I am writing this in code because I cannot speak or say
the thing. The thing which should be, or I so wish
could be
plumbed fathomed disinterred from this silence, this ever thickening
silence through which, once, the long thin stalks & stems, first
weaker weeds then branching &
stiffening, steadying &
suddenly sturdier –
strong enough to carry the seen – the seeming autocorrect reminds me – the meaning my mind offers rushing in here
such that I must pull it back here –
grew. They, or is it it
grew. I
turn to the dead more now,
clearer every day as I approach them,
there in their silky layers of
silence, their wide almost waveless ocean
rolling under their full moon,
swells striating the horizonless backdrop,
extending what seems like forever
in that direction –
though what can forever mean where there is
no space no time. I breathe
that in
and stare at it. I breathe,
I have an in and out. I should have mentioned earlier this autocorrected to breed. I had thought to ignore it but what a strange thing
how we expanded,
spread ourselves in smaller and smaller bits
across the natural world
until we were so thin with participation we
fell away. Remember the code says the away.
But I was saying
how finally the rain will come. Finally it will I say in the code – &
you do intuit my meaning do you
not. It is a rain I have waited for all my life –
why do I see it only
now for what it
is – yes bronze as the sun tries to hang on –
then all these platinums braiding its freedoms,
coursing to find every crevice, loosen every
last stitch &
go in. It will touch everything. It will make more of the
more. More says my baffled soul, yes more.
It will push itself through & more deeply through till all must grow.
And yet we pray for it.
We thought it would never come.
Something did come says the code.
But it did not come.
Not in reality.
We thought it was an ideal.
Therefore it must come.
But it did not come.
How I wish I could say free. And yet we are not free it
seems. Or are we.
Each word I use I have used before.
Yet it is not used, is it? It is not used up, is it? Because what is in it stays
hidden. And the words
appear again as if
new. Rain, I say. Rain now.
And the black ocean shows itself in infinite detail because of the moon.
No matter that all is not lit.
Much remains because much remains hidden.
And you, are you there in the hidden.
Nothing is rare.
All gleams.
And you there, gather these words up now & store them as seed.
Wait for the next rain.
In the world we lost there are those who knew if the lifesaving
rain would
come in time – if it would
actually fall – not pass us by again as a prediction, as
mist. They knew from
the birds. I
am still here with the birds for this while longer.
I do not know what they say.
Dust rises.
Evening sets.
I listen to the chatter.
I remember the clatter of sudden rain. The clapping of it onto the
hard soil.
The birds roost.
Among them a silence now & one singer briefly singing. Then silence.
We must all wait together.
There is no way to know.
It did not come.
(RNS) — It’s a Bible verse familiar to many Christians—and even to many non-Christians who have seen John 3:16 on billboards and T-shirts or scrawled across eye black under football players’ helmets.
But Terry Wildman hopes the new translation published Tuesday (Aug. 31) by InterVarsity Press, “First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament,” will help Christians and Indigenous peoples read it again in a fresh way.
“The Great Spirit loves this world of human beings so deeply he gave us his Son—the only Son who fully represents him. All who trust in him and his way will not come to a bad end, but will have the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony,” reads the First Nations Version of the verse.
Terry Wildman hopes his new Indigenous translation of the New Testament will help Christians and Indigenous peoples read it again in a fresh way.
In the First Nations Version, “eternal life,” a concept unfamiliar in Native American cultures, becomes “the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony.” The Greek word “cosmos,” usually translated in English as “the world,” had to be reconsidered, too: It doesn’t mean the planet Earth but how the world works and how creation lives and functions together, said Wildman, the lead translator and project manager of the First Nations Version.
They’re phrases that resonated with Wildman, changing the way he read the Bible even as he translated it for Native American readers.
“We believe it’s a gift not only to our Native people, (but) from our Native people to the dominant culture. We believe that there’s a fresh way that people can experience the story again from a Native perspective,” he said.
The idea for an Indigenous Bible translation first came to Wildman nearly 20 years ago in the storeroom of the church he pastored on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.
In the First Nations Version, “eternal life,” a concept unfamiliar in Native American cultures, becomes “the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony.”
Wildman, who is Ojibwe and Yaqui, was excited to find a Hopi translation of the New Testament in storage. He wanted to hear how that beloved Scripture sounded in Hopi, how it translated back into English.
But, he said, while many Hopi elders still speak their native language and children now are learning it in schools, he couldn’t find anyone able to read it. That is true for many Native American nations, he added, noting that at the same time Christian missionaries were translating the Bible into Native languages, they were also working with the boarding schools in the United States and Canada that punished students for speaking those languages.
It occurred to the pastor that “since 90-plus percent of our Native people are not speaking their tribal language or reading their tribal language, we felt there needed to be a translation in English worded for Native people,” he said.
Wildman, a licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church, has been working on translating the Bible into words and concepts familiar to many Native Americans ever since.
“We believe it’s a gift not only to our Native people, (but) from our Native people to the dominant culture. We believe that there’s a fresh way that people can experience the story again from a Native perspective.”
He first began experimenting by rewording Scripture passages he was using in a prison ministry, giving them more of a “Native traditional sound,” he said—a sound he’d learned by being around Native elders and reading books written in a more traditional style of English by Native Americans like Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk.
He and his wife, Darlene, who have a music ministry called RainSong, also recorded readings of those passages over music in an album called “The Great Story from the Sacred Book.” It won a Native American Music Award in 2008 for best spoken-word album.
Wildman was encouraged by the reactions he received as he shared his rewordings across the country at tribal centers, Native American-led churches and powwows.
“They just loved listening to it because it didn’t have the church language. It didn’t have the colonial language. It had more of a Native feel to it—as much as possible that you can put in English,” he said.
Many Native people asked what Bible he was reading from.
Young people have told Wildman it sounds like one of their elders telling them a story. Elders have said it resonates with how they heard traditional stories from their parents and grandparents.
Young people have told him it sounds like one of their elders telling them a story. Elders have said it resonates with how they heard traditional stories from their parents and grandparents.
As others encouraged him to turn his rewordings into a full translation of the Bible, Wildman published a children’s book retelling the Christmas story, “Birth of the Chosen One,” and a harmonization of the four Gospels called “When the Great Spirit Walked among Us.”
Then, on April Fool’s Day 2015, he heard from the CEO of OneBook Canada, who suggested the Bible translation organization fund his work. The offer wasn’t a prank, he said, it was “confirmation from Creator that this was something he wanted.”
“Everybody hears English a little differently,” Wildman said.
“We have all of these translations for that purpose to reach another generation, to reach a particular people group. But we had never had one for our Native people that has actually been translated into English.”
Wildman began by forming a translation council to guide the process, gathering men and women, young and old, from different Native cultures and church backgrounds. They started with a list of nearly 200 keywords Wycliffe Bible Translators said must be translated properly to get a good translation of Scripture.
With that foundation, Wildman got to work, sending drafts to the council for feedback. He looked up the original Greek text of the New Testament. He checked to see how other English translations rendered tricky passages. He consulted Dave Ohlson, a former Wycliffe translator who helped found OneBook Canada, part of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.
The Indigenous translation uses names for God common in many Native cultures, including “Great Spirit” or “Creator.” Names of biblical figures echo their original meanings in Greek and Hebrew: Jesus becomes “Creator Sets Free” and Abraham, “Father of Many Nations.”
“We believe it’s very important that the Gospel be kind of decolonized and told in a Native way, but being accurate to the meaning of the original language and understanding that it’s a different culture,” Wildman said.
“We believe it’s very important that the Gospel be kind of decolonized and told in a Native way, but being accurate to the meaning of the original language and understanding that it’s a different culture.”
Over the years, he and his council have published editions of the Gospel of Luke and Ephesians and a book called “Walking the Good Road” that included the four Gospels alongside Acts and Ephesians.
A number of ministries already have started using those translations, including Foursquare Native Ministries, Lutheran Indian Ministries, Montana Indian Ministries, Cru Nations and Native InterVarsity, he said.
Native InterVarsity, where Wildman serves as director of spiritual growth and leadership, has distributed earlier editions of the First Nations Version at conferences and used the Indigenous translation in its Bible studies for Native college students for several years.
Megan Murdock Krischke, national director of Native InterVarsity, said students have been more engaged with the translation, hearing the Bible in a way they’re used to stories being told.
“Even though it’s still English, it feels like it’s made by us for us. This is a version of Scripture that is for Native people, and it’s indigenized. You’re not having to kind of sort through the ways other cultures talk about faith and spirituality,” said Krischke, who is Wyandotte and Cherokee.
“Even though it’s still English, it feels like it’s made by us for us. This is a version of Scripture that is for Native people, and it’s indigenized,” said Megan Murdock Krischke.
“It’s one less barrier between Native people and being able to follow Jesus.”
Earlier this month, The Jesus Film Project also released a collection of short animated films called “Retelling the Good Story,” bringing to life the stories of Jesus, or Creator Sets Free, feeding the 5,000 and walking on water from the First Nations Version.
Wildman said the response from Native peoples and ministries to the First Nations Version has exceeded any expectations he had when he first began rewording Bible passages.
He hopes it can help break down barriers between Native and non-Native peoples, too. He pointed out the suspicion and misinformation many white Christians have passed down for generations, believing Native Americans worship the devil and their cultures are evil when they share a belief in a Creator, he said.
“We hope that this will help non-Native people be more interested in our Native people—maybe the history, understanding the need for further reconciliation and things like that,” Wildman said.
“We hope that this will be part of creating a conversation that will help that process.”
In a tribute to singer Jimmy Buffett and the opening of his latest Margaritaville resort in New York City’s Time Square, a trio of klezmer singers are singing his famed “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” in Yiddish.
There was a purpose to this translation.
The Margaritaville Resort Times Square — part of Buffett’s hospitality company, which manages and franchises restaurants, stores and casinos named for the singer’s hit song, “Margaritaville” — is located at the center of Manhattan’s garment district.
The neighborhood once housed three synagogues serving the many Yiddish-speaking garment industry workers. While most of the textile businesses no longer exist, the historic Garment Center Congregation is now on the ground floor and two sub-floors of the Margaritaville entertainment complex, part of a complicated real estate negotiation.
In honor of that unusual situation, Yiddish culture nonprofit Congress for Jewish Culture commissioned playwright Rokhl Kafrissen to adapt Buffett’s tale of a man’s bar hookup into a woman’s Yiddish plea to skip Shabbat dinner and go right to dessert.
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“Midtown New York is a world away from Key West,” said CJC executive director Shane Baker. “We also wanted to remind Jimmy Buffett that in New York, we do everything a little bit differently, even rest and relaxation.”
The song is performed by klezmer performers Sasha Lurje, Craig Judelman and Lorin Sklamberg.
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Songwriter Kafrissen said Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw” seemed like a hopeful anthem for a pandemic summer.
“Instead of a man propositioning a woman at a bar, I rewrote it from a woman’s point of view,” said Kafrissen. “She’s impatiently watching her husband make kiddush before the Shabbat meal.”
“Kum tsu mir” by Rokhl Kafrissen — Yiddish adaptation of Jimmy Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw”
S’iz shabes do
It’s shabes here
Oy s’iz gut
It sure is good
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Dayn kol klingt mole-kheyn
Your voice is full of charm
Kidesh makhste vunderlekh
The way you make kiddush is wonderful
Un dayn ponim
And your face is
Likhtik sheyn
Shine so bright
Nu, ketsl
So, baby
Nokh a glezl
One more glass
Mashke, vayn, tsi bir
Whisky, wine or beer
Ober loz oys di [ha]moytsi
But let’s skip the motsi [blessing on the challah]
Kum tsu mir
Come to me
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Loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
Let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Ikh hob zikh
I just went
Haynt getoyvlt
And ritually cleansed myself
In der mikve nor far dir
In the mivke just for you
Me ruft dikh a min tsadik
They say you’re really saintly
Oyneg-shabes on a shir
It’s shabes pleasure, without end
Ketsl loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
So baby let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Loz oys di [ha]moytsi, kum tsu mir
Let’s skip the motsi, come to me
Ikh hob zikh
I just went
Ayngetunken
And dipped myself
In der mikve nor far dir
In the mivke just for you
Me ruft dikh a min tsadik
They say you’re really saintly
Oyneg-shabes on a shir
It’s shabes pleasure, without end
Ketsl, loz oys di hamoytsi kum tsu mir
So baby let’s skip the motsi, come to me
This is in response to the letter from Linda Schaeffer’s Aug. 11 letter to the editor, “Americans must work together.”
The beginning of your letter gave me hope that here was someone advocating that Americans work together to make a better country.
Then you ran off the rails by condemning socialism.
Democratic socialism is what gives you Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That is not communism. It is for the people — all people who need it. It does not supersede capitalism.
It goes hand in hand with capitalism with a conscience.
Socialism is not what we have to worry about. What’s bringing our country down is capitalism without a conscience and rampant fascism disguised as patriotism (i.e. white supremacy).
If you don’t know what fascism is, I implore you to look it up in your dictionary, read an accurate account of the rise of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, and think again about what the cancer is in our beautiful United States of America.
While you are in the dictionary, look up oligarchy. It is very similar to fascism except a select few may rule rather that just one tyrant.
A fellow American, and proud of it.
Patty Lavallee
Ocean Shores
Simple solution to homelessness
While driving through the Harbor it is nearly impossible to not see at least one person experiencing homelessness.
The cost of living in our county and generally in the state is shooting sky high, you cannot find a place to live for under $1,000 a month, while the average income is $43,346 before taxes. Applying a tax rate of 22%, that is $2,817.49 a month.People are spending at least half of their monthly income on rent, let alone any other expenses like food or utilities.
What I am recommending to help our community is simple: increase the number of good jobs, expand economic democracy, rent control, and help with required expenses. These simple ideas are used across the world to create working economies, and lift people out of poverty. These solutions will not only lift people from poverty, but they will allow the state government to expand these and other local and state programs with the extra tax dollars they collect.
These programs are simple initiatives that could simply be done, so why haven’t they been done? It’s quite simple, nobody in government local, state or federal wants to do it because they are scared of angering their donors.
And this isn’t a new issue. When Huey P. Long of Louisiana did this a hundred years ago, he was impeached, then they attempted to remove him from the Senate, and finally he was murdered by a doctor in 1935 after announcing his run for president.
People who try to improve the material conditions of the average citizen have done three things; succeed, been popular, and experienced major pushback from those currently in government.
You may be asking how you can help. It’s simple. When it comes time to vote, do research and ask yourself “will this person support attempts at improving my material conditions?”
If the answer is yes, vote for them, and finally do your best to participate in mutual aid programs while we live in our current situation. The best we can do is have the people who have more than enough help those who do not have enough.
Chelsea Johnson
Hoquiam
While driving through the Harbor it is nearly impossible to not see at least one person experiencing homelessness.
The cost of living in our county and generally in the state is shooting sky high, you cannot find a place to live for under $1,000 a month, while the average income is $43,346 before taxes. Applying a tax rate of 22%, that is $2,817.49 a month.People are spending at least half of their monthly income on rent, let alone any other expenses like food or utilities.
What I am recommending to help our community is simple: increase the number of good jobs, expand economic democracy, rent control, and help with required expenses. These simple ideas are used across the world to create working economies, and lift people out of poverty. These solutions will not only lift people from poverty, but they will allow the state government to expand these and other local and state programs with the extra tax dollars they collect.
These programs are simple initiatives that could simply be done, so why haven’t they been done? It’s quite simple, nobody in government local, state or federal wants to do it because they are scared of angering their donors.
And this isn’t a new issue. When Huey P. Long of Louisiana did this a hundred years ago, he was impeached, then they attempted to remove him from the Senate, and finally he was murdered by a doctor in 1935 after announcing his run for president.
People who try to improve the material conditions of the average citizen have done three things; succeed, been popular, and experienced major pushback from those currently in government.
You may be asking how you can help. It’s simple. When it comes time to vote, do research and ask yourself “will this person support attempts at improving my material conditions?”
If the answer is yes, vote for them, and finally do your best to participate in mutual aid programs while we live in our current situation. The best we can do is have the people who have more than enough help those who do not have enough.
Chelsea Johnson
Hoquiam
Time to fund the museum
Why are we willing to spend so much on the Gateway Center when the Aberdeen Museum of History has not yet been replaced three years after the fire?
It makes sense to use the $22 million armory fire insurance settlement replacing what we lost — our Aberdeen Museum — perhaps building on the location of the former armory, or perhaps building on the location of the former Pourhouse, where the Gateway Center is proposed.
Apparently, the city has already committed $7 million of the insurance funds to build the Gateway Center, even though its purpose is rather fuzzy.
Travelers hurry through Aberdeen on their way to somewhere else, but we could provide reasons for them to stop here by building a new museum/welcome station near the Wishkah Bridge. We already have a parking lot/electric charging station there. We already have a park with picnic benches there. Travelers look for clean bathrooms with running water, which we definitely need to provide if we want tourists!
If tourists stop for those reasons, they might check out the museum and perhaps the Chamber of Commerce for information about our history and our attractions. They might decide to visit businesses we already have downtown, and they might make Aberdeen a regular stop on their way to the beaches or the mountains.
We know we will always have tourists passing though town, but we do not know if corporations will want to rent space here from the city.
Do we choose to spend insurance money attracting unknown corporations (Gateway), or do we choose to spend it enhancing travelers’ experiences here while we preserve our history (Museum)?
(RNS) — It’s a Bible verse familiar to many Christians — and even to many non-Christians who have seen John 3:16 on billboards and T-shirts or scrawled across eye black under football players’ helmets.
But Terry Wildman hopes the new translation published Tuesday (Aug. 31) by InterVarsity Press, “First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament,” will help Christians and Indigenous peoples read it again in a fresh way.
“The Great Spirit loves this world of human beings so deeply he gave us his Son — the only Son who fully represents him. All who trust in him and his way will not come to a bad end, but will have the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony,” reads the First Nations Version of the verse.
___
This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.
___
In the First Nations Version, “eternal life,” a concept unfamiliar in Native American cultures, becomes “the life of the world to come that never fades away, full of beauty and harmony.” The Greek word “cosmos,” usually translated in English as “the world,” had to be reconsidered, too: It doesn’t mean the planet Earth but how the world works and how creation lives and functions together, said Wildman, the lead translator and project manager of the First Nations Version.
They’re phrases that resonated with Wildman, changing the way he read the Bible even as he translated it for Native American readers.
“We believe it’s a gift not only to our Native people, (but) from our Native people to the dominant culture. We believe that there’s a fresh way that people can experience the story again from a Native perspective,” he said.
The idea for an Indigenous Bible translation first came to Wildman nearly 20 years ago in the storeroom of the church he pastored on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.
Wildman, who is Ojibwe and Yaqui, was excited to find a Hopi translation of the New Testament in storage. He wanted to hear how that beloved Scripture sounded in Hopi, how it translated back into English.
But, he said, while many Hopi elders still speak their native language and children now are learning it in schools, he couldn’t find anyone able to read it. That is true for many Native American nations, he added, noting that at the same time Christian missionaries were translating the Bible into Native languages, they were also working with the boarding schools in the United States and Canada that punished students for speaking those languages.
It occurred to the pastor that “since 90-plus percent of our Native people are not speaking their tribal language or reading their tribal language, we felt there needed to be a translation in English worded for Native people,” he said.
Wildman, a licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church, has been working on translating the Bible into words and concepts familiar to many Native Americans ever since.
He first began experimenting by rewording Scripture passages he was using in a prison ministry, giving them more of a “Native traditional sound,” he said — a sound he’d learned by being around Native elders and reading books written in a more traditional style of English by Native Americans like Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk.
He and his wife, Darlene, who have a music ministry called RainSong, also recorded readings of those passages over music in an album called “The Great Story from the Sacred Book.” It won a Native American Music Award in 2008 for best spoken-word album.
Wildman was encouraged by the reactions he received as he shared his rewordings across the country at tribal centers, Native American-led churches and powwows.
“They just loved listening to it because it didn’t have the church language. It didn’t have the colonial language. It had more of a Native feel to it — as much as possible that you can put in English,” he said.
Many Native people asked what Bible he was reading from.
Young people have told him it sounds like one of their elders telling them a story. Elders have said it resonates with how they heard traditional stories from their parents and grandparents.
As others encouraged him to turn his rewordings into a full translation of the Bible, Wildman published a children’s book retelling the Christmas story, “Birth of the Chosen One,” and a harmonization of the four Gospels called “When the Great Spirit Walked among Us.”
Then, on April Fool’s Day 2015, he heard from the CEO of OneBook Canada, who suggested the Bible translation organization fund his work. The offer wasn’t a prank, he said, it was “confirmation from Creator that this was something he wanted.”
“Everybody hears English a little differently,” Wildman said.
“We have all of these translations for that purpose to reach another generation, to reach a particular people group. But we had never had one for our Native people that has actually been translated into English.”
Wildman began by forming a translation council to guide the process, gathering men and women, young and old, from different Native cultures and church backgrounds. They started with a list of nearly 200 keywords Wycliffe Bible Translators said must be translated properly to get a good translation of Scripture.
With that foundation, Wildman got to work, sending drafts to the council for feedback. He looked up the original Greek text of the New Testament. He checked to see how other English translations rendered tricky passages. He consulted Dave Ohlson, a former Wycliffe translator who helped found OneBook Canada, part of the Wycliffe Global Alliance.
The Indigenous translation uses names for God common in many Native cultures, including “Great Spirit” or “Creator.” Names of biblical figures echo their original meanings in Greek and Hebrew: Jesus becomes “Creator Sets Free” and Abraham, “Father of Many Nations.”
“We believe it’s very important that the Gospel be kind of decolonized and told in a Native way, but being accurate to the meaning of the original language and understanding that it’s a different culture,” Wildman said.
Over the years, he and his council have published editions of the Gospel of Luke and Ephesians and a book called “Walking the Good Road” that included the four Gospels alongside Acts and Ephesians.
A number of ministries already have started using those translations, including Foursquare Native Ministries, Lutheran Indian Ministries, Montana Indian Ministries, Cru Nations and Native InterVarsity, he said.
Native InterVarsity, where Wildman serves as director of spiritual growth and leadership, has distributed earlier editions of the First Nations Version at conferences and used the Indigenous translation in its Bible studies for Native college students for several years.
Megan Murdock Krischke, national director of Native InterVarsity, said students have been more engaged with the translation, hearing the Bible in a way they’re used to stories being told.
“Even though it’s still English, it feels like it’s made by us for us. This is a version of Scripture that is for Native people, and it’s indigenized. You’re not having to kind of sort through the ways other cultures talk about faith and spirituality,” said Krischke, who is Wyandotte and Cherokee.
“It’s one less barrier between Native people and being able to follow Jesus.”
Earlier this month, The Jesus Film Project also released a collection of short animated films called “Retelling the Good Story,” bringing to life the stories of Jesus, or Creator Sets Free, feeding the 5,000 and walking on water from the First Nations Version.
Wildman said the response from Native peoples and ministries to the First Nations Version has exceeded any expectations he had when he first began rewording Bible passages.
He hopes it can help break down barriers between Native and non-Native peoples, too. He pointed out the suspicion and misinformation many white Christians have passed down for generations, believing Native Americans worship the devil and their cultures are evil when they share a belief in a Creator, he said.
“We hope that this will help non-Native people be more interested in our Native people — maybe the history, understanding the need for further reconciliation and things like that,” Wildman said.
“We hope that this will be part of creating a conversation that will help that process.”
Terry M. Wildman first had the idea of translating the New Testament over 20 years ago. Wildman was living on the Hopi Indian Reservation and serving as a pastor on Second Mesa when he found a Hopi translation of the New Testament in a church basement. “I couldn’t find anyone who could read from it,” he says. “And it wasn’t until much later that I discovered this was true across North America—very few Native people can read in their Native languages.”
Terry M. Wildman is the editor of the First Nations Version and director of spiritual growth and leadership development for Native InterVarsity.
At the same time, Wildman, who was also involved with jail ministry and small group ministry as well as with the church he was pastoring, struggled to teach using existing English translations of scripture, which didn’t speak to Native people or to their cultural context. “I began to experiment by rewording portions of scripture and using that in small groups,” he says. “And the response was surprising. The men and women began to interact more, to ask meaningful questions, and to relate more to what we were reading.”
Over two decades later, this small project that began in a church basement became the First Nations Version, an English retelling of the New Testament that seeks to connect scripture with the lived out reality of Native people around North America. As the introduction to the book says, the book “is not a word-for-word translation, but rather a thought-for-thought translation.” It is the New Testament retold in language that echoes oral storytelling: “This way of speaking, with its simple yet profound beauty and rich cultural idioms, still resonates in the hearts of Native people,” the book’s translation council writes.
What inspired this project?
I guess you could say that it started while my wife and I were living on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northern Arizona, on Second Mesa. I was pastoring a small church there and wanted to have a contextual approach to sharing the gospel, or the good story as we call it.
We did a lot of jail ministry on the Hopi Rez. When I brought the New International Version (NIV) Bible we used to the jail—we used to jokingly call the NIV the “New Indian Version”—I watched how the Native people I met with responded to this version. I felt like there was something missing, a gap between the scripture and people’s experiences.
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I began to search for translations that were more relevant to Native people, but I didn’t find anything. I found a Hopi Bible translation of the New Testament in the church storage room that wasn’t being used. In the five years I lived on the Hopi Rez I couldn’t even find anyone who could read it.
This is why it was really important to me to offer a Native translation of scripture in English. Ninety-five percent of Native people don’t speak their language. Of the ones who do, very few can actually read it. This is because of missionary efforts: While they were translating the Bible into our Native languages, they were also taking these languages away from us.
God blesses our Native people, who have been historically outcast, even within Christianity.
I eventually found a Native American–led organization that had done an introduction to the New Testament. In it they use different kinds of wording. They call God the “Great Spirit,” for example, and use other terminology that resonates in the hearts of Native people. I thought to myself, “Well, we need something like this.”
At first I wasn’t even thinking of a new translation. I simply wanted a new way to present the gospel. My wife and I are musicians, so we decided to create a CD, The Great Story from the Sacred Book, that included the story from creation to Christ condensed into about 15 minutes. Well, that CD became very sought after by Native people. It was our bestseller online and even won the Native American Music Award in 2009 for best spoken word production.
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At this point, I felt like we were on the right track. We were expressing the story of Jesus in a Native-friendly way. From there I began to reword some of my favorite parts of the New Testament and use these rewordings in small meetings. And, again, I got really good feedback: Afterward, people would ask a lot of questions about the scripture, which had never happened before. They would say, “Oh, I understand this better now!”
But even after this, I didn’t think of doing a complete translation. It took years and years of using these small portions of scripture and getting feedback to finally convince me to work on this book, even though I felt like, “Who am I, who’s Terry Wildman, to do a translation of the New Testament?”
It was a long process. In 2002 we started getting the seeds of this idea, but it wasn’t until around 2012 that I actually committed to the process.
Often we hear that to understand scripture you need to understand the original context. But what you’re doing is the opposite: placing scripture within a unique cultural context.
Absolutely. A lot of people don’t think about this, but the New Testament is a translation from the beginning. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, so any time manuscripts have him speaking in anything but Aramaic, that’s a translation. The first time the gospel is preached it’s on Pentecost by Jewish people who are all speaking in different languages. When the apostles publicly preach the gospels after the resurrection, they don’t speak it in Hebrew but in the languages of the people to whom they are speaking. All of these are signs that God wants the good news to be spoken in other languages, because God knows how meaningful it is to hear scripture in your own language.
With the First Nations Version, it’s not actually in our native language but worded in a way that resonates with us. As one Native elder told me, “You say the words in English the way we think them in our language.” That was our goal, and it’s been so wonderful to feel like we’re reaching this goal.
What was the translation process like?
When I started working on this with OneBook Canada and Wycliffe Associates, both of which are Bible translation organizations, they encouraged me to put together a translation council.
So I started contacting people I had met from my many years of traveling all over Turtle Island, as we call North America. I was looking for Native men and women, young and old people to participate. Eventually I had gathered 12 people, and we determined how to proceed together.
There are about 185 keywords that Bible translators say you need to get right in any translation. We started with these keywords. We wanted to find words that were not from the Euro-American background of most Bible translations. We wanted them to be words that are relevant to Native people and that connect to our culture. So we translated Lord as “chief,” hell as “the Valley of Smoldering Fire,” and Jerusalem as “Village of Peace.”
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After we did the initial rewording, we had teams of reviewers offer feedback using Google Docs. Everything was virtual: Yet I look back and we didn’t even have Zoom for most of the time.
Do you have a book or story that was your favorite to work on?
I was raised theologically on Paul, and I’m repentant to say that Jesus was sort of secondary to Paul in my theology: I would interpret Jesus from Paul instead of the other way around. But during this whole process I became so familiar and immersed in the story of Jesus, in what he said and how he said it, that the gospels became my favorite part of the Bible.
I loved translating the Sermon on the Mount. It’s kind of the best of Jesus, who we call “Creator Sets Free” in our translation. It’s basically the meaning of his name with a little bit of Native spin—instead of “God saves,” “Creator Sets Free.”
You say the words in English the way we think them in our language.
A Native elder, commenting on the First Nations Version
I think what Matthew was trying to get across in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Beatitudes was God’s blessing. In our translation we decided that instead of saying, “Blessed are the poor,” for example, we’d say, “Creator’s blessing rests on the poor.” In other words, this is who God blesses: the poor and the outcast. God blesses our Native people, who have historically been poor and somewhat outcast, even within Christianity. A couple verses later, in Matthew 5:5, the NIV reads, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” We translated this as, “Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.”
Through the process of rewording these passages, the scripture really started to come alive in a new way, both to myself and to our reviewers. It was so easy to relate to these passages in a way that it hadn’t been previously.
Where did the translation of Mary, “Bitter Tears,” come from?
Mary’s name was a challenge. The Hebrew name can have many different roots. We were drawn to the story in Luke where Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple and Simon tells her, “A sword will pierce your own soul too” (2:35, NIV). We thought about how Mary is affected by what happens to Jesus. So we went back to the Hebrew root of mara, which means “bitter.” As we continued to research this word’s roots, there was also a sense of salt water connected to the word.
“Bitter Tears” for the mother of Jesus worked out really well. It captures the bitter heartbreak she would feel and how she stands out from every other Bible character as specially chosen.
But then there are so many Marys in the New Testament. We decided to give each one the same basic name but change it a little bit to designate which Mary is being spoken of. Mary Magdalene becomes “Strong Tears,” Mary the sister of Martha becomes “Healing Tears,” etc.
Were there any passages that were especially difficult to translate?
The narrative portions of the New Testament were easier to translate because of the storytelling. When we got into Paul’s theological books, it got a little more difficult. I think both I and the other reviewers had an especially difficult time with 1 and 2 Corinthians. Some of it was Paul’s paragraph-long sentences: He just never stopped. And that’s not how our Native people speak. When we tried to cut down the passages into smaller sentences, there was only so much we could do without getting too redundant.
Even though this is a translation, maybe the first one made by Native people and primarily for Natives, it’s also a gift from Native people to the dominant culture.
There were also some cultural challenges with 1 and 2 Corinthians: women having their heads covered and things like that. We imagined how within our own Native cultures we have different ways of doing things. In the eastern part of the United States, for example, women never sit on the big drum; they stand behind the men. Women in the powwow wear a blanket or something over their shoulders, and it is considered inappropriate for them not to have one while dancing in the circle. So in that passage we put an explanation in italics to give some context to what Paul might have been talking about—maybe it was a cultural practice. It was something that was specific to his particular location: Like one of our Native practices, it wasn’t something that is true for all people in all times and for all tribes.
Who do you hope will use this translation?
I think the book speaks to people in many different ways. Even though this is a translation, maybe the first one made by Native people and primarily for Natives, it’s also a gift from Native people to the dominant culture. I’ve spoken to theologians, Greek scholars, and everyday people who tell me it really speaks to them. I’ve had people who are on all ends of the theological spectrum, from progressive to conservative, tell me that it brings a fresh approach to the scripture.
I was told that two young Native women from the Soboba Indian Reservation in California got an early copy of the book and cried. They said, “Someone really cares about us Native people to do a translation like this.” Just the fact that someone had bothered to do this was so meaningful to them.
We are working on an audio book of the First Nations Version, which will make this content accessible in another way to even more people. We’ve also worked with the Jesus Film Project to create a film based on our translation. It’s an animated version of Matthew 14, of Jesus feeding the 5,000 and Peter walking on the water. We tried to blend Native aspects of the story with its original context, so we’re hoping this version will introduce people to the First Nations Version to help them see Jesus in a different cultural context.
This article also appears in the September 2021 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 86, No. 9, pages 22-25). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
