8 The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. 10 So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” 11 The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. 12 But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. 13 As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” 14 So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17 And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. 18 Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19 Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. 20 God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. 21 He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Genesis 21:8–21 (NRSVue)
With the rise in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers and the Enforcement and Removals Operations’ (ERO) actions across the US as well as the wealth of legislation passed in the aftermath of the fall of Roe v Wade on June 24, 2022, that limits and erases reproductive rights, Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, Abraham, and God hold new levels of pathos and importance in reflecting on this biblical story. I am at my core a constructive theologian, Indigenous scholar, and a woman who reads and creates my analysis based on my study and embodied experience. Womanist and feminist scholarship have interrogated the dysfunction and the promise of Hagar in her vulnerability and in her relationship to God (for example, Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness and Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror). However, I have not encountered reflection or scholarship produced from a Native North American Indian or Indigenous matriarchal perspective in the churches or the academy. As an Indigenous woman, this is my attempt to view this scripture through the lens of theology and to my understanding of Native Matriarchy’s perspectives.
The story of this maladjusted situationship between a God who promises land and lineage to the patriarch, Abraham, and Sarah, his wife, is complicated by the demands of patriarchal expectations and a history of infertility, coupled with the realities of aging. These problems lead Sarah and Abraham to force a pregnancy on their slave girl, Hagar. After running away to the desert from the abusive treatment of Sarah and Abraham, Hagar is told by God to return to her patriarchal residence for the safety of the child. Back in patriarchal custody, Hagar continues her servitude under duress after having a son, Ishmael. The precarity of Hagar and Ishmael’s existence is further complicated by the birth of Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac. Hagar and Ishmael are viewed with suspicion as time passes and concern rises over God’s promised land and legacy of nationhood. Sarah and Abraham decide to send Ishmael away with his mother, while God promises to grant them safety somewhere else. The story concludes with Hagar departing under the care of her now young adult son, as she helps him find a wife of his own to live out his destiny.
The themes of chosen-ness and reward for being faithful to God even at great expense to oneself are often lauded in more antiquated interpretations. The agency and resilience of an enslaved woman and God’s movement toward justice for Hagar and thus all of humanity are also often cited as resolutions for a discomforting story. The tendency is to invite the reader to lament the primitive nature of social structures of the past and congratulate themselves on the evolution of human rights in our time. Our times, however, also belie this comfort because those rights are not just historic but also seen in our contemporary reality in the way black and brown bodies are policed, coerced, and exploited by forces of power and privilege.
Reading this story, parallels may be drawn between the experiences of Native American Women with Hagar, including the theme of theological anthropology and the biopolitics surrounding her work, value, and reproductive capacities. God sets the expectations for which human beings will command privilege and social power by making a promise for land acquisition and nationhood based on Abraham’s paternity. Sarah is a participant, even if resentfully so, in the impregnation and control of a slave woman’s body, without regard to Hagar or Ishmael’s personhood. In an American Indian retelling of this story, God’s promise could be recast as the rhetoric of Settler Colonialism and White Christian Nationalism in their insistence on asserting the rights of Euro-Americans to possess all the land, resources, and privileges of authentic, exclusive citizenship. The challenge of black and brown bodies becomes one of population control and sexualized violence in the management of Native women’s agency and autonomy.
Materially, the promise of belonging and safety is undermined by illusions of white supremacy and delusions of Divine sanction. This kind of self deception also is an indictment of Abraham and Sarah as collaborators through their actions in the forced pregnancy, ongoing subjugation of, and ultimate expulsion of Hagar and her offspring. Contemporary reality reminds of the documented history of militarily deployed tactics of genocide, the forced institutionalization of Native American children in boarding schools, the enslavement of Native Women through the mass for-profit incarceration systems, experiences of forced removal and detention, the high rates of under- and uninvestigated Missing and Murdered Women and children statistics, domestic abuse data, and the forced sterilization of Native Women into the Twentieth Century—all of which resonates with the experiences of Hagar. The ICE detention centers are filled with citizens and nonviolent migrants who are also currently experiencing the effects of a loss of their humanity, agency, and dignity that is not alien to Indigenous Peoples’ lived trauma. Contemporary Native American women and children also find themselves racially profiled by US Homeland Security agents. Like Hagar and her son, Native Peoples know what it is to live and die at the whims of a promise gone wrong because of an avaricious thirst for God’s blessing of land and legacy.
The dilemma for the faithful reader is how to avoid being complicit in the systems that regulate and standardize the persecution the human beings at this moment and in this professed land of freedom. Life and death are at a critical tipping point in the United States. To be faithful to God’s promised covenant for communal flourishing, faith communities must reject the recycled rhetoric of “blood and soil” that is rapidly turning white supremacy into normalized governmental policy and practice.
[Suggested further reading: Sarah Deer, The Beginning and the End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (University of Minneapolis Press), 2015; Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (University of Nebraska Press), 2009; Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press), 2019.]
