Is Genesis Revolutionizing the Culture?

Is Native American history relevant to Genesis? Yes. And in ways I never dreamed possible!

Today, in our culture, Genesis is treated as highly irrelevant to history. It’s roundly rejected by the PhD community. They don’t invoke it when trying to understand Native American history.

Why not? I recently learned a simple answer: Evolution is all that 99% of college students are taught.1

This doesn’t explain how Genesis is relevant to Native American history. But it gets us closer.

Let’s ask another question: Why do 99% of college students hear only evolution? Because federal and Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s kicked creation science out of the public schools. Why did the courts kick creation science out? The courts said that creationists don’t do science.

It turns out that creationists are doing science. And it’s Native American history that’s exhibit A.

Native American history has an Achilles’ heel for evolution.

Why does this matter? Surprisingly, Native American history has an Achilles’ heel for evolution. Mainstream science has been unable to answer basic questions like, “Who was the greatest hero in pre-European North America?” Evolution has the wrong timescale to find the answers. It lacks the tools to solve the mystery.

Recently, creationists have done genetic research within the framework of 4,500 years of human history back to Noah. These DNA discoveries have found an echo in Native American histories. Together, these two fields have begun to recover the play-by-play history for pre-European North America.

In our last article, we left the Algonquians—ancestors of the New England Native Americans and of nations like the Delaware—at the Mississippi River in the late AD 1200s. They had just been slaughtered by the Natchez. We were left wondering how they ever reached the Atlantic coast in time to meet the Pilgrims.

The Delaware history says that friends from the north came to their aid in their conflict with the Natchez.2 Who were these friends? Geographic context provides some clues.

The capital of the Natchez empire was near modern St. Louis. The ruins of Cahokia, their city of 10,000 to 15,000 people, can still be visited on the Illinois side of the river. “North” of Illinois is Wisconsin.

Who was in Wisconsin in the AD 1200s? Another indigenous history suggests an answer.

At the time of European contact, the Lakota Sioux were one of the famous tribes of the Great Plains. Several centuries earlier, their ancestors were somewhere else.

The Lakota language is part of a larger linguistic grouping, the Siouan-Catawban language family. Several tribes in this grouping possess indigenous histories. These accounts describe their ancestors residing along the Atlantic in the AD 800s. Over time, splinter groups moved westward. After Europeans arrived, the Lakota were first in what is now Minnesota, before migrating onto the Great Plains very late in history.

Figure 1. Native American nations in the Algic language family, of which the majority are Algonquian nations.

At the time of European contact, the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) nation was in Wisconsin. The Ho-Chunk are also part of the Siouan-Catawban language family. Long story short, it seems likely that Siouan-Catawban nations were in Wisconsin in the late AD 1200s—in perfect position to go south and come to the aide of the Algonquians.

Together, this alliance defeated the Natchez. The Algonquians successfully migrated east of the Mississippi and were able to reach the Atlantic. Some Siouan-Catawban nations continued south and became the Osage, Kansa, and Quapaw.

But who was the hero of this victory? The Delaware migration account tells us the name of the leader, a man appropriately named The Crusher.3

Do you see what’s happening? You’ve just read a summary of the results of creationists doing science. It’s not an arena that typically shows up in the creation-evolution debates. But it’s thoroughly grounded in the history of Genesis 1–11. And it demolishes the main reason the courts have given for keeping creation science from the eyes of students.

If this creationist success keeps up, we might eventually demolish the statistics PhDs who hold to evolution.