Last week in Mexico, I was on a tour through Mucuyché, Yucatán, and something struck me. The guide mentioned the Mayan locals' superstitious beliefs, and I began to think on the differences in how we label peoples' religious values. When I hear the word "superstitious," I associate it with ignorance, lack of education, etc., and I only ever hear it associated with belief systems of Indigenous peoples. It's not an adjective commonly used to describe Christianity, the values of which are imbued with respectability on the basis of its global reach, and--I honestly think--its base of white followers. Indeed, Christianity undergirds most of the imperialism of the past 600 centuries or so, so Christian rulers and thinkers have obviously had a disproportionate influence on how we word things, how we conceptualize differences between Indigenous versus non-Indigenous peoples. To call a more local belief system superstitious, while holding the mainstream one to be more valid, seems to confer a sense of inferiority to the former. This helps in part to justify imperialism, and to fuel the idea that Indigenous people require an introduction and eventual conversion to Christianity. This is for another, much longer post, but conversion to Christianity has undergirded centuries of war and genocide against Indigenous peoples across the Americas...so these seemingly small linguistic differences are actually super important in understanding horrific and ongoing chapters of human history.
This little realization reinforces how crucial it is to watch our words. Language shapes our thinking, which in turn shapes our actions. Words are the stuff of art, of connection, but also of discrimination, prejudice, and violence.
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