As I mentioned in a previous post, Ross is a realist, and he honestly assesses the changes in society which necessitate changes in Native culture. The 'good old days' are gone, and the simple fact is that they won't return. There is no 'back to the trapline' movement, and there's no one yearning to return to the semi-nomadic, survival existence of the old days. 'The question now becomes,' writes Ross, 'if the physical lifestyle of traditional times is to be permanently abandoned, what other portions of that life can be productively carried forward?' Ross's evaluation is refreshing in light of other evaluations which blame the social chaos that currently exists in many Native groups exclusively on 'the white man.' He surmises that 'a portion of the social chaos apparent today may be a direct result of retaining some traditional rules after people started living in a very different physical context. The fact is, that prior to European contact, there wasn't much need for northern First Nations groups to develop a code of ethics that would deal with ongoing, daily relations with people other than those within one's own extended family.

But the challenge remains that learned ethical commandments, though they originate in the survival context of traditional times, remain in force long after the concern for basic survival has disappeared. Until these commandments reveal themselves to be counter-productive in the changed context of today, says Ross, they will likely continue to exercise controlling influence.

An additional challenge is the fact that a great many Native people spent their youth in our residential schools, forced to abandon virtually everything from their past in favour of the views of their instructors. Many have been out to university, cut off from their own ways and, in order to succeed, wholly immersed in ours. Many live in close proximity to our towns and cities and have adopted many of our ways. We cannot forget, however, where they started from or the magnitude of adaptation that was required for successful accommodation to our educational and economic systems. Ross writes that we should be surprised not about the degree to which their behaviour may still reflect traditional ways of thinking, but how well they have adapted with virtually no help from us.

There is a point of contact between the Christian world-view and the traditional Native world-view, however, in contrast with the post-Enlightenment philosophy that governs Canadian culture. Interestingly, Ross's view lines up well with what Lesslie Newbigin (the missiologist whose book I reviewed here a while back) has said about the contrast between Christianity and Western culture. The controlling belief system in our culture is the assumption that all 'things-out-there', or phenomena, owe their activities, if not their very existence, to chains of cause-and-effect. Things are what they are, and do what they do, largely because antecedent things did what they did and were what they were.

Ross doesn't contrast this with the Christian faith, because his focus is not on Christianity. In the Christian faith, the foundation of belief is not found in searching for causes, but rather in focusing on purpose; Christianity explains the world in terms of its purpose. Everything was created with a purpose, and everything is moving toward an ultimate goal. In a culture where science is believed to explain everything (although with the emergence of post-modernism, this belief is under pressure as well), there is no purpose - there are only causes and effects.

Native culture and religious beliefs are much more fatalistic, because of a belief in spirits which control everything. Failure to 'stand up and be counted,' to take action to force change, says Ross, may flow from a code of ethics which required 'not forceful response but stoic acceptance, a code constructed upon an underlying belief that it is the spirits which are responsible for things, and that man attempts to force them to change at his mortal peril.'

And while some Native leaders are fighting now, at least against oppression from the outside world, those who lead the fight are often young men and women who have lived large parts of their early lives away from their home reserves, immersed in Euro-Canadian ways. Many Natives are uncomfortable with the rhetoric and posturing of national Native leaders, because their actions are profoundly counter-cultural, even while they use these 'foreign' methods to attempt to assert their traditional rights.

But here is a point of contact between Native society and Christianity; we are united in one thing, and that is our opposition to the scientific world-view. While Native religion results in fatalism, however, Christianity offers answers that also put Christians at odds with the prevailing opinions and beliefs of our society. What Christians must guard against, though, is being 'sucked in' to the rationalistic mindset of our culture.

A local missionary told me the following story which explains this point perfectly. A man who lives on the reserve where this missionary works had been drinking, and had fallen into the river, and apparently drowned. Many people from the village rushed out to the river to try to find his body. After a long search, they still hadn't found his body; the people were about to give up the search when a thunderstorm came up. It had been a sunny summer day, but the sudden storm brought thunder and lightning and a violent downpour. When the storm came up, some local elders took this as a sign that the spirit of the drowned man was speaking to the people, because he wanted his body to be found and buried.

The missionary's first thought was that this was just a 'natural' occurrence - a mixture of warm moist air colliding with cold air caused the thunderstorm to come up, as we all know from our elementary school science text books. Of course it had nothing to do with the man's drowning. But it caused him to think - the native elders had a better conception of natural events than he did, even though their beliefs were obviously mistaken. The spirit of the man was not calling from the grave, but at the same time, as Christians we confess that everything is in God's hands, including the weather. The thunderstorm is more than just a 'force of nature' - it shows God at work in his creation, and it, like everything else in our world, is quite literally an 'act of God.'

So here was a point of contact, a way in which the missionary could bring the message of God's Word to the people by confronting their false belief systems with the facts of God's providence. The thunderstorm wasn't caused by a drowned man's spirit, it was caused by God himself. But the point of the story is this: if the missionary had not been able to see through the ingrained belief system of Western culture, which impacts all of us, Christians included, he wouldn't have been able to find this point of contact, and he would have been left unable to provide Christian answers to what had gone on. It's important for us as Christians to be fully aware of the effect that 'our' culture has on our thinking, and to fight against the influences of modernism (and post-modernism) within ourselves in order to bring the message of the gospel to people who are still heavily influenced by animist belief systems.