Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with you all today on this lovely 2nd Sunday in October for my 2nd time in the pulpit. I do have to say though, these past few weeks, with the exception of a day or two, I’ve wondered if I’m actually back in Texas and if the rainy northwest I’ve been hearing about was just a vast conspiracy to lure this cool, rainy day lover in only to swap them out with the warm Texas gulf coast-like weather from which I came which is admittedly, not my favorite. I don’t know about you all, but I’m ready for some cool misty days, and some sweater weather!
This coming week we have two holiday observances that served as inspiration for this week’s sermon topic- tomorrow, October 10th, we celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, a counter-oppressive answer to the traditional and heavily colonialist “Columbus Day”, unfortunately not the last celebration this time of year that’s tinged with a particular habit of exalting conquest and imperialism. Then on Tuesday October 11th, we celebrate National Coming Out Day, celebrated annually to mark the anniversary of the 2nd National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place in 1987. October 11th also happens to be my fiancees birthday, so she gets extra gay points for that- because we do have a point allocation system to accompany our gay agenda, after all. So today, in honor of both Indigenous Peoples Day and coming out day, we’re going to explore intersections between the two.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a link to an old Schoolhouse Rock song on social media. I was a little too young to catch schoolhouse rock in its heyday, but I do remember, as many of you likely do also, the “I’m Just a Bill” video that explained in detail the legislative process of how a bill becomes a law. Being mostly unfamiliar with the majority of Schoolhouse Rock’s body of work, the link that he posted I had never heard or seen before, but some of you might know it. It was a song called “Elbow Room”, and a quick google told me it first aired in May of 1976. I didn’t care to become familiar enough with it to be able to sing it, but a selection of the lyrics goes like this:
“One thing you will discover
When you get next to one another
Is everybody needs some elbow room, elbow room.
It’s nice when you’re kinda cozy, but
Not when you’re tangled nose to nosey, oh,
Everybody needs some elbow, needs a little elbow room.
That’s how it was in the early days of the U.S.A.,
The people kept coming to settle though
The east was the only place there was to go.
The president was Thomas Jefferson
He made a deal with Napoleon.
How’d you like to sell a mile or two, (Or three, or a hundred, or a thousand?)
And so, in 1803 the Louisiana Territory was sold to us
Without a fuss
And gave us lots of elbow room.
Oh, elbow room, elbow room,
Got to, got to get us some elbow room.
It’s the west or bust,
In God we trust.
There’s a new land out there…
Lewis and Clark volunteered to go,
Goodbye, good luck, wear your overcoat!
They prepared for good times and for bad (and for bad),
They hired Sacagawea to be their guide.
She led them all across the countryside.
Reached the coast
And found the most
Elbow room we’ve ever had.
The way was opened up for folks with bravery.
There were plenty of fights
To win land rights,
But the West was meant to be;
It was our Manifest Destiny!”
The song continues on, finally ending with a desire to continue US expansion… all the way to the moon.. and beyond. Why? Because we all need a little “elbow room”. I was appalled at the blatant colonialism and imperialism in this educational video for children. But the reality is, this is the narrative that is still perpetuated if not in practice then in ideology in the US today.
Manifest Destiny- a bit of bad theology that originated in the 19th century- supposed the expansion of the United States was ordained and destined by God; this premise has become so enshrined in the cultural mythology of the United States, that its values and suppositions appear over a century later in “educational” materials from the late 20th century.
As we reflect on this today, well into this the 21st century, it’s worth knowing that Manifest Destiny itself was informed by earlier ideas grounded in more bad theology. These originated in a number of Papal bulls from the Roman Catholic Church beginning in the 15th century. The Christian gospels, with its scriptures ironically grounded in a resistance of the Jewish people to the occupation of the Roman Empire and the coming of a messiah or “god-king” who would liberate from this occupation and oppression, were distorted by both church and crown to support the aims of Empire and conquest. The so-called “Great Commission” in Matt. 28:19–20 which reads, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” d was one of the main scriptures misused as a theological rationale for the European conquest. Two papal bulls in particular, Dum diversas (1452) and Romanus pontifex (1455), provided the legal and religious justification for the conquest and subjugation of both indigenous peoples and lands in the name of spreading Christianity. Dum diversas explicitly declared the need to convert not only indigenous peoples but also the need to convert the land, justified through the premise of “dominion” from Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”. Finally, The Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493 after Columbus’ wrong turn turned into a conquest, played a central role in the Spanish imperialist conquest of the Americas. The Bull stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”
Together these bulls became known as the The “Doctrine of Discovery” and were established as the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ own western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” Essentially, this case determined that indigenous peoples who had been “conquered” had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished at any time.
Through the twisting of scripture to support conquest, robbery, and Empire, the forced conversion and so-called “salvation” of people and land were bound up together, and at once divided from one another. With conversion and conquest came the enforcement of European colonialist norms in all areas of life, including gender and sexuality. What existed before?
Many of us in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community are intimately familiar with the ways in which scriptures can be twisted to uphold oppressive norms in the same way “The Great Commission” scripture in Matthew 28 was used to justify colonialism and Empire.. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, ‘queering’, from “queer reading”, became one way to challenge these norms, including in queer readings of scriptures- for example, challenging the assumption of heteronormativity or the gender binary in certain texts. For example, who said Jesus was straight and cisgender, y’all? Reclaiming the word “queer” from what was an anti-gay slur, “queering” as a practice emerged from “queer theory” which was as an offshoot of critical theory in academia. Critical theory simplified, is a social theory that seeks to examine and challenge power structures, and similarly, queer theory seeks to challenge the power structure of heteronormativity and the social power that comes with being heterosexual or cisgender- or the assumption of either of these as a social norm. Because of its association to queer theory and to social change, claiming an identity as “queer” for many, including myself, has become a way to denote a political identity as well as a personal one. To queer is to challenge binaries and heteronormativity, to move beyond traditional lenses, to view the world in a rainbow of color instead of just a handful of hushed pastel hues. To queer is to challenge white supremacy and cisheteronormativsim at once, and reclaim a movement for founded on the backs of transwomen of color; it is to confront colonialist legacies too, as these are all interconnected and interwoven with one another; queering white supremacy challenges the structures that belie it, the binary of white and black, privileged and not; it supports dismantling hierarchical power and conquest and resisting subjugation. Queering is untangling all of these systemic complexities, seeing them for what they are, challenging them, pulling them down, stripping them of their cloaking’s and disguises, breaking them up if necessary; it is also seeing ourselves for who we are too- our power, our privilege, the places where it shows up, or the places where we are left out. It’s pushing the boundaries towards the center, and disrupting the status quo, and in the process, moving us all closer to liberation.
How then do we “queer” colonialism, and the structures that remain with us, their legacy of forced homogenization, of so-called “schools” which, as we have seen in Canada, the consequences of resisting were much more severe than receiving a failing grade or a mark on your permanent record, in which resistance meant death and compliance meant the alteration of your way of life, one that had endured for thousands of years prior to European contact? For us here now, descendants of both colonizers and colonized, what does it mean to unravel this complex web and challenge now a legacy of entrenched evil that to this day poisons all? What is the antidote to the toxic theologies that the earth was a thing you could own and that people were to be “civilized” and assimilated and converted and relegated to fractions of the lands that they once tended simply because settler colonialists needed more “elbow room” and the Empires needed more riches? And, as descendants of colonizers and colonized, how can we embrace the aliveness and vibrancy of these traditions that were forced aside for in the name of “progress”- refuting and refusing the notion that indigenous peoples are somehow a relic of the past- and also learn from their richness without imposing dominant and oppressive Western concepts or expectations or cultural frameworks on ideas around sexuality and gender that predate colonial contact, in other words, without leaving indigenous cultures immersed in what amounts to little more than white-washed rainbow colonialist capitalism?
I believe that part of it begins by recognizing and celebrating that among indigenous peoples worldwide, sexual and gender diversity has been the norm, rather than the exception, although it bears repeating again and again that indigenous communities are not a monolith. Queering also manifests in resisting the myth of indigenous erasure. Indigenous folx are alive, and well, and vibrant, with a multitude of queer identities, many that don’t fit well into Western LGBT norms! For this reason, it often makes more sense to approach them with a “queer” understanding of gender and sexuality that is more fluid. For example, for the Zapotec people living around Juchitán (hoochiTAHN, Mexico, where ancestors include the Maya with mixed-gender deities and cross-dressing Aztec priests, gender fluidity survives. Here, the muxes (moo-shays) are neither male nor female, but live in a category between the two reserved for people who were assigned male at birth but have been drawn their entire lives to living as a woman. Not all muxes express their identity the same way; some take hormones, some prefer to wear male clothing, some are in between. Community acceptance is not unanimous due to Roman Catholic influence, but it is quite prevalent, with many in the community believing that the muxes have special “intellectual and artistic” talents, a belief that seems to be a common thread regarding gender diverse people in many indigenous societies.
In Hawaii, there is also traditionally a third gender called māhū (maHO); māhū embody both masculine and feminine, and are viewed as teachers and healers who pass on sacred generational knowledge. For the Māori (MOW-rhi) people in so-named New Zealand, takatāpui (taka-taPOOEY) refers to an intimate relationship between two people of the same sex and is used along with queer to denote a same-sex preference. But again, this is within a specific non-western context that doesn’t apply or interact with Western norms in quite the same way.
In the United States, alternative genders and sexualities exist among the Creek or Muscogee, the Chickasaw, and the Cherokee or Kituwah. In the Navajo, or Diné (Den-NAYH), (I’m going to do my best here, I couldn’t find a native speaker on video with the pronunciation) nadleehi means “the changing one”, and indicates one who is neither male nor female in appearance. I find it interesting that this latter word retains impressions of fluidity. Finally, in Osage, Omaha, Kansa, and Oto languages, the term mixu’ga literally means “moon-instructed”, referring to the distinct abilities and identity that the moon conferred upon them. For the Lakota, winkte (winkuhtay), or “two spirit” people had been blessed with powers and could predict the future. Before battle, Lakota warriors visited winkte to increase their strength. And in Cheyenne philosophy, the he’emane’o directed the important victory-dance because they embodied the central principles of balance and synthesis. Over and over again, we find that people that the Western perspective considers to be outside of the norms with regard to gender and sexuality are regarded as spiritually, artistically, and creatively blessed. And these folks- in indigenous societies as western societies- are alive and thriving, not some relic of the past. It’s time that we embrace this as holy, and perhaps in doing so, we can see more of ourselves in our totality, in our splendor, both as colonizers and colonized.
It was never “elbow room” we needed- it was heart room. Room to grown into the whole of who we are, embracing all of God given, Spirit given soul and selves, unobstructed by dogma or dominion. It was room for ourselves and our neighbors to exist as they are, whole, holy; souls alive and connected to the Greatness of All, to God, to Spirit, understanding that colonizers have no more right to own the land than the tree has right to own the forest. If they could see the damage that still perpetuates through to today, if they knew their own legacy, would they weep? As their descendant, I weep, on their behalf. If they could have learned a lesson about what happens when you divide your soul, when you bifurcate or striate your being into only male, only human, only Western, only heterosexual, only non-immigrant, only housed, only middle-class, only cisgender, and refuse to acknowledge the spectrum before you, not only in yourself but in others as well, no longer seeing the wholeness and connection that exists not only in you but within and among all beings and all of nature, what kind of an existence is that? It’s a poor existence. A dark existence. A colorless existence. An empty existence. A separated existence.
There is much that has been harmed, and much to heal. And we can only begin to heal when we begin to see the whole- all of ourselves, all of each other, in all of our spectacular queerness and fluidity. For that is the nature of the world, of the universe, of God and of Spirit themselves- fluid, changing, whole, and alive, bright and shining in its beauty. May it be so.
I end with a prayer:
Spirit of all there is, Spirit of mending, of tending, of healing;
We acknowledge the hurt and the harm that our ancestors have inflicted and endured
In the name of separation of land from body from spirit from wholeness of all.
May we look to the wisdom of those who embrace the wholeness of their being
And call us into relationship and into repair
Asking us the hard questions
And to do the hard work.
We need more than just room for our bodies.
We need room for our souls to breathe free, knowing
That we are all connected to that vibrant, fluid, and ever flowing All.
Go in peace, shine brightly, and blessed be.
Topics: Commitment