Decolonizing Jesus: What Indigenous Wisdom Teaches Christians About Their Own Savior
The Jesus That Colonialism Hid
As someone who has spent decades in both Indigenous communities and Western Christian institutions, I've witnessed firsthand the tragic irony of missionary work: Western Christianity promised all these things: development, hope, salvation/healing, a better life, etc. But for Indigenous people, it only delivered oppression, death and bad news. It was the bad news of the Gospel. The very people who claimed to bring Jesus often destroyed the Indigenous communities who were, without hearing what Christians called the gospel, already living his teachings in a more holistic and consistent way than the Christians.
This isn't hyperbole or romanticized nostalgia—it's documented history that challenges the very foundation of how Western Christians understand their own faith. When I sit with elders who remember their grandparents' stories of first contact, I hear accounts of communities that embodied Christ's teachings about loving others, caring for the poor, and living in harmony with creation. These weren't abstract theological concepts to Indigenous peoples; they were practical ways of life that had sustained communities for thousands of years. They weren’t perfect, just human.
The evidence is overwhelming when you examine it honestly. Archaeological records show sophisticated urban centers like Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, which supported over 40,000 people through sustainable agriculture and complex trade networks—all without the environmental destruction that characterizes Western "civilization." There were many “Cahokias.” Chacoan and Inca road systems that stretched over hundreds of miles, connecting communities in a network of mutual aid that ensured no one went hungry. These weren't primitive societies waiting for the light of Christianity; they were advanced civilizations practicing Jesus's teachings on a scale that puts contemporary Western Christianity to shame.
When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they encountered Indigenous nations that practiced economic sharing, honored creation as sacred, resolved conflicts through consensus, and cared for their most vulnerable members. These were the very values Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of the Kingdom, and his life among the marginalized.
The conquistadors themselves recorded their shock at finding societies that seemed to embody Christian virtues without Christian doctrine. Hernán Cortés wrote to King Charles V about the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, describing markets where no one cheated, courts where justice was administered fairly, and public works that provided for all citizens. Yet these same conquistadors, carrying crosses and claiming Christ's name, proceeded to destroy these communities with a brutality that would make their supposed Savior weep.
When the English, Dutch, French and other Europeans first encountered the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, they were invariably welcomed as needy neighbors who needed help. The Natives felt sorry for them, believing at first that the sacred lands they had held since time immemorial could be shared with the newcomers.
This pattern repeated itself across two continents. The Wampanoag saved the Plymouth colonists from starvation, teaching them sustainable farming techniques and sharing their abundance. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy offered a model of democratic governance that would later influence the U.S. Constitution, based on principles of consensus, women's leadership, and consideration for seven generations in the future. The Lakota practiced Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ—"all my relations"—recognizing kinship with all life forms in ways that mirror Jesus's teachings about the interconnectedness of creation.
Yet European colonizers, blinded by doctrines of discovery and manifest destiny, interpreted this generosity as evidence of Indigenous peoples' supposed inferiority. They couldn't recognize the sophisticated spiritual and social systems they encountered because these didn't conform to European models of hierarchy, accumulation, and dominance.
Indigenous Values as Christian Values
The Harmony Way, which I've studied extensively across over fifty tribal traditions, reflects core gospel principles that Western Christianity has often abandoned. This isn't coincidence or romanticization—it's evidence that the Creator's teachings have always been available to all peoples, often more clearly preserved in Indigenous communities than in Christian institutions.
Community Over Individualism
While Western Christianity focuses on personal salvation, Indigenous communities have always understood that individual wellbeing is inseparable from community health. Jesus's teaching that "where two or three are gathered" wasn't about small group Bible studies—it was about the relational nature of the divine.
In Anishinaabe communities, the concept of Bimaadiziwin—living a good life—cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires the health of the entire community, including the more-than-human world. When someone struggles with addiction, mental illness, or spiritual disconnection, the whole community participates in their healing through ceremony, support, and long-term commitment. This mirrors Jesus's approach to healing, which always restored people to community rather than simply addressing individual symptoms.
I've witnessed this in contemporary settings where families will spend their last dollars to help someone travel to a healing ceremony. No questions asked, no conditions attached, no debt created. This is the economic mutuality that Acts 2 describes among early Christians, but it's been a continuous practice in Indigenous communities for millennia. The potlatch ceremonies of Northwest Coast peoples were so threatening to colonial capitalism that the Canadian government literally outlawed them for over sixty years, understanding that gift economies undermined the entire foundation of settler accumulation.
Creation Care as Worship
Indigenous peoples are now co-sustaining 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity, not through environmental management programs, but through recognizing creation as sacred family. This mirrors Jesus's teachings about the lilies of the field and God's care for sparrows—a theology of kinship with all life.
The difference between Indigenous creation care and Western environmentalism is profound. When Ojibwe communities harvest wild rice, they follow protocols that ensure the rice beds remain healthy for seven generations. They take only what they need, leave offerings of tobacco, and conduct ceremonies that acknowledge their relationship with the rice as relatives. This isn't resource management—it's a living relationship in action.
In salmon ceremonies with Pacific Northwest tribes, the first salmon of the season is welcomed home with prayers, songs, and feast. The bones are carefully returned to the water so the salmon can report back to their people about how they were treated. This ceremony embodies Jesus's teaching about gratitude, reciprocity, and recognizing the sacred in daily bread—or in this case, daily salmon.
Compare this to industrial Christianity's approach to creation. Doctrines of dominion have justified strip mining, clear-cutting, and factory farming as divinely sanctioned human rights. The very landscapes where Jesus walked—the olive groves, the fishing grounds, the wilderness places where he prayed—have been destroyed by people claiming to follow his teachings. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities have maintained these sacred relationships with place for thousands of years.
Restorative Justice
Traditional Indigenous justice focuses on healing broken relationships rather than punishment. This directly echoes Jesus's approach throughout the Gospels—healing the woman caught in adultery, restoring Zacchaeus to community, transforming enemies into friends.
Among some Indigenous people traditional justice, when someone commits harm, puts the focus on understanding what led to the imbalance and how to restore harmony. The offender, their family, the victim, and community representatives all participate in healing circles that can last for days. The goal isn't punishment but transformation—of the individual, the relationships, and the community conditions that contributed to the harm.
In contemporary Indigenous justice programs, where youth caught in the school-to-prison pipeline are sometimes diverted to traditional healing processes. Recidivism rates drop dramatically because the underlying causes—disconnection from culture, family trauma, internalized oppression—are addressed through ceremony, mentorship, and community support. This is exactly what Jesus did with tax collectors, prostitutes, and other marginalized people of his time.
Western Christianity's embrace of retributive justice, mass incarceration, and capital punishment stands in stark contrast to Indigenous approaches and Jesus's own teachings. When Christians support "law and order" politics that criminalize poverty, addiction, and mental illness, they're choosing Caesar's justice over Christ's justice.
Economic Sharing
From potlatch ceremonies to traditional gift economies, Indigenous communities practiced the economic mutuality that early Christians embodied in Acts 2:44-47, where "all things were held in common."
The Haudenosaunee longhouse system ensured that no one lacked for basic needs. Extended families shared resources, labor, and decision-making in ways that made individual accumulation both unnecessary and antisocial. Women controlled the distribution of food and had the power to remove chiefs who became too focused on personal gain. This was sophisticated economic democracy that kept communities stable for centuries.
Contemporary examples continue these traditions, even though we have all been affected by colonization. In many Indigenous communities, successful individuals are expected to give away their wealth through ceremony and mutual aid. When someone gets a good job, wins money, or receives unexpected income, community members will jokingly warn them about the "relatives tax"—the expectation that prosperity will be shared. This isn't burden but blessing, creating the social bonds that ensure everyone's security.
During the pandemic communities organize mutual aid networks that put most churches to shame. Elders isolated by COVID-19 received daily food deliveries, utility bills were paid from community funds, and families struggling with unemployment were supported without judgment or paperwork. This is the "beloved community" that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, but it's been practiced in Indigenous communities since time immemorial.
The Theological Implications
Jesus never became a Christian, by the way, and I don't even think he wanted to start a religion. I think he wanted to start a movement in all religions and in all places, and I think if he would have started a religion, it would look nothing like Western Christianity, in fact, it would look much closer to traditional Native American ways of living.
This statement challenges Christians to examine whether their faith has become an idol that obscures the very person it claims to follow. Jesus was born under colonized military occupation, executed by an empire that claimed divine authority. His teachings consistently challenged systems of domination, wealth accumulation, and religious hierarchy. Yet Western Christianity has often allied itself with exactly these systems, blessing conquest, slavery, and genocide in Christ's name.
The theological implications are staggering when you honestly confront them. If Indigenous communities were already practicing “Christian values” before missionaries arrived, what does that say about Christian claims to exclusive salvation? If the fruits of missionary Christianity were so often violence, cultural destruction, and ecological devastation, what spirit was really behind these efforts?
I've wrestled with these questions for decades, and I've come to believe that Indigenous spiritualities often preserve many of the elements of Jesus’ teachings that Western churches have lost. The emphasis on direct spiritual experience, wholeness instead of a sacred and secular life, the understanding of healing as community restoration—these were central to Jesus's movement before it became institutionalized into imperial Christianity.
This challenges Christians to confront some serious questions: What if the "pagan" community’s missionaries encountered were already practicing what some refer to as "Kingdom values?" What if the very cultures they destroyed were closer to Jesus's vision than the empires that claimed his name?
When Spanish missionaries encountered the Guaraní people in what is now Paraguay, they found communities that practiced communal ownership, consensus decision-making, and care for all members—including those unable to contribute economically. The Jesuit reductions that followed attempted to preserve some of these values while converting the Guaraní to Christianity, creating communities that approached the Acts 2 model more closely than any European society of the time. But even these experiments were ultimately destroyed by colonial powers who found Indigenous-Christian synthesis too threatening to existing hierarchies.
The same pattern repeated across the Americas. Wherever Indigenous communities embraced Christian teachings while maintaining their own cultural practices, colonial authorities intervened to suppress this synthesis. They understood intuitively what contemporary Christians often miss: Indigenous interpretations of Christianity threatened the entire colonial project because they emphasized Jesus's teachings about justice, sharing, and liberation rather than obedience, hierarchy, and accumulation.
Reflecting Jesus
From my years at Eloheh, and working alongside Indigenous communities, I've seen that our ceremonies reflect Jesus or point to him somehow. The pipe ceremonies that honor the sacred breath of life, the sweat lodges that practice death and rebirth, the vision quests that seek divine guidance in sacred places—these aren't competing with Christianity; they're embodying its deepest truths.
Working with my wife Edith at Eloheh has shown me how Indigenous ceremonies contain the same spiritual DNA as Jesus's teachings, often in purer form than what survives in Christian institutions. When we participate in ceremonies, we see how the sacred smoke carries prayers to the Creator in the same spirit that Jesus withdrew to lonely places to pray. The Eagle feathers we use embodies the connection between earth and sky, humanity and divinity, that Jesus spoke of when he called himself the bridge between heaven and earth.
The sweat lodge ceremony parallels Jesus's death and resurrection in profound ways. Participants enter the dark, heated lodge as a symbolic return to the womb of Mother Earth. They endure the intense heat as a form of purification, letting go of old patterns and pain. When they emerge, they're spiritually reborn, cleansed and renewed. This isn't metaphor—it's embodied theology that makes Jesus's teachings about dying to self and rising to new life viscerally real.
Vision quests—the practice of spending days alone in nature, fasting and praying for spiritual guidance—mirror Jesus's forty days in the wilderness. Young people and adults seeking direction remove themselves from community support, face their fears and limitations, and open themselves to divine revelation. The visions they receive often provide guidance not just for personal decisions but for their service to community, echoing Jesus's emergence from the wilderness to begin his public ministry based on ancient systems of shalom, sabbath and Jubilee.
What's particularly striking is how these ceremonies integrate healing of body, mind, spirit, and community in ways that compartmentalized Christianity often cannot. When someone comes to a medicine person for healing, the work addresses not just individual symptoms but family relationships, community dynamics, and spiritual imbalances. This holistic approach mirrors Jesus's healing ministry, which always restored people to community and right relationship.
A Call to Christians to Practice Humility
The decolonization of Jesus requires Christians to acknowledge that God didn't wait for Europeans to arrive in the Americas to begin working among Indigenous peoples. Shalom living was God's plan for all nations from the beginning.
This acknowledgment demands a fundamental shift in Christian consciousness—from seeing themselves as God's exclusive representatives to recognizing themselves as one tradition among many through which the Creator works. It means understanding that the Great Commission isn't about converting Indigenous peoples to Western Christianity but about learning how they've already been following Jesus's teachings for millennia and converting to how Jesus is demonstrated through their truths, stories, ceremonies, songs and lives.
The doctrine of discovery, which gave Christian nations the right to claim non-Christian lands, stands as one of history's greatest theological heresies. It assumed that lands occupied by non-Christians were empty—terra nullius—despite the presence of sophisticated civilizations. This doctrine justified the theft of an entire hemisphere and the genocide of its peoples, all while claiming divine sanction. Yet many Christians still resist acknowledging this history or its ongoing impacts.
True Christian humility would recognize that Indigenous peoples have been the world's most effective co-sustainers of creation, the most successful practitioners of restorative justice, and the most consistent embodiment of economic sharing. Instead of needing salvation from Christians, Indigenous communities often need protection from Christian-dominated societies that continue to destroy their lands, languages, and lifeways.
This means Christians must:
Learn from Indigenous teachers rather than seeking to convert them
The era of missionary Christianity assuming it has something to teach Indigenous peoples about spirituality must end. Instead, Christian institutions need to become students of Indigenous wisdom about living in right relationship with creation, community, and the Creator. This doesn't mean appropriating Indigenous practices but learning the principles that underlie them and applying those principles within one’s own context.
I've seen powerful examples of this reversal in recent years. Progressive Christian seminaries now invite Indigenous spiritual leaders as faculty, not to be converted but to teach Christian students about sustainable living, restorative justice, and holistic healing. These partnerships challenge the academic colonialism that has characterized theological education while offering Christian students access to wisdom traditions that predate and often surpass their own.
Recognize where missionary Christianity destroyed Jesus's teachings and values
The history of Christian missions must be honestly confronted, not defensively rationalized. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Indian boarding schools, institutional Christianity has repeatedly violated Jesus's teachings about loving enemies, caring for children, and respecting cultural difference. These were logical outcomes of theology that prioritized institutional power over Jesus's teachings.
The Indian boarding schools, which operated for over a century with the explicit goal of "killing the Indian to save the man," represent one of the clearest contradictions of Christian values in human history. Children were stolen from families, beaten for speaking their languages, and forced to adopt European ways of life. Thousands died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse. Yet these schools were operated by Christian denominations that claimed to be following Jesus, who said "let the little children come to me."
Contemporary Christians cannot claim innocence about these histories. The wealth that built Christian institutions, the lands on which churches stand, the political power that Christian lobbying wields—all of this is built on the foundation of Indigenous dispossession and genocide. Acknowledging this history isn't about guilt but about understanding how Christian privilege continues to depend on Indigenous marginalization.
Embrace Indigenous wisdom as divine revelation
The theological implications here are profound. If Christians believe that God is the Creator of all peoples, then Indigenous spiritual insights must be understood as authentic revelations rather than pagan deceptions. This doesn't mean all Indigenous practices are perfect or that all traditions are equivalent, but it does mean recognizing that the Creator has been actively revealing truth to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
This challenges Christian claims to exclusive revelation while opening possibilities for much richer theological understanding. Indigenous concepts of time as cyclical rather than linear, of land as relative rather than resource, of healing as community restoration rather than individual cure—these insights can deepen and correct Christian theology in ways that benefit everyone.
Support Indigenous rights and sovereignty as Creator's very work
Supporting Indigenous sovereignty is a theological imperative. If Indigenous communities have been practicing Jesus’ values for millennia, then their self-determination is essential for these values to survive and flourish. Christian support for Indigenous rights becomes a form of supporting God's work in the world.
This means more than symbolic gestures. It means charitable donations and land back. It means supporting Indigenous land rights, treaty obligations, and political sovereignty even when these conflict with Christian institutional interests. It means challenging the extractive industries that destroy sacred sites, opposing the pipelines that threaten Indigenous water sources, mining in sacred lands, and supporting Indigenous-led movements for environmental protection.
Living the Decolonized Good News
Jesus's actual movement—looks more like Indigenous community than Western individualism. It prioritizes healing over doctrine, relationships over institutions, creation care over dominion, and justice for the marginalized over comfort for the powerful.
This realization has transformed how Edith and I approach our work at Eloheh. Instead of trying to make Indigenous practices more palatable to Christian audiences, we've focused on helping Christians understand how their own faith calls them to embody Indigenous values. This means learning to see the earth as sacred relative rather than resource to be managed, understanding healing as community restoration rather than individual therapy, and practicing economics of sharing rather than accumulation.
The decolonized gospel challenges every aspect of contemporary Christian life. It questions suburban Christianity that isolates believers from the ecological consequences of their consumption. It confronts therapeutic Christianity that focuses on individual wellness while ignoring systemic injustice. It challenges patriarchal Christianity that marginalizes women's leadership and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Living this decolonized gospel means Christians must learn to follow Jesus in ways that their ancestors never taught them. It means finding Christ in the sunrise ceremonies that honor the gift of each new day, in the water protectors who risk arrest to defend sacred rivers, in the language keepers who preserve Indigenous ways of understanding the world.
The path forward isn't about Indigenous peoples adopting Western Christianity, but about Christians learning to follow Jesus through Indigenous wisdom. As I've learned from elders who taught me that the Creator was here long before missionaries arrived, the question isn't whether Indigenous peoples need Jesus—it's whether Christians are ready to meet Jesus in Indigenous communities, even when his name is not mentioned.
This encounter requires Christians to release their need to control, convert, or correct Indigenous spiritual practices and instead receive them as gifts from communities that have maintained their relationship with the Creator through centuries of attempted genocide. It means understanding that decolonizing Jesus isn't about making Christianity more inclusive—it's about discovering that Jesus was never colonized in the first place, that his teachings align more closely with Indigenous values than with Western civilization, and that following him today requires learning from the peoples who have embodied his teachings most faithfully.
The ultimate irony of Christian missions is that they tried to bring Jesus to peoples who were already living his teachings, while taking Jesus away from communities that were already following him. Decolonizing Jesus means reversing this tragic mistake—not by rejecting Christianity, but by discovering the Indigenous Jesus who has been waiting all along to be freed from the colonial Christianity that buried him.
In the end, this isn't about Indigenous peoples becoming better Christians—it's about Christians becoming more Indigenous by actually following the teachings of Jesus, learning to live out Indigenous values rather than being colonizers of them. This transformation doesn't threaten authentic Christianity; it fulfills it, finally allowing Jesus's teachings about justice, community, and creation care to flourish in communities committed to embodying them for seven generations and beyond.
I am a mixed Indigenous writer of books, screenplays, articles. I explore spirituality, theology, Indigeneity, justice, race, farming. Recovering PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Speaking and living into healing our world.
1.-"The decolonization of Jesus requires Christians to acknowledge that God didn't wait for Europeans to arrive in the Americas to begin working among Indigenous peoples." Over the past year I've rephrased that concept as the Bible teaching that the Holy Spirit wasn't on pause prior to the birth of Jesus. This usually generates an uncomfortable laugh along with an OMG look in their eyes.
2-"In the end, this isn't about Indigenous peoples becoming better Christians—it's about Christians becoming more Indigenous by actually following the teachings of Jesus, learning to live out Indigenous values rather than being colonizers of them. This transformation doesn't threaten authentic Christianity; it fulfills it,..." I appreciate you including the word "authentic" as I believe that is the only word that should ever be used to modify the word Christianity.
My own Indigenous transformation began with Mark Charles roughly 10 years ago. My love for all things indigenous has grown since then. Reading your book on Indigenous theology was also a spark in that I simply received what I was reading. Learning about and listening to any Richard Twiss videos I could find has accelerated that transformation. I've recently came across Patty Krawec on FB-Wabanan Anangokwe-that is also helping to bring me farther"upstream", a phrase that I've often used in my some 40 yr. old journey. her book-Becoming Kin- is on top of my reading list.
3-The timing of this article is notable for me as I hope it is for all who read it today in light of the dangerous bill being debated in the Senate. Millions could in fact die. That fact is all too familiar, and I hate to use that word here- to all Indigenous people in North America and is something that Colonizers appear to experience themselves.
Apologies for the long commentary vs. comment.
HO!!!!!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥Oh dear Brother, this should be read at the United Nations! TODAY! Please share again ways that we can become bridges to bringing the universal community together without the fear of inconsiderately injecting ourselves or disrespecting one another’s privacy… I think “fear” of man keeps many of us (mixed breeds) initially from reaching out to our indigenous communities or if you would, “step down into the water” like Peter to walk toward Jesus and embracing His true ways for fear of offending or being regarded as a “Wannabe”… But i realize “Now is the Day” we MUST pick up our complacent cots and learn to begin walking the Good Red Road i like like to envision as soaked snd reddened by Jesus precious blood that paves the way, as in “This is the way… Walk in it”…. May Creator continue to keep His hand upon you and Sister Edith and family and continue to enlarge Elohe’ tentpegs until it covers Mother Earth, Creator’s beautiful living, breathing Turtle Island until His return when ALL THINGS will once again be made new! Indigenous wheel of reciprocity and creation in motion and real time! Aho may it be so!