day of repentance
October 10, 2008
Prayers, tears and song mark Episcopal repentance for slavery
[Episcopal News Service] Expressing “profound regret that the Episcopal Church lent the institution of slavery its support and justification based on Scripture,” Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori issued a public apology October 4 for the church’s involvement in the institution of transatlantic slavery.
She went on to state that “after slavery was formally abolished, [the church] continued for at least a century to support de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination.”
The historic gesture of remorse drew hundreds of Episcopalians, both black and white, to St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia October 3-4 for the Day of Repentance — a two-day solemn observance which included presentations that examined racism in the past, present, and future. Jefferts Schori’s complete homily is here.
“It is an immense honor and joy for St. Thomas to host this two-day solemn observance and most fitting that it is being held here at the nation’s first black Episcopal church,” said the Rev. Martini Shaw, rector of St. Thomas.
St. Thomas, founded in 1792 by the Rev. Absalom Jones, a former slave, is the oldest African American Episcopal Church in the United States and the first black church in Philadelphia. Jones was the first person of African ancestry to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. He and Richard Allen, the nation’s first African-American Methodist preacher, changed history when they initiated a walkout from St. George’s Methodist Church after blacks were denied full membership.
Bonnie Anderson, president of the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies (the national legislative house that includes clergy and lay members), was in attendance for both days and said, “This is an amazing day that has been long in coming.”
However she emphasized that although “this is a great start to a new beginning,” no one should view it as being over. Understanding that the “work is hard” and can be emotional she stressed that “it must continue” for the betterment of the Episcopal Church.
“Our coming together shows that this is not an Episcopal problem, nor a Christian problem, but a human problem,” explained the Rev. Jayne Oasin, program officer for Anti-Racism and Gender Equality for the Episcopal Church. “We are saying that we have marginalized and oppressed others, and have not regarded every one as God’s equal creation but we’re not going to be that way anymore.”
Seventeen bishops participated in the event which welcomed the following ecumenical partners: Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Unitarian Universalist and Christian Methodist.
Bob Brundige, of St. Elizabeth Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey said he felt strongly that an “apology” was not enough and what was missing from this event was some form of reparations which he felt was owed to African-Americans by the Episcopal Church for its involvement in and support of slavery and segregation. He suggested the creation of scholarships for black students to attend seminary and/or college as one type of reparation.
Karen Hardwick of the Diocese of Washington said that the question of reparations is “the hard part. It’s virtually impossible to measure injustice and the damages that flow from slavery,” she said.
Bishop Eugene Sutton, the first African American bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, called it “an emotional day.”
“It’s part of a year of turning the clock forward in Maryland and continuing the work of fighting intolerance,” he said.
Sutton, a descendant of slaves, was referring to the stain on a diocese that was first led by Thomas John Claggett, the first bishop consecrated on American soil, who owned slaves while serving as the rector of St. James’ Parish in Ann Arundel County.
Through tears Loretto VanGrasstek, 72, of Church of the Ascension in Stillwater, Minnesota, said, “I cried from the moment I sat down to the last song we sang.”
Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, VanGrasstek of Creole and Choctaw descent, said, “It’s overwhelming to hear white people admit the things I’d only heard my grandmother speak of.”
Loretto’s husband Skye said when his wife recalls the memories of her great grandmother Josephine Starks, a former slave who lived to be 113 years old, she remembers brushing her hair and asking where the “ridges” she felt on her back came from and the answer would always be that “master beat her” sometimes “cause she had done something wrong and sometimes cause he just felt like it.”
At the other end of the spectrum is Skye who discovered four years ago that his great, great, great uncle was a slave trader in the Caribbean in the early 1800s.
Skye said despite the commonality of Loretto’s family “living with the brutality of the Ku Klux Klan and his living under Nazi brutality in Amsterdam during World War II” he is “taking care of Loretto so everything just comes around.”
In this year marking the 200th anniversary of the abolishment of slavery, John Vanderstar, Executive Council member and author of the 2006 General Convention resolution A123, which called for the occasion, said that “the church needs to confront its past in order to change its future.”
Resolution A123 declared that the institution of slavery in the United States and “anywhere else in the world” was and is a sin, and mandated that the church acknowledge and express regret for its support of slavery and for supporting “de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination” for years after slavery’s abolition. The resolution also asked the Presiding Bishop to call for a “Day of Repentance and Reconciliation” and to organize a service.
C. David Williams, president of the Union of Black Episcopalians, who Jefferts Schori also referred to in her homily, described the day as “sublime.”
“It [the day] was offered to God from hearts and minds of black and white people who had need for this apology and received it,” he said. “But we have a long way to go in making the apology real and I’m pledging myself to it.”
The Episcopal Church will now join other denominations and the Church of England, which in 2006 voted to acknowledge its complicity in the global slave trade.
‘Springboard for future action’
The gathering began October 3 with three presentations entitled “Revisiting the Past”, “Taking Action in the Present” and “Charting a Course for the Future.” Presenters included the Rev. Dr. Harold Lewis, rector, Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh, and author of “Yet With a Steady Beat” the foundational book about African Americans and the Episcopal Church; Bishop Chip Marble, assisting bishop in the Diocese of North Carolina; Dr. Anita George, chairperson of the Executive Council Anti-Racism Committee; and Byron Rushing, member of the Massachusetts State Legislature.
In his address “Bend our Pride to thy Control: The Need of the Church to Repent for the Sin of Slavery and its Aftermath” Lewis described slavery as “that odious institution” that has been a virulent cancer that has “metastasized through the bloodstream of our society.”
“The church early on could have assumed the role of that of physician, placing herself in a position to ‘heal the sin-sick soul’ of the society to which she ministered, assuring its people that there is indeed a balm in Gilead,” he explained. “Instead, she allowed herself to be infected along with her patient, rendering herself unable to be of any assistance.”
Marble and George acted as moderators while the dioceses of Delaware, Maryland, Atlanta, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina and South East Florida reported on the current work toward racial healing happening in their dioceses.
Nearly all mentioned using the documentary film, “Traces of the Trade,” by independent filmmaker Katrina Browne as an educational tool. The movie tells the story of Browne’s New England ancestors, the DeWolfs, the most-active slave-trading family in the United States and prominent Episcopalians from Rhode Island.
Browne said Jefferts Schori’s mention of her film in the homily “was an honor.”
“What has been striking about the power of the film is how it seems to resonate with people’s truth,” she said.
In speaking on the future, Rushing told those present that “the course for a future of awareness of the foundation of slavery to our society winds through remorse.” He said that remorse, as opposed to apology, “requires truth today and tomorrow mark the public announcement of this winding course.”
“Nothing is being accomplished by us today except beginning,” he explained.
Ed Rodman, professor of Pastoral Theology and Urban Ministry at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, summed up all three topics of discussion and said “vision only comes when you learn your history.”
“What would make me most proud is if people draw from this event and use it as a springboard for future action,” said Oasin.
She said a DVD will be available in a month but programs of the gathering will be distributed to dioceses in the coming weeks.
churches evicted
October 10, 2008
This is an email I just recieved from the Boarding School Healing Project that I thought worth sharing.
Update from Kevin Annett and The International Human Rights Tribunal
into Genocide in Canada
Oct. 05, 2008 – Squamish Nation Territory Greetings from the
ancestral land of Chief Kiapilano and his people!
This morning, groups of residential school survivors will be posting and
distributing notices at all of the main downtown churches in
“Vancouver”, declaring to the officials and members of the Catholic,
Anglican and United churches that they are illegally trespassing on
Squamish Nation land and are now subject to arrest and imprisonment
under both Squamish and British Columbia law. (see statement at right)
This bold act is a sign of the times, of how far some survivors have
evolved in their campaign to win justice from the churches that murdered
50,000 innocent children.
“It’s time for the churches that killed our people to get off our land”
hereditary Squamish Chief Kiapilano declared last March, when he
formally evicted the “Gang of Three” (Catholic, Anglican, United)
churches from his territory, which encompasses all of Vancouver, the
north shore and Whistler, the site of the 2010 Olympics.
Chief Kiapilano commented yesterday,
“We’re tired of waiting for the churches to be held accountable for all
their crimes, because they never will be unless we do it. So I’ve
declared the convening of traditional Squamish courts of justice in
which we’ll put on trial the heads of these churches and known offenders
at residential schools.
“The trials start immediately. We will be issuing arrest warrants
against the church officials. I am calling on other hereditary chiefs
will do the same thing on their territories: evict the murderers from
your land and bring them to trial!”
Chief Kiapilano is not acting alone. More than two dozen groups are now
working across “Canada” in conjunction with Chief Kiapilano and our
International Human Rights Tribunal, which has arisen as an alternative
to the phoney, toothless, government-run “Truth and Reconciliation
Commission” (TRC) into residential schools. (The TRC has no power to
subpoena, prohibits people from naming names or even describing a
wrongdoing at a residential school, will not conduct any criminal
investigation, and was set up by the very churches that ran the
schools!).
Our Tribunal has been recognized by a host of indigenous groups in
Guatemala, the Philippines, Mexico and Europe, some of whom will be
sending international observers to our forums and investigations over
the next year, especially as we begin to unearth the forensic evidence
in mass graves near former Indian residential schools.
In a nutshell, the direction of our campaign now has three main foci:
1. Create a counter-Tribunal to the government’s “TRC” that will hold
alternative hearings to the TRC forums, and will publish a “Counter
Report” to the TRC’s anticipated whitewash of residential school crimes.
(At our forums, we will encourage people to name names, and provide
evidence of all the crimes that went on in the schools).
2. Identify and repatriate the buried remains of the children who died
in all the Indian residential schools.
3. Evict the Catholic, Anglican and United Church from all indigenous
territories across Canada, reclaim their buildings, and establish in
them aboriginal courts of justice where known offenders and the
fiduciary head officers of these churches, the RCMP and the government
of Canada will be tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity,
including murder.
If this sounds like a tall order, know that actions are already
happening in many territories to bring about this sovereignty and direct
justice. (We can’t say where and how, quite yet, for security reasons,
but if you write or call me I will put you in touch with organizers in
your area, who will tell you more!)
Our strength lies on the ground, in our communities, among the survivors
and their families who know that they have been used and abandoned by
the whorish “Assembly of First Nations” (AFN) and other puppet native
politicians, who serve the government and the churches first and last.
It’s among these survivors that I have been travelling, speaking, and
organizing throughout 2008, in five separate tours across Canada and the
USA. I’ve also been to Europe, where we are rallying forces to support
our International Tribunal, and bring charges against Canada and its
churches at the UN and other bodies.
It’s because of this grassroots movement that the government caved in
last year, and began admitting that thousands of children died in the
residential schools. We have forced the feds and the churches to the
wall, and they are doing their best now to bury their guilt (with help
from the AFN) and worm their way out of any responsibility for the mass
murder that Steven Harper admitted to publicly in his “apology” last
June 11 in Parliament.
It’s up to us to prevent them from getting away with the biggest crime
in Canadian, and world, history.
Someone asked me today is I was going to vote in the Canadian election,
or speak up at all candidates’ meetings about the Canadian Holocaust.
I replied by saying,
“Why would I vote for the system that is murdering my friends every
day?”
(Yesterday, I met Harry Wilson, an Alberni residential school survivor,
who told me that three of his family have overdosed and died after
receiving their paltry “compensation” for years of torture in the
Alberni United Church school).
The murder goes on. But one of our best weapons is our film UNREPENTANT,
which has been seen by nearly a million people worldwide, and tells the
story of planned genocide in Canada. Please arrange a screening of it in
your community and use it to rally people to our movement. (see
www.hiddenfromhisto ry.org <http://www.hiddenfr omhistory. org/zxs> for
details of how to order and download it).
From mid October to mid November, I’ll be conducting my sixth tour of
Canada and the USA to prepare for our spring campaign. I will be
speaking and showing UNREPENTANT in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec
and the Maritimes, New York, the mid west, and California. If I can
raise the funds, I will also be speaking in Italy, Spain and Germany -
look out, Mr. Pope!
If you live in these areas, please contact me and I’ll let you know more
about my venues.
Our Tribunal needs your support, and financial help. We depend
completely on you for our work. If you can contribute anything to the
cost of my travel and the production of our film and books, please
donate through the pay pal on my website (www.hiddenfromhist ory.org) or
send a cheque made out to Lori O’Rorke to:
Lori O’Rorke
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8
(We also have a direct bank deposit system which you can use – please
ask about it).
This is a crucial time – please help us make a stand for the living and
the dead.
I hope to see many of you soon. Please reply!
Sincerely,
Kevin Annett – Eagle Strong Voice www.hiddenfromhisto ry.org
pager: 1-888-265-1007 (pager in Canada)
email: hiddenfromhistory@ yahoo.ca or kevin_annett@ hotmail.com
<http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/FirstPeopl esNews/post? postID=EkXeecTI9 Vn2\
GH8Ia718iF2yHDvtMrM J7agG8Y-RacNHYO- 26h9D0QFtCVYWz8p glA1r8SY8dj_ z88DeVaZF\
uVvK> Notice of Illegal Trespass
You are Trespassing on Squamish Nation Land , claimed by hereditary
Squamish Chief Kiapilano in a writ duly filed in the Supreme Court of
British Columbia on March 4, 2008. (Docket S036483)
Under the Trespass Law of the Province of British Columbia , you may go
to jail or be fined if you enter this building.
The Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada were legally evicted
by Chief Kiapilano from his territory in what is called Vancouver
because of their refusal to return the remains of the children who died
in their Indian residential schools.
This legal Trespass Notice is in immediate effect.
You have been duly warned.
Siem Kiapilano
Squamish Nation
Lawful Owner of these Premises.
October 5, 2008
www.hiddenfromhisto ry.org/LinkClick .aspx?link= 82&tabid= 36
<http://www.hiddenfr omhistory. org/LinkClick. aspx?link= 82&tabid= 36>
—– Teresa Anahuy
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/FirstPeopl esNews
<http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/FirstPeopl esNews>
playing in the dark
July 26, 2008
just borrowed playing in the dark by Toni Morrison from Maia. fascinating enough that it will require a reread in the near future. she writes about how american literature has required the backdrop of the unfree and unenlightened other in black people to define and create the free and independent (white) individual.
thinking about how this same structure works in relation to the missionary enterprise and the pure chosen people of the church. how necessary it is to have the heathen and the damned to define the godly and saved and how racially linked they are in white american christianity. I remember growing up with stories of africfan missionaries and the imagination of them spreading the light of the gospel in the darkness of africa, racially loaded terms for sure and I definatly remember them being passed on exactly as such. remembering too the way that judgement was passed on people who made survival decisions outside of middle class morality that was so clearly equated with christianity. morality that allows for damage done to others at a distance where there is no face allowed to those who are hurt for your benefit, but not for more immediate, and less consequential, slights like shoplifting or fudging an application for assistance.
ave maria
July 24, 2008
Ave Maria, of the third world, full of grace, all you who know pain, know the anxieties and the subhuman condition of your people, the Lord is with you, with all who suffer, who hunger and thirst for justice, who know neither letters nor figures.
Blessed are you among women, the women of the roads and pueblos, of furrowed faces, of brawny muscles, of calloused hands of forlorn eyes, but with hope.
Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Because without him, our life and the struggle for human dignity has no meaning.
Sancta Maria, all of you holy, a thousand time holy, by your lives,by the times you carry water, that you smudge your face at the hearth, trusting and hoping in God. He has made you Mother of Goid.
Pray for us sinners, for it is our fault, in one way or another by our egoism and envy, that you joined with the rest of the women and men of the poor, the third world, suffer misery, totalitarian governments,economic repression,wars and blood and hatred.
Now, so that we change, so that there will be a conversion of heart and of all men and women towards your son, our brother.
And at the hour of our death, so that the Lord have mercy on all who have offended him in our brothers and sisters, in the men and women of a world which is struggling desparately for life.
Amen
This prayer I swiped from Megan Mckenna who swiped it from the oral tradition of South America. I think maybe it shows the beginning of where a proper white theology might start in meeting god in the oppressed and being responsible and judged by god through the oppressed… or is it just more white exoticism? I believe that where i stand before god is where i stand before the oppressed, and I know that not one person oppressed by my privilege asked for the role of being the face of god to me.
god of the oppressed and accompaniment work
July 24, 2008
just finished rereading God of the Oppressed by James Cone. I wish that his chapter on violence and non-violence had been required reading in the trainings for the organization that I used to work for. I did international human rights accompaniment. that is when foreigners mostly white and western drop into low intensity war zones with the idea that their presence will deter violence. the problems with the theory are… well huge. I still dream that there is some possible good in an international presence if that “international” isn’t just another code word for white, but then folks like the ones I worked with would need to rethink their tactics (which mostly are being visible and flashing your white face and/or western passport about while telling oppressed people to be non-violent and morally pure in the face of their oppression) would have to be thrown out and reworked.
when asked about violence Cone’s answer was “who’s violence?” pointing out that the whole racial system (which is necessary for the tactics of the type of accompaniers I worked with) is the violence of white people. he contends that god stands with the oppressed against the oppressor and that the distinction between violence and nonviolence is irrelevant because everyone is violent.
Apologies insufficient
May 27, 2008
A canadian pastor on why the apology for resisential schools is insufficient. Point #5 in the actions would be interesting in relation to white US denominations and slavery as well as US and Canadian churches that ran residential schools.
Author’s Note:
This article below was offered to the Canadian media as an exclusive piece last week, and was rejected or ignored by the following newspapers:
The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Sun, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Edmonton Sun, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, The Alberni Valley Times, The Epoch Times, and the Victoria Times Colonist:
Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive: Bringing Humanity to Bear on the Residential School Atrocity
by Rev. Kevin Annett
Rend your hearts, and not your garments
Joel 2:17
Imagine for a moment that your own child goes missing and never comes home. Years pass, and one day, the person responsible for your child’s death is identified, but he evades arrest and imprisonment simply by issuing to you an “apology” for your loss. He even speaks of seeking “reconciliation” with you.
How would you feel?
Hold on to that feeling, and now multiply your loss by many thousands of children, and make the guilty person the government and churches of Canada. Do so, and you will have arrived in a human way at the Indian Residential Schools atrocity.
One of my former parishioners put it another way:
“What we did to those native children was an abomination, and abominations aren’t resolved with words and money. We need to have our hearts torn in two and be changed. We’ve got to stand, ourselves, under the judgment of God.“
I doubt that Stephen Harper would be satisfied with an apology if his own kids were hauled off and killed for being practicing Christians. Yet on June 11, 2008, he will stand up on our behalf and try to apologize to other nations for having exterminated their children.
The whole effort seems more than ludicrous, or obscene. One cannot, after all, apologize to the dead. But the truth is, the government’s planned “apology” to native people is an enormous exercise in deception – primarily self-deception.
Do we even know the meaning of that easily uttered term, “apologize”?
It actually has a double meaning, according to the internet Dictionary: a) “an acknowledgment of regret for a fault or offense” and b) “a formal justification, defense or excuse for one’s actions”.
That is, in our vernacular understanding of the term, an “apology” can be a genuine regret for one’s acts; but it can equally be a way to evade responsibility for one’s acts, by justifying oneself before one’s victim.
The legal understanding of the word, however, is more specific, and has nothing to do with regret: “apology” is defined simply as “a disclaimer of intentional error or offense”.
A disclaimer.
Now, I’m assuming that the government of Canada relies on legal definitions – operating, as it claims, “under the rule of law” – rather than popularly understood ones. So we must realize that when the government and its Prime Minister uses the term “apology”, its understanding of the word is the legal one: namely, “a disclaimer of intentional error or offense”.
In other words, on June 11, Stephen Harper will issue to the world a disclaimer to the effect that the Indian Residential Schools were not an intentional offense.
It’s not surprising that the Prime Minister will be making such an outrageous and unsupportable claim, since if he ever admitted that the residential schools were intentional, he’d be the first defendant in the dock at an international war crimes trial.
But more important, this effort by our government – and the churches it is protecting – to be absolved of their own crimes is taking place under the illusory pretense of making amends with native people, when its purpose is simply to legally exonerate itself of culpability for the deaths of thousands of children.
This, indeed, has been the norm for both church and state ever since the first lawsuit was launched by residential school survivors in February of 1996. An army of court scholars and legal experts has generated a mountain of “holocaust denial” at every level of Canadian society during the past dozen years, to convince the world that the daily death and torture at the residential schools was not intentional at all.
Such an “apologetic” agenda defies logic and common sense, as in the statements from the government’s misnamed “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” scholars that, while evidence shows that residential school children were being buried “four or five to a grave”, and that the death rate in these schools stayed constant at fifty percent for over forty years, these deaths were “not intended”.
To believe that, one has to ignore the evidence of senior government officials like Dr. Peter Bryce, who found that children were regularly being “deliberately exposed to communicable diseases” in residential schools, and left to die untreated. The word Bryce used was “deliberately”. How else, after all, do so many children die?
All of this legal hoop jumping and evasion of responsibility might make sense to the government, and pay the salaries of their intellectual mercenaries, but it does nothing to advance the cause of truth telling and humanity in Canada, and snuffs out the lives of our victims ever more quickly.
I know this all too well, having spent most of my waking hours for years as a counsellor, advocate and chronicler for many aboriginal survivors of the death camps we like to call residential schools. And what I’ve learned from such work is that we cannot come to grips with something that we don’t understand.
The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn’t understand what these “schools” were, either at a “head” or a “heart” level. If one believes the officers of the churches and government, the residential schools “issue” is all about money and verbal gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I know, have broken down and wept in public over the deaths of so many innocent ones; nor have they even offered to return their remains to their families for a proper burial.
Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and glibly speak about “healing the past”, without even knowing their own history, and about “solutions” to the “residential school problem”, as if they understand what that problem is – not realizing that, to quote William Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an “Indian problem” in Canada. Rather, the problem is a “white” one. The problem is with us.
I won’t point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the paradox of how educated men and women, with families of their own and a professed “Christian morality”, could drive needles through infants’ tongues at Indian residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs, sterilize healthy kids, and deliberately allow children to cough their lives away from tuberculosis, and then bury them in secret graves.
The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal people into a lower standard of humanity that allows them to die at a rate fifteen times greater than other people of this country.
After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves to be – an enlightened society that “assimilated” native people into our ranks, and made them our equals – then why has not a single person ever been brought to trial for the death of a residential school child? Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation? And why is there an Indian Act, and not an Irish or an Italian Act?
Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society that operates, in practice, with two standards of justice – one for native people, and one for the rest of us – Canada can no more cure the legacy of the residential schools than it can stop chewing up the earth for short-term comfort and profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental moral and social revolution.
The fact that we are far from such a change struck home to me a few months ago when the the government’s fraudulent “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” announced that, although criminal acts did indeed occur in the residential schools, there would be no criminal investigation of these schools: an unbelievably brazen subversion of justice that evoked not a murmur of protest in the media or among the good citizens and politicians of Canada.
Regardless of this, there are things that can be done to overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do justice, for once, to the survivors.
Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving “apologies” which change nothing, or staging a sham “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that has no power even to subpoena evidence, the government and all of us could take these kind of bold measures:
1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for Residential School Victims, dead and living.
2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools - naming the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up – by launching an International War Crimes Tribunal with the power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those responsible.
3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in these schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial sites for them.
4. Create National Aboriginal Holocaust Museums.
5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremburg Legal Principles concerning organizations complicit in crimes against humanity.
6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.
7. Recognize indigenous sovereignty and return all stolen lands and resources to indigenous nations.
An Irish relative once told me that the way her country is evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a simple formula:
“First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal”.
Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper and too many of our people are trying to do “apologetically”, it is time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember and admit to the world what we did to the first peoples of this land, and grieve our actions in the manner of people who truly rend their own hearts and want to change.
Perhaps then “healing and reconciliation” can become something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.
Rev. Kevin D. Annett
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 2H8
250-753-3345
email: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca
website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org
GIMME THAT OLD TIME (TRIBAL) RELIGION
April 18, 2008
Just an article I found this morning
GIMME THAT OLDTIME (TRIBAL) RELIGION
I admire a good ghost story, especially a “true” one. I read tales of the paranormal. I watch those ghost investigator shows on television. And I’ve been known to take ghost tours in cities that I visit. I am intrigued by the idea of unknown realms beyond our comprehension. I love that glance-behind-you-and-make-sure-the-closet-door-is-shut chill that lingers for days after hearing a particularly delicious spooky tale. And I am fascinated by the places where history and the paranormal meet, like Gettysburg, Pa. But one aspect of ghost stories—true and otherwise—that I am not so fond of is the demonization of the traditional spirituality of people of color.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard reputed hauntings attributed to Indian burial grounds, angry shamans or the mere fact that “y’know where your house sits used to be Native American land.” (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)
Not as popular, but too common, is the “slaves were here” explanation. Watching a DVR’d episode of Ghost Hunters the other night, I heard a woman at a historic house that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad explain a supposedly haunted room by sharing the accepted lore about the space: (paraphrase) People say some slaves got in here an sacrificed an animal. (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)
Why do we never hear this?
Worried homeowner: I just don’t understand what is happening. Furniture is moving about the house. My wife hears disembodied voices in the laundry room. Our little Billy is interacting with a shadowy figure in the backyard and the dog refuses to go into the basement.
Ghost expert: Well, Mr. Homeowner, we’ve done some research and…some Episcopalians once held a church service right on this very land! (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)
What? Not scary enough for you?
As a black woman, I am sensitive to the ways that traditional African or African-influenced religions get a bad rap in American pop culture. I say this, even as someone who was raised a Christian.
The words Voodoo and Santeria conjure up all kinds of nasty images, thanks in part to racist Hollywood depictions of the faiths. Even I once bought into these beliefs being spooky and satanic. It wasn’t until I took a fascinating class on radicalism and the black church, taught by none other than Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that I learned the truth about African religions and how people of the Diaspora adapted them, using them for spiritual strength and to spur the battle for freedom and civil rights.
Voodoo is a religious tradition originating in West Africa, which became prominent in the New World due to the importation of African slaves. West African Vodun is the original form of the religion; Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo are its descendants in the New World. Read more.
Santeria is one of the many syncretic religions created in the New World. It is based on the West African religions brought to the New World by slaves imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations. These slaves carried with them their own religious traditions, including a tradition of possession trance for communicating with the ancestors and deities, the use of animal sacrifice and the practice of sacred drumming and dance. Those slaves who landed in the Caribbean, Central and South America were nominally converted to Christianity. However, they were able to preserve some of their traditions by fusing together various Dahomean, baKongo (Congo) and Lukumi beliefs and rituals and by syncretizing these with elements from the surrounding Christian culture. Read more.
You may not agree with these belief systems, but I maintain that they are no more frightening than the Celtic polytheism that influences a lot of modern New Age belief and indeed some of traditional Christianity. Why is New Ageyness seen as benign, if not a bit silly, while African-based traditions on the other hand are viewed as dark and demonic?
Oh, I know this is a little thing. Ghost stories are meant to be harmless fun. I take them in that spirit. But it rankles when I see drumming, gyrating, chanting, scantily-clad Africans, bathed in firelight, used as shorthand for impending evil in some film. And it annoys me that the tour guide at the Underground Railroad stop mentioned above would assume slaves were summoning ghosties with their dark tribal religion, instead of, say, gathering spiritual strength for what must have been a harrowing journey to freedom.
File this under minor racial annoyance…another dull ache.
A conversation
February 22, 2008
So i am involved in what i think is an interesting conversation on the blog Holy Digression
Under this sign conquer
February 18, 2008
Is it any wonder that (white, western) christianity has developed an imperial dominating identity when one of the defining moments of it’s history was the the emperor Constantine’s vision of the cross with the command to conquer under this sign.
White culture has since consistently claimed it’s inheritance of the roman civilization and of christian identity.Missionaries have gone out to conquer the world for christ arm in arm with armies who would conquer for the various white empires.
When christianity became the imperial religion it also began it’s series of ecumenical councils to explicitly define doctrinal purity, purity being a value of dominant classes who feel the need to mark the boundaries of who can claim the privileges of belonging.
I am curious in the future to research more about this shift to dominance and the various doctrinal decisions and who they were used to exclude. Particularly the council of chalcedon in 451 that cut off a variety of churches on the edge of the empire from the rest.
