ICE – Feminism and Religion

Of Resistance and Risk, Community and Kin: A Thanksgiving Reflection by Beth Bartlett

At the No Kings rally on October 18^th, Anishinaabe elder Ricky DeFoe affirmed to the gathered crowd that “the natural response to oppression, ignorance, evil, and mystification is wide-awake resistance.” Such resistance, he claimed, calls for an “ethic of risk.” I was immediately struck by his use of the term, paralleling feminist theologian Susan Welch’s A Feminist Ethic of Risk.[i]Returning home, I picked up my copy and found many of the same points DeFoe had articulated.[ii] Both asserted that an ethic of risk recognizes that “to stop resisting, even when success is unimaginable, is to die,” and by this they meant not only the threat of physical death, but also “the death of the imagination, the death of the ability to care.”[iii]

The Beast at Our Door: Fenrir Wolf and ICE by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Binding of the norse mythological wolf, Fenrir. From Guerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline) (1909). Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas. London : Harrap. This illustration is on page 92. Digitized by the Internet Archive Wikimedia Commons

When I was a shamanic trainee, our group spent a lot of time and focus on the “beast within” This concept has had many expressions in different circumstances – the shadow side (Jung), the dark side (Star Wars), letting loose the “dogs of war” (William Shakespeare), reptilian instincts (psychology).

Mythology has many stories about this phenomenon. In our group, we studied the stories as a way to learn what we must do in our own lives to tame the beast so we had this energy available to use the energy without letting the crueler destructive aspects of the beast run rampant. Here are two of the stories as we discussed them.

Fenrir Wolf

Fenrir Wolf is a deity from the Norse tradition who was known and feared as a great monster. Tyr was the only God in Asgard brave enough to tend to Fenrir. For a long time, Tyr fed and cared for him. Eventually, though, Fenrir grew too large to handle and began running throughout the land called Midgard, killing both gods and people. Odin called a council to discuss how Fenrir could be slain.

Patriarchy, Thy Name is Cruelty by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Andrew Young famously said that ‘anything is legal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.” I would add a more modern take. Nothing is too low, too immoral, too illegal if 5 or 6 Supreme Court justices decide to allow it.

Their recent decisions could fill a book on how corrupt they are. (I’ve discussed this before. But this post is looking at immigration and the cruelty that this administration is fomenting. We have always been a cruel nation. Patriarchy has honed cruelty as its worked to crush women’s bodies while silencing women. How else would women have agreed to our loss of power? Carol Christ has written eloquently about this. Immigration policy has blown the lid off this pot. Perhaps because it is too new, too shocking. Because ICE is in our faces with agents flooding neighborhoods and engaging in unfettered cruelty.

For example, when ICE raided an apartment building in the Bronx on Feb 24th, they arrested 19 year old Merwil Gutiérrez. When they realized they had the wrong person, their response was “take him anyway.” Read that again, “take him anyway.”

Merwil Gutiérrez was then deported to the notorious prison CECOT in El Salvador. For months, his family couldn’t find him. He was eventually sent to his native Venezuela.