be learned everywhere. If the Creator created all things, then I think it is highly likely there is truth to be learned everywhere. All white people need to look at what is creating our sense of communal identity. Is it something that brings people together and strengthens our sense of responsibility to all living things? Unfortunately, I can very confidently answer this with ‘no’ for the vast bulk of white people in the US.
How do you view people and their inherent qualities? There is a strong bent in white America to apply some past action to someones core identity. However, it’s almost never an accurate judgement of the person. This reminds me of the quote from Bryan Stevenson - “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”.. Many people have done terrible things. But we are humans Being. We are defined by what we are doing - not necessarily by what we have done - there is always hope.
There is an entire world of animate and inanimate “people” out there that are related to you. I hope you become their kin and strengthen your relationship to them by decolonizing your way of thinking, building relationships, and helping your relatives where you can.
Hopefully this will become even more clear after part 2 - it’s on the way…..