Living with Difference: "Council at Buffalo Creek, 1805"
Sagoyewatha’s responses to the requests of Christian missionaries to evangelize and educate the Seneca people raise the issue of pluralism in values and ideals and the capacity of different peoples to live with difference.
As I wrote in the previous entry, in “Council at Buffalo Creek in the Summer, 1805”, a Christian missionary proposed to “instruct,” “remove errors,” “open eyes,” of the Seneca people regarding how to worship the “Great Spirit” (God) in a manner agreeable to Him [12a]. Sagoyewatha, noting the wickedness of white people in Buffalo, made an ironic counter-proposal to the missionary: To instruct his own people. If the missionary succeeded, the Seneca would reconsider accepting missionaries to teach Christian doctrines [13b].
According to a report, at the end of the council the Seneca chiefs offered their hand as a sign of friendship to the missionary, but he refused to offer his hand, saying that there was “no fellowship between the religion of God and the devil” [13b].
This episode exemplifies a central ethical and epistemological issue in the American context: How should we respond to living with difference? For example, difference in religious beliefs, economic and political arrangements, ethnicity, and moral ideals and values.
Contemporary philosophers Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, in their book American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, identify this question as the central philosophical issue in the history of the United States. At the 1805 council and similar historical moments, we find “the struggle for American pluralism and what it means to live in the context of difference” [x].
The Christian missionary enacted one possible response, available to people in dominant or hegemonic groups: To force the dichotomy of assimilation or exclusion upon the oppressed. The disadvantaged groups can either assimilate into the culture, values, and ideals of the hegemonic group, or they can be excluded from society, citizenship, the nation, and so on. There is a long list of this type of response in U.S. history. The most recent political reaction that has taken a xenophobic, misogynistic hate-monger to the presidency is an example.
An alternative response is pluralism. Quickly, for now, pluralism means the principled acceptance and embracing of difference in philosophical ideals, moral values, religious beliefs, political and economic arrangements among peoples who co-exist and even cooperate.
The pluralist tradition has also had an important philosophical and political history in the U.S., though it is often quieter and less notorious. With further help from McKenna and Pratt, this is a philosophical thread I’d like to follow.
Citations:
Leonard Harris, Scott Pratt, and Anne Waters (Eds.), American Philosophies: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
As I wrote in the previous entry, in “Council at Buffalo Creek in the Summer, 1805”, a Christian missionary proposed to “instruct,” “remove errors,” “open eyes,” of the Seneca people regarding how to worship the “Great Spirit” (God) in a manner agreeable to Him [12a]. Sagoyewatha, noting the wickedness of white people in Buffalo, made an ironic counter-proposal to the missionary: To instruct his own people. If the missionary succeeded, the Seneca would reconsider accepting missionaries to teach Christian doctrines [13b].
According to a report, at the end of the council the Seneca chiefs offered their hand as a sign of friendship to the missionary, but he refused to offer his hand, saying that there was “no fellowship between the religion of God and the devil” [13b].
This episode exemplifies a central ethical and epistemological issue in the American context: How should we respond to living with difference? For example, difference in religious beliefs, economic and political arrangements, ethnicity, and moral ideals and values.
Contemporary philosophers Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, in their book American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, identify this question as the central philosophical issue in the history of the United States. At the 1805 council and similar historical moments, we find “the struggle for American pluralism and what it means to live in the context of difference” [x].
The Christian missionary enacted one possible response, available to people in dominant or hegemonic groups: To force the dichotomy of assimilation or exclusion upon the oppressed. The disadvantaged groups can either assimilate into the culture, values, and ideals of the hegemonic group, or they can be excluded from society, citizenship, the nation, and so on. There is a long list of this type of response in U.S. history. The most recent political reaction that has taken a xenophobic, misogynistic hate-monger to the presidency is an example.
An alternative response is pluralism. Quickly, for now, pluralism means the principled acceptance and embracing of difference in philosophical ideals, moral values, religious beliefs, political and economic arrangements among peoples who co-exist and even cooperate.
The pluralist tradition has also had an important philosophical and political history in the U.S., though it is often quieter and less notorious. With further help from McKenna and Pratt, this is a philosophical thread I’d like to follow.
Citations:
Leonard Harris, Scott Pratt, and Anne Waters (Eds.), American Philosophies: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
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