On Believing Your Eyes

Question Everything

Never take anything you read or images that you see at face value, especially if you agree with it.

An atheist friend - not the one I’ve talked about before - shared this meme on his page this morning, to which I responded:

True.

Christian missionaries of Europe fell into error and sin back when they were bent on converting the natives of all lands - not by the act and desire of leading others to Christ, but by making Christianity about something other than Him, His sacrifice, His resurrection and the purpose(s) thereof.  The missionaries bound up Christ in themselves and their own ethnicity. They were the original carcass worshipers.

(The second paragraph is a quote from a 2008 blog post. The author: me. I was comparing that state of affairs to Black Liberation Theology - a carcass-worshiping belief system that we learned about when one Barack H. Obama first arrived on the national scene.)

After responding, I had a gut feeling and did an image search on the face. It turns out that it’s not Tecumseh, but a man named Wayne Jackson who models/modeled for a narrative artist named Robert Griffing.

This is one of those paintings that was just meant to be.  It represents a lot of good things, from winning the best painting award at the Quest for the West show at the Eiteljorg Museum, to a spiritual happening (that involved the painting) to my friend Wayne Jackson, the Native model who posed for this portrait.  The painting had so much meaning to me that I chose it for the cover of my book. 

Mr. Griffing does nice work but this isn’t the point of my post. Had I just accepted that the portrait was one of Tecumseh, my opinion wouldn’t be any different, but how many photos and quotes do we just accept without doing a quick search that take seconds?

Of course I checked the quote and, it turns out that it is authentic and it turns out that Tecumseh had a lot of great quotes. It’s difficult to argue with any of them.

I’ve questioned the identification of a picture before. This is just another reminder to guard the entries into your mind and spirit.

One more thing: this was Tecumseh … allegedly.