An Indigenous American Nightmare
Today I finished reading Decolonizing Evangelicalism by Randy S. Woodley (Cherokee) and Bo C. Sanders. The text is a literal dialogue between Randy and Bo about decolonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial conceptions of Christianity. Near the end, Randy and Bo have a sobering conversation about the racist myth of the American Dream. There Randy offers this extended reflection about personally experiencing an American Nightmare.
I suppose some, since I have the privilege of being a first-generation college student and holding a PhD, someone could say, “See, they worked hard, and you have attained the American Dream as a result!” And there was a time I might have acquiesced to such a notion. In 2004 my wife, Edith, and our family started a Native American ministry and cultural renewal center in old Cherokee territory near Lexington, Kentucky. On those fifty acres we had a farm; we invested our life’s savings to build roads and buildings and barns; there were pastures and orchards, and we developed springs. We were conducting incredible schools with around forty people. But at the height of our success, the country denied our legal permit to build sleeping cabins for our students. In fact, about thirty of our neighbors showed up to protest our presence and intentions. This was followed by a White supremacist paramilitary group firing daily a 50-caliber machine gun on our property line, to kill us or to threaten us—we at first did not know which. In our plight, we could get no help from the Department of Justice, nor from the Fair Housing Council, nor from the state’s attorney general, nor from the county sheriff’s department. We had to refinance our home twice to stay afloat and finally were forced to sell it at half its appraised value during the economic downturn, just to keep our family safe. This high-stress situation took a toll not only on our financial stability, wiping out in one fell swoop our life’s savings and earned equity, but it also took a serious tool on our family. And this is just one experience of one Native American family who tried to “make it” in America’s dreamland. Now, is that what you think of when you hear the words “American Dream”?
Randy’s words are haunting. They come from a Cherokee whose ancestors suffered forced removal and the Trail of Tears. Like Pam Colorado, Randy reminds us that every Indian knows “Auschwitz ovens/burn bright/in America.” And he reminds us that the linking of white supremacy and land dispossession persists.
