Pine Ridge council votes to ban missionary from tribal lands

(the damned white christian nationalists are determined to control every person, every thing)


Pine Ridge council votes to ban missionary from tribal lands
Does tribal sovereignty allow tribes to govern the activities of churches and missionaries on their lands? Pine Ridge will find out



Mary Annette Pember
ICT

A Christian missionary whose message condemns Lakota spirituality and religion recently hit a sort of reverse sweet spot of outrage among citizens on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In an unusual decision, the Oglala Lakota Nation tribal council voted in July to exclude Matt Monfore, a non-Native from the Jesus is King Mission, from Pine Ridge lands, saying he was spreading hate by distributing pamphlets on tribal lands. “This week the Jesus is King Missionary was found distributing material that literally demonizes the Lakota culture and faith,” according to a letter released by the office of Tribal President Kevin Killer on July 22. “This is unacceptable and completely disrespectful. It is the view of the President and Council that these ‘pamphlets’ seek to promote hate instead of peace. Hate has no place on Oglala land.”

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Shawnee and Lenape author Steve Newcomb, a former columnist for Indian Country Today who wrote the book, “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery,” said modern evangelical missionaries remain guided by the same tenets of the Doctrine of Discovery that describe global domination by the Christian faith as a desired goal and means to fulfill Jesus’s Great Commission to go forth and make disciples of all nations. Indigenous peoples are pawns serving the larger agenda, Newcomb told ICT in an earlier interview. “The evangelical agenda of converting Native Americans to Christianity is a very-well-thought-out strategy,” he said.

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https://indiancountrytoday.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_300/MTkxMzU4NTIzMTk4Njc4NjI2/eleanoreferguson.webp
“This is modern day indoctrination and what cultural genocide looks like,” she wrote. “Why are we allowing these outsiders to disrespect us and our culture on our own territory? Something needs to be done.”
Eleanor Ferguson, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, is a mentor for the Indigenous Youth Council Lakota chapter in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember/ICT)
Ferguson’s challenge to the community came on the heels of the announced visit of Pope Francis to Canada as well as increased media attention on the prominent role that Christian missionaries and churches played in operating Indian residential schools.


Evangelical and fundamentalist missionary groups and churches focusing on the Native population in and around Pine Ridge and other Native communities in the past 10 years share common elements in their messaging. Indeed, there is a growing fundamentalist interest in converting Indigenous “untouched groups,” to Christianity. John Chau, a 26-year-old American missionary who was killed by the Sentinelese people in the Andaman Islands near Thailand in 2019, was trained by All Nations, a fundamentalist mission based in Kansas City. All Nations is one of a faction of Christian missions such as the Joshua Project and others whose primary objective is converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/pine-ridge-council-votes-to-exclude-missionary-from-tribal-lands