« The Spirituality of Geographical and Economic Conquest in the U.S. »

I’ve come to realize that assessing an economy’s spirituality is essential to determining whether that model works on our one planet home. For example, the conquest of the First Peoples on our continent by Europeans has become only more abhorrent to me the more I have realized the spirituality that was used to justify this conquest and expansion into other people’s land. The “wild West,” the invading European settlers claimed, was like the Promised Land that the Hebrew people headed for after their exodus from Egypt.

I have visited some of the Spanish missions along the West Coast of the U.S. Each time my gut aches about how European Christians enslaved First Peoples to build the mission complex. In crass violation of Indigenous ways, the European, MultiEarth expansionists, forced their technological worldview on the First Peoples. The sustainable agriculture of Indigenous people was scaled up through technological enhancements for greater productivity in the short run. Children of the First Peoples had their culture and language schooled out of them even as they were indoctrinated with Christianity by missionary teachers completely unable to appreciate or comprehend the sacred worldview they conquering.

Just as the spirituality of conquest undergirded those early events, it has continued in U.S.-Native American relations into the present. The OneEarth ways of Native Americans do not fit with the MultiEarth views of Progress, Growth, and The Market. But any path of Progress that so genocidally excludes the First Peoples and their OneEarth worldview is no path I want to walk. I ask, “What moral and spiritual authority make such behaviors over centuries okay?”

My desire, still not achieved, is to walk a OneEarth path as well as traditional First Peoples do.