George “Tink” Tinker
The Rocks Shall Cry Out –Consciousness, Rocks, and American Indians

Tink Tinker speaking at a Religion Symposium at Colorado College

Tink Tinker’s article “The Integrity of Creation” was published in Ecumenical Review and explains why asking him to offer a session at Ring Lake Ranch makes perfect sense when its mission is “renewal in a sacred wilderness.” We have much to learn about living in harmony with all Creation:

We live in a crazy and dangerous time. We are destroying God's creation at such an alarming rate, polluting the earth's waters and air, and at the same time inventing ever new and ever more brutal ways to oppress greater and greater portions of the earth's human population, ways more devastating than ever known before. We are told that ten percent of the world's rain forest is being destroyed, cut, cleared every year. Within fifteen years this regenerative source of the earth's oxygen supply will be completely destroyed.

And even as this craziness continues, it has precipitated a new oppression of Indian tribal people in the jungles of Brazil and elsewhere, from whence come today a stream of reports of massacres and genocide. As if that were not enough, we live with the constant terror of violence and war, under the nuclear threat of total annihilation. It is in this context that we must consider the "integrity of creation" and the World Council of Churches' programme on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.

In times of crisis, the church has always been constructive and vital in its theology, and not protective or defensive. The modem crisis calls upon all of us as the church to respond with all our gifts of creativity, to think through theological issues in ways that will enable us all to image ourselves in new ways of being together as the church; new ways of experiencing God's salvific grace that is ours in Christ Jesus; new ways of proclaiming God's cry for justice; and ever new ways of implementing God's reign of peace in our threatened world. A reassessment of our theological reflections on creation is vital for our response.

. . . An adequate theology of creation must include a theology of nature, that is, it must address the sacredness of all in the world and our relation as human beings to that all. If we can affirm the sacredness of the natural world, if we can begin to live our affirmation, if we begin to experience the world, including one another, as sacred, then God's demand for justice must become a vital and consuming concern. And God's desire for peace built on justice will then become our passion as well.

The particular gift of Native American peoples (and of other indigenous peoples) is an immediate awareness and experience of the sacredness and interdependence of all creation. American Indian cultures are rooted in the earth and particularly in tribally specific lands that have always been the foundation of Indian religious experience.

Tribes suffer even today from the trauma of forced separation from their land base — the injustice, the dislocation, the resultant disruption of health and well-being, both spiritual and social. Yet, Native Americans still experience the world as sacred and still sense their own inter-relatedness with all in the world. Whether traditional or Christian, this is their Native spirituality; and Native people are convinced that their spiritual insights may contribute much to the understanding, theologies, health and well-being of others in the world, especially to those who symbolize the source of their oppression.

In 2004 the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA recognized Tink Tinker as Alum of the Year: This is what they said about him –

Tink Tinker describes himself, in 2004’s Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation, as “a theologian who is unequivocally committed to the well-being and liberation of my own (American Indian) community.” As a longtime activist in urban American Indian communities; a leading indigenous voice within the field of liberation theology; and a professor at Iliff School of Theology for 20 years, Tinker plays a uniquely multifaceted role in his mission to improve the well-being of his Native American community.

Tinker is professor of American Indian cultures and religious traditions at the Iliff School of Theology, in Denver, Colorado, where he has taught since 1985. He earned his doctorate in Biblical Studies at the GTU in 1983, and is an ordained Lutheran pastor (PLTS M. Div. ‘72). He is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation.

The Theological is the Political
Central to Tinker’s work is the idea that an American Indian theology must be “overtly political.” Native American suffering in the face of oppression is reflected in rates of unemployment, alcoholism, suicides, and homicides that are from ten to six hundred percent higher than the total U.S. population. In this community, theologians must take seriously the political reality. To this end, Tinker’s work encompasses issues of sustainability, development, economics, and state sovereignty.

Tinker has long been engaged in community activism, which he sees as a necessary part of intellectual reflection. He is on the leadership council of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of Colorado, which organizes a range of campaigns. He also directs Four Winds American Indian Survival project in Denver. This group seeks to rebuild the Indian community through spiritual and ceremonial practices rooted in the ancient traditions of the different Indian peoples that have been brought to metropolitan Denver over the past four decades.

Standing at the Boundary
While Tinker’s work has focused outward to concerns of the Native American Indian community, his questions are rooted in his own personal identity and history. Raised in New Mexico by a non-Indian Lutheran mother and a Native American Indian father, he has spent much of his life exploring his multi-cultural identity. “I’ve tried to hold in tension my mother and father. Those two worlds—they are different worlds.

I spent a good portion of my career finding new ways to express Christianity that would fit with Indian culture.”  Although he hasn’t rejected either aspect of his historical identity, Tinker’s primary spiritual path is Native American. He served as pastor to a Native American church for many years, and he and his extended family participate in an annual Osage spring ceremony in Oklahoma.

Delwin Brown, dean at Pacific School of Religion and Tinker’s former colleague at Iliff, says that he “stands at the boundary of two traditions, Native American and Christian, and negotiates between them. He is working out a Native American vision in conversation with and critique of the dominant culture. For each world, he serves as a translator to the other.”

A Visionary Spirituality
In addition to his new book Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation, he is the author of Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (1993), and some three dozen journal articles. He is co-author of Native American Theology (2001), and is currently working on two volumes that articulate a native spirituality.

For Tinker, spirituality should be creative and constructive. “I want to argue for radical and creative vision that will ultimately change the way we live together on this planet,” he writes in Spirit and Resistance. Cultivating this vision of justice involves remembering past struggles and resisting oppression, as well as celebrating cultural and religious identity in the present.

Dreaming a new vision of the world will necessitate a shift of focus from the individual to the community. The basis for this kind of shift can be found explicitly in Native American religious thought, as Tinker establishes in Spirit and Resistance. “The transformation must begin with a theological shift away from the individual toward a theology that founds and sustains a community existence. The salvation of the communal whole (that is, the world) demands a theology that treats the community as a whole and avoids unnecessary fracturing of the community into individual actors.”

Tink Tinker’s commitment to remembering the past and articulating a vision of the future gives hope not only for the North American Indian peoples, but for the global community as well.

About Tink Tinker’s latest books –
Spirit and Resistance — Political Theology and American Indian Liberation

Writing from a Native American perspective, theologian George Tinker probes American Indian culture, its vast religious and cultural legacy, and its ambiguous relationship to the tradition—historic Christianity—that colonized and converted it.

After five hundred years of conquest and social destruction, he says, any useful reflection must come to terms with the political state of Indian affairs and the political hopes and visions for recovering the health and well-being of Indian communities. Does Christian theology have a positive role to play?

Tinker's work offers an overview of contemporary native American culture and its perilous state. Critical of recent liberal and New Age co-opting of Native spiritual practices, Tinker also offers a critical corrective to liberation theology.

He shows how Native insights into the Sacred Other and sacred space helpfully reconfigure traditional ideas of God, Jesus' notion of the reign of God, and our relation to the earth. From this basis he offers novel proposals about cultural survival and identity, sustainability, and the endangered health of Native Americans.

“Tinker’s powerful and well-reasoned thoughts are expressed in a much kinder way than some of us are likely to do. While Tinker’s work is well known to scholars, it is less known to most younger readers and hence will arrive on the scene as brand-new thoughts. Just what is needed in a society that seems to be more a flock of sheep than a human enterprise.”

– Vine Deloria Jr., author of God Is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins

Native Voices
American Indian Identity and Resistance
Edited by Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins  June 2003
368 pages, 6 x 9


HONORABLE MENTION, OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARDS, GUSTAVUS MYERS CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF BIGOTRY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

One of Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005

Native peoples of North America still face an uncertain future due to their unstable political, legal, and economic positions. Views of their predicament, however, continue to be dominated by non-Indian writers. In response, a dozen Native American writers here reclaim their rightful role as influential “voices” in the debates about Native communities at the dawn of a new millennium.

These scholars examine crucial issues of politics, law, and religion in the context of ongoing Native American resistance to the dominant culture. They particularly show how the writings of Vine Deloria, Jr., have shaped and challenged American Indian scholarship in these areas since the 1960s. They provide key insights into Deloria’s thought, while introducing some of the critical issues still confronting Native nations today.

Collectively, these essays take up four important themes: indigenous societies as the embodiment of cultures of resistance, legal resistance to western oppression against indigenous nations, contemporary Native religious practices, and Native intellectual challenges to academia.

Individual chapters address indigenous perspectives on topics usually treated (and often misunderstood) by non-Indians, such as the role of women in Indian society, the importance of sacred sites to American Indian religious identity, and the relationship of native language to indigenous autonomy. A closing essay by Deloria—in vintage form—brings the book full circle and reminds Native Americans of their responsibilities and obligations to one another—and to past and future generations.

Ranging from insights into Native American astronomy to critiques of federal Indian law, this book strongly argues for the renewed cultivation of a Native American Studies that is much more Indian-centered. Without the revival of that perspective, such curricula are doomed to languish as academic ephemera—missed opportunities for building a better and deeper understanding of Indian peoples and their most pressing concerns and aspirations.

“A critical and Indian-centered contribution to Native American studies in particular and postcolonial studies in general, and a turning point in the same way that Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties were turning points in this field. There will be no going back to familiar ways of doing business in Native American studies after the publication of this book.”

—Thomas Biolsi, author of Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation

“Inclusive and wide-ranging in scope, this important volume succeeds like no previous work in defining and describing the new Indian scholarship that has evolved since the 1960s. . . . An ideal book for Indian studies classes at the undergraduate level.”

—Donald Lee Fixico, author of The Urban Indian Experience in America

CONTRIBUTORS: S. James Anaya, Ward Churchill, Cecil Corbett, Vine Deloria, Jr., Richard A. Grounds, Joy Harjo, Inés Hernández-Ávila, M. A. Jaimes-Guerrero, Clara Sue Kidwell, Henrietta Mann, Glenn Morris, John Mohawk, Michelene Pesantubee, Inés Talamantez, George E. Tinker, David Wilkins.