Understanding the Sins of the Founding Fathers
7/1/1
Every country has founding myths. The most powerful of these stories suggest a people are particularly blessed by God. In the United States, we too have these stories, but building a common national identity is more difficult because we are a nation of immigrants. We have gotten around this challenge by having shared stories that mythologize the immigrant experience---whether crossing the Atlantic Ocean to overcome religious oppression or the pioneers crossing the prairie to settle the west. Consider the story of the Puritans. In 1630 while on board the ship Arabella, Governor Winthrop gave a sermon that likened the colonists to the ancient Israelites, whom God delivered unto the Promised Land. Winthrop drew upon Matthew 5:14 when he said they were new Israelites and that “we shall be as a City upon the Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The “City upon the Hill” image has become an enduring part of American political discourse, although most people do not know that it has a Biblical basis; nor that it refers to Winthrop’s sermon. What has been left out, however, is that Winthrop also thanked the deity in his diary for the fact that the native inhabitants for a 300 mile radius around their settlement had been “swept away by the small pox so God hath hereby cleared our title to this place.” This example should remind us all that not all Americans had the mythologized immigrant experience, whether due to having ancestors who survived the horrendous Middle Passage or because their indigenous ancestors managed not to succumb to small pox. While no one alive today is personally responsible for slavery, the wholesale destruction of Native populations or for that matter, the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, but we inherit what our forefathers and foremothers wrought. For example; Numbers 14:18, Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9 about God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” As a child I found these verses troubling. I had enough of my own sins to worry about, and didn’t need my great-grandfathers’ sins added on. Recently while traveling on reservations and surrounding communities in Montana and South Dakota, these verses came to mind. I think it was because those places feel like the Indian Wars occurred in the recent past, not more than 125 years ago. It seemed like Custer’s 1876 defeat is immortalized at every juncture.
In contrast, one has to search out places where most of those killed were Indians, such as Wounded Knee where the 7th Cavalry killed between 150-300 mostly unarmed Lakota men, women and children. The commander, James Forsyth, got a town named after him and 20 troopers were awarded the Medal of Honor. All of this reminded me not only about the sins of the fathers passed unto us, but our ignorance about those sins.
But today there are 5.2 million people with Native American ancestry. That is roughly the equivalent to the number of Jews in the United States---a group that politicians regularly court. Yet few politicians worry about the Native vote and the reason is that nearly 40 percent of those eligible to vote are not even registered. And that leads into what I was doing in Montana and South Dakota. I had agreed to be an expert witness in the Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch voting rights case. While most of my traveling was related to that case, I learned quite a bit about things unrelated to voting rights, but that gave me a sense of what it means to be Native in some communities.
This is where my thoughts again turn to the Biblical verses about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. While none of us committed those original sins, I do not want on my conscience having remained passive in the face of current injustices with roots in the actions of our forefathers and mothers. Nor do I want my sins of omission (i.e., not acting) being passed on to my children unto the third and fourth generation. Jean Reith Schroedel is a political science professor at Claremont Graduate University in California. She has written three single authored academic books, including one that was given the Victoria Schuck Book Award by the American Political Science Association in 2001, as well as more than 40 scholarly articles and book chapters. In 2009 Schroedel co-edited two books on the impact of evangelical Christianity on democracy in America for the Russell Sage Foundation. She has spent much of the past several years studying voting rights issues and written a monograph entitled, “Vote Dilution and Suppression in Indian Country” that is being published later this year in Studies in American Political Development. Schroedel also served as an expert witness in the recently settled Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch voting rights case. On May 31, 2014 Schroedel gave the plenary address to the bi-annual Christians in Political Science conference. A condensed version of that talk, “Understanding the Sins of the Fathers,” is being published here. Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/01/understanding-sins-founding-fathers |