| |
| author |
Nathan Blackwell
| | title |
Canaanite Mother(s), Half-Breed Genealogies, and Rez-Dog
Imaginaries:
Reading for the Canine-ite Foremothers of Christianities Messianic
Figure, or, How the Indigenous Women of Matthew's Genealogy
Survived and Continue to Find Life
| | abstract |
Reading the Indigenous women of Jesus' genealogy as survivors, tricksters, and
terrorists—expendable, murderable, and sterilized bodies and narratives—this thesis poses the
questions: what responsibility does the messianic figure of the Matthean gospel have to his
Indigenous foremothers? What responsibility does Christianity have to the Indigenous peoples of
the Americas? Four women inhabit the politico-narrative arena of the Matthean genealogical list:
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and "the wife of Uriah." Four women who are Natives of the land of
Canaan—the land flowing with milk and honey. This thesis reads these women as Indigenous
women—both of the past and the present—in juxtaposition to the historiographic invading
(settler-colonial) Israelite people. Situating the Matthean genealogy of Jesus (Matt 1.1-17) as the
crux of imperial Christianity—here, in the Twenty-First century—I read the genealogical list
from and for the Indigenous peoples and communities of North America. Re-rendering the
Hebrew textual narratives surrounding each of the figures of these four women, this thesis
selectively reads for the political and decolonial concerns of Indigenous communities on
reservations and within modernity in the Americas. Concluding with a case-study of Jesus'
singular interaction with a Canaanite woman in Matthew 15, this thesis pulls the interpellations
and narratives of the four women located in the Hebrew Bible into the dialogue and collision
with that brief interaction in the Christian gospel narrative. Until this point, no one has sought to
read all the Canaanite/Native women of Jesus' semiosphere in conjunction and relation to one
another, and this thesis argues that doing so brings to light potential decolonial imaginaries for
the subalternated Indigenous peoples of North America. Imagining beyond the derogatory
rendering of the Canaanite women—and Indigenous women—as animal, I argue for the trickster
and terrorist potential within the Canine-ite figures as interlocutors for the future decolonization
of the Americas—liberation from the strangulation of imperial Christianity.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
M.A. (2022)
|
| advisor |
Danna N. Fewell
|
| committee |
Stephen D. Moore
|
| full text | NBlackwell.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
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