Indigenous peoples spend their lives aware of what colonization has done to them, their families, and their nations. They experience its effects every day: the loss of traditional knowledges and ceremonies, estrangement from their lands, systemic racism and violence, intergenerational trauma, and a host of other ways. An aware-settler hermeneutic asks settlers and settler-descendants (definitions below) to have this in mind when reading and interpreting the Bible.
Aware-settler hermeneutics is a decolonizing technique focused on how settler identity affects biblical interpretation. Simply put, aware-settler hermeneutics is a lens for Bible reading. It means considering past and ongoing relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples. It requires a focus on the role land plays not only in the text but also in your life and situation. And it asks you to consider ways the Bible may not automatically apply to you. Aware-settler hermeneutics is a practice that encourages self-knowledge and attention to how sacred texts can be interpreted in ways that do damage to others.
Who is a settler?
A settler is anyone who came to a new land, or whose ancestors did, not to join an existing society but to replace it. Knowingly or not, settlers assist in the dispossessing and eradicating of Indigenous populations while gaining control of their resources. In places like the United States, Canada, and Australia, descendants of settlers may be distanced from early colonization efforts, but they still benefit from the ongoing violence it causes. Of course, there are groups other than settlers, their descendants, and Indigenous peoples now living in many colonized countries. But settlement continues to affect everyone.
How can being a non-Indigenous person on colonized land affect biblical interpretation?
Where readers place themselves in biblical stories says a lot about how they see themselves. For instance, European Christians arriving in North America in the early seventeenth century turned to the Deuteronomistic History, Isaiah, the Psalms, Matthew, Acts, and Revelation when they wanted to celebrate, and sometimes justify, the so-called success in their new homes (on Indigenous lands). Sermons on Matt 28:16–20’s Great Commission sometimes cast Indigenous peoples as “savages.” Renaming Indigenous locales Ebenezer or Jericho echoed themes of biblical conquest and of separation and disdain for Indigenous “Canaanites” and “Philistines.” Many early immigrants saw America as the heavenly Jerusalem described at the end of the book of Revelation, and their manifest destiny was to occupy this “promised land.” These examples show how appropriating the identities of biblical Hebrews or ancient Roman believers supported violence, resource theft, and racism.
How does an aware-settler hermeneutic work?
Awareness of one’s status as a settler discourages naïve identifications with biblical texts and the belief that they are always and automatically about the modern reader.
It means being suspicious of readings that understand the occupation of land as a blessing from God and thereby implicitly authorize or celebrate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Passages concerning identity, election, land, eschatological home, and mission have been used for church events and sometimes funerals; these emotional links tend to make interpretations resistant to self-critique. However, an aware-settler hermeneutic encourages double-checking the negative stereotypes that certain readings perpetuate against Indigenous peoples.
This hermeneutic drives readers to approach the Bible with questions like: On what and whose land does the story happen? On what land am I, the reader, situated? Am I plugging myself into the position of the story’s “good guys”? Why? If I am not Indigenous, where might an Indigenous reader place me into this text? What relations to Indigenous peoples, to land (including waterways and “resources”), and to animals does my reading encourage? This approach notices that Indigenous readers read the Bible with different eyes—for instance, identifying with the Indigenous Melchizedek rather than the arriving Abraham (Gen 14:17–24) or seeing themselves not as awaiting an “end” but, because of the destruction caused by colonization, seeing themselves as those who have already experienced an apocalypse and are now rebuilding after it.
How is an aware-settler approach to the Bible different from other approaches?
Aware-settler hermeneutics is similar to post-colonial readings but narrows in on how self-awareness on the part of settlers and settler-descendants can change their biblical understandings. I coined the term to encourage double-checking readings that frontier-ize inhabited places, portray Indigenous land as promised, or ignore the specific land and place from which they are read. Through aware-settler hermeneutics, readers are also encouraged to consider how Indigenous readings of the Bible often challenge standard interpretations and contribute new insights to sacred literature.
Bibliography
- Anderson, Matthew. “‘Aware-Settler’ Biblical Studies: Breaking Claims of Textual Ownership.” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 1 (2019): 42–68.
- Aldred, Raymond, and Matthew Anderson. Our Home and Treaty Land: Revised and Expanded Edition. Friesen, 2024.
- Krawec, Patty. Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Broadleaf, 2022.
- Warrior, Robert Allen. “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians.” Christianity and Crisis 49.12 (1989): 261–65.
