Daniel and friends at the Carlisle Indian school

Abstract

This essay explores the first chapter of the Book of Daniel as an example of resistance against an empire. Using the experience of Native Americans, especially children at the Carlisle Residential Indian School, the tropes of naming, diet, and the body in Daniel 1 are read as a call to resistance and gamesmanship in the narrative environment of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the authorial context of the Selucid Hellenistic Empire. With reference to similar situations in South Africa and elsewhere, this reading of the story in Daniel 1 sees a promise of God’s support in religious fidelity accompanied by cultural code switching.