Christmas, or What Was God Saying to Indigenous People 2,000 Years Ago?

So I've been thinking about what God was saying 2,000 years ago to people living in North America, or what Indigenous people call Turtle Island.

At Christmas, Christians celebrate how they believe God came into the world through Jesus.

But when God came into the world 2,000 years ago in Palestine, what was he saying to Indigenous people in North America at the same time?

That’s the question that was posed to me recently.

I have to admit: I had never thought about that before. I went looking for more information.

The person who asked the question said he was quoting my friend Terry LeBlanc, an Indigenous Christian leader and director of NAIITS, an Indigenous Christian learning community.

I sent Terry an e-mail. Did he really say that?

Terry said yes, the gist of it was correct. Then he amplified what he meant.

First off, Terry said, he wanted to affirm “if there is a singular Creator of all things, something about which I am in agreement, then unless he is the deist’s god (who created the world and then left), God has been and is omnipresent by default.”

What this means, he said, is that while the history we read about in the Bible was unfolding for the Jews, “there was an historical timeline of equal length unfolding here and in other places of the globe.”

Terry was quick to add he’s wasn’t saying “God as Jesus, specifically, was here [in North America], though there are prophecies of the arrival of the message of Jesus.”

Instead, he said, what he meant was “God as Creator and God as the Spirit were here.”

If that’s the case, I asked him, what was God saying to the Indigenous people of North America?

God was speaking about things like the seven teachings, Terry said: Love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth.

As we know, when Europeans arrived they assumed North America’s Indigenous people were heathens—that they had no knowledge of God. (At least, not God as they understood him.)

But they did, Terry said. They just used different language and stories to express it.

But Christian missionaries assumed those stories “were irrelevant and/or replaceable by the biblical narrative, instead of recognizing the universal applicability of those [Indigenous] narratives.”

When I read Terry’s comments, I was reminded of what Richard Twiss, a noted American Indigenous Christian leader, said in his book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys.

In it, he noted that “the Creator’s presence” was active among native people before Europeans arrived.

Unfortunately, he added, they were blinded “to the already existing work of Creator among Native nations of the land.”

Instead of coming alongside Indigenous ways of understanding God, they sought to convert them to “white man’s religion.”

The result was a disaster for Indigenous people as Europeans suppressed their spirituality, culture, languages and ways of life.

But back to the original question: When God came into the world as a baby in Palestine over 2,000 years ago, how was he communicating with the inhabitants of North America—or people in other countries around the world? And what was he saying?

Those are questions I will be pondering this Christmas. What do you think?

Photo at top: Norval Morrisseau, Indian Jesus Christ, 1974.