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By Root 2358 0

” This shouting worked no better at stopping the slaughter of Indians by whites than peace treaties had. When he finally realized the troops were attacking in earnest, he did not fight back, but folded his arms and sang his death song, “Nothing lives long/Except the earth/And the mountains.”456 The third person Hart wants us to emulate was also present at Sand Creek. Black Kettle somehow survived, and somehow continued to want to make peace with the whites. But he met the same end as the others, murdered along with his wife by Custer and the boys at the Washita massacre.

I have to be honest and tell you Hart’s examples didn’t compel me to want to become a moral pacifist,457 and I have to be even more honest and tell you that I found the notion of standing by while someone molests or harms one’s children or other loved ones to be profoundly immoral and irresponsible—despicable even. Many traditional Indians would have agreed. The response by Shawnees to members of their own tribe who refused to fight the whites458 was to sneer at their weakness and fright,459 to evince disgust and anger.460 Of one of those who wanted peace with the whites it was written that he “was generally considered to be an inconsequential chief with nothing of any great consequence between his ears, [who] was very inclined to attend the proposed peace treaty talks and wished to grasp the American offerings of peace irrespective of at what cost.”461

I didn’t, however, find Hart’s pacifism surprising, for two related reasons. The first was that the article was written in 1981,462 long after Black Hawk’s fears were realized, long after many Indians had taken on the mantle of their oppressors. The second reason has to do with how the mantle in this case manifests. Even more important to my understanding of Hart’s statements is the fact that he’s a Christian: a Mennonite pastor. The most direct (and so far only) argument I’ve seen for absolute moral pacifism by an Indian was written by a Christian. Of course. Of course a Christian would counsel pacifism and accommodation in the face of oppression. Of course a Christian would explicitly suggest that nothing be done to stop violence that flows down a hierarchy, even when this violence is done to one’s family. Of course a Christian would counsel that withdrawal and contemplation (sitting and smoking and doing nothing) are appropriate and moral responses to molestations and harms that could be stopped. That’s the point. A purpose of Christianity is and always has been to rationalize submission to those in power. Those in power conquer under the sign of the cross, while the rest of us count on getting our rewards in heaven. Or maybe we’ll get some rewards here: If only we’re meek enough, we’re told, with a barely perceptible smile and the hint of a wink, we may someday get to inherit (the wreckage of) this world.

Now, I could understand Hart’s story and teachings if he presented them as simply one part of a community’s spiritual life, a part that is necessary to the health of the community, but no more nor less necessary than appropriate counsel for war, appropriate counsel for hunting, for child rearing, for where to place your communal latrines. The Shawnee, for example, had five clans, each of which served functions for the Shawnee as a whole. Two clans dealt with political matters both within and without the tribe, one dealt with matters of health and medicine, one with spiritual matters, and one provided the majority of warriors and war chiefs.463 They all worked together. Further, I can see how it’s appropriate for people to think clearly under as many circumstances as possible (but where does feeling enter Hart’s description?), and I can see how it may be appropriate for some people in the community to attempt to think clearly and contemplatively under all circumstances, even the most personally trying. And I can see how others in the community may serve other roles, as appropriate. But it is simplistic, absurd, unrealistic, unnatural, and just plain incorrect to suggest, as Hart seems to,464 that absolute