THE HOLY SPIRIT

Wrong Kind of Green Feb 04, 2016 Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Wrong Kind of Green

February 4, 2016
By Jay Taber

Maya culture: mural, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

While (at age 63) I am now a deist, I was raised Lutheran, until (in my adolescence) I began my
quest for freedom from institutionalized religionseeking a more personally meaningful spiritual
identity. As a child living next door to a Yakama Indian family, I was vaguely aware of other
points of view regarding the Holy Spirit, but in the dominant Euro-American culture
prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up cross-cultural sacred interaction was
unusual.
In the 1970s, thanks in part to the hippie movement which rejected consumerism, racism,
sexism, institutionalized religion, and militarism my perspective on holiness slowly began to

change. While I did not attempt to emulate any Native American religions, I became increasingly
aware of their authenticity, and began to incorporate some of their philosophical values into my
life.

An armada of paddlers from Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations journey between their
territories in opposition to the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, on September 2, 2012. Photo
by Zack Embree.
After departing Yakima Valley Community College and arriving at Western Washington
University, I encountered Coast Salish Nationan extended kinship society of tribes surrounding
the Salish Sea. After university, I worked in the coastal fisheries of Alaska and Washington as a
cannery vessel captain, where I got to know Lummi, Nooksack, Samish, Swinomish, Tlingit and
Tsimshian fishermen.
In the 1990s, through my human rights work, I became acquainted with American Indian
scholars at the Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS) in Olympia, Washington. One of the
elders at CWIS, Russell Jim, is the director of environmental cleanup for Yakama Nation,
focused on remediation of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where one of the bombs that
annihilated Japan in World War II was made. I had grown up across the Columbia River from
Hanford which, until Chernobyl, was the most contaminated site on earth and knew this was
a job that few would be willing to commit their lives to.

Mkayla Tahkeal, a member of the Yakama Tribe, pilots her familys boat while fishing for salmon
on the Columbia River on a blustery morning in early September, 2015. Her cousins BJ
Whitefoot and Alec Yallup were aboard as well.
In a 2001 videotaped talk Nuclear Attack on the Yakama Culture that Russell delivered at the
University of Washington, he recounted his childhood, during which his aunt rescued him from a
Lutheran-run Indian boarding school, in order to raise him in the Yakama Longhouse tradition
even if she had to take him to live on Mt. Adams, which borders the vast Yakama Indian
Reservation. In the video, he sings a short excerpt from a Lutheran service, that begins with the
words, Holy, Holy, Holy.
When I joined a human rights speakers bureau in 1996, I encountered a Lummi Nation elder,
who said that emotional bonding between people of different faiths and Native Americans is fine,
but that people with good hearts need to prioritize intelligence over emotion. Otherwise, the
pitfalls of reconciliation and atonement can lead to unintended consequences, some of them
harmful.

The first American Indian Boarding School was established in 1860 by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. By 1879 using a model curriculum implemented by retired Army Colonel Richard Henry
Pratt, the schools became militarized. By 1879 these school had enrollments of 12,000
students, by 1973 enrollment of 60,000 students Children were forbidden to speak their native
languages, forced to shed familiar clothing for uniforms, cut their hair and subjected to harsh
discipline for the least infraction of the rules. The daily activities for the children were strictly
regimented to keep the children continuously occupied with vocational level education and
training, work activities, Christian teachings, maintaining the school and its farms, and
removing any vestiges of their former lives to the point that these children no longer spoke their
native language. [Source]
Reconciliation currently in vogue with progressive churches and synagogues is a risky,
sometimes dangerous process. Little understood by kind-hearted people of faith, it can be a form
of torture for those who experienced (and live with) the intergenerational trauma of
institutionalized genocide. As Susie Linfield remarked in her essay Living with the Enemy,
What becomes clear is that forgiveness and reconciliation are of far less interest to the victims
than they are to perpetrators.

September 2015: Children pose on the 3,000-pound totem pole as it makes its way from
Washington State to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation on a journey protesting coal mines and
rail terminals. Photo: Jacqueline Keeler
In response to the Totem Pole Journey a sacred act of diplomacy by Lummi Nation in 2015, the
Unitarian Universalist Association held a national conference of support in Portland, Oregon.
This holy Public Witness, however, has not been accompanied by any right action from the
Earth Ministry interfaith alliance in Seattle, of which they are a participating religious body.
To date, none of the progressive churches in the Pacific Northwest has confronted the
portentous movements intent on promoting interracial discord and a growing politics of fear
targeting the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. None of these institutionalized religions
have opposed the ongoing, anti-Indian, hate radio programs, or any other forms of mainstream
media racism.

A ceremony held at Cherry Point, a part of the Lummi anti-coal totem pole journey. 09/30/2013
Photo: Ryan Hasert
If people of faith want to help defeat White Power on the Salish Sea, they need to call out the
promoters of this interracial discord. Otherwise, they become yet another instance of white
people assuaging their guilt over the institutionalized mistreatment of Native Americans by
indulging in the consumption of Indian acts of spiritual generosity, without committing
themselves to acts of reciprocity.
As Lummi elder Jewell Praying Wolf James remarked at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church in
Portland, Talks good, but actions better.

[Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, a
correspondent to Forum for Global Exchange, and a contributing editor of Fourth World
Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a
volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists engaged in defending democracy. As a
consultant, he has assisted indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at
the United Nations. Email: tbarj [at] yahoo.com Website:www.jaytaber.com]