Last year I wrote for Clarion about the racism crisis that exists in my hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario. I explored how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology from below and cruciform ethics focuses our attention on the earthbound, existential Christ of vulnerable love; a God who voluntarily chooses to identify, suffer and show solidarity with Indigenous people crushed by the wheel of racial injustice and dehumanizing oppression. It’s a crisis that has played out across Canada for generations, culminating today in police brutality and systemic racism against numerous Indigenous people, particularly young vulnerable women like Chantal Moore who was shot and killed this summer in New Brunswick by police conducting a wellness check gone horribly wrong.
In Canada, the deep wounds of cultural genocide and racial oppression inflicted on Indigenous children and families are still widely felt today, but not so much widely accepted by our dominant culture, including and especially many of our Euro-Christian churches. I consider myself to be amongst this dominant culture, even though my spiritual and theological formation would have me kneeling alongside protestors across North American cities today in support of racial justice and social healing.
Even so, I had not taken the time needed to educate myself on the history of residential schools and how the leaders of Canada’s white ethno-nationalistic government colluded with pseudo-Christian church actors to destroy the cultural and spiritual identities of Indigenous children and families through years of appalling abuse, segregation and oppression.
To my shame, it was just last year that I began to read the summary findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Report. But what I found was nothing short of disturbing:
“For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien … Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed … For the students, education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers” (TRC Summary Report pg. 3).
What deepened my horror was the fact that “Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches were the major denominations involved in the administration of the residential school system” (TRC Summary Report pg. 3).
Canada’s Christian churches—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—came together to administer the near destruction of an entire nation’s cultural identity.
Let’s let that sink in for a minute. The gravity of such atrocities should crush our hearts and make our skin crawl.
For over a hundred years, Indigenous children were targeted and taken from their parents only to face crippling neglect and abuse. Traditional land was often seized and occupied, pushing communities to the margins. Indigenous rights were ignored and in many cases, Treaties were fraudulently coerced to benefit Euro-Christian settlers.
And while educating ourselves about residential schools—a task I’ve admittedly (and embarrassingly) barely scratched the surface on—is a great first step towards addressing systemic and institutionalized racism today, “what is truly needed,” says Charlie Ratte, “is a heart change.”
Ratte, a vibrant, well-educated and outspoken Anishnawbe woman, has traveled across North America before the pandemic speaking at conferences about her Christian faith and how reconciliation can be integrated into the ethics and discipleship of Euro-Christian churches today.
“I wonder if the role of the church is to really enter into prayer on these issues. I wonder what it would look like if there was a prayer movement amongst committed Euro-Christian settlers who gather together on a regular basis to pray for hearts to be changed.”
Evoking well-known Navajo activist and theologian Mark Charles, she agrees that entitlement—an entrenched belief that Canadian settlers have an absolute right to land that was seized illegally or coercively through dishonest Treaties—is a major stumbling block to reconciliation and lasting heart change in the Church today.
“Cultivating the spiritual practice of gratitude to the Creator for the land that Canadian settlers enjoy today can really get at this sense of entitlement in Canadian culture,” says Ratte. “When people turn to God in prayer and cultivate this sense of gratitude to the Creator, that’s when hearts of stone can be turned into hearts of flesh.”
In this age of racial scapegoating, police brutality, systemic racism and hyper-polarized politics, the cruciform Word of the cosmos calls His people—the Church—to follow the Way of Cruciform Love to bring forth true and lasting heart change and reconciliation.
“And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ,” proclaimed Bonhoeffer, “must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of fire in which all hate is smothered and proud, hateful people are transformed into loving people. Our churches...have done many mighty deeds, but it seems to me that they have not yet succeeded in this greatest deed, and it is more necessary today than ever.”
Thanks Josh.
Great insights!
I have a close relative who simply and airily dismisses all that historical horror towards aboriginal peoples. More, he rails against indigenous leaders who dare to suggest we settlers have any responsibility whatsoever to make things right.
Sadly, that view is still dominant in Canada and all over the colonized world. It's a form of fundamentalism obdurately insulated against any trace of empathy, shut off from any kind of moral suasion/culpability, incapable of/unwilling to recognizing Truth. On the order of: "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!." To which one says: Dreadful!
An excellent set of resources by the Christian Reformed Church is: The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism (https://waynenorthey.com/2018/02/07/the-doctrine-of-discovery-manifest-destiny-and-american-exceptionalism/).
Mennonite Church Canada through Steve Heinrichs has also developed many outstanding resources. See: MC Canada Indigenous-Settler Relations (https://www.commonword.ca/Browse/868).
On my website,https://waynenorthey.com/ ,there are resources under "indigenous" (https://waynenorthey.com/?s=indigenous) and "aboriginal" (https://waynenorthey.com/?s=aboriginal) for starters.
To catch on to the prophetic in Scripture is not to read the "Left Behind" series. That takes one in the diametrically opposite direction of biblical faithfulness--even if, outside the Bible, the all-time world bestseller!. It is rather two things (at least):
1. Having eyes to see, ears to hear
2. Connecting dots.
We humans/followers of Jesus don't tend to do well at either . . .
Thanks again.
Blessings
Wayne
Posted by: Wayne Northey | July 29, 2020 at 04:29 PM