-- Luther Standing Bear
Meditation: by the Austrian born Jewish poet Erich Fried, who fled to England in 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. This is a poem entitled “What Happens,” translated from the German by Michael Hamburger.
It has happened
and it happens now as before
and will continue to happen
if nothing is done against it
The innocent don’t know a thing about it
because they’re too innocent
and the guilty don’t know a thing about it
because they’re too guilty
The poor don’t notice it
because they’re too poor
and the rich don’t notice it
because they’re too rich
The stupid shrug their shoulders
because they’re too stupid
and the clever shrug their shoulders
because they’re too clever
It doesn’t bother the young
because they’re too young
and it doesn’t bother the old
because they’re too old
That’s why nothing is done against it
and that’s why it happened
and happens now as before
and will continue to happen
Reading: by the historian Aviva Chomsky from Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (p. 26)
Some of the unspoken foundations that support the idea of illegality today come to us thanks to Christopher Columbus and the European expansion that followed in his wake. It might surprise [you] to hear that many of the structures that have led to the current ways that people are moving around the planet – or prevented from this movement – date back to that same colonial expansion.
The “age of exploration” sent Europeans around the globe with the aim of settling and ruling distant lands and peoples. They developed an ideology to justify this exploration: an ideology that granted full humanity, free will, intellect, and strength to white Christians. To those who did not fall into that category, the Europeans… attributed irrationality, brutality, stupidity, and barbarity.
Along with the ideologies went ideas about movement: who belonged where. Europeans, apparently, belonged everywhere. Christians needed to expand their realms and bestow the benefits of their government to others, and settlers needed to fulfill their pioneering spirit and manifest destiny by applying their will and their capital to new lands and peoples. And they created countries, governments, and laws to authorize themselves to do these things.
Reading: by Robert Young, a professor of English and Critical Theory Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (p. 45, 49, 50)
In many colonized countries, settlers created vast farms and estates by driving off those who had traditionally lived on that land, some of whose descendants continue to this day to live in an impoverished landless limbo….
The experience of dispossession and landlessness is… typical of settler colonialism, and is historically most difficult to resolve. …The struggle for “native title” has… been a major concern for native Americans in North America, for aboriginals in India, and for the dispossessed African farmers in Zimbabwe…, while dispossession from family land and the claim for the right to return represents the central issue in Palestine.
These are all postcolonial struggles, typically dealing with the aftermath of one of the most banal but fundamentally important features of colonial power: the appropriation of land.
Reading: by Louisa Fletcher a poem entitled “The Land of Beginning Again”
I wish that there were some wonderful place
In the Land of Beginning Again.
Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches
And all of our poor selfish grief
Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door
and never put on again.
I wish we could come on it all unaware,
Like the hunter who finds a lost trail;
And I wish that the one whom our blindness had done
The greatest injustice of all
Could be there at the gates
like an old friend that waits
For the comrade he's gladdest to hail.
We would find all the things we intended to do
But forgot, and remembered too late,
Little praises unspoken, little promises broken,
And all the thousand and one
Little duties neglected that might have perfected
The day for one less fortunate.
It wouldn't be possible not to be kind
In the Land of Beginning Again,
And the ones we misjudged
and the ones whom we grudged
their moments of victory here,
Would find in the grasp of our loving hand-clasp
More than penitent lips could explain...
So I wish that there were some wonderful place
Called the Land of Beginning Again,
Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches,
And all of our poor selfish grief
Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door
And never put on again.
Whose Promised Land?
A Sermon Delivered on October 26, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Ever since my wife, Elaine, and I moved to Urbana, we have been homeowners. Before coming here, we always rented.
I remember buying property was a big deal. The financial implications were frightening, the whole experience humbling. And I confess, I am still coming to terms with the rights and responsibilities involved.
So, for instance, I know that, being a property owner, it is my responsibility in the winter to keep our sidewalk shoveled. And in the summer, over the years, neighbors have explained repeatedly that it is my responsibility to keep the branches of our massive forsythia bushes reasonably pruned, so they don’t become pedestrian hazards.
Our little plot of land is a corner lot with neighbors to the west, and neighbors to the north. And I know exactly where their property ends and ours begins. I shovel snow and rake leaves right up to the invisible line that marks the border of my land. And when the branches of my neighbors’ trees grow over my property, and when the big leaves of their magnolia tree fall on my driveway and clog my gutter, I notice. And I quietly resent how they are infringing upon what is rightly mine, and what I legally own.
I have a piece of paper in my desk at home that says this land is mine. A legal document, signed and notarized, says that we own lot twelve, in block two of Shuck’s subdivision of lot six, eighty-three and fifteen hundredth feet off the north end of lot seven of James S. Busey’s addition to Urbana, as per plat recorded in deed record 15 at page 307, in Champaign County, commonly known as 502 West Oregon Street.
We bought it fair and square from a kindly gentleman names Jack Simon, who had lived here all his life. I have a legally binding warranty deed that says: To have and to hold, the above granted premises is ours “forever.” Forever, that is, until we might chose to sell it and settle on a different this plot of land.
Our plot of land originally belonged to James Busey, a descendent of Colonel M. W. Busey, the man who founded Urbana in the 1830s. Before that, according to our city history, the first pioneer settlers built the first house here in 1822. What the city history doesn’t say is who lived in this area before the settlers arrived.
* * *
In a book entitled An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz makes the case that the accounts most of us learned in school about the history of this country do a very poor job providing an accurate portrayal of how it was settled.
She is reminded of how skewed the average American’s sense of history is every time she teaches a class in Native American studies. She always begins her class with a simple exercise. She asks her students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain.
Invariably, every time she conducts this simple test, the majority of students draw a map that has about the same shape as the present US, that reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Of course this is wrong. At the time of independence in 1783, the US consisted of just 13 colonies, from Georgia in the south, to Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the north. All of the colonies, with the exception of Pennsylvania, bordered the Atlantic Ocean.
“When called on this,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes,
“students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious “manifest destiny,” embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previously been terra nullis, a land without people.” (p. 2)
Imagining the United States as a much larger country in 1783, the students are not describing historical facts, but historical aspirations. Though there were only 13 colonies along the east coast in 1783, the settlers were indeed determined to take possession of the continent that extended thousands of miles to the west. This hunger for western expansion was a key factor in the American Revolution.
You see, the land west of the colonies, on the other side of the Appalachians and the Alleghenies, was Indian Territory protected by the British, stretching all the way to the Mississippi River. The British wanted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, and control the frontier conflicts caused by settlers encroaching on Native American lands.
Just four years after the American Revolution, and a year before the US Constitution was written, our founding fathers ratified the Northwest Ordinance, which provided a legal basis for taking over that Indian Territory, and beyond.
* * *
We think if this as the land of the free, the home of the brave. We sing, America, America, God shed his grace on thee, from sea to shining sea. O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat, across the wilderness.
We imagine this nation’s founding as the story of Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land. Yes, we know there were conflicts with Native Americans. The common narrative in our history books describes it as a “cultural conflict.” The frontier is described as “a zone of interaction between cultures, not merely advancing European settlements.” American culture is imagined as “an amalgamation of all its ethnic groups,” a benevolent multiculturalism. All of these stories, Dunbar-Ortiz writes,
“are meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of this country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources… This approach to history allows [us] to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society.” (p. 4)
She writes:
“US history… cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from the ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in consciousness of US Americans.” (p. 9)
* * *
Part of what makes it easy for European Americans to ignore the unsettling realities of how this country was settled, is that, every step of the way, the government created laws that declared our intentions and actions “legal.”
Aviva Chomsky writes,
“Europeans used laws to assert their superiority and their right to move, and to deny others the right to freedom of movement, all the while asserting that the rule of law must be held sacred… Over the past one thousand years, Europeans have used religion, race, and nationality – that is, countries and citizenship – as organizing principles to divide people in categories or castes. Each has been used hierarchically to justify social inequalities and differential legal treatment of different groups. Once status becomes inscribed in the law, this becomes an automatic justification for inequality: “it’s the law!”” (p. 25)
Treaties were ratified and treaties were broken. When Native Americans were able to defend their territory against the encroaching settlers, land rights were grudgingly granted. Once settlers realized they really wanted that land – like when gold was found in the Black Hills of South Dakota – those land rights were withdrawn, and US military moved in.
All of this was done legally. It was based on legal precedent reaching back to fifteenth century Europe. One of the first and most lasting principles of international law is justified by the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The Doctrine of Discovery was created by the pope in 1455 and granted the Portuguese monarchy the right to seize West Africa. After that, it provided a legal basis for the European conquest in Asia, Australia and America.
As Gale Courey Toensing concisely describes it, the Doctrine of Discover “was essentially a racist philosophy that gave white, Christian Europeans the green light to go forth and claim the lands and resources of non-Christian peoples and kill and enslave them—if other Christian Europeans had not yet already done so.”
In 1792, then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed the Doctrine of Discovery was international law applicable to the new US government. In 1823 the US Supreme Court ruled [that the Doctrine of Discovery] was also the law of the United States. Therefore, as Dunbar Ortiz writes, “European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag.” The Doctrine of Discovery has never been overturned. It continues to guide legal decisions to this day.
* * *
For descendants of the settlers and for legal landowners, the history of United States is a story of bravery and freedom. We worked hard to build a land of liberty and justice. I worked hard to earn the money I needed to buy the land I now rightfully and legally own. I have a piece of paper that clearly states that I am legally right. But what that piece of paper doesn’t address is whether I am morally right.
How does morality and legality apply when we are dealing with stolen goods?
Chief Crowfoot of the Siksika First Nation said,
“Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to [people] and animals. We cannot sell the lives of [people] and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land. It was not put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us. You can count your money and burn it within the nod of a buffalo's head, but only the great Spirit can count the grains of sand and the blades of grass of these plains. As a present to you, we will give you anything we have that you can take with you, but the land never!”
* * *
The Promised Land that is so central in the Biblical tradition, was never merely a matter of actual, literal earthly turf and territory. The notion of a “promised land” was used in a symbolic sense to express the wholeness of joy and well-being that comes with social cohesion and social justice. God’s promised land describes our human longing for belonging, for safety, prosperity, dignity, and freedom.
The Promised Land cannot be geographically measured or legally acquired. The Promised Land is a figment of our moral imagination. It is a dream we long to make real.
We all truly long to live in a land of the free and home of the brave, just as our national anthem says. But we are not there yet. In order to get there, we need to look at our history, we need to recognize our responsibility, acknowledge our complicity, and realize the harm done by past actions that may have been legal, but certainly weren’t morally sound.
The first step we need to take is to re-examine our history and acknowledge what happened. We need to realize it happened, and it happens now as before, and will continue to happen, if nothing is done against it.
And then, with a deeper understanding of all peoples’ rights and responsibilities, we need to begin again. Our next step is to imagine a new promised land, a Land of Beginning Again, where all our mistakes and all our heartaches, and all our of our poor selfish grief could be dropped like a shabby coat at the door and never put on again.
Our next step is to imagine a land where the one whom our blindness had done the greatest injustice of all could be there at the gate like an old friend. And the ones we misjudged and the ones we grudged would find in the grasp of our loving hand-clasp more than penitent lips could explain…
May we have the wisdom to learn from the past,
And may we have the courage to boldly move toward a better future.
Amen.
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