EMQ » April–July 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 2
Summary: Throughout the Scriptures, the Creator has written a story about a reality in which gentiles and outside nations have been invited into reciprocal relationships where everyone can contribute to the creation of a people who are to be a blessing to all. But in our collective past, so many have been drawn in by reading ourselves into the stories of conquest and domination and imposed relationships of power and control that we have forgotten our original instructions.
By Monique Ransom
More than forty years ago, on one of several family visits to Mexico, I found myself standing in the ancient temple at Cholula, Puebla. Absorbing the modern sites and sounds awakened in my 8-year-old mind and heart what has become a longstanding curiosity about the beliefs and experiences of my ancient relatives and other Indigenous peoples across this continent.
The guide led the tour in both Spanish and English, evidence of Europe’s longstanding domination over the languages, cultures, politics, and business of the area. The stories he told described the Spanish conquest of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and the almost complete annihilation of the cultures that predated their arrival. The echoes of this reverberate across Turtle Island (now known as North America) today.
As we peer through the layers of history, beginning in the late 1400s, it is clear that despite the diversity of Indigenous beliefs and ways of life around the globe, there are certain universal elements found in Indigenous experiences with dominating colonial forces. Indigenous nations worldwide have historically been forced to contend with dehumanizing assumptions of Amer-European colonizing powers. This has resulted in culture and identity loss. It is also the root of the continued struggle to be recognized as having a valuable participatory role in weaving the social, political, educational, and spiritual fabric of the modern nations in which they exist.
As people of North America, we have a history that many have never learned and may be traumatized by hearing. Yet to move forward together in a right relationship, we must discover how to dialogue. The goal is not to promote a sentiment of guilt for the past actions of ancestors. Instead, it is to recover a sense of where we have come from and discover a sense of responsibility to move toward where we can be collectively as people sharing this history and land.
The Doctrine of Discovery
Beginning in the late 1400s, the Church developed a complex web of laws and proclamations that determined who had the right to land. Terra nullius, meaning empty lands, granted dominion through the right to invade territories peopled by non-Christians and subjugate in perpetuity the “soulless” people found there.[i] While Indigenous nations were developing concepts to guide them in the management of shared spaces, Catholic popes were developing their own incongruent ideas.
This legal framework of papal bulls, on which the doctrine is based, developed over hundreds of years, peaking during the colonial era. “It established spiritual, legal, and political justification for taking land from those who existed outside of the church’s influence, other peoples with whom the Europeans came into contact. The Doctrine of Discovery declared that lands discovered by European powers belonged to those powers because it wasn’t owned by Christians.”[ii]
Most of this history precedes the formation of several Protestant denominations. Yet it “situates itself very much in Western Christianity as rooted in Roman Catholicism, … we need to clearly understand that Roman Catholicism is indeed our foundational heritage and to try and distance ourselves from that is to distance ourselves from our own history.”[iii]
Understanding our history and how it has affected our theology enables us to move forward in the light of the truth of the gospel. It also helps us build community in a way that honours the Creator’s work in Christ and creation.
The Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery
The doctrine of discovery and its attendant ideas continue to separate Indigenous people groups from their piece of the earth. It forever altered their communities. It also contributed to normalizing wrong beliefs about the place of Indigenous populations in Western societies. Dysfunctional and oppressive actions rooted in these flawed assumptions are deeply engrained in the Western imagination[iv] and psyche. Out of them grew a worldview that allowed for the displacement of Indigenous bodies.[v]
The European settler worldview was shaped by the theological imagination foundational to the doctrine of discovery in its legal and political role. This set of legal principles governed the colonizing powers of Europe, particularly regarding the administering of Indigenous land. It remains the primary legal precedent that controls Indigenous affairs and rights.[vi] The intentional use of language in these documents created an identity for those outside the realm of European Christianity and enforced the labeling of non-Europeans as “other.”
These ecclesial statements were embraced first by the Portuguese who began perpetrating the slave trade from the African continent to the European and American continents. The Christian body saw the African body as another resource to be taken and used “for the pleasure and profit of the European Christian body, the one made most fully in the image of God.”[vii]
Subsequent mid-to-late-fifteenth century papal bulls would sow the seeds for the erroneous theology that was fulfilled and manifested in the slave trade. They also justified the actions of the European powers against African and Indigenous peoples by asserting that the salvation of their souls sanctioned European Christian Authority and activities over their lands, bodies, and possessions. This created an ideology that presented Europeans as the true and pure representation of Christianity in the world with the privilege to determine what is right and just.[viii]
Resisting the Legacy
Setting up entire groups with a label such as “other,” obstructs the hermeneutical process that enables one to relate to the narratives that a people create about themselves. We must challenge ourselves to think deeply about the associations we make, where they come from, and whether available narratives accurately portray truths about a people or a situation, or to simply rely on convenient assumptions to do the thinking in our place.
The Church can be an effective agent for change. We can become a community of leaders in repairing and building new relationships with Indigenous peoples by analyzing assumptions and the narratives that spring from them. This can be done with a lens that encourages prioritizing authenticity and works to change narratives that cause unnecessary division, dehumanize others, or deem other cultures inferior. This can ostensibly lead to the creation of a new narrative that honours Indigenous cultures, peoples, and histories while providing a good way forward toward reconciliation.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada: Residential Schools and Cultural Genocide
The harmful theology that arose from the doctrine of discovery justified the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples across the globe. In Canada, one of several methods used in genocidal actions was the removal of Indigenous children from their homes, families, languages, and cultures for placement in Residential Schools. These schools operated in collusion between the government and churches across denominational lines.[ix]
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued 94 Calls to Action, with Calls to Action 48, 49, and 58–61 directly inviting the church to respond in various ways. The Commission calls upon “the church parties to the Settlement Agreement, and all other faith groups and interfaith justice groups to comply with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,”[x] and “to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery” and its attendant concepts used to justify European sovereignty of Indigenous lands and peoples.
The Calls to Action invite the church to respond in ways of thinking and being that lead to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond. According to the Commission, reparative actions should include ongoing education strategies to ensure that congregations discover the role of their church in colonization, “the history and legacy of Residential Schools, and why apologies were necessary.”[xi]
Further recommendations for conciliatory actions towards Indigenous peoples by the church invite church parties into collaboration with Indigenous spiritual leaders, Survivors, and religious training centers including seminaries and schools of theology to develop and teach curriculum for all student clergy, especially clergy and staff working in Indigenous contexts to respect Indigenous spirituality. They call for church leadership to teach “the history and legacy of religious conflict in Indigenous families and communities and the responsibility churches have to mitigate such conflicts and prevent spiritual violence.”[xii]
In the final call to the church, the Commission calls for collaborations with Survivors’ representatives of Indigenous organizations to create sustainable funding for Indigenous peoples toward community-controlled projects. Sustainable projects will be centered on healing and reconciliation, language and culture revitalization, education and relationship building, and spaces for Indigenous youth and elders to discuss Indigenous spirituality and self-determination.[xiii]
Exploring and leaning into these Calls to Action with a lens focused on truth, justice, and reconciliation provides clear answers and direction for the church to actively participate in building relationships that can lead to reconciliation between Indigenous communities and followers of Christ.
Guiding Principles
Relational and historical knowledge of the people and land around us provides a foundation for creating mutually transforming relationships that are respectful of the theology, practices, and experiences of other members of the community of creation. It addresses language that is dualistic, individualistic, and condemning. It can also help recover values and teachings within the Christian tradition that allow us to approach people and the earth with care and rectify and/or atone for the abuses perpetuated by the church and Christians.
The church must intentionally set aside past assumptions of Amer-European superiority that fail to acknowledge the longstanding, well-developed spiritual beliefs and practices of Indigenous peoples. Perspectives that view Indigenous peoples as empty vessels to be filled with European culture or blank slates upon which Christian missionaries can write the gospel must be challenged. Missionaries must re-evaluate paternalistic styles of evangelism that deny the presence of the sacred within Indigenous cultures and diminish the role of any part of creation in the work of God.
The Bible reveals our original instructions of connection and relationship, yet they have been overlooked or redefined in service to settler-colonial ideas about how a society ought to be ordered. Creator made creation sacred by calling it very good, yet we have devalued it by subjecting it to capitalist ideas that are incongruent with the shalom economy that is illustrated to us throughout the Scripture. The Spirit of the gospel of Christ gives his people the power to reject the colonial ideas that have made the good news difficult to believe among Indigenous peoples.
Throughout the Scriptures, the Creator has written a story about a reality in which gentiles and outside nations have been invited into reciprocal relationships where everyone can contribute to the creation of a people who are to be a blessing to all. In our collective past, so many have been drawn in by reading ourselves into the stories of conquest and domination and imposed relationships of power and control that we have forgotten our original instructions. The church has run roughshod over all of creation and responded to the differences they saw by either elimination or absorption. These actions and motivations of our forebears should not be a model to follow, but instead should serve as a cautionary tale.
In Niagara, we are surrounded by Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee stories and knowledge that can provide us a lens through which to see our own stories differently. God calls us to be ministers of both truth and reconciliation. Truth and reconciliation is about reading our histories differently and finding a way to live together in peace, honesty, and respect. Patty Krawec, Anishinaabe follower of Christ writes, “We need to go back to the beginning or rather to a story of new beginnings in order to start again.” [xiv] She continues:
Almost every civilization has recorded a flood story as part of their ongoing creation. Just as a creation story tells us about our origins, a flood story can tell us how to rebuild. In the Anishinaabe story, Nanaboozho, the only human survivor of the flood, together with animals, rebuilt Turtle Island with a handful of mud gathered from deep below the floodwaters. In order for us to return to our original instructions and to pick up that handful of mud, we too, must travel through the floodwaters. We are living through a time of crisis and upheaval, a flood event, and we have the potential to create something new.[xv]
Creation stories are a kind of story that we can revolve around and come back to over and over again. Searching these fundamental narratives for clues about how we got here and why we are here is a pivotal piece of the puzzle. The Anishinaabe creation story is like the origin story of the Hebrew people in that it begins with a thought from which comes a breath. With that breath, everything comes into existence. After all things are made, the Creator takes four parts of Mother Earth and blows into them, and with this breath, man has come to life![xvi]
The last form to be created and lowered onto the earth, humanity is the last, the least, and the neediest of all creation. Every part of creation relies on the one before to exist and while creation existed without us despite everything we have done, the creation of God still continues to provide for us. Of all the layers of creation only the rocks, natural forces, and spirits would survive independently. But they would not be content if they survived alone because they would be unable to keep their promise to ensure survival for all others as their original instructions have been defined by the Creator.[xvii]
The early commands to Adam and Eve and the words of Moses could be seen as original instructions. The words of Jesus form the original instructions to the church, and these are the responsibilities of us as human beings. We are to remember these and then build our lives around them, to go back and remember those instructions before colonialism and capitalism overlooked and redefined them. We must return to the beginning to remember who we are.[xviii]
Relationship for Relationship’s Sake
As the church considers how to continue to engage in sharing the gospel with Indigenous peoples, it is important to understand that relationship for relationship’s sake must come first, instead of as a means to an end. No one appreciates being made into a project; people respond to respect and the vulnerability that comes with authenticity and genuine love.
Many evangelicals hold onto a future promise of a heavenly home imagined as an eternity spent as angelic beings floating around in that otherworldly sky. A mining of the Scriptures under the tutelage of elders, theologians, and pastors has made it clear that we do not await this existence as citizens existing in a colonial kingdom empire, but we are members of the sacred family in the New Jerusalem, in a kingdom that is best described as the community of creation (Revelation 21:9–11, 21–27).
When we prepare to share our faith across cultures, we must work as Paul did in 1 Corinthians 9:20–22.This is a powerful impact statement that is clear about the posture we must assume as those about to enter a world that is unlike our own:
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. (ESV)
Paul means that the most successful way to reach others is to use words, language, and concepts that they can understand and relate to. Be willing to humbly enter the world of another and listen for the ways Creator God has been working in that world. From this posture of listening one can prepare a safe space to co-create a mutually transforming dialogue.
The Scriptures illustrate God’s expectation of diversity throughout the Hebrew creation narrative and in the genealogy of Christ. Even more, we can see God’s repeated redirection in humanity’s tendency to seek security and safety in the sameness of our neighbours in the story of Babel. God called their motivations and actions profane as they rejected the diversity of God’s creation while finding security in and preferring the likeness of their neighbour, rather than in the provision and protection of God.
We can avoid that same problematic position of preferring safety in sameness over the safety of walking in harmony by looking through the lens of Scripture, with God’s focus on relationships. We must take off the lens of the colonial culture that has been our frame of reference for so long.
Each nation or Indigenous people group in Canada has a creation narrative and original instructions that offer perspectives on building relationships with the Creator, non-human creation, and each other. In those relationships, we discover ways to share the gospel and be in ministry with others, using language that centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Together we can work through ways to enter the world of another for the sake of relationship, rather than creating relationships for the sake of evangelism alone. Relationship begins with connections that are made strong with the understanding that listening brings. Times of deep listening with an intentional aim to understand the experiences of another create the space for mutual sharing and reciprocity.
Our responsibility as Christians is to avoid profaning the community we are attempting to create. It is our mandate to be an active force, joined together with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to achieve the communal goal of growing the community of creation through a model of love and humility lived out in the form of Christlike servanthood.
For excellent insight into working for reconciliation with Indigenous people groups in Canada, please visit The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s website: evangelicalfellowship.ca/IndigenousRelations
Monique Ransom (ransomed5@gmail.com) is a de-tribalized descendant of the Mexica people group from Central Mexico with German and Chinese settler ancestry. She is a recent graduate of the master of theology: Indigenous program at NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community. She is currently serving as pastor of outreach: families at Queensway Free Methodist Church in Niagara Falls, Ontario where she resides with Alex, her husband of 32 years.
[i] Geraldine Patrick Encina, “The Vatican formally renounces the Doctrine of Discovery in support of Indigenous-
rights.” One Earth, accessed January 2, 2024, https://www.oneearth.org/vatican-renounces-doctrine-of-discovery-in-
support-of-indigenous-rights/.
[ii] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future
(Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 49–51. Dum Diversas-1492, Romanus Pontifex-1455, Inter Cateras-1493, and secular laws led to the enactment of The Indian Act in Canada.
[iii] Dr. Terry Le Blanc, “Indigenous People, The Doctrine of Discovery, Colonial ‘Law’ and the Gospel,” lecture,
Indigenous Andragogy, CHED IS13, Naiits: An Indigenous Learning Community (July 2021).
[iv] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
[v] Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of
Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 14. Charles describes this dysfunction as beginning with
the idea of discovery connected to an inhabited place. He calls the process “stealing, conquering, or colonizing.”
There is an implicit racial bias in America that sees Native Americans as less than human. This bias is revealed in
the usage of the term “discovery” to describe what Columbus did in the Americas. An ontological view such as this
creates hostility and/or indifference towards Indigenous peoples and their ways of being.
[vi] Charles and Rah, Unsettling Truths, 15. A subsequent papal bull for the benefit of Portugal, the Romanus Pontifex
allowed European Catholic nations to possess non-Christian lands and justified the enslavement of native, non-
Christian “pagans” in Africa and the “New” World.
[vii] Charles and Rah, Unsettling Truths, 16.
[viii] Charles and Rah, Unsettling Truths, 18.
[ix] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to
Action (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), https://crc-canada.org/en/ressources/calls-to-action-truth-reconciliation-commission-canada/.
[x] The United Nations Human Rights Council, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(New York: UNDRIP, 2007), https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html.
[xi] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Calls to Action, 7.
[xii] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Calls to Action, 7.
[xiii] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Calls to Action, 61.
[xiv] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin, 21.
[xv] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin, 21.
[xvi] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin, 21.
[xvii] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin, 25.
[xviii] Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin, 25.
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 2. Copyright © 2024 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
