The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and North America's First Nations

One of the advantages of writing a book on G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations of North America is that there is not a lot of competition. Traffic at the intersection of these particular interests is light. Just as curious, perhaps, the person to bring these fields together is a specialist in neither realm of study. My academic training is in the art and architecture of the Eastern Christian world.[1] On first glance, the cavernous, candlelit sanctuaries of the monastic republic of Mount Athos, where prayers rise with incense, and the darkened womb of a North American sweat lodge, where prayers rise with pipe smoke and steam, seem unrelated. But the British journalist G.K. Chesterton, with his gift for making unexpected connections, taught me otherwise. Let me explain.

Throughout my education, I managed to hold on to my Christian faith with confidence thanks in part to the ministrations of Chesterton, “the Prince of Paradox.” Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was inoculation against newfangled versions of Christianity while I was a youth minister at a mainline Protestant church and a student at a mainline Protestant seminary. “I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth,” he tells us, “and I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it . . . I did try to found a heresy of my own, and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered it was orthodoxy.”[2] Written in the early 1900s, when Chesterton was in his thirties, Orthodoxy’s attacks on bare logic (“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do”[3]) squared well with the fashion for deconstruction of the early 2000s. Chesterton melted the ice of mere reason with the fire of wonder. Fairy tales, he reminds us, “say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.”[4] And what upholds this gratitude for existence is not fleeting sentiment but sound doctrine, “the heavenly chariot” that “flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”[5]

Later in graduate school at a research university where knowledge was fragmented into endless specializations, Chesterton’s coherent bravado on offer in The Everlasting Man provided an antidote. Because the book was published in 1925 when Chesterton was in his fifties, reading it was like enjoying extended conversation with a wise older brother. I learned from Chesterton that so-called pagan culture could be approached positively. “In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronized by patron saints as much as by pagan gods.”[6] And yet, Christ burst into uroboric time “swift and straight as a thunderbolt.”[7] Chesterton showed me that when the rivers of mythology and philosophy flowed separately, they flowed sadly. Until, that is, they merged in the joyful cataract of Christian faith.[8] When the celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek visited my graduate school and cited Chesterton approvingly, I was delighted to learn that my reading choice had become suddenly fashionable. I expect Chesterton would have relished Žižek’s challenge just as he enjoyed the company of all his atheist sparring partners. “In order to save its treasure, [Christianity] has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge,” claimed Žižek.[9] “Why not?” I imagined Chesterton replying. For “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”[10]

En route to Europe for a research trip, on a plane thirty thousand feet above Nova Scotia, land of the Mi’kmaq (a term I did not then know), I learned from Chesterton that the best thing I could do was leave North America as quickly as possible and make my way to the Mediterranean, for:

Round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things; the Republic and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the memories of the lost empires; Aristotle and the measure of all things.[11]

What a thrill then to finally land in reality itself, not just its British or North American imitations. Wandering the streets of Thessaloniki on my first trip to that city, I could see Mount Olympus in the distance, abode of the gods. But I could save myself the bus trip and grueling hike because the brown-brick medieval churches I was studying, autumn leaves of the Byzantine Empire’s waning years, were themselves the abode of God.

Even Mount Olympus seemed to smile on these late Byzantine-decorated churches.[12] In their frescoes, mosaics, and icons I found the creative zest of Zeus without his escapades of rape; the light and clarity of Apollo without his petulant revenge; and the confidence of Ares absent the warmongering. Hermes’s promise of meaning was realized at last; Orpheus’s descent to the underworld was confirmed by Christ’s harrowing of hell. In these churches—the living heirs of Hellenism—the mother goddesses Hera, Demeter, and Aphrodite, were transformed into something far less expected: Mary, the mortal Mother of God. Athena was present as Holy Wisdom herself. The power of Poseidon was contained in baptismal fonts, Hestia’s sacred hearth fire in the votive candles, and Demeter’s shafts of wheat in the consecrated bread.[13] Or, as Chesterton himself put it: “We have entered more deeply than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the meaning of all the myths.”[14]

Three times I enjoyed the ferry to the rocky outcrop of Mount Athos for research in fresco-festooned monasteries. I came to love the massive singular peak of Athos, a monotheistic answer to jagged Mount Olympus. Once, Alexander the Great was asked if he would like his face carved into the mountain. Fortunately, Alexander demurred, saying that the peninsula had already been defaced by a canal carved by the Persian King Xerxes I. That my own government had carved the faces of its leaders into a different holy mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota did not then occur to me; but it is the kind of connection I expect Chesterton, ever suspicious of imperialism, might have made.

A good decade after my trips to the Mediterranean I found myself on a different ferry, heading for a different rocky outcrop, a freshwater Mount Athos of sorts. A short drive from my wife’s childhood home in Ontario is a place known as Manitoulin Island,[15] the largest freshwater island in the world. Just as the Mount Athos ferry flashed with icons that defied both the norms of Renaissance art and our contemporary digital screens, so the exterior of the Chi-Cheemaun ferry was emblazoned in the Woodland School style founded by the “Picasso of the North,” Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007). I was on my way to Wikwemikong, the only unceded First Nation reserve in Canada.[16] Technically, therefore, Wiky (as its residents refer to it) is not in Canada at all. Like Athos or the Vatican City, it is an entity all its own.

And as with Athos or the Vatican, proper connections were required to make this trip. I met an Ojibwe friend, who was understandably cautious that I not be too conspicuous. That night we attended a sweat lodge, as intimate and as foreign an experience for me as the liturgies on the Holy Mountain. First, we prayerfully anointed our foreheads with bear grease (an unexpected move, but I went with it). We arrived at the home of a man who was conducting the sweat, a charge his family has upheld for generations. His face was as serious as the face of the Athonite monks who presided over the Eucharist. As Christians, my companion and I were not New Age seekers looking for a spiritual high.[17] Still, I realized just how quickly I could ruin this. I wondered if I already had. As on Mount Athos, nothing about the ceremony catered to my desire to see it, and if I was regarded, understandably, with caution, I was still welcomed.

After the heated stones were deposited in the lodge, ten of us entered, sat in a circle, and covered ourselves with blankets. Most in the group were Anishinaabe, which can be translated “original people.” This is the Great Lakes umbrella term that includes (but is not limited to) the Council of Three Fires, the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe, and the Odawa.[18] The only other White attender was from the nearby drug rehabilitation clinic. One of the elder women looked at me, glanced at my friend, and, guessing why I was joining them, raised her eyebrows and said, “Manopause?” I laughed and braced myself for the first round of heat. As the steam intensified, the prayers began. A woman on the reservation was ill, and this particular sweat was dedicated to her. In other words, this was a prayer meeting. The prayers were extemporaneous, just as they were in the evangelical youth group that won my enthusiasm as a high school student. I internalized my amens, and I kept breathing, anchoring my breath to a word internally spoken, Christ. “It’s not my job to make amends,” I remember thinking to myself, “but I know the one who did.” With each round, the heat intensified as did the prayers, and I made it through. We exited for a potluck feast, which was markedly unspiritual. We offered a cake we had purchased at the grocery store, and I enjoyed my first taste of Zizania, wild rice harvested on the Great Lakes.

The next day I found myself face to face with the altarpiece by Ojibwe artist Blake Debassige at the Anishinabe Spiritual Centre, which depicts Christ as a cosmic tree.[19] I had learned of the cosmology of the Mississippian Indians (c. AD 900–1500), for whom the above and below worlds were conjoined by an axial tree, and with the throughways between those worlds marked by crosses.[20] In a 2004 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that attempted to disseminate knowledge of Mississippian art, the director lamented, “Why has knowledge of this early form of [Native North American] civilization failed to make its way more decisively into our public system of education and our sense of cultural heritage?”[21] Thanks to Debassige’s painting, however, it finally had. Here ancient Native cosmology was not an artifact of a bygone era or an instance of a superseded worldview, but part of a living faith. I asked the Centre staff if they had any resources that put Christianity into conversation with Indigenous spirituality. They promptly produced a responsible, community-generated fusion of the Ignatian Exercises and Ojibwe prayer that now informs a course I teach,[22] which includes a visit to “the Ojibwe Jerusalem,” Madeline Island.[23] “The Christian religion is like a huge bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men who made the world,” said Chesterton on a journey to the more famous Jerusalem.[24] Thankfully, the insight is not site-specific.

There have been many more trips and experiences like that one in the course of writing this book, along with a temptation to leave G.K. Chesterton behind. After all, he visited North America twice, in 1921 and 1930, including visits to lands rich with Indigenous presence, places such as Oklahoma and Ontario. I have traced Chesterton’s journeys, and then some, in my own travels. Along the way, I have wondered why a thinker so effusive about pre-Christian myth did not make the same connections on his visits to this continent. But instead of cataloging Chesterton’s deeds,[25] or his misdeeds,[26] why not simply supplement his vision instead? If Chesterton taught me to see European Indigenous culture fulfilled in the churches of Thessaloniki, the same lesson can be applied to sweat lodges and Sun Dances as well. Or as Steven Charleston (Choctaw) puts it:

If, in fact, the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of the first century, is truly Christ of the twenty-first century, then he must be transcendent of time and culture. He must be as much a part of the Native story as he is of the story of any tribe or people. Consequently, we should be able to see his vision through lenses of Native American tradition as clearly as through European thought.[27]

After Chesterton’s extensive travels in America, it was he who perceived a profound lack in his analysis. “I wish I had more space here to do justice to the Red Indians,” he tells us.[28] That is what I aim to work toward here. This adaptation (as opposed to adulation) of Chesterton strikes me as necessary, lest North American fascination with figures like Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers devolve into a self-serving Christian intellectual subscription to BritBox.[29] Instead of bewailing the limits of Chesterton’s richly Christian vision of history, I aim therefore to extend it.

Chesterton’s desire for a “homogeneous England” is evident.[30] “One can imagine,” a sympathetic biographer suggests, “what [Chesterton’s] reaction would have been to a multicultural England.”[31] This book is one attempt to so imagine, and to suggest otherwise, but without leaving Christianity behind.[32] Such a project is possible only thanks to the wealth of scholarly material that has recently emerged, complicating the relationship of Indigenous culture and Christianity, questioning popular stereotypes of evil missionaries and Indigenous victims.[33] Scholarly prejudice against Christian Indigenous material, sometimes deemed insufficiently “exotic” to White imagination, has led to major losses, making it important to highlight material that survives.[34] In lieu of a summary of this literature, material culture makes the point with particular force, whether the funeral remains of an eleven-year-old Pequot girl, buried around 1700 with a medicine bundle containing the skeletal remains of a bear paw and a fragment of Psalm 98,[35] or the illustrated vision of a Kiowa man named Fí̠qī́ (Eater), received during the revived Ghost Dance, of Christ blessing the ceremony himself.[36]

Over the last 150 years, White views of Native spirituality have shifted “from a shocked contempt for primitive superstition that verges on devil worship, to an envious awe for a holistic spirituality that might be the last best hope for the human race.”[37] Christianity has colored every point of this dizzying spectrum. Yet it is too often forgotten that secular admiration of Indians can be as patronizingly violent in “editing” Indigenous Christianity as Christian missionaries had once been in attacking Indigenous ceremonies.[38] The embarrassments of early Christian missionaries are real; but so is the appropriation and commercialization of Indigenous culture by the New Age movement at present.[39] While the fusion of Indigenous and New Age thought is a recent invention,[40] the fusion of Christianity and Indigenous North American culture is nearly five centuries old, and is vastly preferable to more recent uses of Indigenous culture to buttress “claims about lost continents and UFOs . . .”[41] Tutored by Chesterton’s humor, his taste for paradox, his love of legend and mythology, and his distrust of imperialism,[42] my book continues the age-old conversation between Christianity and Indigenous North American life.

Some readers might wonder how a Protestant Christian, which I happen to be, manages the ultramontane swagger of Chesterton’s Catholicism. W.H. Auden’s remarks on this score are hard to improve upon: “If [Chesterton’s] criticisms of Protestantism are not very interesting, this was not his fault. It was a period when Protestant theology (and, perhaps Catholic too), was at a low ebb, Kierkegaard had not been re-discovered and Karl Barth had not yet been translated.”[43] Indeed, it may be that the Prince of Paradox underestimated Luther’s Pauline paradox that so effectively describes the redeemed human condition, that of simul iustus et peccator (at the same time just and sinful).[44] But speaking of sin, few have considered how much Indigenous Americans suffered from competition among Protestants and Catholics on North American shores. In 1565, decades before Plymouth Rock, Jean Ribault visited the New World, establishing Fort Caroline near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. The first European artist to visit what is now America was on that mission, Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588). He encountered the Timucuan people, producing valuable engravings of their lifeways, which he carefully observed.[45] And they, in turn, carefully observed European practices, soon witnessing 143 French Huguenots executed by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a pious Catholic. The inscription above the gallows read, “I do this not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans.”[46] When the Indians protested, “You killed fellow Christians, the French,” the Spanish reply was simply, “They were bad Christians.”[47]

Whatever is to be said about reports of cannibalism among Indigenous Americans, the French explorer Jean de Léry, who produced similar reports on South American Indians, asserts that Europeans were worse. Hatred between Protestants and Catholics in France was so severe in the wake of the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre that one victim “was cut to pieces and displayed for sale to those who hated him, who wanted to grill it over coals to eat it, glutting their rage like mastiffs.”[48] Such was the atmosphere in which competing Christian missions in the New World began, and in which they continued. “Many of the reasons why Native religions offended and irritated American Protestants—ritualism, fanaticism, clericalism, a veneration for sacred objects and places—have to be understood in the context of contemporary anti-Catholicism.”[49] An unsavory, but perfectly typical, illustration of such polemics in full flair is on offer in competing catechetical ladder illustrations used by Catholic, and then Protestant, missionaries to Native Americans, each ridiculing their denominational competitors with perfected visual spite.[50]

Sobered by these facts, I will not perpetuate internecine squabbles here. “We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel with God, as the Catholic and Protestants do,” complained the Nez Perce chief Joseph (1840–1904). “We do not want to learn that.”[51] And some of us now want to unlearn it.[52] I remain grateful for Chesterton’s reclamation of Christianity’s essential contours in the face of a Protestant establishment that neglected them.[53] But “Christianity shattered on the shores of this continent,” reminds Vine Deloria Jr.[54] Boasting, as Chesterton does, that the largest piece of a fractured vessel is intact is no argument that the vessel is unbroken.[55] That Indigenous persons drank from the Christian vessel still, and thereby transformed it, remains a marvel—even one of Christianity’s grimmer “proofs.”[56]

Summary and Rationale

The first chapter of my The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations takes its cues from The Everlasting Man to examine not the cave paintings of Europe, as Chesterton did, but the Indigenous rock art of North America that is only recently coming to light. The Indigenous belief of the Underwater Panther (Mishipeshu) and Thunderbird (Animiki), so often depicted in rock art and mounds, emerges as the book’s guiding motif; the former I connect to the process of settlement, the latter to Christ. Of course, when using Indigenous symbols, the thorny question of appropriation emerges. If anyone will come to my book wishing for an Indigenous description of these complex beings who inhabit the upper and lower realms, they have come to the wrong place. To understand these creatures and their symbolic contours on Native terms, I refer readers to Native persons themselves.[57] My Potawatomi contacts in particular were only comfortable with my proceeding with my interpretation insofar as that was made abundantly clear. I am borrowing these motifs not to define, reduce, or explain them,[58] but in order to drive home the realities of settlement and the presence of Christ among the First Nations, and even to illuminate my own psychology.[59] To be sure, this method has its risks, but the invitation to employ these symbols beyond the Native world has been extended.[60] My approach is certainly preferable, I hope, to the current options of popularizing these symbols in tourist attractions (the Hodag), automobiles (the Pontiac Thunderbird), or TV shows.[61]

It is also preferable, I hope, to the considerable risk taken by most North Americans by default: ignoring these symbols altogether. Put another way, I refuse to pass by depictions of Thunderbirds and Underwater Panthers that surround me without letting them deeply inform my life as a Christian. What Hugo Rahner said of classical culture applies to Native American culture as well: “All that is good and true has proceeded from the Logos and has its homing-point in the incarnate God, even though this be hidden from us, even though human thought and human good-will may not have perceived it.”[62] Or as an Ojibwe elder says in Ignatia Broker’s novel Night Flying Woman: “Only time will tell if [Christianity] is the right thing for our people. If it is, then the people who wish us to be baptized will some day come to know the goodness that has been our life.”[63] That overdue day has come. The Christian Thunderbird, long muffled and suppressed by European entitlement, is once more taking to flight.[64]

In the second chapter of The Everlasting People, I intend to contribute to the burgeoning regionalist literature of the Midwest[65] with what I am calling penitent regionalism. If Chesterton’s localism adored the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, we can love our own homes wherever they are, but without forgetting the Indigenous cultures that came first. I hope in this exploration to have avoided the risk of romanticization that can emerge, sometimes unintentionally, when approaching Indigenous societies.[66] In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond famously explained how the accidents of geography and climate are what gave Europeans “more cargo.”[67] “If [Indigenous] people had enjoyed the same geographic advantages as my people,” he cheerfully explains, “[they] would have been the ones to invent helicopters.”[68] Diamond neglects, at least in this upbeat documentary encapsulation of a complex thesis, to mention they might have been helicopters of war.[69] A Chestertonian perspective, ever cognizant of original sin (“the stone that the builder of Utopia rejected . . .”[70]), avoids that risk. In this respect, the American Indian Movement activist and convert to Christianity Richard Twiss offers a corrective: “If Natives had canoed across the Atlantic and discovered Europe, . . . we would have been no less ethnocentric and brutal than the Whites who came here from France, Holland, England, Spain, etc.”[71] Still, it was the guns-, germs-, and steel-bearing settlers who, in any event, gained the upper hand and who now, in retrospect, bear responsibility to make amends. It may not have been the job of nineteenth-century frontier settlers, struggling for survival, to engage in the kind of investigation offered in my book; but it can be the job of settler descendants today. Twiss is right to add, “We must continually ask the Holy Spirit to anoint our hands with oil so we won’t be able to hold on too tightly to the wrongs of the past.”[72] But some of us, especially in the Midwest, have not even gripped the wrongs in the first place.

In the third chapter of The Everlasting People, I turn to one of Chesterton’s neglected poems and evoke the Virgin Mary in a way that offsets some of the younger Chesterton’s triumphalism, offering a Virgin that speaks to both settler and settled alike with the mystery of suffering love. Chesterton’s bellicosity, his nostalgia for Christendom, and his satires of multiculturalism can be vicious. In The Resurrection of Rome, Chesterton runs into a person who suggests that “we may yet have a black Pope.” Chesterton’s reply was this: “In a spirit of disgraceful compromise I suggested meekly that (if not quite ready for that) I should be delighted to see a black Cardinal.”[73] His ill attempt at humor on this occasion is off-putting to the extreme. If we remove these lines from their original context, impute ill motives, broadcast them to people unfamiliar with his work, we need not bother reading Chesterton at all. But it would be a mistake to say that Chesterton himself was not already overcoming his own prejudices, and, moreover, he knows it. “Then I remembered,” the passage continues, “the great King who came to Bethlehem, heavy with purple and crimson and with a face like night; and I was ashamed.”[74] There will be no apologies for Chesterton’s obvious faults. I will, however, be using the best in the later Chesterton to correct the worst. As one critic put it, he is too important a writer to be left to his mere admirers.[75]

Finally, Chesterton was confident enough in his own Englishness that he trashed his own family records, showing little interest in his ancestry.[76] But more than a few White explorers of Indigenous issues eventually realize, as I have, that examining the resources of one’s own ancestry is preferable to siphoning someone else’s.[77] This is why pursuing Indigenous matters with Chesterton, whose English heritage I share, is particularly important. As the beneficiary of a pattern of settlement with which I, and many North Americans, have yet to take into full account, I have been prompted (by Chesterton!) to reconstruct my own unglamorous ancestry, including an unexpected connection to a central conflict on the American frontier. Hating my own Whiteness, however, remains a dead end. “His sickness was only part of something larger,” says Leslie Marmon Silko of Tayo, the Indigenous protagonist in her novel Ceremony, “and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything.”[78]

Thanks to such exploration, I have discovered that my wife and I are just as much guests on Turtle Island, a widespread Indigenous name for this continent, as we are respectively “Canadian” or “American.” Acknowledging this hospitality, which comes with considerable humiliation, is a first step toward calling this land home. Chesterton protested that myth “cannot be properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science.”[79] Moreover, “there are too many keys to mythology . . . Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest . . . everything is everything.”[80] He pleaded that we take such stories as the imaginative incantations that they are, and “imaginative does not mean imaginary.”[81] Looking at the Turtle Island creation, or in some cases re-creation, story in that spirit, it is the humble muskrat who collects earth from the watery depths to establish this continent on the turtle’s back.[82] The story might be considered a fitting take on Christ’s words that “the meek . . . will inherit the earth” (Matt 5:5); and it might also be considered a parable of the settler’s journey. It is a difficult plunge to touch the earth at last, to hear the silenced stories this continent conspires to tell us. And in the process, it cannot be forgotten, the muskrat dies, as perhaps part of us must as well.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Taken from The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations by Matthew J. Milliner. Copyright (c) 2021 by The Marion E. Wade Center. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com, All Rights Reserved.