Why I do NOT beLIEve in a CreatOR

Author:  George E. “Tink” Tinker (Respected Elder from the Osage Nation)

Originally published in 2014 as an Essay within “Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry” (conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and life Together)

What is your word for God?  What do you mean you have no word for God?   Everyone beLIEves in a creatOR, don’t they!?

Our more liberal-minded White friends always want to know more about us [Indigenous Originals], so they naturally come with questions.   Thirty-five years ago, a native elder from northern California told us a creation story.  Long ago, Coyote, was floating through the air and wanted some place to rest.   So he created the earth – although it was just an accident.   So is coyote God?   The Creator?

As we have learned from the world of physics, even scientific observation changes what is being observed (i.e. The “observer effect “).  In this case, the very question that any white person (say, an anthropologist) asks a native person shapes her answer, indecisive ways.  Whatever the native person has to say about the matter, must now use the language categories of the colonizer.  In this case, the key problematic words are God creator, and believe.  The question itself shapes the reality that a native person must try to describe.  Now she must struggle to use colonial language of God, Creator, and belief to interpret her own world back to the well-meaning colonizer, who seems to assume that everyone in the world is similar to himself.  The more these, euro Christian friends hear about coyote however, the clear they are that crazy old man coyote is not exactly what they mean by the word God – even if he created something.

It might sound quite incredulous and heretical to announce a disbelief in a creator since talk of a “creator”, and a “creation” has become second nature in the Euro-colonized world as liberal Christianity attempts to reclaim a theology, rooted in what some call it’s “First Article” doctrine (i.e., beginning with the creator and creation, as in the Apostles’ Creed).  My objection to creator\creation language, however, is vitally important to preserve the coherence of an American Indian worldview.  My concerns include both linguistic complexities involved in any translation and the imposition of categories of cognition in the colonizers language, as though they represent some level of normative university allergy in this late colonial world.  This is necessarily complex, and requires some detail an explanation.

The Up-Down image schema

In this case, creator and creation are key categories of presumed universality deeply embedded into the “social imagery” of euro-colonial people in north America as normative truth.  As such, they get to easily imposed on the vanquished aboriginal owners of the land, as though the euro-american metaphoric imagination were so concrete intangible, a presumably obvious “first principal”, as it were, that all peoples must inherently find someway to talk about this colonial Christian imagery, even if in their own discreet language.  First of all, the word necessitates a couple of other conditional categories that I am increasingly disavowing.  Those two categories include both the notion of a “creator” – that is something euro-westerners would call “god”, usually with a capital letter – and a much more pervasive cognitive model we might call in up-down cognitive image schema (using the language of cognitive lingquistic theorists).  This image schema then identifies as a whole social imagary that are organizes everything from political realities (even in a “procedural” democracy) to theologies (from conservative to liberal).  Identifying a creator as a super-personality, who is responsible for creating all things, a “god on high”, is a euro-colonial hierarchic imagary that lens itself both historically and presently to euro-Christian notions of hierarchy and inequality.

Here, I am not simply objecting to the language of god and creator as language embedded in a European worldview or Christian ideology.  It is much more crucial to notice that imposing these religious metaphors of a hierarchical divine as an overlay on Indian cultures, irredeemably distorts the Native culture, destroying the intricacies and the beauty, that is, the coherence of the native worldview.  An up-down linguistic cognitive image functions to structure the social whole around vertical hierarchies of power and authority.

Largely unnoticed by those who are immersed in an up – down image, schema is an ever present. American conceptual metaphor, one that creates the hair kick notions that dominate our euro colonial world of Christian conquest.  It puts some over others, and someone always seems to be in charge”.  The app can be a king or a president, but the person is the one the top of a hierarchy.  Until recently, European theorist explained white as the superior form in their racial hierarchy, with a descending rank, according to the darkness of skin color.  Wow, man is head of household in European gender hierarchy, the so-called order of creation that suppresses women into a lower status see Genesis 2 and one, Timothy 2:11–15), children are always thought to be subservient to the parents (to be seen and not heard). This order of creation mentality, then evolves politically into the valorization of meritocracy as a norm in American political, intellectual and socioeconomic culture. Especially beginning in the 16th century humans come before all the rest of creation. Since trees are far down the hierarchy of being clear, cutting a forest for human profit is an easy thing to rationalize. Capitalistic economies function with a clear up down hierarchy of command as do modern military “chains of command”. Uptown lens itself, especially to the language of ruler and sovereignty words that lack any ancient counterpart in native languages. And in euro Christian worldview, there must be a spiritual power (higher power) rules over humans and over all creation. So people generally talk of a god who “looks over them”.

In other context, I have noted that the indigenous worldview is primarily spatial. Wow the euro western world view is primarily temporal.  That may seem a bit paradoxical in my description here of what seems to be special up down euro Christian imagery.  The temporality that is so characteristic of the Euro western world view is somehow morphed into the physical space image of the uptown uptown deity.  There is a hierarchical “geography” that is attached to the euro western temporal worldview, resulting in this uptown, special imagery or imaginary that gets populated with all kinds of concrete objects that inhabit actual space, such as kingdom and white haired, bearded guard, sitting on a throne in a heavenly palace.  It is indeed, spatial imagery. Everything in its has a footprint, but the spatial here is located in a way of distant abstract place.  The Updown image schema seems to be inherently temporal, and only subordinately spatial.

A clear and particularly disastrous use of the uptown image schema in relation to native peoples, is the use of great white father to referred to the US head of government and great white mother in Canada, in reference to the queen of England.  The language does not come from natives themselves, but was the van attempt of white colonial functionaries of the frontiers to name both white superiority, and the authority of the political leader of the European invaders weather in Washington or Ottawa.  The hierarchy is obvious; white conquistador, white superiority over savage uncivilized natives.

An American Indian worldview to the contrary, generate a social hall that issues, uptown hierarchies in favor of lateral social constructs. There are much more egalitarian in predicated on balance and harmony.  The important distinction here is that lateral does not imply neutralizing, or a dismissal of the uniqueness of persons, whether two legged, four-legged, wind, or all other forms of living and moving persons within the greater whole.  In other words, it is not a worldview that could be a Kwaidan with the Euro western notion of communism.

Imposing and uptown cognitive scammer overlay on an Indian collateral worldview not only fails to allow for the expressing of native realities. It is ultimately very destructive of those native realities.  End, it certainly does not matter that many, if not most native people have made under the duress of sheer survival, the concessive move to adopt those conditional categories, as somehow meaningful in their own postcolonial contexts.  Ultimately, this new year-old Christian colonial imaginary imposed on native peoples, and on their lands over the past centuries grossly distorts what is left of Indian cultures and remains an impediment to the continuing any egalitarian relationship between peoples (using peoples as a legal technical term).  More to the point, I would argue that this is newly imposed Euro-Christian worldview is ultimately destructive to the earth and all our relatives here on the Earth, and thus imperils, all Peoples, including those who live within the Euro western world view.

The key problem is that the deep structure realities of the two worlds. Those of Europe, Christianity, and those of American Indians, are inherently opposite to one another..  Or as Seneca scholar, Barbara man puts it in Iroquois, women, “in the European Iroquois, and instance, none of the metanarratives of the two cultures coincide”.

Collateral – egalitarian image schema as community-ist

The worldview that traditionally provided all native communities in the Americans embodies a cognitive model we might call a collateral – egalitarian image schema, which is more of a community-ist model.  As noted above, this is distinct from what the Euro west to easily imposes, a native peoples as a communist model.  To understand the radical difference this model embodies we need to begin with the numbers one and two and unpack the difference culturally. Men rightly insist that Indian people are dualistic in the sense of pared reciprocity, and that two represents the number of balance and wholeness. The number one she insists is dysfunctional.  We need to see the number one as extractive rather than reciprocal.  [Fibonacci ref here]  value is placed in the one at superior and the Euro west, cannot envision a distribution of value or meaning across multiplicities of two.  In the Euro western Christianized, mine this kind of distribution dilutes value.  There is only a monolithic image of power, and a value of the one which is static and superior.  Two in the American Indian context is necessarily dynamic and lens itself to reciprocity.

For Indian people does duality inherent in the number two is the balance of two paired halves necessarily to make a whole colon light in Dirk, male and female sky, and earth, night and Day, sun and moon, etc.  This American Indian, reciprocal dualism of parent halves is the opposite of what she identifies as the Manichaean and oppositional dualism in uptown image schema that fuels euro western political and religious, idealologies.  So, first of all the notion of a single creator, immediately participates in the dysfunctionality of the number one signaling a hierarchical order of creation.  The dualistic, opposite, rather than a feminine coparticipant, is then abject evil, or the devil, something entirely lacking in Indian cultures, and tell it was red back into our traditions by missionaries who needed to find, and still do an equivalent evil to fit their own theologies.  For Indian folk, the notion of a single male sky god is decidedly unbalanced and leads to chaos competition male supremacy, racial hierarchy, and competing notions of a single doctrinal truth over and against false this hearsay and evil.  Immediately allows for in Anthropologie that is decidedly anthropocentric in elevates the human superior over all other lifeforms, the inferior and equally allowance for the elevation of mail over female since it is the male man Adam, who is particularly made in the image of the Cristian male, sky, god.

Indians, Creator, God, in the colonization of the mind

“Wait a minute there!” Some colonialist critic might insist, “I hear Indian folk call on the creator in their prayers all the time.”  Yes, it is true that many Indian folk, and even national communities have today falling into using creator language, and I must admit to have fallen into that usage myself in some previous writings.  Yeah, this reflects a couple of postcolonial realities. First Indian minds have been so deeply colonized into colonial discourses – even discourse is about ourselves – that we have come to believe what the missionaries have told us about ourselves. Even those of us who claim to have rejected the imposition of colonialist language and cognition, can find ourselves slipping into euro Christian colonialist usage at the strangest and most unguarded moments.

Under the intense colonizing pressure of the invader governments (i.e. Canada in the United States), and the steady stream of Euro colonial missionaries to many Indian folk, have simply capitulated to Christianity in the guise of one denomination or another. To use creator language, instead of missionary, God language helps the Indian folk feel a little more Indian like since all her traditions do it Ballengee variety of powers that brought about our present world. Second many Indian folk have held on to something of their traditional ways but those ways have been effectively altered along the way by your own colonial interpreters (missionaries, anthropologist, elitist, tourists and adventurers, etc.) And processes that man usefully calls “euro–forming”. In this process, even our traditional ways are persistently reshaped, particularly to exclude the feminine and to replace reciprocal dualism with the masculinist oneness of sky-god.

wako”da, the colonial missionaries have long told us must be the Osage word for “God” oh, stages and other natives must necessarily have some innate sense of a monolithic high God (read hierarchy/up – down guard). The necessity of course is for affirming, the self identity and cosmology of the conquering colonizer into coerce the native into the new, cultural modality of singularity and hierarchy of the Updown image, schema imposed by the colonizer. The first step down is to erase women, erase the feminine entirely. So what was powerful, reciprocal and duality of a collateral balance, becomes a male dominant monotheistic modality.  wako”da mo”shita ski wako”da udseta, Life Maker Above and Life Maker Below, Grandfather and Grandmother, I’ll get reductively suppressed into “dear, heavenly Father”. And that dear heavenly father, we are shared by the missionary voice, is the English equivalent of the original native wako”da.  What a tragic loss, a loss of cosmic balance. The power of the old, Osage traditional experience of the world, and of every native community of the Americas, was it implicit and explicit sense of balance and harmony. That collateral image, schema of balance and harmony, then is replaced by the multiple euro Western cultural image, schema of up – down (masculinist) hierarchy.  The collateral community capitalist image schema of inter-relationship (“we are all realted”) is replaced by hierarchy and ultimately of domination. The role of the feminine in our experience of the cosmic energies is, he raced in favor of male supremacy; the collateral image schema of cosmic (and personal) balance is instantly discarded in favor of the new up – down image, schema of power and control. Not only is the masculine high God, fully in charge, a masculinist clergy is vested with full authority to interpret the will of that one.  And that has become the predominant Osage reality today, after more than a century of intense missionization.

Cosmic duality in balance (expressed in wako:da mo:shita and wako”da udeseta) are as much at stake as our personal in community-ist balance.  The spiritual energies are dual and reciprocal, mutually reinforcing of one another in vitally and necessary for balance.  In my wife’s dissertation about indigenous Andean mining, she describes the Andean view that everything under the surface of the Earth was not “evil”, but rather held a different kind of energy that needed to be respected when going underground.  Those underground or subterranean energies are absolutely necessary for balance in all of the universe, but they must be approached and interacted with differently.  As Aaron Running Hawk listened to her description, he said that from a Lakota perspective, the unearthing of minerals, and bringing them up to the surface for modern industrial use, was creating a huge in balance of the Earth.  One can picture the sphere of the Earth, becoming distorted and shape, and wobbling out of its spin and orbit. Also, during the Latin American celebration of Carnivale, the purpose of the event is to momentarily reverse the duality in order to preserve balance.  Thus the Andean procession of dancers wearing for some masks of the underground powers is exactly meant to maintain balance.  “El Diablo” (the post-Christianizing name for Tio or Muki) is brought into the light of day for a little while, but then one would presume from this that the above earth powers become subterranean for a little while.  Then it all shifts back to the way it was.  This has incredible contemporary relevance.  For within the indigenous Andean worldview, which respects both powers above and below, the very minerals of the Earth are considered to be the veins and blood of this living, animate earth.  And thus modern industrialization is committing extraordinary, personal violence by leeching all that blood to the surface in order to satisfy the monotheistic, imaginings and desires of those who live by the “Protestant ethic” of capitalism and prosperity theology.

Indian “creation” stories

Well, all Indian people have stories of origin – called “creation stories” in euro-talk – the stories differ significantly from euro-West’s perspective.  OC just remember that the dryland portion of this world was made in the long ago by o’po” to”ga, the bull elk.  so, why can’t we just say that Bull-Elk is the “creator” and leave it at that?  The first problem with that choice is that human people and at least elk already existed.  So did the Earth. When the sky people backslash, humans came down from the stars they were brought down to the Earth by the eagle (another creator figure?) but found it covered with water. It was Elk who then created the dry ground, and all kinds of living things to help the humans to be able to survive. Once the sky people began to make their way around mo”sho”, then they discovered another community of humans, the Earth people, who are already here.  So Elk sharing a role and responsibility and making the world the way it is as did Eagle. But neither one is the sort of monotheistic “creator” like the one brought over the waters with the Christian European invasion. Indeed recall that the world and people already existed-particularly the oak tree in which the sky people first landed. Namely, there are no credible historical American Indian stories that tell of a creation ex nihihilo, a creation from nothing.  Nor is there a super personality, who is ultimately in charge.  The same structuring of beginnings plays out in all Indian traditions. As Barbara mine describes the Iroquois’s traditions for instance there are pairs of individuals who contribute to the making of the world.   Sky Woman, her daughter Lynx, and Lynx’s two sets of twins, one male and one female. Writing in correction of the euro formed version of the Iroquois traditions which labels the male twins (Flint and Sapling) as one being good, and one being evil, she insists, “Flint was not a ‘destroyer’, nor Sapling a lone ‘Creator’.  Instead, both twins were creators of life, abundant-as were there, female elders before them.  Mann’s point here, relates exactly back to indigenous Andeans’understanding of Muki as a separate spiritual power source, as well as explaining carnivals misuse of Muki as a Christian devil figure. Here we could add one more note of difference. Wow, there is no garden of bliss in aboriginal, American traditions, all the stories tell of balance in the world from the beginning, without any aspirations of human fallen-ness or sin, and without any notion of an evil influence in the process. That only comes with the Christian euro-forming of our indigenous traditions.

We are all related

In terms of euro – Christian theological notions, the contemporary and more liberal idea of stewardship continues, precisely this notion of hierarchy in an anthropocentric modality that is antithetical to an Indian worldview in the values that emerge from that worldview. Since our experience of the world is one of enter relationship, we cannot conceive of a human superiority, to any of the other living things of the world. They are all “relatives”. And to put ourselves, somehow, in charge, seems to Indian peoples, to be a very dangerous move, which puts the balance of the hole in great Jeopardy.

Experiencing all non-– human persons as relations generates an affect, or a way of life, in which there can be no hierarchy of being, either among a human community, or between the different categories of persons in the world: two – Leggetts, four – Leggins, flying ones, or what we call the living – moving people, for example, trees, corn, rivers and mountains. All of these persons are our relatives and need to be attended to the appropriate relationship behaviors. If we are all related, then the ideal that every Indian community strive to achieve, was, and is HARMONY and balance with all of life around us, that is, with all our relatives. And this epitomizes the collateral – egalitarian image schema. Even in up – down hierarchy of human\non – human proves destructive to any ideal of cosmic balance.

Disruptions of balance (from personal to cosmic) occur daily, so they must be medicated with ceremonial reciprocity. Whatever we human beings, acquire or receive, we must give something back. So, if we take an animal relatives life – for example, the buffalo – there must be a ceremony to restore balance in a relationship with the Buffalo, and with the Earth. The ceremonial giving bank might include, for instance, a sprinkling of corn pollen (Navajo or Pueblo traditions). Then, when we harvest agricultural goods – for example, corn and corn pollen – there must likewise be a reciprocal ceremony of giving something back. Perhaps the gift might be one of tobacco, but harvesting tobacco, likewise, requires us to give in order to maintain balance, even as we disrupt balance by taking. So we are constantly reminded that the people whose lives we disrupt by taking our indeed our relatives: corn, buffalo, tobacco, and other living beings. None of these people are there merely for human consumption or at-will usage. Rather, they inhibit the Earth, along with us, and have intrinsic value equal to that of humans. And our response to disruptions, we necessarily create, in order to eat and live, requires a constant cycle of ceremony intended to restore balance.

In our living room, we have a lovely lithograph by Hopi artist Dan Namingha title Ceremonial Night, a scene with the moon rising over Southwest Pueblo. The irony of the title, of course, is that there is never a single ceremonial night. Their ceremony includes all the nights and days, leading up to, and preparing for the ceremonial night, and then includes all the nights and days afterward spent for filling the obligations, which are communicated from the spirits in the ceremony itself, and which lend themselves to maintaining community balance. That’s hardly accords with the dryer for efficiency. That is the reality of our modern – day, post – industrial, digitalized 21st century.

Even under the conditions of conquest, generations of propagandizing, residential schools and missionaries, and the radical urbanization of many contemporary native folk, we still try to pay attention to this need to maintain balance. At urban Powells or community ceremonies someone always takes responsibility for making a “spirit plate” to set aside for our ancestors, and for the spirits, something that many of us do even as we cook in our high-rise condominiums or apartments. There is constant travel from north American cities, back to reservations in reserves just to maintain the ancestral connections. The land here takes on a continuing importance in the self identity of people. For some national communities, there is still a tradition of taking a babies umbilical cord back to the home territory. (now usually reduced to a reservation) to be buried there, in order to maintain a lifelong ceremonial tie to that Place.

In the spirit, our responsibility as humans, and the responsibility of every other life form, is to help maintain harmony and balance in the cosmic hole around us. While we can destroy that balance, and have a responsibility to help maintain that balance, we are never conceived as being in charge, and some hierarchical chain of being. This is very different from the story our colonizers tell.

How our white relatives might join us in this cosmic task of maintaining harmony and balance, I cannot even begin to suggest. Sorting out that task after centuries of living out of the app – down hierarchy, worldview is something that these relatives, my sort out themselves – even though we natives can certainly help inform that process along the way. But the up – down metaphoric conventions of life that seems so natural and intuitive to all your euro – Christian folk, must give way to a new notion of collateral – egalitarian balance. From our experience with the modern economics of power politics, especially around the use and abuse of native lands. (think Alberta tar sands), to the United States’reliant on foreign policy modalities that rely so heavily on the threat and use of violence (including economic violence in this late colonial period), to the startling realities of global warming and climate change, it seems that two – leggeds are being given a strong message about the way of life that has come to dominate the Earth. Up – down, the allergies of domination have not served the world well. Even the more liberal and entirely post – modern, the theologies of “stewardship” are still stuck in that up – down schema that in order, inordinately privileges the human being in an anthropocentric hierarchy. All this points to the need for a serious re-thinking of the ONE, cosmic, male creator died, who rules all things. Talk of creation, and the single creator it implies is not possible for those of us who take seriously [sincerely, by living thru Other and welcoming Other to live through self], collateral – egalitarian, balance, and community-ist living.