Canaanites and Colonizers
Andrea Smith is right: “The history of missionization to Indigenous people in the United States has been simultaneously the history of Indigenous genocide.”
But we can go further. The following is also true: The history of missonization to Indigenous people in what is now called the Americas has been simultaneously the history of Indigenous genocide. A cursory glance of colonial and settler colonial histories makes this clear.
A cursory glance at these histories also shows that we cannot chalk up the link between missionization to and genocide of Indigenous people to illness and disease. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues, this view is ahistorical. She writes:
If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting war against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—nearly three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.
Disease alone cannot explain how “nearly all the population area of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects,” nor how Christian mission efforts fueled this genocide.
A full analysis of the link between missionization and Indigenous genocide requires more than a blog post. But we can here highlight one aspect of this link: the construal of Indigenous peoples as Canaanites.
Scholars including Albert Cave and George Tinker have demonstrated that Puritan settlers depicted Native people as Canaanites deserving complete destruction. Consider this quotation written by George Henry Lokei in 1794:
The human behavior of the governor of Pittsburgh greatly incensed those people, who according to the account given in the former Part of this history, represented the Indians as Canaanites, who without mercy ought to be destroyed from the face of the earth, and considered American as the land of promise given to the Christians.
This Puritan appropriation of Scripture wasn’t colorblind. Summarizing the Puritan perspectives, Andrea Smith writes: “As Canaanites, Native peoples had a one-way destination to destruction to allow for the ‘New Israel’ of whiteness in what would become the United States.”
The Puritan race-conscious appropriation of the Canaanite conquest wasn’t new. The Spanish championed it a century before in a legal document called El Requerimiento, “the Requirement.” El Requerimento drew upon the racist theological reasoning of Spanish conquistador and lawyer Martín Fernández de Enciso. As Robert Chao Romero writes, Enciso argued that “God entrusted the East Indies (the Americas) to Spain in the same manner that God had given the Palestinian Promised Land to the Israelites. Moreover, just as God had assigned Palestine to the Israelites because of the pagan idolatry of the Canaanites, so did God assign the land of the Indians to the Spaniards because of their idolatry.”
Here is Enciso:
The [Spanish] king might very justly send men to require those idolatrous Indians to hand over their land to him, for it was given him by the pope. If the Indians would not do this, he might justly wage war against them, kill and enslave those captured in war, precisely as Joshua treated the inhabitants of the land of Canaan.
For Enciso, Christ empowers popes with divine authority to distribute creation to Christian rulers who will spread white Christian supremacy across the globe. Like Joshua, these kings have God’s blessing to wage war against Indigenous people who would keep them from achieving their supersessionist manifest destiny.
Informed by racist theologies, Anglo and Spanish “evangelized” and warred against Indigenous people they saw as Canaanites deserving destruction. Yes, not every European colonizer saw nor acted this way. But thousands did. And their racist thoughts, feelings, and actions shaped the Americas.
