10.9.16 Healing Old Wounds full service1 of 15
Sermon: Healing Old Wounds - Diana
Morgan said in her candle lighting that we need to ask ourselves, “Who is telling the stories?” and she is right.
Sometimes, like today, we are the ones telling the stories, even if they are not ours—we use stories from people and cultures around the world to illustrate something, as we heard today with the Lakota story of White Buffalo Calf Woman. These stories are one way to connect with cultures beyond our own, and we can learn from them. When we turn from the sacred mythologies of the world’s people, though, are we listening to their factual stories, the stories of their lived experience?
Until very recently, it has been true that history has been written predominantly by the victors. That is changing, or has the potential to change, in the modern era of technology that enables everyday citizens to record video, send texts and tweets, post on Facebook. More stories are being told—and slowly, slowly, the dominant narrative of our society is changing. We don’t have to go far back in our history at all to reach a time when only one version of a story was told.
When we hear and tell the stories of our nation’s founding, for example, which stories are they? Who decided what the official story would be, and is it too late to change it?
This weekend a national holiday is observed in many (but not all!) places across the country: Columbus Day. We now understand that the history of our nation is more complex than many of us learned in school, and that for the indigenous people of this land, Christopher Columbus is not a heroic figure, but a representative of colonialism.
In some places, and in some of our Unitarian Universalist congregations, what we celebrate on this weekend has been changing. The day has been reclaimed, renamed from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
An NPR story[1] on Friday said in part:
The state of Vermont and the city of Phoenix have joined the list of places that now call the second Monday in October Indigenous Peoples' Day, in a show of momentum for honoring indigenous people on the federal holiday that's named for Christopher Columbus.
Phoenix is now the largest U.S. city to recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day…Other cities have adopted similar laws in recent years, including Seattle and Minneapolis.
The city council of Denver, which observed Indigenous Peoples' Day last year under a temporary proclamation, embraced a permanent observance this week — a development that's particularly striking because Denver is where the idea for a holiday honoring Christopher Columbus first took root.
"Colorado became the first state to observe Columbus Day as an official holiday," according to The Denver Post, "and in 1909, Denver held its first Columbus Day parade.”
Denver's move comes two months after Boulder's city council declared that Indigenous Peoples' Day will be celebrated on every Columbus Day holiday.
But the push to rename the Columbus holiday is being turned back in some areas: This week, the Cincinnati City Council rejected an Indigenous Peoples' Day proclamation, for instance.
…For years, only one state — South Dakota — officially designated the second Monday in October to honor the people and cultures that thrived in North America before Europeans' arrival.
Alaska's governor adopted Indigenous Peoples Day last year; we'll note that the state, like Hawaii and Oregon, had previously not recognized Columbus Day.
As of this week, Vermont also recognizes the second Monday of October as Indigenous People's Day, after Gov. Peter Shumlin issued an executive proclamation. In it, Shumlin noted that Vermont was founded on land that was long inhabited by the Abenaki people.
South Dakota adopted Native American Day back in the 1990s; California observes a day by the same name, but it does so on the fourth Friday in September. Late last month, Nevada's governor established American Indian Day in the state; it was observed on Sept. 23.
As for the reasons behind the push for change, here's what Lakota activist Bill Means told Minnesota Public Radio back in 2014, when Minneapolis adopted Indigenous Peoples' Day: "We discovered Columbus, lost on our shores, sick, destitute, and wrapped in rags. We nourished him to health, and the rest is history," Means told MPR. "He represents the mascot of American colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. And so it is time that we change a myth of history."
The Indigenous Peoples Day Committee in Berkeley, California—where it has been celebrated for more than two decades—shares a more detailed history on their website[2]:
The idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day was first proposed in 1977 by a delegation of Native nations to the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, held in Geneva, which passed that resolution.
In July 1990, representatives from 120 Indian nations from every part of the Americas met in…Ecuador in the First Continental Conference…on 500 Years of Indian Resistance. The conference was also attended by many human rights, peace, social justice, and environmental organizations. This was in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Native resistance to the European invasion of the Americas, 1492-1992. …At the suggestion of the Indigenous spiritual elders, the conference unanimously passed a resolution to transform Columbus Day, 1992, "into an occasion to strengthen our process of continental unity and struggle towards our liberation." …While the U.S. and other governments were apparently trying to make it into a celebration of colonialism, Native peoples wanted to use the occasion to reveal the historical truths about the invasion and the consequent genocide and environmental destruction, to organize against its continuation today, and to celebrate Indigenous resistance.
…The U. S. Congress had chosen the Bay Area as the national focus for the planned “Quincentenary Jubilee” hoopla, with replicas of Columbus' ships scheduled to sail into the Golden Gate and land in a grand climax (eventually canceled).
In the fall of 1990, a well-attended conference of Northern California Indians met …in Davis, California, and organized the Bay Area Indian Alliance for counter-quincentennial planning. They resolved to "reaffirm October 12, 1992 as International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples." The final day of the conference was…opened to non-Native people. This conference organized Resistance 500, a broad coalition to coordinate 1992 activities with Indigenous leadership….
…The Berkeley Resistence 500 Task Force investigated the historical record, and concluded that Columbus’s expedition was not a scientific “voyage of discovery,” but a scouting mission for a scheme of imperialism and conquest.
Columbus openly stated that he planned to conquer and colonize the lands he “discovered”: first the Caribbean islands and then mainland America. On his second voyage he brought the Spanish army with him, and proceeded to do just that. The islands were populated by over a million Taino Indians, peaceful farmers and fishermen. Unable to find enough gold there to finance his schemes, Columbus captured thousands of Tainos and shipped them to the slave markets of Spain. The Tainos resisted with fishbone-tipped spears, but those were no match for artillery. Columbus demanded that each Taino pay a tribute of gold dust every three months, under penalty of amputation of the hands. In two years over a hundred thousand Tainos were dead, and the survivors were slaves, mostly in mines and plantations. Columbus personally invented European imperialism in the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade. He took personal leadership in acts that would today be called genocide.
Berkeley Resistance 500 reported those historical facts to the city council, and that Native peoples around the world had proposed replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. The task force recommended that Columbus should no longer be honored, but the city should instead commemorate the contributions of Native people and their resistance to the European invasion. With strong support from the community, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously that October 12th was henceforth to be Indigenous Peoples Day, to be commemorated annually on the nearest Saturday.
In subsequent years the municipality of Santa Cruz also began celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day. The State of South Dakota replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day. October 12 is now celebrated in Venezuela as the Day of Indigenous Resistance…The United Nations, at the request of Indigenous groups and led by Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, declared International Indigenous Peoples Day. But instead of changing Columbus Day, as requested, the U.N. sidestepped the issue of Columbus by naming August 9th as International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples. Phoenix now celebrates Indigenous Peoples Day on March 12, relating to the Aztec calendar. However, in keeping with the original request of the Indigenous spiritual elders at the Continental Conference…on 500 Years of Indian Resistance, Berkeley has retained October 12 as Indigenous Peoples Day.
This year’s Berkeley celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day, which took place yesterday, was dedicated to “the movementat Standing Rock, North Dakota, to affirm Indiansovereigntyover reservationland”[3].
I have been seeing Facebook posts from fellow Unitarian Universalists, some of whom are my friends and my ministerial colleagues, who have shown up at Standing Rock. They went to provide support in the form of both supplies and witness for the Native Americans gathered from over 300 different indigenous nations who are doing their best to protect both the water and the sacred sites on what little land remains to them after European invasion of this continent.
Yes, invasion—that is the word we would use if people with skin color, language, religion, and culture different from ours showed up today and populated this country. But when we talk about the European arrival on this land, our society talks about settling or founding, or at best, colonization—we rarely call it invasion. Yet if we can, for a moment, attempt to take the perspective of the people who already lived here, already had a multitude of rich cultures, had already settled the land and founded a society, we can imagine that’s exactly what it felt like. And it’s still going on, as pipelines and railroads and interstates are built through the places where people of color live rather than through wealthier, predominantly white areas.
My point today is not to shame those of us who are of European descent, but to ask us to hear and read and consider the stories we were likely not told in school.
My title for today is “healing old wounds,” and I do not mean to suggest that we can ever repair the damage that was done by many of our ancestors, and that continues to be done in our names, whether we want it or not, both by our government and by our society. What I do intend is that we recognize that the first step towards healing a damaged relationship is listening.
I spent Thursday and Friday at a leadership retreat for a group I’ve been part of for nine years. Almost everyone in that group is white. Almost all of them are significantly wealthier than I am. Many are or were formerly presidents, CEOs, and owners of companies. Many have now left corporate America for lives of service—either with local efforts like food banks or shelters for people experiencing homelessness, or internationally with projects like building schools and dorms in Africa, or supporting an organization in India that rescues women and children from sexual slavery. They are kind-hearted, well-intentioned, and they are willing to read and discuss difficult stories.
On Thursday, though, something new to many of them happened—they sat face-to-face with people who told their own personal stories of what it is like to be “other" than what this group represents. To be an immigrant from Egypt or Iran or the South Sudan or Jerusalem. To be black or brown in America. To be Muslim in America. To be a queer Christian pastor in America. To use a wheelchair—which on that day meant having to be pushed in that wheelchair because our meeting space had carpet so thick that the woman could not roll into or around the room on her own. To be poor in America.
Not everything about the encounter between our group and these guests was ideal. Our best intentions didn’t translate into an event where they felt like our equals; one man voiced his anger that he felt tokenized not only in America but right there in that room—that he was put on display as a Chicano man for the purpose of educating white people who would likely do no more than listen and perhaps talk, but take no action to change things. I wasn’t sure he’d even stay to be part of the discussions.
He did stay, as did the others, and we, the white people in the room, mostly listened as we sat in small groups and our guests shared their stories and answered our questions. We learned about our immigration system through the eyes of families that arrived here no less legally than many of the families of those us in this room today—they showed up, just as some of our ancestors showed up, looking for a better life. They didn’t have our permission—just as my ancestors and many of yours didn’t have the permission of those who already lived on this land before Europeans arrived.
It’s all in the perspective. Who is telling the story? The white person afraid that brown immigrants are stealing our jobs or are terrorists in disguise? Or the person who came to this country as a child, undocumented, and now cannot apply for federal financial aid to attend college because she has no social security number? The religious conservative who says this is and always has been a Christian nation, or the Muslim or Jew or Hindu who came here looking for the same freedom of religion that many of our ancestors sought? The American of European descent who sees Columbus as a hero, or the indigenous person whose land, way of life, and very existence was threatened or destroyed by Columbus and those who followed after him?
None of our guests last week at that retreat were Native American. The young man who spoke about being tokenized, however, is Chicano—he is of mixed European and indigenous Mexican heritage. He pointed out that some of his people, who cross the border from Mexico into the United States, are returning to land that was the home of their ancestors. He asked us to consider how it feels to be told that they are there illegally, that they need documentation to be an American.
Some of our ancestors took land from people, whether in what is now New England or what is now Texas or Arizona. Others took people from their own land, bringing them to this country from Africa. These are old wounds, wounds not easily healed, but we can begin by at least acknowledging the wounds—by telling a more complete story about our nation’s founding and its history than we were told.
Several of us have been attending the weekly viewings of episodes of the civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize” which this congregation co-sponsors. For many of us, even some who lived through the 1950s and 60s, we are learning details we did not know before. We are hearing stories other than the ones that were lifted up in the narratives of the movement for civil rights in that era, or by the media of the day, or in the history texts written since then. I wonder if we might consider, after that series ends, what stories we might find and watch together to learn a more complete version of our collective story?
If not documentaries like Eyes on the Prize, what books might we read to help us understand viewpoints other than our own or those that are dominant in our society?
And then, after we have read and listened to more stories, what will we do? How will we make different choices grounded in our more complete understanding? To quote the guiding questions of that leadership retreat I attended, “How will we live in a world that does not work for all? What work is ours to do?”
Listening is a start, but it is only a start, and if it’s all we do, it’s not enough. We can’t watch Eyes on the Prize, be outraged or saddened by what happened in the 1950s, and fail to acknowledge the eerie similarities between what the segregationists of that era said and what many white people are saying today in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. That particular story hasn’t changed as much as we had hoped.
This weekend we celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or Columbus Day, depending on the story you choose to allow to shape the day. What stories will you choose to hear? What stories will you choose to repeat so that others may hear them?
And then, what new story might we write, together?
Hymn #318 - We Would Be One
Candle Extinguishing - Ushers
Benediction - Diana
As we prepare to leave our time of shared worship, may we listen for and share the stories not widely told. May we share stories of those who have been silenced. May we learn from the stories of those not like us, and through doing so, may we begin to heal old wounds.
May that be our practice, and our prayer.
Go in peace, go in love.
©2016 Diana K. McLean
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