Aboriginal Christians Research Articles

Freedom from Colonial Bondage

AbstractThis article sets out the colonial legacies and realities which continue to dominate indigenous peoples’ lives, experience, communities, and capacities in Australia. It roots this colonial violence in the particular efforts of missionaries to convert and dominate indigenous peoples with a white colonial God. The Bible was a key weapon for this work, but it is also central to the decolonial work of reconstruction and reparation. While Aboriginal Christians are rereading the biblical texts in ways that push back against the colonial occupation that is at the heart of the church's biblical exegesis, the article is pointing to this as a task laid on all churches and Christians, who can and should decolonize the dominant biblical and theological narratives. Further, there is a deep need to see theological education as a key location for reparation by the colonial inheritors, so that indigenous Christians can continue to deepen and deliver the tools that will help liberate mission and theological education from their colonial legacies.

伝統文化を否定するアボリジニ・キリスト教徒たち : アボリジニ社会の変化と連続性をめぐる一考察

伝統文化を否定するアボリジニ・キリスト教徒たち : アボリジニ社会の変化と連続性をめぐる一考察

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.

The Sources and Resources of Our Indigenous Theology: An Australian Aboriginal Perspective

I will attempt to show the Australian Aboriginal Christian from the spiritual, physical and cultural perspectives. The point that I wish to highlight is that there is an expression of continuity of relationship and ritual sacredness between my ancient people and their Higher Power (known by various names). This relationship is an unbroken thread that has weaved its way through the passages of time. It has been passed on for thousands of years to us here today as Aboriginal Christians. We are not only the “Children of God,” but are also the “Children of the Dreaming”– this is my identity.

“That we may obtain our religious liberty…”: Aboriginal Women, Faith and Rights in Early Twentieth Century Victoria, Australia*

The paper, focused on a few years at the end of the First World War, explores the request of a group of Aborigines in the Australian state of Victoria for freedom of religion. Given that the colony and now state of Victoria had been a stronghold of liberalism, the need for Indigenous Victorians to petition for the removal of outside restrictions on their religious beliefs or practices might seem surprising indeed. But with a Pentecostal revival in train on the mission stations to which many Aborigines were confined, members of the government agency, the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, preferred the decorum of mainstream Protestant church services to potentially unsettling expressions of charismatic and experiential spirituality. The circumstances surrounding the revivalists’ resistance to the restriction of Aboriginal Christians’ choice of religious expression offer insight into the intersections of faith and gender within the historically created relations of power in this colonial site. Though the revival was extinguished, it stood as a notable instance of Indigenous Victorian women deploying the language of Christian human rights to assert the claims to just treatment and social justice that would characterize later successful Indigenous activism.

Clapsticks and Karaoke: The Melting Pot of Indigenous Identity

In recent decades, a mixed-style dance festival has been held at camping grounds near the town of Laura on Cape York Peninsula, including contemporary forms of music and dance. The Laura Festival has its roots in the funding of Aboriginal dance festivals in the 1970s across northern Australia with the aim of fostering the sharing, recovery and maintenance of Aboriginal traditional dance forms. The range of cultural forms at the Festival clearly reflects a broad expression of Indigenous identity, from the classic traditional styles to creative forms that explore symbols and motifs, to modern cultural forms that adapt western forms with an Indigenous style. Questions the authors reflected on at the Festival were: “Where is God in the Laura Festival?” and “What does the Festival say about Aboriginal spirituality in general and Aboriginal Christian spirituality in particular?” In answer to these questions we felt that the Creator was very much present in the vitality and creativity of the Festival and in the shaping of new expressions of Indigenous identity in the modern world. Further, the Festival affirmed that there is a foundational place for Aboriginal spirituality in the formation of Aboriginal Christian identity and spiritualities through a combination of traditional spiritual foundations linking people to creation, culture and to the Creator known through Christ, and a creative shaping of contemporary expressions of belief and practice.

Anthropology, Self‐determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

ABSTRACTOver the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north‐east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non‐Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.

Native and Christian: indigenous voices on religious identity in the United States and Canada

I Spirituality and History 1. Indian Spirituality: Another Vision 2. Who Can Sit At the Lord's Table? The Experience of Indigenous Peoples 3. An Aboriginal Christian Perspective on the Integrity of Creation 4. Rivers of Life: Native Spirituality for Native Churches 5. The Old Testament of Native America II Liberation and Culture 6. Reclaiming our Histories 7. Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today 8. Vision and Community: A Native American Voice 9. Spirituality, Native American Personhood, Sovereignty, and Solidarity 10. Native Americans and Evangelization III Tradition and Community 11. Remember the Sabbath Day 12. The Challenge of the Future: Creating a Place Called Home 13. Program Development and Native American Catechesis 14. The Sacred Circle: Native American Liturgy 15. The Meeting of the Two Ways 16. The Native American Church of Jesus Christ IV Transformation and Survival 17. The Story and Faith Journey of a Native Catechist 18. Returning 19. Plucked from the Ashes 20. Two Paths 21. The Native Church: A Search for an Authentic Spirituality