2025.10.12 | Sacred Wisdom
“Sacred Wisdom”
Indigenous People’s Day
Romans 2:14-18 (First Nations translation)
“The True Spirit of Jesus” by Ohiyesa (aka Charles Alexander Eastman)
Preached by
Rev. Ashley Wai’olu Moore
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
12 October 2025
Good morning, Beloveds!
Happy Indigenous People’s Day! While some parts of the country will still celebrate Columbus Day tomorrow, in the State of California we instead now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day out of a desire to recognize the people of the First Nations of America. There is a lot I want to cover today and hope to do so as concisely as I can. So I ask that you please forgive the generalizations I will be making in the interest of brevity.
The history of The Americas is long and complicated. Between 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, people crossed the Bering Straight and began rapidly migrating southward, occupying both North and South America no later than 14,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier than 20,000 years ago. Over many millennia, pre-Columbian civilizations like the well-known Olmec, Inca, Maya and Aztec societies rose and fell. At the time Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, it is estimated that as many as 60 - 112 million indigenous people were living and flourishing in the Americas. 7 - 18 million of those lived in North America.
Mesoamerica was one of the six areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently. It was also one of only five regions of the world where writing is known to have developed independently. (1) These cultures also had advanced astrological knowledge and the knowledge and ability to build large complex structures without the benefit of Old-World tools, engineering or domesticated beasts of burden. Some had advanced agricultural techniques that allowed them to cultivate large amounts of food in very arid and challenging climates.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas existed in territories from Alaska near the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of Argentina. They were not a single unified or homogenous culture. Rather, there was a great diversity of autonomous cultures and traditions that existed for at least 11 millennia before Columbus arrived.
In North America, were the First Nations peoples, often called Native Americans. There were “hundreds of different nations with diverse languages, religions, and ways of living. Some groups lived in large cities like Cahokia near the Mississippi River, which had massive earthen pyramids and thousands of residents. Others built homes of wood and bark in the forests of the Northeast. In the Southwest, Tribes like the Hopi developed irrigation systems to farm in the desert, while groups on the Pacific Coast fished and built plank houses from cedar trees. They created governments, art, music, and spiritual traditions. Many Native nations believed the land was sacred, not something to own or exploit, but something to care for and pass on to future generations.” (1)
Now if you’re like me, you grew up hearing that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But the alternate perspective is that a group of indigenous people discovered Columbus lost at sea and floating off their coast. Columbus thought he had arrived in India and thus called the people he found there “Indians.” A year later, Pope Alexander VI issued a proclamation that stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be "discovered," claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers. It further declared that "the Christian religion be exalted, increased and spread everywhere, (so) that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." This "Doctrine of Discovery" became a part of international law allowing European nations to claim rights over lands they "discovered," disregarding the presence of Indigenous peoples.
After Columbus came, Eurasian diseases such as influenza, smallpox and measles, which were new to North America, caused the deaths of upwards of 90% of the indigenous people, resulting in great losses to their societies and cultures. The dominant narrative used to be that deaths to these diseases was accidental and not in any way intentional, and thus was an unfortunate side affect of first contact. But deliberate, systematic actions by Europeans were the primary cause of subsequent population declines.
“Numerous scholars have classified elements of the colonization process as comprising genocide against Native Americans. As part of a policy of settler colonialism, European settlers continued to enslaved or wage war and perpetrated massacres against Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands, and subjected them to one-sided government treaties and discriminatory government policies. Into the 20th century, these policies focused on forced assimilation.”
They even engaged in biological warfare. Historian Ann Ramenofsky wrote that the most severe form of small pox “can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or blankets. In the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army sent contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to control the Indian problem.” (2) (And) in Brazil, deliberate infection attacks continued well into the 20th century as Brazilian settlers and miners transported infections intentionally to the Native groups whose lands they coveted.
Historian David Stannard estimates that the extermination of Indigenous peoples took the lives of 100 million people.
Perhaps the most notorious example of such policies and pogroms was the forced exodus of the Cherokee nation under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which aimed to relocate Native American tribes from their ancestral lands in the eastern United States to designated territories west of the Mississippi River. The travesty that followed became known as the Trail of Tears.
As progressive Christians of the 21st Century, we likely agree that these were cruel and reprehensible acts enforced against innocent people. Part of the tragic history of the United States. Yet we can see the same kind of actions taking place today. The descendants of the First Mesoamericans are being demonized and victimized for, what the poem we heard earlier called, crossing borders that actually crossed them. Nearly a third of the western United States was once part of Mexico. And their ancestors were here long before Columbus came. This land was forcibly taken from them.
Then as now, the ideologies underlying such actions are the conceits of European supremacy and hegemony, combined with the distorted Christian entitlement of the Doctrine of Discovery. What’s worse is that most of this pain and suffering was done in the name of Jesus by people who called themselves Christians.
They mistakenly believed that the indigenous people were pagans who worshiped nature. Instead, their belief system is more accurately defined as Panentheism, or the belief that God (whom they called the Great Spirit or “Grandfather”)…that God is within everything and everything is within God. Thus, God’s spirit was all around them, constantly, in every living thing.
So the colonialists sought to “correct” and convert the Native Americans through the teaching of the Gospels so they might be saved. The children were forced to attend schools where they would be indoctrinated to the ways of western Christian civilization under the paternalistic notion that it was “for their own good.”
But as they learned the teachings of Jesus, the Native Americans observed that their oppressors did not practice what they preached. As we heard the elder say to Ohiyesa earlier, “These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilization. (He) does not follow the example set by his brother Christ.”
Let me share some of Ohiyesa’s observations with you:
“I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, I have never lost my Indian sense of righteousness and justice.
When I reduce civilization to its most basic terms, it becomes a system of life based on trade. Each man stakes his powers, the product of his labor, his social, political, and religious standing against his neighbor. To gain what? To gain control over his fellow workers, and the results of their labor.
Is there not something worthy of perpetuation in our Indian spirit of democracy, where Earth, our mother, was free to all, and no one sought to impoverish or enslave his neighbor? Where the good things of Earth were not ours to hold against our brothers and sisters, but were ours to use and enjoy together with them, and with whom it was our privilege to share?
Indeed, our contribution to our nation and the world is not to be measured in the material realm. Our greatest contribution has been spiritual and philosophical. Silently, by example only, in wordless patience, we have held stoutly to our native vision of personal faithfulness to duty and devotion to a trust. We have not advertised our faithfulness nor made capital of our honor.
Again and again we have proved our worth as citizens of this country by our constancy in the face of hardship and death. Prejudice and racial injustice have been no excuse for our breaking our word. This simplicity and fairness has cost us dear. It has cost us our land, our freedom, and even the extinction of our race as a separate and unique people.” (2)
George “Tink” Tinker is an (Osage) American-Indian scholar and Professor at the Iliff School of Theology who contends that, contrary to the Doctrine of Discovery, the indigenous people of North America did not need to be saved through the teaching of the Gospel because they were already following the principles that Jesus taught. For, the Apostle Paul claimed in his letter to the Romans that “those who do not possess the law, (but) by nature do what the law requires…are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts.” (3) And as we heard the old warrior say to Ohiyesa earlier, “we have followed this law for untold ages!” Unfortunately, the colonialists were unable to recognize this. What a tragic irony!
We see the same kind of behavior today – aggressive Americans who loudly proclaim that they are Christians while pursuing policies that are demonstrably antithetical to the spirit and teaching of Jesus and harming people. This cognitive dissonance represents a perilous continuation of supremacist ideologies and the Doctrine of Discovery.
As disciples of the teachings of Jesus Christ, we are called upon to challenge, repair and/or dismantle ideologies that create hatred, violence and suffering, and bear witness with “a love that calls for justice and equality.” I fear that the pogroms of this administration and its agency of terror - ICE - are just ramping up. Let us not make the mistakes of the past, because we are too afraid and tell ourselves that these things do not directly affect us. Remember that Jesus said whatever we do unto the least of these, we also do unto him.
We must collectively and individually act to prevent the displacement, disruption, exploitation, subjugation and suffering of the indigenous peoples of North America from ever happening again.
If we are listening and responding as a community, then we can be working collectively and co-creating with God, rebuilding SHALOM and being agents of goodness and healing against the evil powers of our time.
Today, Native Americans represent nearly 3% of the national population. According to the 2020 census, there were approximately 9.7 million Native Americans living in the United States. 80% of them do not live on reservations. The largest populations are in Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona and the Dakotas. There are more than 500 separate tribal nations and 325 American Indian reservations.
Beginning in the 1960s, inter-tribal organizations such as the American Indian Movement (ARM) began coalescing with the goal of promoting Native American pride, autonomy and political power. Some groups were focused on trying to salvage cultural heritage, others protested the loss of their lands by trying to protect, recover or re-occupy sacred sites such as Alcatraz Island or the Shell mounds of the East Bay.
In 2016 and 2017, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of South Dakota campaigned to halt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline which eventually drew thousands of supporters from all across the country. The protests culminated in acts of violence instigated by police and security workers who released attack dogs on the demonstrators, shot them with rubber bullets, blasted them with water cannons. shocked them with Tasers. President Obama then stopped the pipeline’s construction. That decision was later reversed by President Trump.
Today, there is an ongoing national movement to get land back into the hands of Native communities. Such rematriation efforts are raising awareness, gaining momentum and having successful campaigns with major tracts of land being returned to tribes through state agreements, federal initiatives, grants, donors and grassroots advocacy. According to the Department of the Interior’s web site, “nearly 3 million acres in 15 states were consolidated and restored to Tribal trust ownership as of 2023.”
Lands have been successfully rematriated in places such as Wyoming, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, California – even in Oakland.
In a historic step toward reconciliation, Oakland has returned five acres of city-owned land to Indigenous stewardship. The site is a wooded hillside once known as Sequoia Point in Joaquin Miller Park, lies within the ancestral territory of the Ohlone people, specifically the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. This land will now be managed by the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous women-led organization dedicated to cultural conservation, environmental restoration, and public education. My former church provides office space to them at a discounted rate and has entered into a co-management arrangement for the church campus.
“This movement can not only right the historical injustices that led to their land dispossession in the first place, but also further acknowledge that Tribes have the knowledge and value systems to steward their lands exceptionally well.” (4)
But proposals from Project 2025 suggest eliminating federal protections for sacred sites and increasing resource extraction on tribal lands. Such moves could stall or even reverse recent progress in the Land Back movement, forcing Indigenous communities to fight new legal and political battles to reclaim their ancestral lands. (5)
Let us actively impede a return to the supremacist practices of the past, and become allies helping indigenous communities regain their autonomy and their land. We can also support local Native American groups when they seek to protect indigenous lands or prevent developers from desecrating sacred sites.
May it be so!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerica#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFagan1996762-8
https://www.history-education.org/native-americans-before-columbus-understanding-culture/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#cite_ref-177
The Wisdom of the Native Americans, Ohiyesa, “The Gift of My People”
Romans 2:14-16