Whipple’s Vision: Theology of the Land and Nineteenth-Century Episcopal Missions to Minnesota Native Americans

Abstract

This article considers theologies of the land by examining the legacy of the nineteenth-century Episcopal bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple and his encounter with Minnesota’s Native American people. Using the work of Willie James Jennings as an interpretive lens, it argues that Whipple developed and implemented a theology in which land is (1) fundamentally separate from people, (2) passive physical material, (3) a resource for human productivity, and (4) an instrument for the formation of Christian and American identity. It shows how such a vision of the land has contributed to a destructive theology of displacement, conquest, wealth, and assimilation. It briefly proposes an alternative theology of the land in which land is (1) distinguishable but not separable from people, (2) differentiated and sacred, (3) a creature with value exceeding its productivity, and (4) a place for mutual formation of people and land through God’s power.

In the summer of 1862, Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822–1901), the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, made a visit to the Ojibwe community at Red Lake, in the north-central region of the state. During the trip, Whipple kept a diary containing a variety of observations, ranging from the Mississippi River to maple trees and bear tracks. He also saw, with both appreciation and sadness, the ways in which Native people lived in the land. ¹ On August 11, he wrote,

The shores of Red Lake are bold and beautiful. The view extends for miles and miles away, with the dim outline of the distant shores, and luxuriant gardens with their rude fences festooned with the wild cucumber which grows everywhere in profusion. To give up such a home, to leave the graves of their fathers to go, God knows where, and be subject to the merciless treatments of corrupt agents, is a doom to which I would subject no enemy. ²

But despite his grief, Whipple saw some sort of removal from home as inevitable—even advisable and beneficial—for the Ojibwe. Five months earlier, on March 6, the bishop had penned a letter to President Lincoln. Prior to their treaties with the United States, Whipple notes, Minnesota’s Native people had enjoyed, among other things, abundant food and strong tribal relations. But the treaties—and especially corrupt government agents—destroyed this way of life, stripping them of their land and leaving them vulnerable to murder and liquor, neglect and want. Given these ongoing injustices, Whipple proposed that the Ojibwe be gathered into one reservation for their own protection and well-being. There the Ojibwe could “abandon his wild life,” and the government could help him “in building a house, in opening his farm, in providing utensils and implements of labor” (p. 512). In his ongoing encounter with the People of the Land, the Ojibwe and Dakota, Bishop Whipple’s ministry came to be grounded in the soil, trees, and animals of Minnesota.

This article is a theological exploration of the land that Whipple came to share with Minnesota’s Indigenous people, especially the Ojibwe. Although I focus directly on a particular nineteenth-century context, the issues I address touch on contemporary matters relevant to Anglicans and others, including land acknowledgment, settler colonialism, environmental sustainability, mission legacies, and more. Methodologically, my work incorporates various areas of scholarship—including mission history and Native American history in Minnesota, as well as biblical exegesis—but it converses primarily with Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. In this book, Jennings deftly relates the development and contours of racialized identity in the modern world through an interweaving of missiology, colonial history, Indigenous studies, biblical theology, and reflections on the land. His theology and social theory are rooted in concrete places and people, and he illustrates the crucial and often tragic role of Christian imagination in our dis-placed and race-divided world. As he puts it,

I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place, and space, leaving such realities to the machinations of capitalistic calculations and the commodity chains of private property. ³

Jennings’s insights guide my interpretation of Whipple’s involvement in Native American affairs, as well as his theology of the land. I argue that there are four interlocking dimensions to Whipple’s vision of the land. Each of these runs counter to Native Americans’ own understandings and ways of life, and each has significant theological implications. First, for Whipple, the land is a reality separate from human persons. Second, the land is passive physical material that can be quantified, divided, and possessed. Third, the land is a resource for human productivity. Fourth, the land is an instrument for the formation of Christian and American identity. Although Whipple genuinely cared about, advocated for, and even helped Native people in certain ways, his vision of the land reflected and contributed to a theology of displacement, conquest, wealth, and assimilation, with destructive and ongoing consequences for Native Americans, Christianity, and the land itself. Along with other Christian missionaries working among Native Americans, Whipple was thus unwittingly a “partner in genocide,” as the Osage/Cherokee theologian George Tinker has put it. ⁴ Repenting of this sin, Christians must therefore continue to turn to and develop alternative views of the land that are in keeping with God’s vision and abundant life.

Historical background

Whipple is remembered more as a church leader and statesman than as a theologian. His Lights and Shadows, the primary text for this study, contains relatively little material that is explicitly theological. He did not present his vision of the land as a product of theological reflection, but instead drew from extensive travels in Minnesota, conversations with Native American leaders and U.S. government officials, and the practical demands that attended his roles with church and state. He articulated his conception of the land through letters, speeches, travel notes, reports, and reminiscences that touch on land, culture, history, and more. Before examining Whipple’s conception of the land in detail, I offer a broad overview of his practical impressions of the land, briefly recounting his sense of the land as it had been in the past, as it was in the present, and especially as it ought to be in the future.

During his forty-two years as bishop, Whipple learned much about and from Native Americans. He formed close relationships with Native people, especially with John Johnson Enmegahbowh (d. 1902), an Ottawa-Ojibwe Christian who was a life-long friend of Whipple, as well as the first Native American Episcopal priest. Thanks to his visits to far-flung places within the state, Whipple witnessed some of the traditional ways of Native life on the land before they were disrupted. His writings indicate an awareness of several significant aspects of Native life, but they also reveal the limits of his vision, what he missed and dismissed, as discussed in detail in the next section. On the whole, Whipple gave a sympathetic—and often paternalistic—account of the Native world. Many of his observations suggest that Whipple saw greater virtue in generous Native Americans than he saw in selfish European Americans. He recognized, too, something of the significant role of the land in Native life. For the Indigenous people he met, the land was filled with spiritual presence: “They believe that everything in nature—the laughing waterfall, the rock, the sky, the forest—contains a divinity” (p. 34). The land was abundant, both naturally and through good stewardship. This was seen in the fruitful expanses of wild rice: “It grows in water from two to four feet deep, . . . standing as thick as wheat at thirty bushels to the acre. The crop seldom fails, and the Indians always leave enough ungathered for seed” (p. 80). Animals were an integral part of Native American life in the land, supplying meat, leather, and fur, while also serving a central role in a rite of passage associated with traditional religion (p. 35). When he encountered an old Native man sitting by a graveside along the edge of the Mississippi, Whipple glimpsed the sanctity of burial places. Although the elder was hungry, he declined Whipple’s offer of food:

Putting his hands on his heart [the old man] answered: “Father, you are kind to the Indians. But my wife is sleeping here. I cannot go far from her; she would be lonely without me. Thank you.” And with bowed head he again took his seat by the grave. (p. 39)

All of life conformed and responded to the land, both spatially and temporal: family hunting grounds, maple sugar-making, annual feasts accompanying planting and berry picking (p. 41).

In Whipple’s present moment—beginning with his election as bishop in 1859 and lasting through the turn of the century—all this was changing. First in the southern part of the state, but increasingly to the north, droves of white European American settlers flowed inexorably into Minnesota. They cut forests, dammed rivers, destroyed fisheries, flooded wild rice, over-trapped fur-bearing animals, decimated wild game, established farms, introduced alcohol, and irreparably altered the land and its Indigenous people. Ojibwe and Dakota people suffered terribly. Whipple condemned much of the change as unjust, but he also considered it to be irreversible. There was no way to preserve the land and its original inhabitants; their best—and only—hope was a government commitment to integrity, honesty, and provision for their Native dependents:

From the day of the treaty a rapid deterioration takes place. The Indian has sold the hunting-grounds necessary for his comfort as a wild man; his tribal relations are weakened; his chief’s power and influence circumscribed; and he will soon be left a helpless man without a government, a protector, or a friend, unless the solemn treaty is observed. (p. 511)

In the face of this situation, Whipple did not despair. His response to the tumult in his diocese was to propose an agrarian future for the land and its Native people. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of other Christian groups in North America who, since the colonial era, had invested in agrarian missionary enterprises that sought to subordinate or eliminate existing Native American agricultural practices and to replace them with European-style farming. ⁵ This emphasis on agriculture, along with good government and education, was at the core of Whipple’s list of recommendations for dealing with “the Indian problem,” especially for the Ojibwe bands. Whipple called for a farm program consisting of three main elements (pp. 50–53). First, the Ojibwe should be relocated and centralized on one reservation. This would allow them to be better served by the government and would protect them from the designs of white opportunists. This reservation, Whipple insisted, must be good land, well suited for the cultivation of crops. Second, the Ojibwe should obtain individual title to the land and thus each be empowered to operate his own farm and to reap the rewards of his labor. Third, the government should provide in-kind assistance and education to develop a community of Native farmers: seed, agricultural implements, and honest trainers were all essential.

Whipple got his wish for a new Native American farming program, at least initially. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson, after meeting with several Ojibwe leaders in Washington, D.C., created the White Earth Reservation. It was good land, filled with prime farmland, stands of pine trees, and lakes and trees that supported traditional Ojibwe practices. ⁶ In the spring of 1868, various bands of Ojibwes moved—or were removed—to White Earth. The government built a sawmill and grist mill, and it provided expensive farm machinery. Whipple’s associate Enmegahbowh was enthusiastic. At this moment of transition, he said, “I have never seen [the people] so willing & ready to work & cultivate the soil.” ⁷ When Whipple preached at White Earth in July 1871, he was encouraged by what he saw. In his diary, he wrote, “I have often visited these Indians & found them savages. [Now] I found them dressed as white men, living by toil, dwelling in houses.” ⁸ On White Earth, Whipple’s vision for the land took root.

Theology of the land

The historical background above reveals several connected aspects of Whipple’s view of the land. While the following analysis foregrounds his own views, there are also glimpses of alternative visions that the bishop overlooks or rejects, especially Native Americans’ own ways of understanding and living with the land. Their vision grounds a profoundly different theology of the land.

Land as separate

First, at a foundational level, Whipple conceived of the land and the people as separate realities. ⁹ For him, land and people were not only distinguishable but also divisible. Whipple’s political and religious work contributed to a dislocation of identity, so that identity no longer resided in a specific, given place in the present, but in “civilization,” a future heavenly home, and/or God. One sees this shift in Whipple’s report about a meeting with White Earth Ojibwe who were angered at news about the sale of their pine trees. Whipple approvingly records how one leader, Chief Washburne, stood and spoke from a Christian perspective:

I should not be an Indian if I did not feel the wrong done unto my people; but I am a man who has started on a journey. The place I want to reach is the home the Great Spirit has made for me. If I let myself be angered by things which happen on the way, I may lose the trail. The Great Spirit is our Father. He wants us to tell him of our troubles. When I cannot see, I kneel at his feet.

Washburne then turned to Whipple and said, “When I kneel there, Kichimekadewiconaye [Ojibwe title for Whipple], the name I never forget is your own” (pp. 264–65). It seems that Washburne had been—or was in the process of being—separated from the land. Here was an identity that was no longer fixed in place, but projected into the future, into a home that was not yet known. Washburne could no longer see his identity in the place where he lived—indeed, even the trees identifying the place had been or would be cut down—but rather by the faith brought by Whipple.

The bishop realized to a limited extent that Ojibwe identity was tied by history and custom to the land, but he acted with the false assumption that this linkage was more incidental than fundamental. For Ojibwes, like many other Native people, the land was and is sacred, integrally bound to person, community, and action: “Our land, our religion, and our life are one.” ¹⁰ Their relationship with their cherished land was characterized by deep respect and knowledge; it constituted an intrinsic part of their cultural identity. ¹¹ By contrast, Whipple believed that the relationship between Native people and the land could—even should—evolve in such a way that the people understand themselves as essentially independent from the land. The Ojibwes may be in the land, but they need not be of the land—and the land certainly need not be in the people. ¹² In a certain way, Whipple’s own life embodied this separation between person and place. He was born in New York; attended college in Ohio; led congregations in New York and Illinois; moved to be bishop of Minnesota, a state he’d never seen; often wintered in Florida; toured internationally; and circled the United States for ecclesial, political, and personal reasons. ¹³ Whipple carried his identity, possessed it, in himself and brought it to whatever place he happened to be in. ¹⁴ Native Americans, he imagined, could and must do likewise. Whipple did not believe that a people could be altogether landless—to that extent, people were dependent on land in general—but, to a significant extent, he held that many lands (even if not just any land) would do. ¹⁵

At the heart of this conception of the land is a theology of displacement or dislocation, long operative in colonialism. This displacement plays out both in space and in theological anthropology. The land is objectified and distanced from human life. People are seen in terms of mobility and conformity to “universal” standards. Jennings writes,

The age of discovery and conquest began a process of transformation of land and identity. . . . Peoples different in geography, in life, in different worlds of European designation—Africa, the Americas, Europe—will lose the earth only to find it again in a strange new way. The deepest theological distortion taking place is that the earth, the ground, spaces, and places are being removed as living organizers of identity and as facilitators of identity. ¹⁶

Put in biblical language, adam (a human) is no longer bound to adamah (earth or ground) (Gen 2:7). Creation is envisioned in discrete sections—people here, places there—more than in its ecological wholeness. Humans are not seen as essential participants in the rest of creation, but as independent agents who can float freely over the land.

In this fragmentation and dislocation, white Christian civilization takes the place of the land in determining identity. ¹⁷ European American leaders like Whipple assessed Native Americans and judged that they had potential to find their identity apart from the land, in the church and the ways of the Western world. Whipple wrote, “Can these red men become civilized? I say, unhesitatingly, yes. . . . In Canada you will find there are hundreds of civilized and Christian Indians, while on this side of the line there is only degradation” (p. 512). Civilized Christian identity, then, can be taken up by “red men” as easily as by whites, regardless of place. It is the potential, even destiny, of all people. In this scheme, human identity thus takes a Gnostic tone, with spiritual capacity more important than place and body. Land becomes secondary, even if it retains some utility. Such a theology of dislocation, with its separation of land and people, intertwines with the other aspects of Whipple’s conception of the land, including the idea of land as substance.

Land as substance

Because he drew a line dividing land from individual and communal identity, Whipple could support the reservation system, Ojibwe relocation and consolidation, and the allotment of land as private property to individual tribal members. Here, a second aspect of Whipple’s conception of the land emerges: land as inert substance that can be measured, fragmented, and owned. Like others before and after him, Whipple operated within the logic of Thomas Jefferson’s Land Survey System, made into law in 1785, which stamped the land with one-mile-square boxes, each containing exactly 640 acres. Thanks to this tool, land was flattened, neutralized, measured, commodified, partitioned, and purchased. “This grid system became fundamental to the way Americans would imagine actual living space—its divisions, borders, and limits.” ¹⁸ It led to Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act, which allowed individuals, for only a small filing fee, to lay claim to a quarter-section (160 acres) of “free” land. Likewise, it enabled the governments to mark out the boundaries of the White Earth Reservation in 1867 and to parcel out the lands therein through the 1887 Dawes Act and 1889 Nelson Act. The Nelson Act, a piece of state legislation, apportioned land first to individual tribal members; when all eligible members had received their tracts, the government put the remaining land on the auction block or took it for public land. Land was no longer held collectively by the tribe but by individuals, who were often convinced by white businesspeople to sell their land in the ensuing years. The White Earth reservation lost its territorial integrity and became a checkerboard of Indian-owned and—increasingly—white-owned blocks of land. ¹⁹

This control of the land was not merely a matter of Ojibwe places being brought under the umbrella of Minnesota and the United States. Something deeper and more imaginative was happening: the “land itself [was] drawn into a new dimensionality that rendered former spatial designations and coordination of ways of life meaningless or at best marginal to the entrance into a civilized sphere of existence.” ²⁰ Ojibwe ways of life, for instance, were not “square” or contiguous. Traditional Ojibwe land use patterns did not follow a surveyor’s rod but rather wound, shifted, and jumped: “Maybe I get my wild rice over here and my maple sugar bushes over here. I go over here and that is where my trapline is.” ²¹ Like a premodern map, Ojibwe life on the land was not rigidly standardized; instead, it flowed with the land’s seasonal movement patterns and revealed spatial density. ²² Ojibwe images of the land bulged and clenched in sacred places; space itself had agency and depth. Not so within Whipple’s Jeffersonian vision. In this way of seeing, all lands were uniform, mathematically defined so as not to veer or flex with waterways, burial sites, or concentrations of maple trees. ²³ Land was fundamentally object, something that could be managed and instrumentalized. Ultimately, all of this was part of a “reformation of space within a vision of ownership.” ²⁴ It was a form of conquest.

Whipple was not the first to see the land in this way. Jews and Christians have long understood that land, especially the Promised Land of Canaan, could be measured and owned, brought under the sway of a greater power—that of humans. The biblical perception of Canaan serves as an intriguing point of comparison for my discussion of Whipple, both in terms of the taking of the land and the division of the land. In his book on six Old Testament land ideologies, Norman Habel analyzes various ways in which biblical texts portray the land. Like Whipple’s, all the ideologies “are promoted by particular social groups with vested interests in promoting a given ideology to gain, regain, or maintain land.” ²⁵ While it is not possible simply to equate Whipple’s conception of the land with any one of these ancient ideologies, Habel’s work with Joshua sheds lights on Whipple’s conception of the land as surveyable and possessable. In Joshua, notes Habel, there are two elements at work. The first, in which land is seen as family lots or allotments for the twelve tribes of Israel, is the more innocuous of the two. “The divine process of granting the land culminates in the act of dividing the land into identifiable lots with recognizable boundaries. These lots are assigned to the ancestral families . . .” ²⁶ Although this allotment of lands did not take place according to a grid system, it still divided the land and assumed that land could be owned. The second and more ethically problematic element in Joshua’s land ideology is the conquest narrative, with the Hebrew people taking the land that God had promised them. In this way, Joshua gives divine sanction to the expulsion of the Canaanites and to Hebrew control of the land. ²⁷ The biblical conquest narrative gestures toward another conquest narrative, this one in Whipple’s time: Manifest Destiny.

The reduction of land through measurement, allotment, and possession allows for the conquest, not only of Canaanites and Native Americans, but also of the land itself. ²⁸ Admittedly, Whipple differed from Joshua insofar as the bishop did not explicitly cite divine inspiration for the Homestead Act or the creation of the White Earth Reservation; neither did Whipple altogether dismiss the rights of the Indigenous people, as Joshua does with those of Canaan’s inhabitants. Even so, Whipple’s writings and the text of Joshua both evince a strong desire for control of the land. This theological imagination accents human possession of the land over divine ownership, the rights of humans over the rights of the land, and the rights of the new people over the old. Once the conquest is complete and the land is safely owned, the land can be put to work and thus serve its allegedly proper end: production.

Land as productivity

Those who own land, Whipple believed, would rightly come to perceive the land in a third way: as a source of productivity and profitability, primarily through agriculture, including its commercial forms. Of course, the land was already productive before “modern” farming. Through their hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivating, Ojibwe people were deeply attuned to the land’s abundance. They knew first-hand that “the land looks after us.” ²⁹ While all community members played a part in receiving the fruit of the earth, Ojibwe women took the lead in agricultural work. ³⁰ Women planted and harvested garden plots of corn, pumpkins, squash, and more. When the season was right, they collected and processed maple sap and wild rice, which were stored for future needs, as they still do today. ³¹ To a limited extent, the bishop did recognize the natural fruitfulness of the land apart from the economic market. However, he saw this as a relic of a fast-fading past or, less charitably, as inferior to the possibilities of modern farming. On his 1862 tour of Red Lake territory, Whipple saw the Ojibwe people thriving in the land. He enthused about vast gardens of corn and potatoes. Over the course of this excursion, Whipple feasted on duck and fish, gazed on vast stretches of wild rice, and reveled at the abundance of berries and nuts (pp. 75–77). Even so, he wrote, “Much of the way the land is poor, but there is little which would not repay cultivation” (p. 77). In other words, the land, like the Native American, was immature, not yet a “productive citizen.” Its potential needed to be developed. In Whipple’s eyes, the land may have been rich in a certain way, but that was the wrong—or, at least, the doomed—way. ³² Real richness lay in the European American approach to the land, though which land was equated with its monetized use-value.

According to this conception of land as source of production, land can and must be “taught.” In this capitalistic and colonialist mindset, land is not seen for what it has been or what it produces of its own accord, but for what it might be. As Jennings says,

the new worlds were transformed into land—raw, untamed land. And the European [and American] vision saw these new lands as a system of potentialities, a mass of undeveloped, underdeveloped, unused, underutilized, misunderstood, not fully understood potentialities. Everything—from peoples and their bodies to plants and animals, from the ground and the sky—was subject to change, subjects for change, subjected to change. ³³

With the right seeds, equipment, and teachers, the land could be re-formed as cropland, pasture, and lumber: wheat, not wild rice; cattle, not deer; board feet, not pine forests. In this conversion, the land and its people were dependent on the expertise of white Christian farmers and businessmen, whose mastery of the land knew no end. By such teaching, Whipple and his associates sought to “transform the New World into one large, ever-expanding classroom with no beginning or ending period, an unrelenting pedagogical eternality.” ³⁴ Farming, as inculcated by white educators, would fulfill the land’s purpose, transforming the land from chaos into orderly, productive cropland and well-kept homesteads. Until the end of his life, Whipple remained optimistic about this process. In the closing pages of his memoir, Whipple highlighted growth in Indian farming. According to the Indian Commissioner’s 1897 report, there were “348,218 acres of land cultivated by Indians. One million, seven hundred and sixteen thousand, nine hundred and eighteen bushels of grain were raised by Indians, and the value of the products sold by them was $1,033,047” (pp. 492–93). Dismissive of the land’s productivity before the implementation of European American agriculture, he implies that his nation’s farming investments have created outputs that did not previously exist. By his measurements, it thus seemed that his conception of the land as productivity was coming to fruition.

Whipple’s theology of land productivity was complicated. On one hand, it provided displaced Native Americans with a potential means of survival in their new reality, while also reflecting the Scriptural view of the land as means of sustenance and gladness for its people. ³⁵ On the other hand, such productivity could—and did—easily come to serve ends other than basic, shared human flourishing. Here, a comparison with Habel’s work is again illuminating, even with the contextual differences at play. Habel uses Scripture’s portrayal of Solomon, as well as the royal psalms, to describe the “royal ideology,” through which the monarch harnesses the productivity of the land in order to increase his wealth and empire. The measured and owned sections of land are seen as “economic units” or “a set of revenue centers for the accumulation of wealth.” ³⁶ The monarch is justified in exploiting the land in this way because he is YHWH’s representative, who can claim “the established earth . . . as a personal domain.” ³⁷

While Whipple did not promote his view of the land for the sake of the Solomonic monarchy or other explicit theological/biblical precedents, his perspective parallels Solomon’s narrative. Deeply shaped by his own historical and cultural context, Whipple’s emphasis on productivity forwarded other empires, especially those of capitalism and the United States government. ³⁸ Whipple’s stress on agriculture meant that the land and the Indigenous people must participate in the broader economic system through commodity production, the marketing of goods, wage labor, and wealth generation. Once incorporated into this capitalistic view of the land, Native Americans could leave behind their subsistence lifestyle and be linked into the larger European American market system, which sought to cover the whole earth. A strong economy, served by both European Americans and Native people, would contribute to a strong, growing country. Whipple seems to have shared the nineteenth-century fervor for national expansion and power. ³⁹ The United States was a “great Christian Nation,” called to “deal righteously with the Indian nations in [the nation’s] charge” (p. 514). Insofar as the leaders of the country did so, the beneficent empire would certainly grow and flourish. And by teaching the land to produce wealth, the empire could also leverage the land in forming its people.

Land as tool for human formation

All of this points to a fourth and final aspect of Whipple’s conception of the land: the re-formed land’s role in shaping human identity and behavior, especially that of Native American people. This was not a reunion of land and people, not a reversal of the separation described above. Rather, it was an instrumentalization of the land so that it could produce humans who fit the pre-established, “universal” standard of a civilized American Christian farmer. In this ideal, “American,” “Christian,” and “farmer” intertwined and strengthened one another. The impact of Whipple’s “politics of Indian assimilation” has been severe. ⁴⁰

What did this ideal look like? Here, Whipple upheld the Jeffersonian model of the yeoman farmer: a man and his family laboring and remaining on their own land, providing for their own needs, participating in the larger economy, and becoming strong American citizens. Jefferson once wrote, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” ⁴¹ Whipple took a similar position when he opined, “The law which gives land in severalty is an excellent provision. No man becomes civilized until he has something which he can call his own” (p. 313). Farmer Indians would look like European American farmers. They would be men, not women—which, in Ojibwe context, compounded the socio-cultural upheaval entailed by his plan. They would not wander but put down roots on their own 160-acre farms. They would grow grains that could be sold. They would wear pants and cut their hair (p. 264). Even their physiques would change, as they developed stronger upper bodies (p. 287). They would support the government and—importantly—be cooperative and peaceable neighbors.

Whipple had examples of such “farmer Indians” in mind when he wrote, especially in light of the turmoil and violence of 1862. In August of that year, a group of Dakota people in southwestern Minnesota, fed up with the government’s refusal to honor its financial commitments to the tribe, killed 800 white people in the so-called “Dakota Uprising.” ⁴² Not all Dakotas, though, participated in the violence. Taopi, the “chief of the farmer Indians” (p. 111), stood with white settlers and protected many of them. H. H. Sibley, the first governor of Minnesota and colonel of the state militia during the events of 1862, gave this “farmer Indian” a certificate of appreciation (p. 134). The Dakota leader Wabasha was another whose life on the land formed him into the sort of citizen Whipple hoped for. Wabasha wrote, “I want to be among the whites and live like a white man. I am a Farmer. I want to aid the whites” (p. 114).

Whipple employed scriptural language and his theological imagination to outline the process whereby Indians could be so formed on and by the land. He wrote,

History enforces the lesson which is written with the finger of God on the pages of Holy Writ. The Indian must have a home; his wandering tribal relations must be broken up; he must be furnished with seed, implements of husbandry, and taught to live by the sweat of his brow. (p. 517)

Here, the bishop ignores or denies the fact that Minnesota’s Native people did not regard themselves as homeless wanderers in need of Whipple’s remedy. He then weaves his misperception into a particular biblical trajectory. Whipple considered Minnesota’s Native people to have a certain nobility, but deemed that, without help, they were destined to be “Ishmaelites” (pp. 516–17), those “wild,” conflict-prone people about whom Genesis 16:12 speaks. The way to avoid or domesticate such wildness was labor, submission to God’s decree to Adam and Eve at their eviction from the Garden of Eden: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Gen. 3:17b). Farming, then, was God’s burdensome but ultimately life-giving provision for those who have been expelled from the garden. Through this way of life on the land, Native Americans no longer needed to be wanderers who merely subsisted from day to day—perhaps this was too much like the peripatetic rhythms of Abraham and Sarah or the wilderness wandering of the Israelites. Instead, Native people could be moved to their own Promised Land, where they could enjoy allotted lands, security, and storehouses of marketable grain. Civilized American Christian farmer Indians: this was the goal, and the land played a critical role in its realization.

Insofar as it preserved the lives of threatened and suffering Native Americans, Whipple’s conception of the land as a tool for human formation served charitable ends. More deeply, however, the conception of the land furthered a theology of sameness: for lands, people, life on the land, and Christian faith. Whipple approvingly cited the wisdom of Captain R. H. Pratt, head of Pennsylvania’s (in)famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, who regularly emphasized that “an Indian is like a white man, and that industry, reward of labor, protection of law, and Christian homes will do for the one what it has done for the other” (p. 168). In a way, Whipple saw the land as Pratt saw the school: as a means of assimilation. Through these means, Indians could be brought into Western civilization, the English-speaking world, the American nation, the agrarian economy, and the Christian church. Whipple recalled with gladness a “pantomime” that the Ojibwe Christians of a White Earth congregation organized and performed for him and another visitor after a worship service and feast. The production recounted the vibrancy of Native life before contact with whites and then the degradation wrought by “forked tongue” European Americans, with their deceit and “fire-water.” It ended with the changes brought by Christianity. According to Whipple, the narrator “clapped his hands, and a manly young Indian clergyman in clerical clothes appeared, and by his side a gentle woman in a neat gray gown” (pp. 184–85). Might the drama have been “double-speak” meant to assuage the white spectators? We cannot know, but Whipple simply took the performance at face value. For him, this was evidence that the land could produce not only flourishing, civilized American farmers, but also familiar Christians, fellow disciples of Jesus, hardly distinguishable from white people.

A piece of land to call home, food to eat, peace with neighbors, sobriety, membership in Christ’s body through the church: these are good outcomes to which Whipple contributed. To some degree, though, these gains are vitiated by the theology of assimilation that runs through Whipple’s legacy. Whipple’s vision of the land tended to foster sameness and uniformity more than communion through joining and intimacy. In this theology of assimilation, difference and particularity are acknowledged—and then promptly eliminated, absorbed by the standard form. The theology of assimilation entails change for one party—the weaker one—but not the other. In Whipple’s nineteenth-century Minnesota context, European Americans did not undergo risk, loss, and change as Native Americans did. Since white settlers and missionaries were on the side of the “universal,” they could allow others to join them without moving themselves. ⁴³ For the land, this meant an expansion of the dominant vision, not the development of a new one.

Evaluation and alternatives

How should one evaluate Whipple’s vision of the land? Although my evaluation is generally negative, one can also recognize that his conception of place had some qualities that are at least potentially positive and understandable. First, Whipple viewed the land from multiple perspectives. He moved through and assessed Minnesota’s spaces as a bishop, political influencer, traveler, and friend to both European Americans and Native Americans. He thus realized something of the land’s complexity, including its social, economic, and political significance. A good theology of the land must take into account a broad range of variables, as Whipple sought to do.

Second, Whipple was right to see that the land forms people, though he wrongly conceived, instrumentalized, and applied this power. It is true that land formed nineteenth-century Native Americans and European American farmers, and such formation remains relevant today. Furthermore, in some contemporary North American contexts, Whipple’s Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer is likely a helpful prescription, in that it supports a local, land-based economy instead of large-scale, market-based, technology-driven industrial agriculture. A suitable theology of the land must attend closely to the ways in which the land shapes human identity and behavior.

Third, given the historical circumstances Whipple faced, his conception of the land may have been the best—or least worst—option. Whipple was pragmatic, and something needed to be done with respect to Native Americans. As influential as Whipple was, he could not single-handedly turn the tide of European American settlers, land ownership, and capitalism. The original White Earth land—with the combination of its western plains, which were good for farming, and its eastern forests and lakes, which sustained traditional Ojibwe practices—could have allowed for a hybrid way of life for the Ojibwe people, if only the lands had stayed in their hands. Whipple’s theology of the land, then, reminds us of historical limitations, which cannot be avoided.

Despite all of this, Whipple’s conception of the land was deeply flawed. Broadly stated, Whipple saw Native American people, but he was unable or unwilling to see with them, to see themselves and the land as they did. More specific problems also arise. First, in separating the land and the people, Whipple supported a theological anthropology that failed to recognize the creatureliness of humans and their proper embeddedness within creation. Furthermore, he oriented people to the future without sustaining an adequate grounding in the present. Second, in viewing the land as substance, he ignored the uniqueness of place and commodified God’s gift of land. In so doing, he participated—even if unintentionally—in the conquest of the land and its people. Third, by perceiving the land in terms of its use-value, he overlooked the land’s natural abundance and served a capitalistic and expansionist ideology of wealth and empire. Fourth, by instrumentalizing the land to form Christians and American citizens, he assumed the absolute pedagogical power of white Christian civilization and furthered a theology of assimilation and sameness, which precluded mutuality in relationships between others.

In hindsight, Whipple’s theology of the land did not work out well, despite the hopeful attitude the bishop maintained until his death in 1901. The experience of White Earth is representative for Minnesota Native Americans more broadly. There was some initial success with Ojibwe farming in the reservation’s first decade or two. Some Native farmers were able to preserve their “commitment to traditional, communal economic practices.” ⁴⁴ Some used European American farming to supplement their traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and gardening. However, the character of Whipple’s vision, together with a harsh climate, high capital expenses, recurrent Indian agency indiscretions, and Ojibwe factionalism, mitigated against the success of White Earth’s agricultural enterprise. ⁴⁵ Most devastating were the 1887 Dawes Act and 1889 Nelson Act, mentioned above, which led to a process of individual allotment and exploitative land sales. By 1914, only 14 percent of original White Earth land was still in Native hands. ⁴⁶ On White Earth and elsewhere, both the land and its Native people have struggled.

Whipple and his conception of the land must be critiqued, but critique alone is not adequate; we must also attend to the present and future. The words of George Tinker are again instructive. Tinker minces no words about the damages Whipple wrought, but he ends like this:

In an important way, Whipple—and others involved in Indian missions—was as much a victim of Anglo arrogance as were Indian peoples. He really could not have done other than what he did, but this by no means excuses him. Indeed, it becomes all the more important for modern white America to learn from the traps and pitfalls of his valiant attempt to achieve the best for his people, including Indian people. . . . Health and well-being come not from denying our past or even disassociating ourselves from it, but only from acknowledging and learning from it. ⁴⁷

Thus, in closing, I offer a sketch for a different theology of the land, following the lead of Native Americans, as well as postcolonial theology and eco-theology. ⁴⁸ Learning from Whipple’s history, we can begin to see and live in ways more faithful to God, the Scriptures, the land, and all its creaturely communities, human and otherwise. My proposal is far from comprehensive, but it provides an initial response to Whipple’s fourfold conception of the land.

First, the land and its people are distinguishable but not separate realities. The Native American understanding quoted above merits repetition: “Our land, our religion, and our life are one.” As Psalm 24:1 proclaims, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” Humans, soil, rivers, plants, and animals belong together fundamentally because they belong to God. They are part of God’s creation, not just in the beginning but also now and in the age to come, when God will make all things new. Furthermore, just as the scandalously particular Jesus was a Jewish man from Nazareth in Galilee, so too all other humans are rooted in places. For Christians, the land does not constitute the entirety of human identity, but it remains central and irreplaceable for what it means to be human.

Second, the land is not merely exchangeable material for human measurement and possession, but is differentiated and sacred, even creaturely. In Native American terms, places, like people, are alive and irreplaceable; thus “each people [must know] their land, their territory, in an intimate way.” ⁴⁹ This accords with Jewish understandings, as well. When Jacob awoke from his theophanic dream at Bethel, he built a stone pillar to mark it as a holy place and exclaimed, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” (Gen. 28:16). Christians, grafted by God’s grace into the irreducible particularity of Israel, must acknowledge the ways in which different lands are unique and blessed, each with its own value. Whipple recognized something of this truth when he visited Palestine in 1865, even if he did not translate it to Minnesota. He described Palestine as

that land consecrated as the place where the Son of God tabernacled in the flesh. With all its desolation it is the dearest of all lands to the Christian. . . . Although it has been trodden under foot by the heel of Gentile armies, and its bosom scarred with the battles of contending hosts, it is the same land; and he who travels there with a thoughtful heart will see everywhere the finger of God. (p. 229)

Third, though the land may be cultivated, it is not a tool or resource for human exploitation and accumulation; it is a source of daily bread for all that God has made, as well as a creature for which God cares, even apart from its utility to humans. In Native American terms, the land is not a wilderness to be taken and tamed, but a generous “Mother” who gives “physical and spiritual sustenance for the people.” ⁵⁰ In the corresponding words of Psalm 145:15–16, “The eyes of all look to you [God], and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.” Christians, worshippers of the God who provided manna for the Hebrews in the wilderness, trust that God works through the land to provide enough and plenty. Those who see the land only in terms of its use-value are worshippers of Mammon and servants of human kingdoms, not disciples of the one who said,

Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matt. 6:31–33)

Seeing the land in terms of God’s abundance, not human productivity, is better for the land and for the soul.

Fourth, and finally, the land is a hospitable place for mutual formation of people and the land through the power of God, for “joining, mixing, merging, and being changed.” ⁵¹ This is entirely different from the land as the dominant civilization’s tool for human formation, with a vision only for assimilation. With this alternative vision, we can perceive the way in which many Native American people, shaped through their close relationship with and spirituality of the land, have a strong sense of kinship with all Native people, leading to mutual care and expansive community. ⁵² Building on this in a biblical register, we see how the land is host to multiple people, with God bringing blessing to the nations through God’s chosen people. It is as Isaiah prophesied:

In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isa. 2:2–3)

Here, the land itself teaches and forms all people, as directed by God. It does not manufacture “civilized white American Christian farmers” but creates God’s new people—with Jew and Gentile, Native American and European American, both planted in their places on earth and brought together in the body of Christ. ⁵³

These brief constructive remarks do not, of course, address many pressing and practical questions related to the land. Still, they demonstrate how God provides life-giving alternatives to Whipple’s conception of the land and to the corresponding theology of displacement, conquest, wealth, and assimilation. Furthermore, they compel Christians to learn from the deep wisdom of Jewish and Native American people. Renewed vision and imagination along these lines are essential as Christian people and churches respond to the need for reparation, reconciliation, and renewal for the earth and all its creatures today.