Friends, one of the best things about education is it puts you in a place where you get to use your mind the way it is intended, that of thinking through whatever subject or issue there is before you.
On the matter of religious paradoxes, for instance, the way a singular belief system is imposed on a people, Mi'kmaq author Marie Battiste and Chickasaw, James Youngblood Henderson, in Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, offer these insights; When asked 'What does God look like?', Linda Hogan Dwellings' answer is, "... these fish, this water, this land."
In total, this is a very holistic way to look at Indigenous thought, as such.
On the other hand, Eurocentric religious thought consists of cognitive imperialism, that is a set of beliefs imposed on an oppressed and powerless people.
Take for instance, the one-sided argument this represents. The bible itself has very little to do with the authorship of it's supposed word of God.
The Christian bible comes from a time in the 13th Century, when Earth was still believed to be flat, to the King James version, for instance, put together by a medieval overlord, when science began, as a system of knowledge.
From this shaky foundation the concept of divine order and secular law came about.
Colonization, thus marked a new age of religious wars, no less, with conversion by demand, as its way of imposing itself upon our nations here on Great Turtle Island, the America's and the rest of the world, for that matter.
Monotheist religions, with its singular God, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, came up with the idea of salvation, souls needing saving, with a binary division, between the priesthood and the damned.
Divine law thus imposed a singular authority, including the legitimacy of imposed politics and legal order.
So here we are today, with Eurocentric thought with its entitlements and a 'White mythology', a set of rigged beliefs.
Heady stuff, yes, but another way to look at it is offered by Blackfoot scholar, Leroy Little Bear, who follows up on the thought that our traditional beliefs have become homeless in all of this, caught up and swallowed whole, in the fight between church and state, drawing "cultural blanks", and powerless on the home front.
One thing to consider, too, friends, is we are now legally beyond this kind of powerhold. Section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom clearly states there is to be no coercion of this kind.
There is hope, too, for ways to work out our situation, eventually, but not without knowing how we have come to this. Mahsi, thank you.