Native chiefs framed indigenous ceremonies in Christian terms to get legal protection

Evidence

Recognizing the salience of religion in White American society, Native American chiefs invoked religious freedom in their defense of the Ghost Dance and other indigenous religious practices. For example, a group of Pawnee leaders wrote to US Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells, asserting, “Our Messiah or Ghost Dance is a religion that we think a great deal of, for through it, we found the white man’s Christ, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament furnishes us much of our ceremony whereby we worship the great spirit of Heaven.” Similarly, a Blackfeet tribal representative compared the need for three days to celebrate the Medicine Dance to Christianity’s Holy Week. He wrote, “These gatherings are to us as Easter is to white people. We pray, and baptize our babies only instead of water we paint them.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 213

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The phrase ‘only instead of water we paint them’ is a devastating miniature of how colonized peoples must translate their entire spiritual world into the colonizer’s vocabulary to have any standing at all.
• SEED: Essay angle: the forced translation of indigenous religion into Christian idiom as a survival strategy — and parallels with Muslims today having to pre-emptively reassure the state that their practices are ‘moderate’.