The religious roots of efforts to crush Indigenous Missourians

Although I'm not a native Missourian (I was born and grew up in Illinois except for two years spent in India), I've lived in the Show-Me state for more than half a century.

But it's been only in the last couple of years that I've learned much of anything about the Indigenous people who first occupied this continent. And only in the last few weeks that I've deepened that knowledge to include more information specifically about Indigenous Missourians.

In many ways, I blame bad religion for some of that.

It was, after all, the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery contained in an encyclical issued by Pope Alexander VI that led European nations, because of their beliefs about white supremacy, to imagine that they were free to conquer and even enslave Indigenous people in what became the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Oh, and not just to enslave them but also to turn them into Christians instead of leaving them be what our Declaration of Independence called them, "merciless Indian savages."

The wildly complicated history on this continent after that has led to the diminishment of Native peoples in countless ways -- though not, finally, to their elimination. That history is told with a special focus on Missouri in a remarkable new book, Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present, by Greg Olson.

Indigenous people have always lived in Missouri, of course, even after it became a state in 1821 and then, in 1839, as Olson notes, passed a law that "required any Native person who entered the state to have written permission from a government Indian agent in order to do so."

The roots of that kind of treatment, as I say, go back to religion. As Olson writes, by the early 1600s, "Native people in Missouri found themselves subject to laws and policies based on religious and cultural concepts developed half a world away. These foreign ideas, first carried to the continent by European colonizers, sought to legitimize the desire of Christians to take control of Native land without regard for the sovereignty of Indigenous nations."

In this brief review, I cannot do justice to the depth of Olson's detailed research and the way he uses those facts to portray what colonial settlers did to disrupt and in many cases destroy the lives of Indigenous Missourians. But Olson does not make the argument that deeply sinful Europeans crushed highly moral American Indians. He is much more nuanced than that, making sure readers understand both the mixed motives of settlers and the reality that Natives were simply other human beings who at times went to war against each other and who, like people everywhere, went bad in the usual ways.

But the sweep of the story is clear: European settlers crushed Indigenous residents in countless ways. The remarkable thing is that Native people did not disappear and are still with us. Beyond that, they are continuing to seek justice and to stop cultural misappropriation and other forms of discrimination.

Two examples of that: The "Not in Our Honor" effort by area Natives to get the Kansas City Chiefs to change the team's name and to stop fans from using the Arrowhead chop motion. It's all part of what Olson calls the need of Native peoples "to confront the ongoing issue of non-Natives appropriating Indigenous culture, traditions and ceremonies for their own purposes."

Second, there's the effort to get the Tribe of Mic-O-Say scouting organization to stop a similar appropriation of Native customs and history. The tribe goes back to the 1920s and to former (and late) Kansas City Mayor H. Roe Bartle (known as "Chief"). Recent local efforts to stop cultural appropriation haven't achieved their goals, but, as Olson reports, The Kansas City Star has editorialized about this, saying that the "Mic-O-Say program demeans Native Americans.  . .(and) is long past due for a major overhaul." Olson also correctly notes that the program has its defenders who say Mic-O-Say honors Indigenous people.

In the last couple of years my own congregation's efforts to be an ally of the Kansas City Indian Center have helped me get a better grasp on area Indigenous history and issues. But Olson's book should be a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the long, often sad history of how settlers mistreated Indigenous people and what that means for relations today. I can almost guarantee readers that they will learn things about the Midwest and specifically Missouri that they didn't know.

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ROCKLAND, Mass. -- I'm in New England for a family wedding scheduled for this coming weekend, so there won't be a second item here today and the blog will be on a short vacation after today until either Aug. 23 or Aug. 26.