Canto Ergo Sum : Indigenous Peoples and Postcolonial Theology

Abstract

This essay argues that indigenous Christian theologians are justified in expanding their canonical resources to include the ancestral “Testaments” of their own people groups, and scripture itself provides a precedent. The book of Genesis reveals a pattern of respect for the distinctive religion of the ancestors. And contrary to a reading of Paul which has Galatians erase distinctive cultures, the body of Christ is as much Greek as Jew, as much Pitjantjatjara as Anglo-Celtic. Theology needs, however, more than the serial addition of ethnicities, to work with postcolonial understandings of cultural hybridity and self-limiting practices of “kenotic” listening - to attend within the body of Christ to the particularity of all the songlines which have become, or may become, incorporated into our life together.