Let Justice Roll Down Lesson Two

Lesson Two: Land Justice

Scripture: Genesis 2:7; Leviticus 25:23; 25; 26–27; 28; Deuteronomy 20:16–18; Joshua 6; 1 Kings 21:1–16; Psalm 24:1–2; Isaiah 5:8

Recognizing Our Forebears

As we all know, and as Lesson 2 details, European American settlers displaced a vast number of Indigenous inhabitants of the New World over the course of about three centuries. Estimates of the pre-European North American native population range widely—from a million to twelve million, according to one study of textbook references. A detailed graphic of the process of Native displacement can be seen in a digital project called “The Invasion of America,” created by Dr. Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia. This graphic facilitates understanding that it wasn’t a natural process but a series of wars, treaties, executive orders and laws that authorized this transfer of land piece by piece.

Why should Christians care about this? For many reasons. Simple humanity, for one. For another, because this wholesale, often violent, displacement was sometimes justified by appeals to the Christian faith, to Christian morality. And because, even though the original players are all dead now, both the victims and their victors, the effects of this history live on in racism and impoverishment. And because, as we are now learning, the land ethics by which many tribes lived over the centuries were replaced by diminished understanding. Conservation biologist Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute outside Salina, Kansas, observed in his book Becoming Native to This Place that a single county, Rice County, was home to over 25,000 people when Coronado first explored Kansas in the mid-sixteenth century. But by 1990, after generations of misuse of the land, no more than 10,000 people could eke out a living there.

It is not unusual to see today, in emails and Zoom meeting introductions, information that never occurred to most of us twenty years ago: not only preferred pronouns (she/her; he/him; they/them) but also acknowledgements of earlier residents of the particular land on which we live. When these statements began appearing, my first thought was, “How interesting! I wonder whose land I live on?” My second thought was, “What good does it do to say this, unless the awareness guides our attention and actions?”

The blurry screenshot on page 27 of the map from Native Land Digital is not likely to answer all questions that we might put to it. Even the original map, which can be examined at https://native-land.ca/, rich as it is with information, only invites further questions. It reveals that history is never simple.

For instance, when I search on my own location (Henryville, Indiana), a long list appears of former inhabitants. Some names I know: Shawnee, Osage, Kaskaskia. Others, like Hopewell and Adena, are mound building cultures from long before. Still others are new to me. Clicking further into each of these names, I see entirely unspecific, overlapping maps. Not national boundaries such as we know, but territories of influence spreading from centers of culture. This is truer to Indigenous understandings of land than borders are. Yet since Native American traditions bespeak a different relationship to land, it’s not accurate to say the land “belonged” to them as a possession. Nor does it belong to us, if we take Scripture seriously, as Lesson 2 details.

Because New York’s historical record is more widely known, the Native Land website is more explicit along the Mohawk River where my Dutch ancestors settled. Their homestead still sits on land once inhabited by Mohawks, members of the Haudenosaunee confederation, one of the world’s oldest democracies, which also included the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora. Their pre-European covenant splintered during the Revolution when some tribes were coopted by the British and others by the American rebels.

What can we make of information that is either too vague or too complex to fit handily into a Zoom introduction? I find myself attending more closely to local history. From searching plat maps and deeds at our county courthouse I know, for instance, that my spouse and I represent the seventh resident family that stretches back over two centuries to someone named David Todd. He evidently acquired this land as part of a grant given in 1781. In lieu of wages following the American Revolution, soldiers serving under General George Rogers Clark, the brother of William Clark, who explored the Louisiana Purchase with Meriwether Lewis, received newly surveyed acreage. This land, often called Clark’s Grant, encompassed all of today’s Clark County and parts of other counties. It was Indiana’s first U.S. settlement, subdivided into tracts of 108 to 216 acres. In name, at least, this land north of the Ohio River had been taken from the British, who had taken it from the French a generation before.

Yet the conflicts here were not yet ended. During the War of 1812, in coordination with the British, Shawnee warriors attacked Pigeon Roost, a small Clark’s Grant settlement five miles north of my home, killing ten adults and fourteen children. This event is etched into local memory with a cemetery and memorial on the village site. I know of no similar memorial to Natives who died or lost their homes here.

Four years later, in 1816, after a long and tangled legal story, a state designated “Indiana” was carved from this newly seized territory north of the Ohio River. That same year, the first deed for our own land was recorded, when David Todd sold 656 acres to a man named Cuthbert Bullitt. Whether the Todd family ever lived here, and what prompted them to part with the land, I do not know. The Bullitt name is still very much alive in the Louisville area.

In another, more widely known story of the New World, Puritan William Bradford arrived on the Mayflower and served as governor of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Before his arrival, he wrote of “the vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants,” since the prior residents were “savage and brutish men . . . little otherwise than the wild beasts” (A. Vaughan, ed., The Puritan Tradition in America 1620-1730, 43-44, 65). But according to some reports, after he and his colony received lifesaving help from Natives, his attitude began to soften—a testimony to the ways personal relationships can temper prejudgments. His evolution leads me to wonder what other stories of Europeans and Native Americans in what became Clark County should have been told.

The practice of land acknowledgements can be, at their worst, an artifice and a half-truth. At their best they can, given further digging, open a path to understanding local contributions to a complex and ambiguous national story that continues to evolve as we fathom our own, and others’, dependence on God’s land.

Patricia K. Tull
Author of the 2024–2025 PW/Horizons Bible study, Let Justice Roll Down: God’s Call to Care for Neighbors and All Creation

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This blog is the second in a series of nine blogs.

Presbyterian Women in the PC(USA), Inc. publishes an annual Bible study. Let Justice Roll Down is the study for this year. You can purchase a Let Justice Roll Down Bible study book (HZN24100) and study along with us. Call 800/533-4371 or order online.