This is the type of site that makes my blood clot in my veins: Restoration: Reaching America’s Oldest Cultures through Practical Acts of God’s Love. Christians poking at American Indians again – in this case the Hopi, one of the last groups to keep their mother goddess (mostly ‘cause they plunked their villages on mesatops and carved trails up the mesas so narrow no one could get their horses up them).
What makes this dud of a group think the Hopi want to be “reached”? In my head I see a cartoon of the Hopi running for their lives across the desert at the sight of these “Restoration” bogeymen.
I mean, haven’t the Christians done enough bone-breaking damage to the Hopi? First the Spanish Conquistadores called them "heathens" and tortured them for gold.
A little later Spanish missionaries tortured them in the name of Christ. In addition to torture they pumped the Hopi into forced labor, “summoned” Hopi women for sexual favors, and tried to take down the Hopi Mother Goddess. Hopis caught practicing their age-old religion were either “whipped or executed” (Billard 1979: 174).
Although usually peaceful and nonviolent, the Hopi have never been shy about fighting for their rights. So after being manhandled by the Spanish for a few decades they banded together with their Pueblo cousins and in 1680 royally routed these Spanish rogues.
Then in the mid 1800s in stomped the Anglos with their missionaries and government policies (Dozier 1970: 88). From about 1900-1920, the Mesa villages snapped and popped. For adults there was the U.S. Religious Crimes Code, designed to root and stomp out Indian religion.
For kids there was an even finer delight: the Indian boarding school. Against their parents’ will children were carted off to these re-education camps and cracked open like nuts (Dozier 1970: 115). Pueblo English professor Paula Gunn Allen says “…millions of Indian people were educated in boarding schools … wherein serious sexual and other kinds of physical abuse, neglect, terrorization, starvation, and humiliation were the order of the day…” (1992: xiii-xiv).
Just in case they don’t know squat about their Christian history I’m sending Restoration a copy of this post
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Billard, Jules B., The World of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1979).
Gunn Allen, Paula, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
Dozier, Edward, The Pueblo Indians of North America (Case Studies in Anthropology, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970).
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Thnx to Ale Paiva for the foto
