Aboriginal peoples in North America today are, if you will, a fourth world. I As fourth-world peoples, we share with our third-world relatives the hunger, poverty and repression which has been the continuing common experience of those overpowered by the expansionism of European adventurers and their missionaries five hundred years ago.What distinguishes fourth-world indigenous peoples from other third-world peoples, however, are the particular repercussions of conquest and genocide as they impacted our distinctive indigenous cultures. While the immediately obvious effects of conquest and genocide seem similar for third-and fourth-world peoples -poverty, unemployment, disease, high infant mortality, low adult longevity -there are deeper, more hidden but no less deadly effects of colonialism which impact third-and fourthworld peoples in dramatically different ways. These effects are especially felt in the indigenous fourth-world spiritual experience, and we see our struggle for liberation within the context of this distinctive spirituality. This has been often overlooked, until recently, in third-world liberation theology models of social change which often remained inappropriate and ineffective in the struggle of indigenous peoples for their right to self-determination. In fact, the themes of much liberation theology have been derived from the very modes of discourse of the Western academy against which indigenous peoples have struggled for centuries. These modes of discourse -whether theological, legal, political, economic, or even the so-called social sciences -have structured colonial, neo-colonial, and now Marxist regimes which, in the name of 0 Dr George E. Tinker (Osaga-Cherokee) is assistant professor of cross-cultural ministries at Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado, USA.
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