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“There is a season for everything, and a time for every occupation under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die,” a declaration attributed to Qoheleth, a sage by profession and a Palestinian Jew living in the third century BCE. Qoheleth and others developed the Book of Ecclesiastes as a corrective to counter the empty philosophies of Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism that had vulgarized life in Israel and eviscerated traces of the Sacred. Life was empty; knowledge, virtue, love illusory.
Yet, a sense of the Sacred permeates this short book, sacralizing the totality of life: its impetus, Creator God and no other.
Fast forward to the present. Despite later prophetic utterances, even those of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth, not much has changed, save for solitaries harboring the Sacred within their depths, save for some churches whose Spirit-filled members give thanks and serve with joyful hearts—such is my perception.
I return to yesterday’s green flag and my continuing eligibility for receiving hospice care— “Six months or less to live,” I was told. Others have judged the proximity of my physical death, as if Creator God has no say in the “work of his hands.” The obsession to conform to Medicare’s rules and regs, constantly under revision, keeps the sickened system contorted beyond fixing. The specter of this fiscal dragon continues sprouting new fire-spewing crowned-heads, terrifying its work force.
Qoheleth was more than accurate when he declared “a time to be born and a time to die.” No health care executive can make this decision for me. I belong to Another.
My interest in the Native American presence in the nineteenth-century state of Missouri led to the heartbreaking read, The Ioway in Missouri by Greg Olson, the Curator of Exhibits at the Missouri State Archives: heartbreaking because of the spiritual, emotional, psychological, and physical dissolution of the Ioway tribe, between 1800 to 1837.
Central to this dissolution was the Supreme Court’s 1827 adoption of the Doctrine of Discovery, found in international law and first practiced by the Crusaders taking over lands of vanquished Turks, perceived as pagans and unfit. In the fifteenth century, this precedent was published in four Papal bulls. Thus protected, American and European settlers headed west, especially following the1803 Louisiana Purchase. No matter that Native Americans were already there. “They’d have to change, be like us.”
From the mid 1700s, however, the Ioway tribe enjoyed a rich presence in and around what constitutes the state of Missouri. Their rituals, tradition, and practices bound them to the earth, perceived as sacred, and to their ancestors in the afterlife from whom they were influenced. From sunup to sundown, theirs was a predictable world, when not warring with another tribe, usually over hunting rights.
Greg Olson’s use of primary sources, accompanied by photos and maps, makes those thirty-seven years bleed. Misunderstandings, language differences, the violation of multiple treaties, greed, dishonesty, and impatience justify the most stinking aberrations. In 1837, the government removed the Ioway to the Great Nemaha Reservation in the state of Oklahoma, a barren stretch of land where extreme poverty and alcoholism enervated the Ioway even more.
Yet, The Ioway in Missouri concludes with an inspiring epilogue. The Ioway still survive in Kansas and Nebraska and preserve their traditions.
Across the wide swath of flaming maples, I glimpsed bloodied feet of the Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Cherokees, and Seminole, five civilized tribes in the southeast, forced by our government to walk the Trail of Tears, between 1830 and 1850—their destination, the barren reservations in Oklahoma.
At the time, protesters lobbied, published, shouted out, lectured from pulpits and courtrooms, but the planters won. Cotton remained King, gobbling up nutrients from stolen lands, viewed as sacred by the tribes who had tended them. Such is our scarred history that greedily wants what it wants, but we are not alone.
The precedent of ethno-cleansing has fueled unspeakable atrocities throughout the world. With others, I cry, “Mercy!”
Heart Whisperings 