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Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation was written by American Indian theologian George “Tink” Tinker and published in 2004 by Augsburg Fortress, the publishing arm of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The book can be conceptualized as a broad critique of Western intellectualism, culture, and continuing imposition of individualism and cultural and societal norms on American Indians, leading to dissolution of native culture, social structuring, and spirituality. The book is divided into eight chapters, given below.

Contents 1 Chapter 1: “Liberation and Sustainability: Prolegomenon to an American Indian Theology.” 2 Chapters 2 & 3: “Indianness and Cultural Alterity” and "American Indian Religious Identity and Advanced Colonial Malignancy” 3 Chapter 4: “American Indian Religious Traditions, Colonialism, Resistance, and Liberation: That the People might Live!” 4 Chapters 5 & 6: “Fools and Fools Crow: The Colonialism of Thomas Mail’s Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power”, and “Thunderbeings and Anthropologists” 5 Chapter 7: “Indian Culture and Interpreting the Christian Bible”

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This chapter begins by suggesting that any American Indian theology contains certain difficulties (2). “We are faced,” Tinker says, “on the one hand with a broad spectrum of the rich diversity of Indian mythological expressions and other traditional narrative, forms of Indian spirituality, ceremonies and structures of Indian societies (2).” All this rich spiritual diversity has the potential to provide very interesting theological reflections. But as these theological reflections are derived from a history of suffering, poverty and oppression under White Euro-American hands, American Indian theology should be careful not to be just interesting to an external (non-Indian) audience, but must be an expression of the reality of contemporary Native American experience and be formulated from Native American experience and culture (3). Thus an American Indian theology must include a recovery of American Indian spiritual and cultural heritage. Such a theology also must begin within the political reality of Native American communities where, through continuing Euro-American imposition of Western culture and political systems, Native American communities “endure rates of unemployment, alcoholism, suicides, and homicide that are 40 percent to 600 percent higher, and rates of longevity, levels of education attained, proportions of school dropouts, and levels of income that are significantly (10 to 50 percent) less than the general population (3).”
Any American Indian theology of liberation must be necessarily linked to the liberation and healing of Euro-Americans from their past and from the political, social, and religious structures that continue to perpetuate the cultural genocide and oppression of American Indian communities, as well as a general disregard and disrespect for the environment and its ecosystems (5). In an attempt to help Euro-American communities in such endeavors, Tinker offers a critique of what Euro-Americans consider their best solution to these problems: national sovereignty and sustainable development.
Tinker recognizes that sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy are important for American Indians, who have always been denied these things. It is precisely because only states are recognized internationally as sovereign, and thus those people within these sovereign states who are indigenous, natural communities are denied any sense of sovereignty and seen only as ethnic minorities (7). Tinker also deplores what he calls “the divine right of the nation-state (7)”, the idea that sovereignty of the nation-state is assumed a priori to be a sovereignty over both its people and its territory (7.) Thus nations, such as Brazil, engage in unrestricted destruction of the environment (i.e. the rainforests) which is further exacerbated by the constant pressure nations are put under to “develop” and become recognized in the international arena (8).
In response to this reality, Tinker offers two questions: “at what point and by what process did a people who never ceded their sovereignty to an immigrant colonial state lose their sovereign status to these modern entities? And what is the moral reasoning that sustains such exercises of state sovereignty (8)?” His answer is that with the formulation of international individual rights as prioritized over indigenous sovereignty (thus a person, who has these individual rights, is still subject to the law of the nation-state) unjust theories of national sovereignty were imposed on indigenous peoples who never ceded there land to anyone (8).
Tinker then discusses the liberal Euro-American idea of sustainable development. Often the remedies to the genocide and ensuing social, political problems wrought upon Native Americans have been “development” and “civilization”(9). These remedies, however, have not at all been successful and have, to the contrary, lead to the imposition of Western social structures, politics, economic systems, cognitive structures and technologies on people who did not want them, who had lived perfectly with their own technologies and social structures for thousands of years (10). Development, even sustainable development, has left “devastation and confusion in its wake (10).” It has especially effected Nature, which is seen as “mere raw material for human exploitation, needing management and control (11).”
This is because, Tinker suggests, of ten reasons:
1. Western cognitive categories of individualism and temporality have lead to a disregard for the environment and for indigenous people who have been exploited in the name of “civilization” and “development (improving the human condition) (12)
2. Western, Euro-American solutions to the problem are not helpful because they are rooted in the very same political contexts that created the problem (12).
3. The very words of development and sustainable development presuppose a temporal view of reality, one which that indigenous people do not share (12).
4. The concept of the state is artificial and the creation of large centralized states involves the subjugation of people who originally lived there (12).
5. Likewise modern borders are artificial and do not recognize natural and cultural boundaries (12-12).
6. Indigenous people should work to reclaim natural boundaries and entities instead of helping outsiders develop (14).
7. The basic political unit should be small, local, autonomous communities recognized and respected internationally. There should be a tolerance for a variety of political configuration (14).
8. One world system (i.e. Marxism, capitalism, democracy) should not be imposed on all people, who have diverse cultures, worldviews, and communal living (14).
9. Different cultures should be respected and one culture should not seek to dominate others (14).
10. Developed states will benefit from allowing indigenous peoples autonomy, and these peoples, with a fundamental orientation to the community and to the wholeness of creation, can help us immensely in this problem (14).
These ten points can be broadly whittled down to a criticism of the current economic system: economics, with its individualistic assumptions and its emphasis on self-fulfillment, has thus institutionalized human greed as an important part in the economic engine (15). Tinker’s solution is an alternative vision in which humanity does not try to surpass the limits put on it by the natural world, but learns to live within them. To him, Native American ceremonies express this need for humans to live within the limits, to maintain a balance in creation (20). Thus Tinker is developing a theology that allows for and sustains a community existence and prevents it from being fractured (26).

In “Indianness and Cultural Alterity” and the following chapter, American Indian Religious Identity and Advanced Colonial Malignancy”, Tinker is concerned with addressing the question of “who is an American Indian?” This question is complicated because with the Euro-American conquest and imposition of Western culture on native peoples two things happened: many Euro-Americans raped native women and the children of these rapes, though they could claim Indian blood, were nevertheless acculturated into Western norms. Thus many people nowadays claim to be American Indians yet are completely Western in cultural expectations, habits, assumptions, and presuppositions. Tinker considers the cultural genocide of American Indians, the lost of spiritual traditions, language, even the spatial and communal orientation, is the most effective weapon that Euro-Americans have leveled against American Indians. For loss of culture is necessarily loss of any identification as a community with any cultural integrity.
The United States Census Bureau uses a blood quantum to define who can be an American Indian. However, as Tinker argues, one can be fully integrated into American Indian culture yet be below the blood quantum while, reversely, one can be above the blood quantum, yet be fully integrated into Western individualism and temporality (51). Tinker suggests, then, defining American Indians by their cultural competency. The first test is an orientation to spatiality, as opposed to the West’s priority of the temporal, which leads to “progress, history, development, evolution, and process becom[ing] key notions that invade all academic discourse in the West, from science and economics to philosophy and theology (44).” Second, American Indians have been traditionally communitarian and thus do not place the individual above the community, but in the community (45). Third, American Indians have a conviction in the interrelatedness and interdependences of all creation (45). They do not accept, for example separating the universe into “living” things and “non living” things. Thus American Indians speak of all creation, rocks, stars, plants, and animal as their “relative.” Indian cultures think of themselves as part of creation, not as apart from it and thus able to consume it (45). The fourth point derives from these first three points: Native Americans are attached to their land. They do not conceive of objects as property, neither do they believe land can be owned by a particular person (45).

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The first chapter looks at the continuing colonialism of native peoples through an American Indian hermeneutic. Tinker is concerned about a new type of colonization happening today: the colonization of traditional Indian ceremonies (i.e. Sun Dance, Purification Ceremony, Vision Quest). American Indian ceremonies, so central to maintaining cultural and spiritual integrity, were traditionally understood by Native Americans in terms of vicarious suffering (57). Thus, while Euro-American literature usually understands these ceremonies in terms of “self-mutilation” and “self-hurt”, the pain involved in these ceremonies are done for the good of the community (58). They have become even more important to Native Americans ever since they were disposed of their lands and their livelihood, they help American Indians to resist the continuing pressures from the church and the state to conform with colonization and Western culture (58). However Westerners, especially New Agers, are slowly invading these ceremonies, done to restore the balance of creation that Euro-Americans and their development and disregard for nature have so upset.
Tinker interprets this new threat of spiritual colonialism, of “spiritual racism (61)” in terms of a consumptionist society. The sense of spiritual poverty that has created the New Age movement has lead many Euro-Americans to seek exotic spiritualities (61). While Tinker recognizes that these New Agers feel that the West, with its notions of temporality and individualism, has been so thoroughly spiritually impoverished, he is concerned about the effects of inviting Euro-Americans into traditional ceremonies. “When New Age aficionados invade Indian ceremonies,” Tinker says, “they represent another sort of colonizing virus that threatens the health and well-being of the communities into which they have invited themselves or from whom they have finagled an invitation from Indian people accustomed to saying no and too weak from generations of colonialization to change their traditional cultural habit of hospitality, even when their own cultural and physical survival might depend on it (62).” So, despite the best intentions of New Agers, just as with missionaries, in participating in traditional ceremonies they infect those native communities with the individualism and temporality that is emphatically antithetical to Native American existence. Furthermore the presence of Euro-Americans in traditional ceremonies invites those involved to change the language involved in the ceremonies in order to help the outsiders understand it. This involves infusing the ceremonies in individualistic and temporal terms. In this way, ceremonies are westernized and individualism enters more fully into the lives of Indian people (65).

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The next two chapters concern the intellectual monopoly Whites have in areas of academics, spirituality, and even American Indian studies. Chapter 5 critiques a book by Thomas Mails entitles Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power. The book is in the New Age genre, telling the life story of Frank Fools Crow, a Lakota chief, as told, apparently, to Thomas Mails. However the books, written by a Euro-American, does not escape Western categorical imposition, interpreting the words of Fools Crow in Western terms. Mails, for example, call Fools Crow the Highest and Most Holy One. These words, however, are never used by the Sioux to describe any sort of deity or sense of the spiritual (77). Likewise, Mails imposes the Judeo-Christian image of the Trinity on Lakota spirituality (77). Furthermore, Mails assumes a superiority to other Lakota by saying that he was on first name basis with Fools Crow and did not have to call him grandfather. Mails then suggests that he was the only one Fool Crow entrusted to keep the ancient traditions (75) once again assuming his own superiority over that of other Lakotas (75).
In chapter 6, Tinker similarly critiques a book called Thunderbeings and Anthropologists: A Lakota Primer, written by Stephen E. Feraca. The book once again demonstrates a Euro-American sense of superiority: “As Vine Deloria, Jr.., Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and others have demonstrated persistently, academics have made Indian people a means for carving out careers based on the intellectual domination of aboriginal peoples in North America, posturing themselves as the experts about the cultures of colonized victims (79).” Tinker demonstrates how this book fits this description in the rest of the chapter.

The seventh chapter “Indian Culture and Interpreting the Christian Bible” deals with American Indians’ relationship with Christianity. Since the Christian Church was the primary weapon of cultural genocide and an important means by which native land was colonized, the subject of Tinker’s book Missionary Conquest, necessarily created strained relationships with Christianity. While the Europeans, especially the Puritans, identified themselves with the Israel of the Old Testament and North America as the “Promised Land,” most Native Americans in fact identify themselves with the disposed Canaanites (90). Furthermore, Native Americans do not consider themselves to be spiritually impoverished; they had a relationship with the Sacred Other and understood the importance of Creation long before Columbus (89). Christianity, therefore, has little to offer Native American spirituality; quite the reverse is true, in fact.
In this vein, a Native American hermeneutic of the Christian Bible entails specifically Indian cognitive structures, such as spatiality and an orientation to creation. Such a hermeneutic involves a de-centering of humanity as the pinnacle and central species in creation (anthropocentrism) (92). This anthropocentrism, in fact, can be sin as an Native American understanding of sin. Humanity, believing that the universe exists only for it, refuses to live within the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of nature. Rather humanity wants to transcend its limits by conforming creation to its will. This refusal to live within the limits of creation can be seen as the root of all evil and sin. Redemption, therefore, is accepting human limitations.
Tinker then suggests that the gospel of Mark suggests that the early Christian writers, like Native Americans, categorized things spatially, instead of temporally. He suggests that in Mark10:46-52, in which Jesus heals the blind beggar Bartimaus, that Mark uses the word “road”, hodos, points to the spatial basis of Mark’s thinking (96). Tinker the proceeds to interpret the Kingdom of God in spatial terms: “In this American Indian interpretation, the basileia must be understood as all-inclusive; that is, if it symbolizes the harmony and balance of all creation, then it must include all things created (97).” The Kingdom of God, then, is not about the final eschatological moment in history when this Kingdom will be finally instituted, “it is concerned with how one images oneself in the present in relationship to the Creator and the rest of creation (98).” This Kingdom can only be fulfilled through repentance: “calling on God’s people to recognize the divine hegemony, to return to God, to return to the ideal relationship between Creator and the created, to live in the spatiality of creation fully cognizant of God’s hegemony, of human createdness, and of the interrelatedness of all the createds (98).”

Endorsements

"George Tinker is the long-awaited intellectual voice of the indigenous peoples of this Turtle Island. He speaks with the gift of immense wisdom and respect for the people's spirit and of the humble and interdependent place they occupy on the sacred earth circle." — Henrietta Mann, Professor Emeritus of Native American Studies, Montana State University

"Tinker is a mature intellectual force to reckon with, and his new book reflects it. Solidly researched, closely but eloquently argued, and extraordinarily effective, Spirit and Resistance is must reading for anyone concerned with the relationship between indigenous and Christian traditions in the Americas." — Ward Churchill, author of A Little Matter of Genocide and Struggle for the Land

"Tinker's powerful and well-reasoned thoughts are expressed in a much kinder way than some of us are likely to do. While Tinker's work is well known to scholars, it is less known to most younger readers and hence will arrive on the scene as brand-new thoughts. Just what is needed in a society that seems to be more a flock of sheep than a human enterprise." — Vine Deloria Jr., author of God Is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins

WORKS CITED

Tinker, George E. Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004.