What Was God Saying To Canada's Indigenous People Before the Nativity? Or, How to De-Colonize Christmas

At Christmas, Christians celebrate how they believe God came into the world through Jesus.

But before God came into the world 2,000 years ago in Palestine, what was he saying to Indigenous people in North America at the same time?

After all, it’s not like God wasn’t doing anything to communicate to human beings prior to that event—including to Indigenous people who have been living in North America for as long as 12,000 years. 

So what was God saying?

That’s the question I posed to my friend Terry Leblanc, an Indigenous Christian leader and director of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies.

While affirming the traditional Christmas story of God breaking into the world as a baby in a particular place and time to provide redemption and restoration for all creation, Leblanc notes this doesn’t mean God wasn’t also speaking to Indigenous people before that event.

While the history we read about in the Bible was unfolding, “there was an historical timeline of equal length unfolding here and in other places of the globe,” he says.

This doesn’t mean “God, as Jesus, was here [in North America],” he adds, although he says there are Indigenous prophecies “of the arrival of the message of Jesus.”

But God “as Creator and God as the Spirit were here,” he states. 

If that’s the case, what was God saying to the Indigenous people of North America? 

According to LeBlanc, God was speaking about things like the seven teachings: Love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth. 

As an “Indigenous follower of the Jesus Way,” as he describes himself, the biblical story qualifies “the notion of the Creator’s sufficient revelation to Indigenous peoples in the past,” he says. 

“For whatever reason, God chose to enter God’s own creation in human form to perform the ceremony of redemption and restoration, through a particular people group, from a particular land, at a particular time, and that this was for all of creation.” 

When Europeans arrived on this continent, he notes, they assumed North America’s Indigenous people were heathens, people with no prior knowledge whatsoever of God. 

But they did, Leblanc says; they just had a different way of understanding and expressing it through stories. 

Christian missionaries assumed those stories “were irrelevant and/or replaceable by the biblical narrative, instead of recognizing the universal applicability of those [Indigenous] narratives,” he says. 

Blinded to the Creator’s presence among Indigenous people, and conflating Christianity with their own culture, the European missionaries sought to convert them to their way of being Christian. 

“It is this theologically aberrant understanding that has been thrust upon Indigenous peoples,” he says. 

But Indigenous people aren’t the only ones who need to de-colonize the theologically aberrant understandings thrust upon them, he suggests; it’s also something non-Indigenous Christians need to do. 

As Leblanc puts it: “Decolonization is just as needed for Euro-centric Christianity at Christmas as it is for Indigenous peoples. Only then will we be able to see a Christ-filled celebration that is not devoid of culture, but rather expressive of the intent of God through all cultures that have emerged through time.”

For him, that intent is “the redemption and restoration of all things . . . whatever hinders or redirects that intention needs either to be decolonized or set aside entirely.” 

So—what would it mean for non-Indigenous Christians to de-colonize Christmas? After all, it’s been colonized so completely by a culture of consumerism. Separating the biblical message from the cultural and commercial trappings of the season is almost impossible. 

One way to start is remembering the radical idea behind God’s coming to earth: to upend all rulers, structures, cultures and economic and political systems. 

Another is to remember how Jesus, during his ministry, discomforted the political and religious elite, overturned cultural norms and challenged theological certainties by doing things like eating with prostitutes, befriending tax collectors and re-defining the concept of neighbour. 

Or, as Christian author Jonathan Martin put it: If this Christmas the Jesus you worship “makes emperors feel comfortable and oppressed people feel unsafe, it's time for a grand reversal.”

Image above by Jackson Beardy. From the Dec. 21, 2019 Winnipeg Free Press.