Review: Undoing Manifest Destiny

November 3, 2026November 2, 2026 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Undoing Manifest Destiny

Undoing Manifest Destiny, L. Daniel Hawk. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514008645) 2026.

Summary: Through vignettes from Ohio history, questions narratives used to justify injustices against Native peoples.

“I live on the ancestral Lands of the Miami and Hopewell peoples. This Land was ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.” This is the land acknowledgement I’ve appended for some years to my email signature. In this treaty the Indigenous peoples of Ohio ceded roughly three fourths of what is now Ohio to the United States, retaining the land of the northwest quadrant for their own use. The treaty was never enforced and settlers encroached on this remaining land.

Like the author of this book, I’ve lived all my life in the state of Ohio. The name of the state and most of its rivers and many counties derive from indigenous names. My wife has a collection of arrowheads found in her backyard, not far from a tribal gathering area on the east side of Youngstown. We live a couple hours from the site of the massacre of Moravian Christian Native people at Gnadenhutten. In the quadrant reserved for Indigenous peoples, particularly the Wyandottes, they were eventually expelled, traveling their own “trail of tears.”

I am a lifelong fan of Cleveland baseball. However, from the first time I saw the demeaning image of Chief Wahoo outside the old Municipal Stadium, I sensed something wasn’t right. I approved the name changed to the Guardians, so appropriate to the carved figures (“the Guardians”) on the Bob Hope Bridge approaching Progressive Field from the west. And I live in a city named after the “discoverer” of America, a city that removed a statue of him in recent years from in front of City Hall. October 12 is now Indigenous Peoples Day in our city.

L. Daniel Hawk descends from a German family that settled in the northwest Ohio town of Tiffin. An Old Testament professor at Ashland Seminary, he also has studied Ohio’s treatment of Indigenous people. Likewise, he explores the conquest narratives in Joshua and their use to support American settler narratives. He brings all this together in a rich exploration designed not to blame or shame but to encourage us to question those narratives. He writes particularly for those of us who, like him are descendants of White settlers.

Each chapter of the book begins with a vignette from Ohio history, a number which I’ve mentioned. He begins with a statue of the Indian Maid overlooking his home of Tiffin. He considers the settler narratives that justified dispelling the Seneca peoples. In succeeding chapters, he explores the use of the doctrine of discovery along with the creation mandate to seize land and efforts to extort, exterminate, expel, and erase indigenous peoples.

Then he explores five “tropes” used to construct native peoples, four of which are under the fifth, the Vanishing American. All of these help explain by White settlers are the rightful possessors of the land. The other tropes are the Ignoble Savage and the Noble Savage, and the Indigenous helper (e.g. Pocahontas) and the White Savage.

When Hawk turns to Joshua, he does not find many direct references to Joshua’s conquest in early colonial writing. However, he does find parallels in the theological justifications of violence, displacement and seizure of the land. He also notes the parallels of Indigenous helpers, Rahab in Joshua and Pocahontas and Sacagawea in the American context.

The concluding chapter offers hope and help for those deconstructing the American settler colonialist narrative. It can be hard and there may be pushback, as he notes our city experienced in removing the Columbus statue. Our state has doubled down against teaching students, even in college, “divisive” concepts. Sadly, they miss the truth that it is only by interrogating our narratives that we can begin to explore healing pathways. He concludes with one such example, in which his denomination restored a Wyandotte mission and burial ground to the living descendents of the Wyandotte nation, now living in Oklahoma, marked by exchanges of gifts and shared celebration. Instead of division, there was a new friendship.

What makes this such a compelling study is that Hawk models what he invites the reader to consider. He interrogates his own situation, his own history, working from there to set it in a larger national context. Rather than write a piece on national policy, he exemplifies the thoughtful and hard work Christian individuals and congregations might engage to undo the myths of national origin and destiny, including Christian overlays, by which our forebears perpetrated grave wrongs. Then, he points to ways we can pursue making things right in our sphere, as we connect with Indigenous peoples. Rather than suppress history or cause division, he points to awareness that can heal.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Home is the Road

March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Home is the Road, Diane Glancy. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022.

Summary: The traveling memoirs of a literature professor listening to the messages the land speaks and what within her answers these messages.

This is a book constantly on the move, as is its author. Diane Glancy is an emeritus literature and creative writing professor, still a visiting professor at various institutions across the country. She lives on the road, driving from place to place in an old Chevy with 180,000 miles on it. She believes the land has messages to which she listens as she drives. Her home is the road. She sleeps at rest stops, eats at roadside restaurants, and offers exquisite descriptions of what she sees.

She writes:

My creative scholarship is on the road by myself, sometimes within the shadow of other cars. When I am working on a project, I am following the trail of some historical character. The land has memory. It keeps a journal of what has passed upon it. It is in the elements–if I stand there long enough. There is something in the solitary that I find its shape and that I find its shape and connection to the past.

She is part Native American, raised in a fundamentalist Christian tradition where “everyone accepted Christ as their Savior.” As fashionable as it is in her circles to scorn Christianity and as problematic as it may be she states, “It has been foundational in my life–even its incomprehensible and off-setting parts. I believe in the Christ who was crucified.”

She chronicles her adventures with movers transporting her household from Kansas to California and her own parallel travels, who break and possibly abscond with some of her stuff, and yet she prays God’s mercy on men who brought fishing poles in their truck.

The book reads like the musings one has when driving alone on a long trip, watching a train in the distance, the slowing of trucks on a steep incline, the “shredding of self” that occurs as the miles pile up, the challenges of faith and the failures of her life, including a failed marriage. Will there be driving in the beyond? She thinks Jesus would have loved interstates (all this on two pages). Another chapter, “At Dawn, When You Drive Again,” consists of fragments of memory, mostly of childhood.

Her chapters on disenfranchisement are perhaps the most powerful. Once again, she holds terrible injustices and gospel truths in tension:

But I stayed. I have always stayed. I always will stay. I belong to Christ. I believe within the gospel is everlasting life. The missionaries came with soldiers to teach us this and to rid us of the desperate attacks of panic.

Movingly, she captures the tragedy of the Dakota Access Pipeline, once more, the imposition of American power over indigenous peoples during a visit to see what was taking place.

What made this travel memoir so powerful was this process of listening to the land, to its story and her own, often painful and yet held in tension with an unwavering belief, a hope that would not let her go any more than her love for the road. This is also an American story, in the grandeur of the landscape, the expanses we see from our network of highways, the spirituality that roots us, even as we wrestle with the pain of our own stories and the moral ambiguities of our national story. But will we listen? Will we stay?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview

July 29, 2022July 28, 2022 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview, Randy S. Woodley. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022.

Summary: A discussion of an indigenous approach to theology that proposes it is closer to both the indigenous traditions and the teaching of Jesus.

Until recent times, not only the history of our relations with indigenous peoples, but also our theology has been written by Euro-Americans. Randy Woodley, as he introduces himself in the beginning of this work is a mixed blood Cherokee who grew up in a Detroit suburb where his father worked in the auto industry. He came to faith in a revival meeting in a Baptist church, delivered of a drug habit. Educated from a Western perspective, he engaged in missions and pastoral work among indigenous peoples, learning their history and spiritual outlook in his efforts to communicate Christ, and became convinced in many respects, that the indigenous worldview, in many respects was closer to the way of Christ than the Western worldview.

In this work, he engages in three conversations, in indigenous fashion, telling stories and answering questions that contrast indigenous theology and the Western worldview. The first discusses the Western, progressive narrative of history versus the high civilizations of indigenous peoples that existed for centuries before they were “discovered,” likening the encounter to the story of the wolves (indigenous peoples) and the terrapin (the discoverers). They failed to understand the covenant Jesus had with all peoples and the strong indigenous sense of relationship between creator, people, and land.

The second conversation contrasts Western dualism and the much more integral understanding where all of life is both physical and spiritual, where the life of a people is integral with the land they inhabit, and one seeks to live in harmony (shalom) with creation. Western thought “othered” indigenous people, marginalizing and killing them. Healing this begins with acknowledgement, recognizing we are latecomers and usurpers, and working together to repair the damage.

The last conversation gestures toward a decolonized, indigenous theology rooted in what he calls the “harmony way”–ten indigenous values held in common by a wide representation of indigenous groups;

Tangible spirituality/our spirituality must be practiced. Respect everyone. Everything is sacred.
Our lives are governed by harmony. Seek harmony.
Community is essential. Increase your friends and family.
Humor is sacred and necessary. Laugh at yourself.
Feeling of cooperation/communality. Everyone gets a say.
Oral communications and traditions. Speak from your heart.
Present and past time orientation. Look forward by looking back.
Open work ethic. Work hard but rest well.
Great hospitality/generosity. Share what you have.
Natural connectedness to all creation. We are all related.

What connects all this to Christianity is the idea of shalom, and the healing of creation in the vulnerable shalom of the cross. Woodley contrasts this with Western ideas of conquest, control and power.

Is this orthodoxy or syncretism? Woodley would contend that this is for indigenous believers to work out among themselves. Others are interlopers who might better listen to the stories and reflect where they are being invited to walk more closely in the way of Jesus rather than in the distortions of the Western worldview. Does that mean Western Christians have nothing to offer? Woodley would affirm that they do, owing his faith at least in part to Western Christians. But he would resist any efforts to control from the outside as opposed to engaging in the way of harmony, where growth comes in community, as we engage from the heart in sharing our stories and listening to those of others.

Other indigenous writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer invite us to listen to indigenous wisdom in books like Braiding Sweetgrass. What Randy Woodley adds to this is the opportunity in listening to indigenous believers, we might not only gain insight in living wisely on the land that was once theirs alone as a gift of the Creator, but may also walk more wisely with the Creator of the land and with one another.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.