Can "White" People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission (Missiological Engagements Book 12)

by Willie James Jennings

As a result, as George Tinker notes, Puritans in particular often did not bother missionizing Native peoples unless it was politically expedient because they did not see Native peoples as peoples at all.9 Rather, as many Native scholars have noted, Native peoples were seen as biblical Canaanites. Albert Cave and others have demonstrated that Christian colonizers often envisioned Native peoples as Canaanites, worthy of mass destruction.10 As an example, George Henry Lokei wrote in 1794: “The human behavior of the governor at Pittsburgh greatly incensed those people, who according to the account given in the former Part of this history, represented the Indians as Canaanites, who without mercy ought to be destroyed from the face of the earth, and considered America as the land of promise given to the Christians.”11 As Canaanites, Native peoples had a one-way destination to destruction to allow for the “New Israel” of whiteness in what would become the United States.