Sermons

This religion had its heroes. It had its prophets. The great Iroquois league, for instance, was begun by a divinely-inspired prophet Degandawiga who had been granted a vision- a revelation from the Great Mystery, a vision of peace through the sisterhood of the tribes. His work made it into our Constitution. (La Farge, 54)
This religion had it’s Moses, too- at least one, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés up in what is now the State of Washington. Dee Brown, in his 1970 masterpiece Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee includes a conversation between him and some Indian agency commissioners.

“Why do you not want schools!” the commissioner asked.
“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered.
“Do you not want churches?”
“No, we do not want churches.”
“Why do you not want churches?”
“They will teach to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.” (Brown, 318)

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