Canada’s Christian prophets weren’t white
For generations of Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en people along the Bulkley and Skeena rivers of northwestern British Columbia, the arrival of Christianity did not occur when the Oblate missionary James Mcguckin came to the area in 1870. As the story goes, when Mcguckin showed up in the vicinity of Kyah Wiget, which was later called Moricetown, a village that now goes by its proper name, Witset, the people had been expecting him.
Mcguckin is said to have been told that his visit had been long expected, and that it was understood he’d come from the land of ghosts. The people made the sign of the cross, and they knew all about the commandments, and they knew about heaven. They’d learned these things years earlier from the dreams of the Lake Babine chief, Uzakli, a prophet.
Uzakli was one of many prophets who had come to acquire the knowledge the Oblates proposed to bring to the people. There was another man, Senesaiyea from Fraser Lake, and two women, Bopa and Nokskan, and a Bulkley River man named Lexs. But the greatest of all the prophets was Bini.
The story of Bini comes down to us through the works of several ethnographers from the 19th and 20th centuries who collected accounts of his life and work, his miracles and prophecies, from perhaps two dozen storytellers, some of whom were old enough to remember Bini when he was alive. Bini may have held the chiefly name Kwis before his visions. He is believed to be buried at Hagwilget, B.C.
Anthropologists have speculated that the vivid Christian inflections in Bini’s teachings derive from Indigenous evangelists from Oregon, or from the wordof-mouth journey of ideas from Catholic missionaries or devout Métis people east of the Rocky Mountains, or via some similarly circuitous theological transit from the outer coast, originating with the Orthodox missionary Innocentius Veniaminof, from Russian Alaska.
It doesn’t much matter. The New Testament has quite a few contested origins, too. The point here is that the retelling of Canada’s catastrophic residential-school legacy that has taken up so much media bandwidth over the past few weeks, and the obscene pleasure quite a few “progressive” Canadians have been taking in the desecration of Indigenous churches, is nothing even close to a reckoning with Indigenous history.
For one thing, it was not the “missionary vanguard” that brought Christianity to Indigenous people in furthest corners of Canada, and rather than being merely an instrument of white supremacy or colonialism or whatever such cliché we’re all meant to recirculate, Indigenous Christianity was “mobilized as a religion of resistance” in the early days of European settlement. In the analysis of the University of Manitoba’s Jason Allen Redden, indigenized Christianity was like a manifesto, a declaration to the churches and to the ostensibly Christian authorities and settlers that ended up as thick as fleas on a dog’s back by the late 1800s: you don’t own this, we are entitled to it by our own lights, it’s not yours to give.
The facts bear out the Indigenous possession of Christianity as far back as the 17th century, and the persistence of Indigenous expressions of Christianity. This is the main point that appears to have completely eluded the high-fashion instigators and endorsers of the “burn it all down” polemics that have accompanied the torching of churches sacred to the Penticton people, the Lower Similkameen people, the Upper Similkameen people, the Gitwangak people, and the rest — it’s been hard to keep count.
Among the non-indigenous churches that have been desecrated: a Vietnamese evangelist church and an African evangelical church in Calgary serving a congregation made up almost entirely of refugees, and a working-class Filipino church in East Vancouver that celebrates Mass in Tagalog. And it’s not good enough to say, well, Indigenous people are angry — as if there’s any evidence that the arsonists and vandals are Indigenous, and as if it would change anything if they were.
Neither is it good enough to say, well, the churches in Gitwangak and Calgary weren’t even Catholic, so sure, those desecrations were wrong. It is a gross offence against human decency to hold innocently devout Roman Catholics in any way culpable or responsible for the long-ago crimes committed by Catholic clergymen. Torching a church over those crimes is no different than smashing synagogue windows over some uproar in Gaza, or vandalizing mosques over some wretched thing done by the Khomeinists in Tehran or the Saudis in Mecca.
The thing that quite a few self-professed white “allies” should notice is that not a single Indigenous leader in any of the communities that have become crime scenes in tandem with the fever-pitch hysterics about residential schools has expressed anything less than revulsion and heartbreak over their burned churches. Even those leaders who reject Christianity entirely and profess a hatred of the institutions that interned generations of Indigenous children say they are just as disgusted and dismayed as devout Indigenous Christians are.
Back in the early 1800s, the Sto:lo prophet Quitselkanum
stood on the peak of the mountain called T’itema:mex, on the north bank of the Fraser River above Ruby Creek, which today is little more than an hour’s drive east of Vancouver. It was in the aftermath of the smallpox disaster that smashed into the Coast Salish civilization like some kind of asteroid, carrying away two out of every three people. There were strange new people beginning to move through the landscape, the xwilitim — the hungry people. The old remedies couldn’t contain the disease. The whole world was convulsing in a kind of moral chaos.
God spoke to Quitselkanum and to the other Sto:lo prophets, to Tawqpa’met and to Kweles, and to Skimlaha, who encountered three men in a vision who showed him how to make the sign of the cross. Like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, Quitselkanum came down from T’itema:mex with a sort of parchment, with symbols on it, and with instructions on a new way of life that would deliver the people from their suffering. The laws were the Ten Commandments, more or less.
So when the Oblates arrived a few years later, Quitselkanum’s people had seen them coming. They knew who they were. The Oblates, some of whom had been chased out of the American territories for “siding with the Indians,” were, in contemporary diction, “allies.”
And the trust the people placed in them was horribly betrayed, in the most hideous ways, as we’ve all known for years — although it must be said that the Oblates profusely and meticulously apologized in the early 1990s. As if that matters to anyone.
In the past few days, as pyres have been made of the sturdy little churches the Similkameen people and the Gitwangak people and the Penticton people built, where they baptized their babies and attended to their old devotions and mourned their dead, the sneering of all those white “allies” is the thing to notice.
It’s as though the whole world has been convulsing in a kind of moral chaos, and the old remedies can’t contain the disease.
INDIGENIZED CHRISTIANITY WAS LIKE A MANIFESTO, A DECLARATION.