Reading the Bible on Turtle Island (2): Dreams, Visions, Scripture and Community

AI Generated Transcript of Episode

Speaker 1 (00:00)

So can you speak to how scripture might be relevant to the idea that God was already present here in this place before European missionaries arrived?

Speaker 2 (00:11)

Yeah, so we look at the Scripture story and see, is there evidence where God says, you know, I'm interacting outside of Israel as well? And there's numerous places, but a particular verse we turn to amongst many is Amos 9-7, for instance, where he's essentially reminding the Israelites of the very thing that you're asking. Like, he's saying,

Yeah, just like I moved you this way, I also did that with the Arameans. So like I moved them around. You know what mean? So you have these examples where God says, I have these relationships with nations. It's not like Israel, you're the mediator. Like I've stuck in with you only. I'm the creator of the whole world. I love all peoples. I have a unique story that I'm having with you in the way that I have a story with this nation. I have a story with this nation.

And so we see that in the scripture. so, you know, if we see that in the scripture, hopefully you can understand why we say, and we see that on Turtle Island as well.

Speaker 3 (01:14)

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:15)

You say a lot, you actually have a whole chapter devoted to dreams and visions. Do you see a fruitful connection between indigenous experiences of visions and dreams and those found in the Bible?

Speaker 3 (01:26)

early on when we were having conversations with people about what difference their indigenous heritage makes to reading the Bible, oftentimes they would just look at us like that was a dumb question. That question did not usually elicit too many stories. And as we listened though, you know, because they would just say, I just read the Bible. I just read the Bible in English. That's it. That's it. And then they go into, well, I had this dream and

Now I read scripture this way and I found confirmation in this and I will be a positive. Wait, wait, wait. That's not how they teach hermeneutics and scripture interpretation seminary. Like dreams are not. They don't remember that. And, ⁓ you know, when you look at the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament and you see how God is communicating to his people, there's not a lot of stories of them going to text or reading books.

It's through dreams and vision throughout all scripture and in our indigenous cultures We have many stories of visionaries whether it's Wovoka or black elk or Mabel McKay a people who received ⁓ Dances and instructions of how to weave through dreams and visions ⁓ Mabel McKay would say who is by the way a famous weaver her substance Smithsonian She was a no one's taught me how to weave

I learned this all through a dream. And when I heard that, was like, Paul says something like that in Galatians, that no one taught me this gospel. I received it from Jesus. How do you receive Jesus? He wasn't a disciple of Jesus. He received it in a vision, a dream. And as a biblical scholar, know, one of the things I did in grad school was spend a lot of time trying to figure out how does Paul get to his gospel message that Gentiles don't need to be circumcised and everyone's looking to figure out the hermeneutics of Paul and

It's hard because his scriptural reasoning is all over the place. There's no rhyme or reason to his method. And we oftentimes just throw up our hands and say, well, it's the Holy Spirit. But what we fail to recognize is what Paul tells us the whole time. I got this from a dream and a vision. And he got the message that Gentiles don't have to be circumcised, which has no scriptural justification in the Hebrew Bible ⁓ from a vision of Jesus. And then he has to reverse engineer.

the scriptures backwards to how do we get to this conclusion? Because Jesus told me this, I know it's the answer, but how now do I read the story of Israel in light of this vision I've gotten? And then you go to Acts and you see so many of the core movements that happen in that are led by the Spirit. I was one time giving this presentation at a Nate Symposium about how Paul is much more like an indigenous medicine man who receives visions and dreams than like a reformed theologian pouring over books to figure out something. Now, Paul was bookish.

But what drove his method, I would say, is through visions and dreams. A dear friend of mine came up to me just in tears and just saying, a non-Indigenous woman, but saying that, you know, I've had these core dreams I've held onto my whole life that I feel have guided me and have informed the things that I do, but I never had any category or pattern to understand this. And the way in which...

you opened up scripture and talked about the presence of dreams and visions as the vehicle by which God communicates the people, like gave me something to hang my experience. I just thought I was weird and this had no place in my tradition. But now I feel like I've always belonged and I cherish this in a new way. And you you were asking me earlier, like, what does this teaching have to do with non-Indigenous people? It's like, well, I think if it's the...

really good and beautiful, it'll speak to all communities. Indigenous people don't own the rights to hear from God through dreams and visions or to have like embodied relationships with the land. But by telling these stories, hopefully we provide and awaken some patterns and some experiences and give names to things that ⁓ non-Indigenous people have experienced and validate those experiences.

Speaker 2 (05:43)

And if you bring those into community, that's the place where you can discern together, right? So that example that Chris gave, where I sat with myself and didn't know what to do, what would have been different in an example like that if she had the space to come to a church that said the spirit might be speaking through those dreams and visions and let's discern that together and then move forward together. That's what we hope a little bit to cultivate in church spaces and community spaces.

Speaker 4 (06:14)

This has really been ⁓ asset based experience. so I hope you don't mind if I kind of turn the corner a little bit to deficit based experience and talk about displacement and boarding schools. ⁓ So you each wrote chapters on forced migration and displacement. Chris on the Trail of Tears and Danny on more recent history of boarding schools. ⁓ How have the stories and experiences of your people shaped the way you relate to the Bible, especially stories like the Exodus?

the Babylonian exile, ⁓ the book of Daniel, and then more specifically where you found new sources of hope and resilience.

Speaker 2 (06:51)

Yeah, so the first thing we'd like to say is that Chris and I really did write the book together. So we brought our stories together. Either we were sitting in the same room together or we were in the same Zoom room together. ⁓ And we were bouncing ideas back and forth. We were bringing our stories, our research, et cetera, and writing together. ⁓ So just to note that. So in terms of the boarding schools, ⁓ that's the stuff that

from Canada was most relevant kind of front of mind for me. So just to speak to that and ⁓ Chris can add, but in Canada, for those of you who don't know, we've had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a series of large events across Canada in which residential boarding school survivors, the ⁓ residential school ran for

over 100 years in Canada, first run by the government, then run by the church for a long period of time. The last one closed in 1996. Again, so this is an ancient history. I graduated in 97. And so ⁓ as those were happening and as ⁓ students were coming out of those schools, stories started rising of the abuse, of the lack of food, lack of healthcare, ⁓ all of these things. And so it resulted

in ⁓ lawsuits and ⁓ part of the settlement, it was the survivors that said, we need healing. They could have just said, we're going to take the money and you're going to have another 10,000 lawsuits coming, but we need healing. And so this was the residential, the TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So was a series of events in which residential school survivors came and told their stories, sometimes for the very first time.

all fully documented and put together. Sometimes ⁓ those survivors were willing to speak it again and record it and so you can find those online as well. And so, people need to understand this is why so many Indigenous peoples, even if they love or just respect Jesus, can't stand the church. Right? How would you feel about an organization that came for your children?

right? And this is the reality of the history that we need to own up to as a church in North America. This is the legacy that we are in. And so the boarding school example, both in Canada, mine's Canadian specific, but there were boarding schools in the US as well. And we tell that story ⁓ very similar to what we see in the book of Daniel, ⁓ where Daniel is also a young man with his friends who's also taken away.

given for an education, trying to hold on to their tradition at the same time. And so we see these resonances and so we put these stories side by side and we read them together in hopes of educating people on the history of their country, the devastation that's happened to Indigenous peoples in targeting children. Because the express goal of the residential school system in both countries was to kill the Indian and the child. So you take the child out.

from their communities, away from their parents. And this was very expressly stated by many ⁓ officials in the hopes that you get rid of the Indian so that this person can become the unnaturalized U.S. citizen, as it were, or a Canadian citizen. And so we wanted to educate people on that story, even while creatively engaging with the scriptural text as an example of what we mean by bringing our histories and our cultures and the pains that we carry.

as we wrestle with the text.

Speaker 3 (10:48)

Yep. Our editor noted, you have a lot of history in here. Was this intentional? And the answer was yes, because a lot of people don't actually know these stories. And one of the things we're taught in seminary, right, is good preaching is the Bible one hand and a newspaper or history book and the other and bringing them into conversation. We're very aware, especially these days, that we all are watching different news sources.

And in a similar vein, we all are carrying around different histories and stories that are in the back of our minds as we listen to scriptural stories. And we want to invite indigenous pastors to bring those stories and histories to the pulpit and to show them that these do preach together. And when you juxtapose the stories and hold them together, you're going to ask new questions about each version that you would not have thought of to ask otherwise.

So in one of the chapters, I talk about the chat experience of the Trail of Tears, which is by people. And I go to scripture and I'm like, well, what's something comparable to this? And it's the moment when Babylon exiles and makes the people in Jerusalem walk a long walk to Babylon, which leads to the Daniel story. What was that experience like? We usually pause to think about that and actually.

It's interesting, the Hebrew Bible doesn't really describe that experience directly. And our only accounts of that experience really come from the Babylonian administrative texts that we find from archaeology, which is interesting. In a similar vein, I spent all this time trying to firsthand accounts of the Trail of Tears, and they're really not there. But we have accounts from the missionaries and the administrators and the people who did the Trail of Tears.

for the forced people off of it than the actual indigenous people. So I thought that was an interesting parallel. ⁓ A side story, then I'll wind it back into it. When I went in to Oklahoma and I asked indigenous ministers, Choctaw and Cherokee ministers, where do you see your indigenous heritage come to light as you read the Bible or participate in the church? I'd often hear stories about the importance of the songs, the hymns, the Choctaw hymns, the Cherokee hymns. And as a biblical scholar, I was looking for something textual.

Right. Tell me a story about the Bible. I just, I don't know what to do with this information. But I was sitting in Talek while listening to Cherokee hymn singers and they were about seeing Amazing Grace in Cherokee. And before they sang the song, they introduced it by saying, this is a song that we sang before we entered the Trail of Tears, when we were cooped up in cages in the forts.

because they had removed us from our land, but they removed us too early before we had to get marched out. And while we were imprisoned, the soldiers would sometimes take our women and sexually assault them. we, the men would sing this song helpless, but would sing this song nonetheless to tell the women that they know what's happening and they're in solidarity with them. And they would go proceed to sing the song.

What happened afterwards was they kept singing, introducing the other hymns that were singing with these really tragic songs. And it occurred to me, man, these songs are vehicles for really important stories. These songs were sung along the trail. These songs were sung and created on the trail. ⁓ And this is true for both Cherokee and Chata. And so that made me go back to the songs. And one of the stories, there's only a single drop of blood is one of the songs. I'm mispronouncing it, but.

⁓ The cadence is really slow first and then it speeds up. And that reflects the story of as Cherokees, and this is true of Chaotas too, we're walking along. We know this information because by the way, ⁓ these stories were recorded by the grandchildren. And the grandchildren told the stories that their grandparents went on. And actually this one account by Effie Oakes said, I was on this trail and I saw them kill babies. And this song even speeds up because it's trying to encourage

mothers to walk faster so their children aren't killed by ⁓ the drivers of the ⁓ train going on. So ⁓ she recognizes that her brother is small and overweight and is not gonna make it. And so she puts him on his back and walks the trail with her brother on her back so that he won't get killed. And that little brother will grow up to become a Supreme Court Justice in the Chata Nation. And so, you know, when you read Psalm one,

37 and it's by the rivers of Babylon and it's just this Lamentation and it's like how can you ask me to sing an ancestral song outside of my homeland and it ends with this passage that we wring our hands around the bike You know blessed are the people that come and smash Babylonian babies against rocks. Hmm. They're like, oh, well, how could that be in the Bible? And it's like well, I don't know how I know that resonates with that the oaks I know that resonates with a lot of Chahta and Cherokee people who are

processing that trauma of having seen their babies dashed against trees and rocks along the way. ⁓ listening to these stories gave me a new imagination for how the Psalms may have functioned along that trail of tears from Jerusalem to Babylon. And even though we have no access to those oral stories, I think it's probably a high likelihood that those songs carried stories and carried people along the way. So it gave me a fresh appreciation of the Psalms.

They never had the four sitting with Cherokee hymn singers in Tahlequah.

Speaker 1 (16:40)

I'm so grateful for the stories that you've shared in your engagement with the Bible. It is so clear that you love God and you love your people and you love your history. It's given you incredibly important and meaningful work to do. So as people are reading this book and engaging with this book, what is something that you would want them to take away? Maybe you could speak to both an indigenous audience and a non-indigenous audience.

Speaker 2 (17:03)

Yeah, for indigenous readers, going back to what we said earlier, we're speaking kind of to young Chris and young Danny, ⁓ in that we were ⁓ Christians, we were reading the scripture all the time, we were studying as biblical scholars. No one ever said, you know, in seminary, you know, go back into the riches of your cultural heritage and, you know, what assets do you bring forth?

so that you follow Jesus as an indigenous person. We hope that this is helpful for indigenous people to give them, again, that encouragement that they have beautiful things in their history and in their cultural heritage and they can bring that ⁓ into their scripture reading. They can bring that into their Christian discipleship. They can bring that into their church. And ⁓ for some, hope that, you know, we hope again, like people who may be on the process,

There's going to be plenty of indigenous people, I think, that will have never really thought of that because they haven't had that experience at all. It may have been that, you know, harsh example like I had with my, you know, in my family history of it's like you put that aside, that's pagan, that's heathen. You just embrace the, you know, the Christian culture as it works. And so we hope that it'd be, you know, a poke at them and saying, no, there's things that you're missing there, right?

beautiful things that you're missing. we really hope, you know, at the end of the book, Chris and I say, we hope this is just the start where more voices are going to come up and there already are more Indigenous scholars and pastors who are bringing these stories together and weaving them together. And ⁓ we're just excited that we get to be, you know, ⁓ equipping in a little way that kind of conversation.

Speaker 3 (18:55)

And for non-Indigenous people, Danny and I really believe that the vision and invitation of Jesus is for all our relationships, and that includes all of us settlers and Indigenous people, to be in right relationships with one another in our full encultured selves. And the way we get to right relationships, just like any relationship, is to deeply know one another's stories.

And this book really is for the whole church. This book isn't about shaming a particular group or saying that in order to talk about the assets of one group, we're going to talk about the deficits as a complete foil of another group. The vision ultimately is how do we get to a space where we tell some of the hard stories with a vision of restoring relationship, getting to healing and getting to mutual flourishing and thriving and prosperity.

because there is enough, there is abundance. And we think that a lot of what indigenous people have taught and believed and lived into in terms of their cultures and life ways even provides a corrective measure to a lot of the problems we're facing in our world as we are not living in sustainable ways. And we are having a lot of trouble figuring out how do we provide enough for our communities and how do we...

not destroy our planet. And indigenous people have long found ways to live well with their environment, with the plants and the animals in their own genius. Or as we call it sometimes our indigenovations that we ⁓ want to appreciate. So there's something to learn, I think from this book for alchemy is in the same way that I've been so enriched.

and learn from African-American communities and Asian-American communities, Euro-American communities, German scholarship. There's something to learn from everyone. So we hope that this begins a conversation and that this invites more words and maybe even better words.

Speaker 1 (21:01)

You cast a beautiful vision. It's just an honor to be part of this ongoing work that you are doing in building out indigenous scholarship and indigenous Christian biblical scholarship. So thank you so much for being guests at the Algae Lab.

Speaker 2 (21:14)

Thank you.

Speaker 3 (21:14)

Thank you, Yakko.

Speaker 1 (21:17)

Just a reminder, will be a link to the book in the show notes by Danny and Chris.

Speaker 3 (21:21)

Did cover my name again?

Speaker 2 (21:23)

Actually, I think I covered one.

Speaker 3 (21:27)

You covered the end thing. It's kind of a joke, then when we show the book, like, just covered... Chris, like, what's up?