Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry.

Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry. I am reading Allan W. Eckert’s “Wilderness Empire”. This seminal account of the Iroquois League demonstrates how little things change with the passing of fashion and technology. The same conflict between justice and rent seeking we find in the mission and development field today existed in the vast wilderness of North America as Catholic orders and European kingdoms wrestled for wealth and power. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac's writing, below, explains the conflict between the Jesuits, Recollet friars, and the priests of the Missions Estrangeres concerning his plan to build a fort along the strait – or detroit, as it was termed – which separated Lake Huron from Lake Erie. This plan would bring civil administration into a region largely administered by the church and would “civilize” and “educate” the Indians, including efforts especially focused on teaching them to speak the French language. Cadillac wrote: “It is essential that in this matter of teaching the Indians our language the missionaries should act in good faith, and that His Majesty should have the goodness to impose his strictest orders upon them; for which there are several good reasons. The first and most stringent is that when members of religious orders or other ecclesiastics undertake anything, they never let it go. The second is that by not teaching French to the Indians they make themselves necessary [as interpreters] to the King and Governor. The third is that if all Indians spoke French, all kinds of ecclesiastics would be able to instruct them. This might cause them [the Jesuits] to lose some of the presents they get; for though these Reverend Fathers come here only for the glory of God, yet the one thing does not prevent the other. Nobody can deny that the priests own three-quarters of Canada. From St. Paul’s Bay to Quebec, here is nothing but the seigneury of Beauport that belongs to a private person. All the rest, which is the greater part, belongs to the Jesuits or other ecclesiastics. The Upper Town of Quebec is composed of six or seven superb palaces belonging to Hospital Nuns, Ursulines, Jesuits, Recolletes, Seminary priests, and the bishop. There may be some forty private houses, and even these pay rent to the ecclesiastics, which shows that the one thing does not prevent the other. One may as well knock one’s head against a wall as hope to convert the Indians in any other way [then that of civilizing them]; for thus far all the fruits of the missions consist in the baptism of infants who die before reaching the age of reason”. What I find striking is this notion of rent seeking and the conflict between benefiting targeted communities and meeting rather less sanctified needs that mission and development practitioners frequently experience. Even more alarming is the perpetuation of a state of dependency and subjection in the power relationship. Cadillac is demonstrating this internal contradiction of the mission and development industry; If target communities are empowered, converted or otherwise transformed, than the source of income is diminished. This is especially relevant in the mission and development field because the excesses are not as regulated or reported as in other spheres of society. There is an adage in the developing world that generals and preachers never go hungry. Working in the developing world, it is eye opening to see the modern financial kingdoms created by Central American Protestant families that control the levers of power for North/South Exchanges. Even more alarming is the wave of North American retirees moving to exotic, comfortable locals as modern day missionaries to spread the word and donated shoes, frequently taking up shop in tourist destinations where neither the need nor danger is great. This is not to mask the considerable sacrifices and struggles of the faith-based and development communities seeking justice and empowerment for communities marginalized by the powers of the day. Rather, understanding the historical examples of rent seeking by church hierarchies provides a needed historical context for establishing direct and transformational practices in mission and development.

Recollections of Things to Come

This morning I was reading team reviews from the Summer 2010 Partners in Service program and I found a couple of comments to be rather illuminating. They demonstrated a significant obstacle faced by indigenous nations in obtaining a meaningful part in contemporary political, philosophical, and academic discussions. One comment bemoaned the mixed messages delivered by HSP between “preserving Mayan culture and trying to bring progress to the Highlands.” So, the subliminal message to this dichotomy is that indigenous culture is primitive, backwards, and antiquated. Actually, one of the greatest struggles faced within indigenous communities is the internalization of this very message—that their culture is the cause of their poverty. That is to say that Westerners have a romanticized and erroneous view of indigenous culture. First, to believe that indigenous culture is to be dirt poor, living on the side of a mountain in a shack, unable to provide for the nutritional needs of a family, and existing in complete ignorance of natural cycles and causes of illness. The problem with this colonial worldview is that it is both factually off base and that it also impedes an introspective process for industrial Western societies to find their way back to a healthy and harmonious lifestyle.

In the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas, written by Charles C. Mann and published in 1995, 1491 is not as much a story of the year itself as it is a story of what the Americas were like before Europeans arrived. As the book’s Amazon review observes, “The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.” In regards to the cultures predating European arrival, the same review writes of Mann’s work, “But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before.” As Mann says, to judge indigenous culture by what was found in the years immediately following initial contact is comparable to judging European Jewish culture through the pathetic living conditions of Auschwitz survivors in Eastern Europe in 1945. What is important to understand is that indigenous cultures have very valuable understandings of science, philosophy, spirituality, metaphysics, and aesthetics. To assume that being ignorant and superstitious is synonymous with an indigenous worldview is to not realize the colonial blinders that are inhibiting an honest assessment of past and potential contributions of indigenous culture.

Another antidote concerns a time when we had a Mayan priest conduct a ceremony and had a participant complain that it would have been more authentic had the shaman not worn a cell phone on his belt. It’s interesting to contemplate that it was this shaman’s ancestral profession that independently came up with the concept of zero—something pretty dawgon important in computer operating systems, and, more notably, cell phone operating systems.

Mayan languages describe different periods of times as frequencies as well as contemplate variances in solar radiation—things that took Western societies hundreds, if not thousands, of years to understand and utilize. Therefore, one could look at Western observers at the Mayan ceremony and smile that their primitive and war-like societies have finally been able to harness powers that cannot be seen, touched, or dissected.