Native Americans and the Christian Right

Front matter

NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

ANDREA SMITH Native Americans and the Christian Right

The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances

Scene 1

Iam sitting in a Bible study session preceding church services at a conservative Southern Baptist church. The Bible study leaders, a married couple, are explaining the “biblically correct” pattern for male-female relationships within marriage, using their marriage as an example. The husband makes all the important decisions in the marriage, and the wife submits to his authority enthusiastically and unquestioningly. To illustrate: whenever the wife pays the bills she waits until her husband comes home so he can sign the checks. While listening to this lecture, I sense dissatisfaction from a young woman sitting next to me. She is a longtime and faithful member of the church. “Do you buy this?” I ask. “No, she replies, rolling her eyes. “Some people just are not enlightened on these issues.”

Scene 2

Iam in another conservative Christian Bible study group. We are having a debate on abortion, with me defending the “pro-choice” position. While most members are strongly anti-choice, the male Bible study leader describes how he shifted from this position. A friend of his had an abortion, even though she thought it was murder. After this incident, he asked his female Christian friends, “If you had an unwanted pregnancy while single, would you have an abortion?” and they all answered yes. When he asked his male friends, they all said no. He concluded that a “pro-life” position is in a sense founded on male privilege.

SCENE 3 At an American Indian Movement conference, one of the speakers is describing how Christianity has oppressed Indian people. He charges the audience to turn its back on Christianity and follow traditional ways. The next day people are looking for him, but he is nowhere to be found. Finally, his wife reports that he went to church that morning.

SCENE 4 l ask a Native woman activist if she is pro-life or pro-choice. She says, “The fetus is a life, but sometimes that life must be ended.”

SCENE 5

During a United Nations Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa, conflict arises between the indigenous caucus and the African descendant caucus over the issue of reparations. One member of the indigenous caucus states, “You can have the mule, but the forty acres are ours.” Years later, however, members of both caucuses meet to develop a joint strategy for reparations for slavery and abuses perpetrated in Indian boarding schools.

SCENE 6

Iam having a manicure when I get into a conversation with the manicurist about this project. She tells me how she became a staunch, born-again Christian committed to pro-life politics. However, she tells me, she voted for Ralph Nader rather than George W. Bush because she felt Bush could not really be pro-life if he supported the death penalty. She then explains why she supports same-sex marriage. Christians mistakenly believe that same-sex marriage will destroy the institution of marriage, when what is really at stake, she argues, is that gay couples need to be able to visit their partners when they are in the hospital. She informs me that she convinced her other evangelical friends and family members to change their position on this issue.

As someone rooted in both Native rights activism and evangelical Christianity, I have found that neither academic nor activist understandings of religion and politics have been able to account for the variety of social justice activisms that I have witnessed and participated in. As I read the scholarly and activist accounts of evangelicalism, which tend to depict evangelicalism as monolithically conservative, I see virtually no mention of the many people within these churches, including myself, who do not follow the Republican Party line. Similarly, scholarship on Native activism tends either to ignore contradictions and tensions within Native organizing or to dismiss it as unimportant. As a result, would-be allies join indige-

X PREFACE nous struggles with a romanticized view of Native resistance and quickly drop out when we fail to meet their expectations. They often have a particularly difficult time dealing with Native peoples who do not fit their image of a “traditional Indian”—for instance, Native peoples grounded in conservative Christianity. Christian Indians are generally seen as dupes for white supremacy, complicit in their own oppression. “True” Native activism is reduced to the politics and practices of a handful of prominent Native activists, generally males.

On the other hand, I have found that other sectors of “the Left” dismiss our movements as irrelevant to social justice. Native peoples are thought to be hopelessly mired in “identity politics,” concerned only about cultural particularities. Social justice activists and scholars have particularly failed to consider the significance of Native women’s organizing. We have nothing to contribute to social justice activism or theory in general, we are told; our struggles have no relationship to political economy. Consequently, the complexity and importance of Native organizing, particularly Native women’s organizing, remains undertheorized.

My particular experience reflects larger trends within social movement theory. This theory, as it is produced in academic and activist circles, so strictly defines who can be thought of as an agent of political change that it has narrowed the options of those seeking political and social transformation. Today progressives in and out of the academy grapple with identifying methods of resistance and revolutionary change in an era dominated by multinational capitalism. In these difficult times, we might want to take a closer look at whom we have identified as potential allies and whom we have written off as unreachable adversaries. What groups have we identified as central to political organizing, and what groups have we dismissed as insignificant? In doing so, we might open ourselves to unexpected strategic alliances with groups across the political spectrum that further our politically progressive goals.

Thus, this book centers on questions about coalition building. Who can be allies and under what conditions? Which alliances matter? How do we carve alliances, not only with outside communities but internally within our communities (however we may define community)? In fact, how can so-called identity politics be reconceptualized as alliance politics? What are the ethical and political considerations involved in carving out alliances? What are the politics involved in refusing to work with potential allies? And how does a study of alliance politics force us to reconsider our conceptualization of left- versus right-wing politics?

In this work, I will examine religious and political configurations of

PREFACE xi

Christian Right and American Indian activism as a way of talking about the larger project of rethinking the nature of political strategy and alliance building for progressive purposes. I have chosen case studies in Native women’s and Christian Right organizing in part because of my own history of organizing. In addition, these forms of activism provide interesting case studies because virtually no scholars see the Christian Right as a possible site for progressive organizing. The significance of American Indian activism also remains generally undertheorized. By comparing American Indian and Christian Right activism and analyzing their intersections, this study will explore the problematic nature of “resistance,” “accommodation, and “acquiescence” to political structures of oppression within both progressive and conservative forms of organizing. More important, this study will open up new possibilities for political organizing that do not depend on uncritically held assumptions about what constitutes progressive politics and who is able to participate in them.

At first glance, Native American and Christian Right organizing appear to have an orthogonal relationship. But, by bringing into conversation with each other two such seemingly disparate constituencies as conservative evangelicals and Native activists, I am signaling that this book will disrupt some of the assumed notions we have about the logics of these organizing sites. I also hope to disrupt normative assumptions about their inevitable political distance from each other. As Rebecca Klatch notes in her study of left- and right-wing organizing in the 1960s, examining activist struggles generally seen to be on opposite ends of the “left-right” political spectrum demonstrates the “complicated and at times unpredictable nature of political commitments and allegiances” (1999, 5). These case studies also enable me to complicate views of religious and political identity that presume a simple and unchanging relationship between religion and politics. However, while I hope to carve out a space in which to think more creatively about Native and Christian Right organizing in particular, my primary purpose is to work with these case studies in order to shift the way we think about coalition building in general.

METHODOLOGY: CENTERING NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that Native American studies is not understood as its own intellectual project that has broader ramifications: “It is as though the American Indian has no intellectual voice with which to enter into America’s important dialogues.” She writes, “The American Indian is xii PREFACE not asked what he thinks we should do about Bosnia or Iraq. He is not asked to participate in Charlie Rose’s interview program about books or politics or history. It is as though the American Indian does not exist except in faux history or corrupt myth” (1998a, 112). In essence, Native American studies is equated with projects that have Native peoples as their object of study rather than as a set of methodological and theoretical approaches that contest academic disciplinary formations with its own frameworks. I wish to differentiate between “studying Indians” and doing Native studies by centering Native studies as an intellectual project that can have non-Native communities as its object of study.

I also differentiate between centering and including Native American studies. As I have discussed elsewhere, projects that attempt to organize women of color have begun to reject the politics of “inclusion” (A. Smith 2005b). Instead they ask, if we recentered the analysis and organizing from the perspective of women of color, how would we see political issues differently? This approach differs from a politics of inclusion that seeks to include a marginalized voice within a preestablished politics or discourse —an approach that is generally the basis of the multicultural framework for organizing and analysis. Let us include as many voices as possible, the multicultural ethic urges us. Such an approach, while generally problematic, is particularly troubling for Native peoples and Native studies because the relatively small population of Native peoples always renders our inclusion less significant than that of groups with greater numbers. Furthermore, as Elizabeth Povinelli has so aptly demonstrated, the liberal state depends on a politics of multicultural recognition that includes “social difference without social consequence” (2002, 16). Thus, it becomes critical, as Kimberle Crenshaw notes, to focus less on including the apparent “difference” that Native peoples represent and more on centering the difference this difference makes (1996). As Povinelli further states, “These state, public, and capital multicultural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken” (2002, 29). This multicultural practice, as Sandy Grande asserts in Red Pedagogy, manifests itself within Native studies in terms of the constant imperative to represent Native culture and identity. She asks, “How has this preoccupation [with cultural representation] obscured the social and economic realities facing indigenous communities, substituting a politics of representation for one of radical social transformation?” (2004,1). In the concluding chapter, I will further discuss the theories and organizing

PREFACE xiii strategies produced by Native women organizers that challenge the model of the liberal nation-state, which is the basis of multiculturalism.

Centering Native women in this analysis also helps us rethink how we constitute “community” or understand “the nation.” As I discuss in chapter 4, coalitional politics often assumes stable communities or “nations” that come together for a common cause. However, Native women’s organizing has called into question the heteronormative basis of this kind of coalition building. At the same time, as members of colonized nations, they have not dispensed with the goal of furthering “sovereignty” or nation building. Rather, they are articulating alternative notions of sovereignty that then speak to alternative understandings of coalition building. These visions of sovereignty demonstrate the extent to which identity politics is itself a politics of alliances, both internally and externally. This politic, constantly in flux, demonstrates that Native nations are distinguished less by an essential identity, than by what Justine Smith refers to as “ontopraxy.” That is, Native peoples are fundamentally constituted by relationality and praxis (J. Smith 2005, 117).

The project of recentering entails a Foucauldian understanding of power and hence does not assume a permanent center or that the “center” is stable and monolithic. Rather, we constantly recenter the discussion to see if this illuminates our understanding of the issues so that we can build a more liberating framework, not just for the communities we center in the analysis but for all peoples. And, as I discuss later, this recentering strategy is integral to the most successful forms of Native organizing because it allows Native organizers to reframe issues in order to garner broader support for their struggles.

Centering Native American studies as a starting point to articulate methodological approaches, however, does not suggest that these ap-

1 To give an example of this approach in practice, when women of color decided to develop this approach of centering women of color in the analysis of domestic and sexual violence through the group INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, we saw that it did not make sense to focus our strategies on involving the criminal justice system in addressing violence because we were as victimized by the criminal justice system as we were by interpersonal gender violence in our communities. As an alternative, some people thought we should involve the medical system as part of an antiviolence strategy. However, when we recentered the discussion to focus on women with disabilities we saw that the medical system was as punitive as the criminal justice system and that we would need to work on developing alternative strategies. In the end, neither the criminal justice nor the medical system was going to solve the problem of violence for anyone, not just for women with disabilities and women of color. See INCITE! 2006.

xiv PREFACE proaches can be found only within the field. On the contrary, it provides us with an opportunity to see how the concerns of Native American studies intersect, overlap, and/or contradict other frameworks, demonstrating that Native American studies is part of a larger world that can inform and be informed by other intellectual approaches and methods. In fact, this work is an intervention against the parthenogenetic strictures that Native American studies sometimes finds itself in—the notion that it must create itself as if it exists completely uninformed by other discourses and practices. For instance I often hear, “Don’t read Foucault or Marx, etc.; they are not Native,” as if engaging non-Native scholars or thinkers within Native American studies contaminates it. I do not mean to suggest that there is no point in engaging projects in which we might almost exclusively use Native sources as part of our exercise of intellectual sovereignty. On the contrary, these projects are groundbreaking and critical to the growth of Native American studies (Warrior 1994; Wilson 2005; Womack 1999).

However, sometimes, in my experiences with both organizing and academic work, we do not engage others because we have actually decentered ourselves. That is, in reacting to our marginalization in the academy and organizing venues, which is the result of colonialism and white supremacy, we may fear that engaging in other discourses may continue our marginalization. But if we really want to challenge our marginalization we must build our own power by building stronger alliances with those who benefit from our work, both inside and outside the academy. When we become more directly tied to larger movements for social justice, we have a stronger base and greater political power through which to resist marginalization. When we build our own power, we can engage and negotiate with others from a position of strength rather than weakness. Thus, rather than fearing that engagement with the ideas emerging from non-Native communities will marginalize us, we can actually position Native peoples as intellectual and political leaders whose work benefits all peoples. The question, then, is not whether we should include Native studies in other discourses, such as American studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and so on, but what would happen to these discourses if we recentered Native studies within them. We might transform these discourses in ways that benefit all who partake in them. The last chapter in this volume reflects further on how the theory produced by Native women activists may benefit us in rethinking how we position Native studies within the academy.

In centering Native American studies as the framework for this book, I

PREFACE Xv wish to employ three approaches I see as critical to Native Americans that inform its methodological approach. These concepts include (1) rearticulation, (2) intellectual ethnography, and (3) generative narratology and prolineal genealogy.

THE POLITICS OF REARTICULATION

The small numbers of Native peoples in this country have forced us to wrestle with the politics of rearticulation. Native peoples organizing on their land bases have to contend with the fact that they are often geographically situated next to white populations that are often hostile to Native interests. For reasons of pure political necessity, they are constantly forced to rethink how they rearticulate the politics of alliance in order to accomplish their political and economic goals. Yet, as will be discussed in the introduction and chapter 5, they have led some of the most successful organizing efforts through their use of unlikely alliances. These alliances were carved out through a politics of rearticulation, the process of transforming political allegiances to build movements for social change.

In this regard, they share Stuart Hall’s analysis of rearticulation.” As Hall notes in his analysis of Thatcherism in Britain, the Right has often been successful because it has been creative in reconstituting its power base, frequently by redeploying conceptual frameworks of the Left for its own purposes (1988). In particular, it has developed popular support for cutbacks in the social safety net through appeals to “freedom” from state intervention.? It has mobilized popular support for repressive law enforce-

? For an explicit engagement with Stuart Hall within Native studies, see Valaskakis 2005.

3 This rhetoric is evident in a critique of liberal politics articulated by Concerned Women for America, a Christian Right women’s organization: “You see, liberals are looking for the silver bullet—but then, wouldn’t we all think it grand if we could conjure up a government program that on a large scale effectively addresses societal concerns?” (Crouse 2000, 5). As Wilcox, Rozell, and Gunn further note, the New Christian Right has emphasized the development of political coalitions and underemphasized divisive religious doctrines in its organizing to build these right-wing hegemonic blocs (1996). Thomas Atwood, the former comptroller of Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign, argues for the importance of developing alliances on the Right because the “major strategic error of the Evangelical Right has been the overestimation of its own strength: Thinking they had ‘enough votes to run the country’” (1990, 45). He calls on white evangelicals to use issues such as privatizing public housing and educational choice for inner-city children to develop alliances with black evangelicals.

Xvi PREFACE ment through its appeals to the racism of the white working classes. As a result, Thatcherism created a “hegemonic bloc” consisting of both corporate and working-class constituencies. The Left, by contrast, was unable to counter the rise of Thatcherism because it assumed that the working classes would naturally see their interests reflected in the Labour program. It made little effort to either create new alliances or challenge the ideological foundations of the Thatcher bloc. As a result, the Left spent the Thatcher years defending its ground rather than actively articulating an ideological framework that could create new strategic alliances. The problem with theorists and activists on the Left, according to Hall, is that they fail to realize that “interests are not given but always have to be politically and ideologically constructed” (1988, 167). Thatcherism was successful because it reshaped the public’s notion of common sense. As Michael Billig further notes, “Common sense, which at one level seems to act as a force for conservativism, also contains the ideological resources that could be rhetorically mobilized by future social movements of critique” (1995, 77). According to Hall, however, the Left has not seen the refashioning of common sense as an important task (1988, 143).

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is another helpful starting point for thinking about how to identify and mobilize resistance. The distinction they make between “representation” and “articulation” allows us to explore the inherent malleability of political alliances. They note that Marxists have traditionally relied on a politics of representation—that is, the view that actors for social change (proletarians, however they are defined) are historically given and political organizing depends on “representing” this historical reality to potential activists. They do not argue that it is illegitimate for the working classes to position themselves as key actors for social change, but they do argue that this position is not historically given. That is, if the working classes become central actors for social change it is because they have “articulated” this project rather than simply stepping into a predetermined historical role (1996, 65).

The politics of articulation has important implications for strategy. Laclau and Mouffe argue that Marxists who rely on notions of given agents of historical change ultimately advocate a conservative political strategy. That is, if the working classes are the natural actors around which other agents will naturally coalesce in effecting historic change, it is not necessary to actively forge strategic alliances that will enable the political project to go forward. Laclau and Mouffe cite Kautsky to illustrate the extreme limit of this position: “Our task is not to organize the revolution but to

PREFACE xvii organize ourselves for the revolution; not to make the revolution but to take advantage of it” (1996, 22).

In addition, when activists assume universal values or common interests from which we struggle we have no incentive to create this common ground. The search for common interests constitutes what Laclau and Mouffe term the “hegemonic project”—that is, taking the political initiative to forge alliances on the basis of one or more political issues. It is true that political alliances are never completely stable, nor are actors involved in cultivating these alliances completely unitary. However, these facts do not impede political activism; rather, they force us to realize that, since the alliances are not given, we must constantly struggle to ensure that they thrive.

Many scholars have commented on the political fragmentation of the Left. When they speculate on the alliances necessary to form a reinvigorated movement, the prospective allies still tend to reside primarily within communities generally considered progressive. But might it not be possible for progressives to forge strategic alliances in new places? Given the Right’s success in creating hegemonic projects that have attracted constituents previously seen as belonging to the Left, perhaps progressives can return the favor. We might even discover that the political division between Left and Right is itself a stumbling block in the creation of new political alliances.

Forging new alliances is difficult and, as Stuart Hall argues, while there is no fixed relationship between classes and ideologies, these relationships are not free floating either (1996b, 41). Consequently, reconstituting political positions is a Gramscian “war of position,’ requiring political actors to articulate a platform in light of the political and social forces that n shape this war. “No ideological conception can ever become materially effective unless and until it can be articulated to the field of political and social forces and to the struggles between different forces at stake,’ Hall writes (42).

The case studies in this book also center the role of religion in social movements. As Christian Smith argues, social movement theorists have often neglected the importance of religion in building social movements (1996). To the extent that social movement theorists address religion, he argues, they see it as an epiphenomenon of the “real” motivations behind the social movement. It is important to take Smith’s charge seriously by centering the theological content of these movements in the analyses. As he notes, while religious movements often adapt their theologies to fit changing political circumstances, at the same time theology can operate xviii PREFACE as an independent variable in shaping these movements.‘ Political progressives must therefore be watchful for possible theological interventions. Smith further contends that sociologists often emphasize the manner in which religious or spiritual practice functions to legitimize the political status quo and have not sufficiently analyzed its potential to disrupt and challenge power relationships (6). In this book, I argue that religious movements can be disruptive of the status quo, not only in explicitly liberative religio-political formations such as those found in indigenous peoples’ movements, but even within groups that appear to support the status quo such as the Christian Right. Particularly in this era of “faith-based” organizations, it is important to analyze the complex ways in which religious and spiritual practices interface with political action.

This project aims to take up Stuart Hall’s charge to rethink the politics of articulation and rearticulation in the age of ubiquitous multinational capitalism. What Native peoples often know by necessity all peoples need to realize—we cannot fundamentally ensure the well-being of our “communities” without rethinking who we can ally ourselves with in order to develop mass-based movements for social change. If we understand that current configurations of religious and political identity within Native and Christian Right communities are not givens, it is possible for them to be rearticulated into new configurations that favor progressive politics. I will explore these possibilities by focusing on sites of political and religious practice that do not neatly fit into categories of progressive or conservative.

In essence, this book is a Foucauldian political project. Both critics and proponents of postmodern thought often argue that Foucauldian analysis is inconsistent with articulating a politics of strategy or liberation. Nancy Hartsock, for instance, argues that Michel Foucault’s analysis of power is not equipped to deal with social structures. Foucault “loses track of social structure and instead focuses on how individuals experience and exercise power” (1990, 169). In Hartsock’s view, Foucault’s analysis of power precludes the possibility of one group’s domination of another: “Power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere,’ she writes (170). Foucault, she claims, is also pessimistic about social change and is content merely to describe power relations rather than engaging in political action. Hartsock invokes the eleventh Feuerbach thesis: “To paraphrase Marx, the point is

4 See also Carol Maxwell and Ted Jelen’s study of male pro-life activists, in which they conclude that religious theology is not an “epiphenomenal” explanation for their involvement in the movement (1995).

PREFACE xix to change the world, not simply to redescribe ourselves or reinterpret the world yet again” (172). Craig Calhoun similarly complains that because all practices are implicated in power relations it is possible to talk of resistance but not possible to talk of emancipation (Calhoun 1996, 120; see also D. Smith 1999). Steven Seidman’s work points to the flaws in these critiques. To say, for instance, that power does not issue solely from the state or other structures of domination is not to say that these structures do not possess a disproportionate amount of power. As he notes, “Foucault did not deny the social importance of the repressive power of the state or ruling social strata” (1998, 246). I would concur with this analysis. In fact, I would go farther than Seidman and argue that Foucault’s analysis does not preclude talking about liberation or revolution, a perspective against which Seidman argues in his other works. As Foucault explains, “When I say that power establishes a network through which it freely circulates, this is true only up to a certain point. . . . I do not believe that one should conclude from that that power is the best distributed thing in the world. ... We are not dealing with a sort of democratic or anarchic distribution of power through bodies” (1977b, 99). This framework does not preclude us from addressing hegemonic forms of power; it simply forces us to address the fact that struggles for state or economic power are not sufficient to shift prevailing power practices if we do not address how power relations are simultaneously enacted on the microlevel of everyday life.

Another argument frequently made by critics of poststructuralism is that its antifoundationalist approach renders the projects of identifying truth and adjudicating moral claims impossible (Bauman 1999, 126; Calhoun 1996, 116-17). In essence, poststructuralism is accused of moral and epistemological relativism. In actuality, a disavowal of foundationalism does not preclude us from taking stands, making arguments, or forming opinions (Bible and Culture Collective 1995, 3; Seidman 1998, 325). Relativism is really the flip side of universalist notions of truth. That is, claims to universalism and objectivity rest on the notion that individuals can transcend their historicity to decide what is eternally and crossculturally true. Similarly, relativism rests on the notion that individuals can escape their grid of intelligibility, with its particular regime of truth, and see multiple truths. Foucault contends that all individuals live within regimes of truth that have their own logic and standards of truth, standards that allow individuals within that regime to adjudicate between truth claims. If a person’s regime were to become destabilized, it would mean that he or she is in the grip of another (partially competing) regime,

XX PREFACE not living without one altogether. Because we know our regime of truth is historically conditioned, we know that it is flexible and given to change, but we are not capable of disbelieving its “truths” as long as we are living under it. That truth is historically conditioned, therefore, does not make it less true for us. As Stanley Fish argues: