The most vibrant night sky that I have ever seen was after a day-long hike into the Burmese mountains. I had no idea that so many stars could be seen to the naked eye—the sky was full and radiant with them. I finally had an understanding of why ancient peoples would have studied the stars and created constellations. During seminary, I was introduced to the concept of viewing the world (and history) constellationally, a phrase referenced in Teju Cole’s article in The Atlantic called “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” Cole uses the phrase in relation to a critique of New York Times’ columnist, Nicolas Krisof, whose humanitarian efforts, while good-hearted, do not allow him to “connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated ‘disasters.’”1 Much of our Biblical literature points us to the light in order to see clearly, but I invite you to walk into the darkness with me in order to see more fully. The metaphor of viewing the world, culture, and systems constellationally honors the depth and breadth of history, peoples, ideas, and images that can be hidden from view by the dominating systems. Choosing to leave the manufactured light, the systems of oppression, and head into the darkness led me to a cross-cultural experience with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Winnipeg, Ontario that focused on the history and present realities of First Nations, Indigenous peoples.
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an organization that “places teams at the invitation of local peacemaking communities that are confronting situations of lethal conflict. These teams support and amplify the voices of local peacemakers who risk injury and death by waging nonviolent direct action to confront systems of violence and oppression.”2 CPT was started by “members of the historic peace churches (Church of the Brethren, Mennonite, and Friends/Quakers)” in the 1980s.3 It grew from a call, made by Ron Sider, at a Mennonite World Conference which resulted in the conference issuing the “’Techny Call’ for ‘more active peacemaking’ and ‘new forms of public witness’ through the establishment of Christian Peacemaker Teams in Canada and the U.S.”4 CPT has grown over the years from offering peacemaking delegations and training to trained full-time corps who reside in conflict zones.
In addition to having a full-time peacemaking presence, CPT offers 10-day delegations to the different areas where they provide a peaceful, supportive presence. I joined a delegation focused on their work with Indgenous Peoples Solidarity. My public education in Virginia granted me trips to Jamestown, highlighting wigwams and reconstructions of villages, but offered no real conversation on where native peoples are today. The public education system, from my east coast experience, taught that all native peoples and tribes were wiped out or pushed west. However, currently, there are nine native tribes with state recognition in Virginia. I was aware there was a big gap between my limited, mythologized understanding of the history and lived experiences of Native Americans in North America and the realities that were waiting to be revealed to me if I was only brave enough to enter the darkness.
Entering into the depth of our privilege, unveiling beloved myths in our history, and truly seeing present oppression is hard to enter into. The darkness can feel scary and void. These conversations with Indigenous people, scholars, elders, and allies are hard and our task is to listen. This journey is not an easy one and it takes a willingness, a sense of bravery and humility to begin and enter in. Waziyatawin (Dakota) notes that “even the most well-intentioned liberal Christians often cannot deal with criticism and instead seek to silence or eliminate those who challenge their perspectives.”5 Seeking to be a supportive ally is not enough and intentional self-work must be done. However, when we do embark on this journey and submit ourselves to the black night—the vastness of understanding and the intricacies of these complex situations are open to us and we can truly begin to understand our place in the cosmos of things. It is worth the painful day-long hike into the mountains and it is worth the months and years of wrestling with privilege, history, and sin to see the constellation of stars unfolding before you.
The Christian Peacemaker Teams Indigenous Peoples Solidarity trip began in Winnipeg, Ontario with a visit and a walk with the Bear Clan. Save for Monday and Tuesday, the Bear Clan Patrol is systematically walking the streets of the North End of Winnipeg where there is a concentration of Indigenous poverty. For three hours, we roamed the streets handing out candy and fruit, greeting every person, and picking up needles or harmful drug paraphernalia. The Bear Clan walks the streets to help create smaller, safer communities—through removing dangerous needles, building community, acting as first responders, and diffusing conflict. Bear Clan members have a vested interest in keeping the police away from disputes because “Native men tend to be incarcerated at five to six times the average rate for the state, nearly ten times the average for whites.”6 Bear Clan, as their leader James told us, was a tribal clan that was tasked with protecting the tribe and community. Bear Clan in Winnipeg is trying to do that in more ways than one.
A young woman we talked to asked our leader, James, if he’d go into a convenience store and buy her a coffee. While James was inside, we talked with the woman. She was a native woman from Thunder Bay in Ontario, which is where the rest of her family was located. She was intoxicated as she talked with us—sharing about her sister who went missing and the police’s inability to begin a timely search. The young woman’s story is not unique—a thousand native women have been victims of violence and have gone missing or been murdered. There is a phrase that I would hear throughout the rest of the trip talking about this phenomenon: “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” The woman’s complaint about the police’s slow movement to help look for her sister is a common one. According to the Washington Post, the frequent complaint from “native communities is that police don’t investigate deaths in their communities with the same rigor as crimes against other Canadians and often classify suspicious deaths as suicides or the result of natural causes.”7 The woman’s sister had fallen prey to the same neglect and was found dead three days later.
During the fall of 2021, the news was saturated by the story of a young, white woman named Gabby Petito. Her disappearance captivated national audiences with nonstop media coverage and sparked a social media frenzy. Petito disappeared in Wyoming, where 710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, were reported missing between 2011 and 2020, according to a report from the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Task Force.8 Their report highlighted that only 30% of Indigenous victims had newspaper media coverage, compared to 51% of White homicide victims.9 A report from the National Crime Information Center reports that in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database only logged 116 cases.10 There is a large discrepancy between attention, resources, and time given to White missing or murdered women compared to how much those things are lacking for Indigenous missing and murdered women.
A supernova impacting Canadian Indigenous populations is the residential school system and tales of the trauma, horror, and neglect are woven into many of our stops and conversations. During my trip in 2018, Canada was wrestling with its sordid past with residential schools through the government sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission is tasked with uplifting and telling the stories of children and families that endured the residential school system. The TRCs task is essentially wading into the darkness in order to see more clearly the connections to oppression, poverty, and racism.
The residential school system was created to teach native children English and French, Christianity, and westernize them. Canadian residential schools were inspired by the United States’ residential school system. Officials from Canada even came to tour select Indian residential schools, including the largest and most famous one in Carlisle, PA. The system seeks to fundamentally squash the “native” while saving the child by taking children from their families as early as five and sending them to boarding schools where they lived with other Indigenous children. Their hair was cut, they were forced to speak only English and they were punished for speaking their native tongue or honoring any of their native culture. The children often suffered physical, sexual, and emotional assault from teachers and priests in the schools, which were often organized by Christian denominations. When children returned home from residential schools, Taieke Alfred described the phenomenon as “if a bomb had been dropped in the middle of the village” and community members “were just salvaging the leftover pieces, just trying to stick them back together.”11 Children were devoid of family, language, and culture—tribes suffered a state-mandated cultural genocide.
In the past year, additional horrors from the residential school system have been unveiled publicly. In May, the first announcement about the remains of children being buried at residential schools surfaced revealing that the remains of 215 children had been found at one former residential school. Many children who survived the residential schools are piecing together memories of classmates going to the infirmary, but never coming back or students who disappeared or ran away. “The technology is something that has validated and corroborated what the testimonies and survivors said,” shares Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Residential School History and Dialogue Center at the University of British Columbia, in a report for NPR.12 The search for the remains of more children buried at the grounds of former residential schools continues.
As the stories of residential schools shrouded me in darkness, the connection from star to star, from oppression to racism to social location was brightened. During our trip, a report was published about the lack of nutritious food at the residential schools and the malnutrition that children suffered there.13 The ways in which the fall-out from residential schools continues to impact Indigenous generations is still being made known, but has exhibited itself through “increased alcoholism, drug dependency, violence, suicide, and various patterns of abuse and family dysfunction.”14
Treaty 3 territory (Ontario, Canada) is made up of lakes and rivers and flowing bodies of water. Hundreds of years ago the forests were bursting with moose, the streams bouncing with fish. Our host, Judy, shared that seeing a moose now is a rare, special thing. Years ago, seeing a moose might have been like seeing deer for people in the Shenandoah Valley. They were everywhere and they made their home in the same physical space as the Grassy Narrows First Nation. The moose have all but gone after illegal logging done on the First Nations’ land. The logging operations and the community’s brave response of standing in their way is what prompted the call of Christian Peacemaker Teams to physically be in solidarity with the people of Grassy Narrows.
During one of our learning sessions with our CPT leaders, we focused on the “Ally Bill of Responsibilities” created by Dr. Lynn Gehl, Algonquin Anishnaabe-kwe. Dr. Gehl lists 16 responsibilities that a good ally will adhere to and respect. It was not until we were walking through the remnants of the encampment site used by CPTers and Grassy Narrows members that I fully understood point 14: “Do not take up the space and resources, physical and financial, of the oppressed group.”15 Stepping into the tarped A-frame, with two wooden bunks and a wood stove, I realized—true allies lived in this lean-to. True allies who were willing to put their very bodies at the same level of risk as the oppressed had stoked this fire and awoken each morning to form a human blockade with their native brothers and sisters. They had provided for themselves and not deprived Grassy Narrows of resources or time, but had devoted their own time, resilience, and initiative.
Christian Peacemaker Teams continues to practice solidarity with Grassy Narrows and other First Nations in Canada through attending and planning rallies, amplifying legislation that is pro-Indigenous rights, leading educational trips, and advocating for First Nations rights to the public. Judy shared that while the CPTers and Grassy Narrows members were able to force the loggers to leave, she’s confident they are somewhere else doing the same thing. Not only did this Nation have to put their bodies on the line for their trees and land, but their bodies are physically poisoned by industrial maleficence and negligence. In the 1960s, a paper mill in Dryden, Ont. began dumping mercury waste into the Wabigoon river upstream from Grassy Narrows, which is surrounded by water. For decades, the community had no idea and unknowingly, ingested fish with deposits of mercury in their system which has led to mercury poisoning of their members. Shortly after my trip, I learned that the Federal Government has finally pledged to provide Grassy Narrows with a mercury care facility so that community members do not need to travel to Winnipeg or Kenora, Ont. to receive care.16
As a white woman, I have had the privilege of growing up in a bright world blind to dark parts of our collective past and present, which can only be viewed by entering into dark, difficult spaces. With only the pinpricks of starlight, I can see how oppressive systems and ideologies have connected into blazing constellations of oppression for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. My seminary trip with Christian Peacemaker Teams was one intentional trip into the dark parts of history to gain a better understanding of how our current realities were not created in a vacuum. My trip centered on the experiences of First Nations tribes in Canada, but the experiences of Indigenous people in the United States are a similar if not more harrowing story. A personal trip was a powerful way to experience and learn these things, but there are so many avenues for education and allyship around a greater understanding of oppression and how we can resist them, in order to support and center the stories of People of Color. As we all continue our journeys into dark places in order to find the points of connectings and illuminate the sky with constellations of understanding, I suggest a few avenues forward if you would like to take steps in understanding the Indigenous experience in North America.
Thanksgiving: Did you know that Indigenous peoples in New England consider Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning in their community? If both Native Americans and pilgrims had a great first Thanksgiving, why would that be? I challenge you to read about the origins of the first Thanksgiving and what followed after that. Learn about the Wampanoag tribe present at the first Thanksgiving and their history as a federally recognized tribe today. Read from an Indigenous people’s perspective: like Alli Joseph’s “Thanksgiving, a day of mourning for Native Americans” published in 2016 by Salon.
Columbus Day: This year, President Biden named Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a federally recognized holiday. This was a holiday Indigenous Peoples and allies were celebrating before it was recognized in 2021 in order to honor the people who were not “discovered” but were already here. Look for celebrations locally that honor Indigenous People’s Day and educate yourself around the lived experiences of Indigenous people today.
Having seen the constellations of oppression and the stars of colonization and white supremacy that burn in the dark skies, one cannot return to the scriptures the same. We are challenged to read the scriptures with new eyes—placing ourselves among the Egyptians and not the Hebrews in the Exodus story, “knowing that our God is at work on the side of those we have murdered, oppressed, and deprived of dignity and self-determination and that their liberation will cost us.”17 Awakened to the connections that modern society and popular culture have tried to hide from us—shrouded in a bright haze—I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words that “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”18 What I have seen in the darkness journeys with me and I continue to make sense of the stars that dot the night sky, the stories that have been forgotten and stamped out. I continue to strive to spend time in the darkness—educating myself and discerning my place in fighting oppression and harmful stereotypes that reduce people to objects—knowing full well that my privilege could allow me to sit dumbly in the light pollution propaganda hiding the truth.
- Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843.
- Christian Peacemaker Teams, https://www.cpt.org/about.
- Christian Peacemaker Teams, https://www.cpt.org/about/history/origins.
- https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Christian_Peacemaker_Teams
- Waziyatawin, “A Serpent in the garden: an unholy worldview on sacred land,” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 2013), 224.
- Frances Kaye, “Where Creation Was Begun: NASCA and Indigenous Regeneration” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 2013), 64.
- Alan Freeman, “The mystery of 1,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada,” The Washington Post, August 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/04/the-mystery-of-1000-missing-and-murdered-Indigenous-women-in-canada/?utm_term=.768b2a7c7441.
- https://wysac.uwyo.edu/wysac/reports/View/7713, page 5
- Ibid.
- http://www.uihi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Missing-and-Murdered-Indigenous-Women-and-Girls-Report.pdf
- Taiaiake Alfred, “Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto,” (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2009,) 32.
- https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043156113/canada-Indigenous-children-residential-school-burial-search
- Kate Kyle, “CMAJ article links hunger in residential schools to Type 2 Diabetes, obesity,” CBC News, August 13, 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/residential-school-hunger-disease-1.4244432.
- Neil Funk-Unrau, “Small Steps Toward Reconciliation: how do we get there from here?,” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, ed. Steve Heinrichs, (Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 2013), 79.
- Lynn Gehl, “Ally Bill of Responsibilities,” received during the trip but can be accessed on Dr. Lynn Gehls’ website, https://www.lynngehl.com/ally-bill-of-responsibilities.html.
- The Canadian Press, “Federal Government pledges to fund mercury treatment facility in Grassy Narrows,” The Star, November 29, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/11/29/federal-government-pledges-to-fund-mercury-treatment-facility-in-grassy-narrows.html.
- Dave Diewert, “White Settler Christians, the Bible, and (De)colonization,” Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, ed. Steve Heinrichs, (Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 2013), 135.
- 1 Corinthians 12:13, NRSV.
Questions to Ask
- On whose land do you live? What are the stories of those tribes?
- To get started, check out: https://www.whose.land/en/ and https://native-land.ca/
- Are there local, native tribes where you live?
- Do you have state or federally recognized tribes nearby?
Educate and Activate Yourself
- Read “An Indgienous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- Read more about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
- Read more about the Residential School System in the US and Canada.
- Read about Indigenous’ activism around Pipeline 3 (Similar to the ways in which Indigenous peoples sought to protect their lands from illegal logging, Indigenous people in the United States are actively trying to protect their people and land from the harmful effects of pipelines. Join them.)
- Book Ted & Company to do a show of “We Own This Now” a moving production on the Doctrine of Discovery
- Introduce a Land Acknowledgement into your church worship or events. Find video examples on whose.land
Check out additional articles from Brethren Life and Thought on Similar Topics
- “For Courage and Healing: A Reflection on Training with Christian Peacemaker Teams” by Jennifer Keeney Scarr
- “Book Review: Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto” by Tim Heishman
Katie Heishman is an ordained clergywoman, mom to Phoebe, and life partner to Tim. She is passionate about seeking and living into God’s justice and shalom in the world. She and her family reside on the Native lands of the Hopewell, Adena, Myaamia, Shawnandasse, Osage, and Kaskaskia tribes which are known right now as Dayton, OH.