Abstract
Given settler colonialism and its damaging consequences for Indigenous peoples in Canada, this chapter proposes a model of mutual hospitality as a way of decolonizing and (re)imagining relationships and “home” with respect to migration realities in Canada. It interrogates dominant conceptions and practices of hospitality and seeks resources for a more robust and viable hospitality rooted in biblical traditions, resistant to settler colonialism in a spirit of repentance and resonant with Indigenous wisdom and treaty practice. This chapter develops in four steps: it explores key modalities of settler colonialism; it identifies how these link with and contaminate hospitality; it retrieves aspects of hospitality that may be resourceful in efforts to decolonize Christian theology and practice; and finally, it concludes with some suggestions for further development that engage and learn from Indigenous wisdom.
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Notes
- 1.
A shorter version of this chapter was published previously. See, “Beyond Hospitality? Unsettling Theology and Migration in Canada,” in Religion and Migration: Negotiating Hospitality, Agency and Vulnerability, eds. Adrea Bielr, Isolde Karle, HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Hone Nord (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019), 109–123.
- 2.
Éric Grenier, “21.9% of Canadians are Immigrants, the Highest Share in 85 Years: StatsCan (25 Oct. 2017),” http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/census-2016-immigration-1.4368970, accessed 22 June 2018.
- 3.
See “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action,” http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf, accessed 9 Dec. 2019.
- 4.
Namsoon Kang, Cosmopolitan Theology: Reconsidering Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love and Solidarity in an Uneven World (St. Louis: Chalice, 2013), 152.
- 5.
Ibid., 151.
- 6.
For further detail, see my “Migration and Theology in Canada,” in Christianities in Migration: The Global Perspective, eds. Peter C. Phan and Elaine Padilla (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 193–220.
- 7.
Arthur Sutherland, I Was a Stranger: A Christian Theology of Hospitality (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 83. Other authors make similar claims to hospitality’s importance like: Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Lucien Richard, Living the Hospitality of God (Mahwah: Paulist, 2000).
- 8.
“What We Have Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation,” 4, http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Principles of Truth and Reconciliation.pdf, accessed 9 Dec. 2019.
- 9.
J.R. Miller, “Compact, Contract, Covenant: Canada’s Treaty-Making Tradition,” (Keenan Lecture, St. Thomas Moore College, 2003), 3, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/g4/11/780973431612_13244st.pdf, accessed 23 June 2018.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: Anansi, 2003), 10.
- 12.
Robert J. Miller, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” in Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies, eds. Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt and Tracey Lindberg (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010), 8. See also Tracey Lindberg, “The Doctrine of Discovery in Canada,” chp. 4 in idem.
- 13.
See Robert A. Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) for an excellent discussion of the roots of European notion of “the savage” and how it played out as the Doctrine of Discovery.
- 14.
Emma Batell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada (Halifax; Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2015), 31.
- 15.
Ibid., 60.
- 16.
See Ch. 9, “The Indian Act,” in Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, Kevin Reed et al. (Toronto: Pearson Canada, 2011).
- 17.
Lowman and Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism, 31.
- 18.
Ibid., 45.
- 19.
Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC, 2010), 14.
- 20.
Ibid., 87.
- 21.
Lowman and Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism, 45.
- 22.
Eva Mackey, Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonialization (Halifax; Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2016), 106ff.
- 23.
See Hyuk Cho, Sharing Concern For Justice: Becoming An Intercultural Church as a Postcolonial Mission Practice on the Canadian Context of Integrative Multiculturalism (ThD diss., University of Toronto, 2017), 38–49; and Grace Ji-Sun Kim, “What Forms Us: Multiculturalism, the Other and Theology,” in Feminist Theology with a Canadian Accent, ed. Mary Ann Beavis with Elaine Guillemin and Barbara Pell (Toronto: Novalis, 2008), 78–99.
- 24.
Lowman and Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism, 4, 31.
- 25.
King, The Truth About Stories, 164.
- 26.
For example, see Michele Hershberger, A Christian View of Hospitality: Expecting Surprises (Scottdale: Herald, 1999); Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Lucien Richard, Living the Hospitality of God (Mahwah: Paulist, 2000).
- 27.
Fr. Pierre-François de Béthune, “Interreligious Dialogue and Sacred Hospitality,” Religion East and West 7/1 (October 2007): 12.
- 28.
Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University, 2012), 163.
- 29.
For example, Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s, 2000); and Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000).
- 30.
Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 114ff.
- 31.
Ibid., 150–151.
- 32.
Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 152.
- 33.
Ibid., 156–157.
- 34.
Kang, Cosmopolitan Theology, 155 f.
- 35.
Eleazar S. Fernandez, Burning Center, Porous Borders: The Church in a Globalized World (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 228.
- 36.
Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, “Hermeneutics and Politics of Strangers,” in A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration, eds. Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 218.
- 37.
Dawn M. Nothwehr, Mutuality: A Formal Norm for Christian Ethics (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 233.
- 38.
Fernandez, Burning Center, 228.
- 39.
Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Continuum, 2002), 59.
- 40.
John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality: Partnership with Strangers as Promise and Mission (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 8.
- 41.
Letty M. Russell, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference, eds. J. Shannon Clarkson and Kate M. Ott (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 16–17, 53–75, 81–84.
- 42.
Letty M. Russell, “Encountering the ‘Other’ in a World of Difference and Danger,” Harvard Theological Review 99/4 (2006): 457–468, at 467.
- 43.
Lowman and Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism, 117–118.
- 44.
Daniel R. Wildcat, “Just Creation: Enhancing Life in a World of Relatives,” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Kitchener: Herald, 2013), 295–309, at 298–299. See also Daniel Wildcat and Vine Deloria, Jr., Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden: Fulcrum Resources, 2001).
- 45.
Leanne Simpson, “Liberated Peoples, Liberated Lands,” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice and Life Together, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Kitchener: Herald, 2013), 50–57, at 55.
- 46.
Lowman and Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism, 63.
- 47.
Ibid., 64, see also 119f.
- 48.
Ibid., 64. See also Dale Turner, This is Not a Peace Pipe: Toward a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2006), 48.
- 49.
Mackey, Unsettled Expectations, 137.
- 50.
Ibid., 64. For further discussion, see idem, 134–137, and Cho, Sharing Concern For Justice, chp. 4.
- 51.
Lori Ransom and Mark MacDonald, “Systemic Evil and the Church: How Does a Church Repent?” Forum Mission 10/2014: 72–84, see esp. 84.
- 52.
Ibid., 80.
- 53.
See for example, Dawn M. Nothwehr, “Mutuality in Mission: A No ‘Other’ Way,” Mission Studies 21/2 (2004): 249–270; and Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on Christian Mission Today (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), see esp. chp. 2.
- 54.
Mackey, Unsettled Expectations, chp. 6.
- 55.
Waziyatawin (Dakota), “A Serpent in the Garden: An Unholy Worldview on Sacred Land,” 210–24, in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, 224.
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Reynolds, T.E. (2021). Decolonizing Theology and Migration in a Canadian Context: (Re)imagining Hospitality. In: Dias, D.J., Skira, J.Z., Attridge, M.S., Mannion, G. (eds) The Church, Migration, and Global (In)Difference. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54226-9_6
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