Wildlands Memorialization: Messianism Mapped

Abstract

Writing about Christianity at this particular juncture of history demands a certain focus. In a US landscape soaked in half a millennium of colonial bloodletting, whose conquering culture has yet merely to acknowledge, much less redress, that unrelenting violence, confession stands paramount. Recent work by native scholars, such as Shawnee/Lenape Steven Newcomb’s Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, has begun detailing the degree to which a fundamentally religious idea has anchored the entire project of Euro-conquest here (and indeed, around the globe). That idea is Christian in derivation, absolute in its effect, and foundational for the whole colonial edifice. Its essential presumption, conjured out of thin air, was the supremacy of Christianity to all native practice thereby designated and denigrated as “heathen.” Its explicit assertion was the legal claim of Euro-sovereignty wherever land might be “discovered” to be unclaimed by any other “Christian” power. And its clear consequence was ruthless takeover.

Jackson likes to tell the story of the old Sioux Indian who watches a pioneer plowing up the prairie sod, stoops to examine the furrow, straightens up, and says, “Wrong side up” (Eisenberg 1999, 328).

And the Lord said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground (Gen 4:10 after Cain has killed Abel).

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137325198