Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way

by Richard Twiss

In my first fourteen years of embracing Jesus, I conformed to the expectation to accept interpretations of the Bible that said “old things had passed away and all things had become white”—regarding my following Jesus in the context of Native ways of music, dance, drumming, ceremony and culture. In reference to my Native culture, I was informed that the Bible said, “Touch not the unclean thing,” or “come out from among them and be separate,” or “what fellowship does light have with darkness?” This meant I needed to leave my Indian ways behind me because I had a new identity in Christ and it was not Indian! The Bible was used to demonize just about everything important to our cultural sense of being one with Creator and creation. As the years went by and I visited my reservation to attend the funerals of relatives, my heart began to remember how I felt during my American Indian Movement (AIM) days and how good it felt to “be home.” Soon Jesus began to enter those areas of my identity that had been sitting idle. My internal journey of self-discovery was beginning as I pondered how my faith in Jesus fit with my Lakota culture, long before I heard the word “contextualization.”