At the age of nine I discovered “sin” and didn’t do well with it.
My 11-year-old sister and I had convinced our parents we should attend Bible camp. One August afternoon we boarded a bus and headed to Vashon Island off the Seattle coast.
Cabins held 12 campers, each with an assigned cot. We were in the same cabin, given cot assignments, told the rules, and wandered until dinner served on trestle tables outside our cabin. Adults talked about the camp, the rules and evening campfires, one fire for each cabin.
We found our group and sat on stumps by a small fire and a neat stack of wood. As daylight faded our leader welcomed us, prayed, then told us to examine the fire, to imagine it many times larger and hotter, that sins would lead to the fires in hell, even hotter and longer lasting.
He told each of us to come to the fire, confess a sin, add a stick of wood. Each sin would make a hotter fire. Girls started to go up, one by one. I understood what I was supposed to do and started to panic. I had no idea what a sin was or how I might have done one but knew I must have. I lost it. I screamed. I cried. I wailed.
My sister tucked me in my cot, sat with me for a while, then returned to the fire. I did not understand sin then and 81 years later sin still evades my understanding. I have observed what can only be evil. I have a well-honed sense of right and wrong. Sins? Nope. Wrongs? Lots.
This week I have come across a wrong that bothers my sleep, a wrong I can do nothing about other than to talk. In the year 1956 President Eisenhower signed into law The Indian Relocation Act, written by the same men who had created laws to round up and inter Japanese Americans in the 1940s. This was another effort to “Take the Indian out of the Indian” – force assimilation, break treaties, decrease reservation populations, and take land and its resources.
Tribal members on all reservations were promised sufficient grant money to move to the cities, be trained in a high paying job, and have housing and food paid until the head of the family was trained in a good job and earning a good income. This program was advertised with elegant posters, pamphlets, government recruiters. To a number of families this sounded like a good way to escape poverty and create a good life. 35,000 signed up in the ‘50s.
Of course, from the beginning the program was underfunded, under supervised, and created to fail. Or fail to improve the lives of the Indians. It did lessen the population of the reservations, increase the acreage returned to the government, and shatter the family unit basic to Indian life.
The program eventually lost all funding and interest, and faded away leaving behind thousands of misplaced people scammed by the federal government. The promise, in that form, faded into obscurity. It was wrong. It is wrong.
Today we see similar efforts to eradicate, to “reverse immigrate” sections of the population deemed bothersome in some ways. One criminal Afghan immigrant results in all Afghan immigrants declared “animals.” They are rounded up, criminalized, spoken of as animals, and sent elsewhere without due process. Relocation plans in different forms. Shocking. Wrong. Sinful?
The universe is full of irony. One result of the Indian Relocation Act was that urban Indians became active in the Civil Rights movement, in 1968 founding the American Indian Movement (AIM). Casinos on tribal lands succeeded. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos failed. And today there are more people speaking out for the first time, protesting as never before, seeing wrongs for what they are, registering to vote and voting.
In the meantime, I have my go-bag ready for the Norwegian Relocation Act.