Immigration and Indigenous Theology -- Sightings

Immigration reform continues to be a contentious and divisive issue, which we have been unable and unwilling to tackle.  Ideology is part of the problem.  Knowing and understanding our history is another.  In this Sighting's essay, Unitarian Universalist Minister Chris Bossen shares his encounter with Indigenous Right's activist and theologian Tupac Enrique Acosta as they were incarcerated for protesting against the Arizona Immigration Law.  Included is a video of Tupac Enrique speaking at a session led by Cornel West.  Watch the video and then read Bossen's essay.  Ponder the contention that the debate is being influenced by a "Christian Doctrine of Discovery" that dates back to 1492.  Consider with me what this issue means for all of us who live within the borders of the nation called the United States of America.

Sightings 2/10/2011

Immigration and Indigenous Theology

-- Colin Bossen

I did not go to jail expecting to meet a theologian. But jail was where I met Tupac Enrique Acosta. Tupac, like me, was arrested in front of one of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s offices for protesting against Arizona's anti-immigrant law SB1070 on July 29, 2010. Unlike me, Tupac had an analysis of the bill's place in history that put it firmly within the context of the ongoing repression of the indigenous peoples of North America.

Tupac, who would probably reject the label theologian, is the leading figure behind the Phoenix-based Nahuacalli, an organization that describes itself as "A Cultural Embassy of the Indigenous Peoples." He is also closely linked with Puente, the grassroots organization behind many protests against SB1070 in Phoenix, and Puente's leader Salvador Reza. Understanding his views on SB1070 illuminates that, for some, the struggle over immigration is about something larger.

In Tupac's view the history of SB1070 does not begin in 2010. It begins in 1492 with Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas prompted European political and religious leaders to develop what indigenous activists refer to as the "Christian Doctrine of Discovery." This is the belief that because the lands of the Western Hemisphere were without Christians prior to 1492 they were free for the taking upon "discovery." For activists like Tupac, the issues as stake in SB1070 are not so much political as theological.

Tupac shared his analysis with me as we waited to be processed through the legal system in holding cells and, later, when we were bunkmates in the cell block. More than once our conversations were interrupted when we were moved, it appeared arbitrarily, between cells. They were also interrupted when the Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio came into our cell to "talk" with us. Sheriff Arpaio, who is currently under investigation by the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, runs what he likes to call "America's toughest jail." He is known for his tactics of intimidating and dehumanizing prisoners, including trying to humiliate male prisoners by placing them in pink underwear and pink handcuffs.

Rather than intimidate us, Arpaio served as an unwitting example for our impromptu seminar on the Christian Doctrine of Discovery. Tupac suggested to me that the logical outcome of a legal system grounded in such a doctrine is laws like SB1070 and men like Sheriff Arpaio. SB1070 would not exist without the doctrine. Arpaio exists to enforce it.

As we sat together in jail Tupac traced the history of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery from its origin to its often unacknowledged presence in contemporary debates about immigration. He suggested that the doctrine was first articulated in Pope Alexander VI's 1493 Papal Bull "Inter Caetera" and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal. Together these documents created a theological and legal framework that justified the expropriation and division of indigenous lands by Spain and Portugal.

In the view of Tupac and many indigenous legal scholars the framework created to facilitate the seizure of indigenous lands continues to form the core of much of federal property law today. This is particularly true as it relates to indigenous property claims. The indigenous legal scholar Steven Newcomb, for example, has found traces of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery within U.S. Supreme Court cases as recently as 2001.

Tupac believes that the principles of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery are operative in SB1070 as well. As he told me, "the purpose of SB1070 was to consolidate the perceptions of some white Americans around the idea of an America that is white in a continent that belongs to them." In his view, SB1070 is just another attempt to assert non-indigenous dominance over the continent. After all, SB1070 is designed to enforce a border that divides not only the United States and Mexico but the indigenous peoples who belong to the Uto-Aztecan language group. They have been moving back and forth between what is now the U.S. and Mexico long before either country existed. SB1070 criminalizes their traditional freedom of movement.

As Tupac understands it, the struggle against SB1070 is the continuing indigenous struggle against colonialism. As he said in a talk, "When we did that marching... we didn't come to legalize ourselves before the state of Arizona. We came to legalize Arizona... Now, let's get this clear, colonization is illegal... If we're going to legalize Arizona we have to decolonize Arizona." Elsewhere he has written that "SB1070 is not a law." He makes this claim because he believes that the entire framework of laws governing immigration rest upon the Christian Doctrine of Discovery. For him, the Mexican and Central American migrants are indigenous and those who would keep them from coming to the United States are the descendants of colonizers.

Tupac and I were briefly reunited when I travelled back to Arizona to stand trial. After a day-long trial which touched on none of these issues the judge ruled us not guilty. Then Tupac set to work again to educate people about the Christian Doctrine of Discovery and passed around a flyer titled "SB1070 is Not a Law."

References

Steven Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008).

Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Fulcrum Publishing, 1994).

Watch Tupac Enrique on a panel with Cornell West at North High School in Phoenix on October 2, 2010 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6t2esf1Hgk.

The Nahuacalli official website can be found at http://www.nahuacalli.org//.

Colin Bossen is minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland. He keeps a blog at http://infidelity.blogsome.com//.

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In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum, Jessica DeCou offers a comic interpretation of the theology of Karl Barth, bringing his work into a surprising and fruitful dialogue with the comedy of Craig Ferguson. Both men, she contends, “employ similar forms of humor in their efforts to unmask the absurdity and irrationality of our submission to arbitrary human powers.” The humor of Barth and Ferguson alike stresses human limitation against illusory deification. DeCou argues for understanding both the humor and the famous combativeness of Barth's theology as part of this single project, carried out against modern Neo-Protestant theology. The Religion and Culture Web Forum is at: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

The Haitian Mess

One week ago today on Tuesday, January 12th at 4:53pm local time, an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale rumbled from 6 miles under the Caribbean island of Hispaniola not far from the capital city of Port-au-Prince in the nation of Haiti.

Widespread damage and massive death resulted almost immediately, and as the ensuing week has passed the death toll estimates have risen into the hundreds of thousands. It was the worst quake to strike at Haiti in over two centuries, and is going to prove to be one of the largest natural disasters in human history.

There is a story here that is being mostly buried under the literal rubble that is now the nation of Haiti. It is a story that most humanitarians would say is secondary at this stage to the human loss and suffering. They are correct on one level. Help is needed, massive amounts of help, and it is needed quickly.

But that story needs to be told as well, because it tells the story of a nation that was a complete mess even before the earthquake struck. It is a story of a nation run by criminal gangs and thugs with little or no national authority. It is a cautionary tale about allowing anarchy to take hold and destroy lives.

For those who are not aware of the basic facts, Haiti makes up the western end of the island of Hispaniola which it shares with it's neighbor on the east side, the Dominican Republic. The island is approximately 700 miles southeast of Florida.

It was on December 5th, 1492 that Christopher Columbus landed in the 'New World' at Hispaniola and claimed the island for Spain. The island was already inhabited at that time by a native tribe known as the Taino. Over the next couple of hundred years the Spanish continued to develop the island, and also began importing African slaves.

In the late 17th century, French buccaneers began to settle the west side of the island which would later become Haiti, and pirates used Hispaniola regularly thereafter due to it's strategic location in the Caribbean. Famed French pirate Jean Lafitte, who frequently operated off the southern United States, was born here in 1782. John Audubon, the famed French-American ornithologist for whom today's nature society is named, was born in what is now Haiti in 1785.

The Spanish and French fought for control of the island, and in 1697 signed a treaty that gave the French control of the western end which they named Saint-Domingue. They brought in thousands of African slaves who made possible the French settlers wealth in the coffee, sugar and indigo industries.

In 1791 a revolution of sorts began to break out among the slaves, which was inspired itself by the French Revolution. The French tried to maintain control by abolishing slavery, and a former slave took over the reigns of governmental power for the first time.

Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to retake control and reinstitute slavery a few years later. These efforts proved not only fruitless but disastrous, as more than 50,000 French troops were lost in the efforts. On January 1st, 1804, the slaves formally declared independence and renamed their nation as Haiti, thus becoming the only nation ever born directly of a slave revolt.

In July of 1825, France again tried to reconquer the island. This time the Haitian government did not fare so well, and was forced to negotiate a peace that allowed it to retain its independence and name, but at the cost of financially reimbursing France for what it deemed were lost slave wage profits.

In the aftermath of this deal with France the Haitian government lost support and in 1843 was removed in a coup. This began a string of dozens of such governmental coups over the ensuing century and a half, leading right up to today. In 2004, the latest coup removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the United Nations has been trying to restore order ever since.

Haiti is a nation with a supposed political structure, but which in actuality was being run on a day-to-day practical level by gangs, some organized and some not, but all violent in nature. These gangs divert or hijack any material aid sent to the country by well-meaning humanitarian groups, with only the Brazilian-led U.N. mission keeping any semblance of order.

It was the mess of a nation called Haiti, a nation that really didn't need any more trouble heaped upon it, that was devastated last week. But the real fact is that Haiti's 10 million people were already living under intolerable, unmanageable circumstances long before the earthquake.

In the aftermath of the quake, the United States has been requested to come to the rescue and provide security for the massive undertaking that will be the rescue, relief, stabilization, and recovery operation that will be going on in the country over the coming months and years.

With a little luck and a lot of sustained American intervention, it is possible that what is reborn of Haiti can actually be better than what came before, and can provide the Haitian people with stability and an opportunity at having a real society that is free and safe for all it's citizens, not just the elite few or the street-wise strongmen that were contributing to its ruin long before the earthquake.