Native Americans and the Bible
EVER since Europeans invaded the Americas, many have tried to teach the Native Americans the Bible.
Since the 17th century, the complete Bible has been translated into six North American Indian languages. The first was John Eliot’s Bible, printed in 1663 for the Massachusett Indians near Boston and Roxbury, Massachusetts. Writing in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Harvey Markowitz states: “Though many historians now question the sincerity with which most of the colonists entered into [a] compact [that is, “to ‘civilize’ the New World’s ‘savages’”], the depth of Eliot’s commitment is witnessed by the fifteen years he toiled in learning Massachusett and devising an orthography to transcribe the Bible. Eliot viewed this difficult undertaking as ‘a sacred and holy work, to be regarded with fear, care, and reverence.’”
Although portions of the Bible were translated into other Native American languages, it took two hundred years before the next complete Bible was published, a version in Western Cree (1862) by associates of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Other translations soon followed: Eastern Arctic Inuit (1871); Dakota, or Eastern Sioux (1880); and Gwich’in, a subarctic American language (1898).
The latest complete Bible is the Navajo translation, published in 1985 after 41 years of preparation and collaboration between two Bible societies. Portions of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures now exist in at least 46 Indian languages.
Who Have Taken the Lead?
Markowitz says: “It is significant . . . that the work of translating the Bible has been an overwhelmingly Protestant endeavor.” The same writer goes on to say that prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962), the Catholic Church “discouraged the dissemination of Bibles among the laity, believing that laypeople lacked the proper . . . training to achieve correct interpretations of biblical texts.”
Various Bible societies are presently involved in at least 20 projects for translation into languages of the Native Americans of North America, including Cheyenne, Havasupai, Micmac, and Zuni. A new version of the Greek Scriptures is being prepared for the Navajo nation. Other translations are being prepared for the Indians of Central and South America.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are not affiliated with any Protestant organizations. However, they are active among all the Native Americans, and as a result, many Native Americans are responding to the Bible’s truths regarding the “new heavens and a new earth,” in which righteousness is to dwell. (2 Peter 3:13) The Witnesses are using the Bibles that are currently available in the native languages of the Americas. They also use Bible literature translated by the Watch Tower Society in several Native American tongues, including Aymara, Cree, Dakota, Guarani, Inuktitut, Iroquois, Navajo, Quechua, and nine other languages.—See Awake! of September 8, 1996.
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“Jehovah” appears in the Navajo Bible at Psalm 68:4