National Indigenous Day of Prayer
Shelagh Balfour

John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

These are the words John chose to introduce his telling of the good news. He started with an origin story, placing the origin of the Christian people at the very beginning of time.

Today, we read the prologue to John’s Gospel in the context of National Indigenous Day of Prayer. And there is no doubt that prayer is needed. In the past few weeks the remains of 215 children were located at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, raising waves of grief, renewed trauma, and anger; a coroner in Quebec delivered her findings in the death of Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamakwe woman who died in agony in hospital while nursing staff berated her for making a scene; and a Thunder Bay man was sentenced for manslaughter, for throwing a trailer hitch at Barbara Kentner, an Ojibway woman, in what the judge described as a “misogynistic, thrill-seeking, and callous attack”.

What wisdom does the gospel bring at such a time? It tells us where we have come from, where we are going, and how, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are going to get there.

In the beginning was the Word, John wrote, intentionally harkening back to the first Judeo-Christian origin story. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. John is telling us the two stories are one – Jesus was there before the world began. Jesus was the Word spoken, embodied, through whom all things came into being. And this Word became flesh and lived among us.

But of course, neither Genesis nor John are the only origin stories. For example:

It begins with two people who are walking in another world. They have been walking for quite some time, they see openings around them. They see an opening and saw the lush greenery, the lakes, rivers, birds and animals, they all look so nice.

So begins one telling of the Cree Creation story. In the introduction to that story the reader is told: The fundamental question [behind origin stories] is where am I, where am I coming from and where am I going? To know who you are and where you are going, you have to have some sense of where you came from. *

Two years ago, when the parish took the first step toward educating ourselves about the history of colonization and the effects on First Peoples in Canada, we learned that storytelling is a good place to begin. If our intention is truly to understand and learn to walk differently with one another we need to learn to tell our own story truthfully – where are we? Where have we come from and where are we going? And we need to listen to one another’s stories, without comment or judgement.

As an example, I offer you a little bit of my story. Some of you know that my brother Andrew is a singer and composer. A few of you also know that he is Cree. I think about what it mean to say this in 2021. Our parents and the other 5 siblings trace our ancestry back to Scotland. Andrew is Cree. He was born in 1967, when I was 11 and I was thrilled to have a baby brother. But he was also born in the midst of the 60’s Scoop and that makes me worry about the ways acknowledging our relationship, and how deeply I love my brother, may cause pain to some and anger to others who were harmed by the policies that brought him to us. Those 1960’s policies were another chapter in an ongoing story of cultural genocide. But Andrew is my brother; no qualifications, no going back.

This is a piece of my story as I see it. I can’t tell Andrew’s story because it isn’t mine to tell. And this is one important part of story: we can tell our own story, but we listen to the stories of others. Ideally, we listen in a way that gives the other person a safe space in which to speak and be heard.

Many of us know facts about the ‘60’s Scoop, about residential schools and the Doctrine of Discover, but facts are dry bones compared to the individual, personal stories that put flesh on them. For the premiere of his choral work Take the Indian, a vocal reflection on residential schools, my brother wrote:

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came to Winnipeg a few years ago, I witnessed an incredibly disturbing afternoon of testimony from the survivors of the Residential School legacy. I’m sure the hundreds of people there listening to the sadness, anger, frustration, loneliness of these people will never forget it. I know I never will.

Residential School survivors were given a space specifically for telling their stories and thousands listened. Andrew took their words and added music and drama, and thousands more heard.

So, we need to learn to tell our own story from our own location and we need to create space for others to tell their stories. But we also need to allow the stories to change us. What those stories can do is shift our location, change our perspective so we begin to see that it might not be the story we thought and it was never just our own at all.

My story of welcoming my brother is obviously connected to his, but also to the ‘60’s scoop. Andrew’s story, while connected with that history, widened to include residential schools even though he didn't attend one. None of us is excluded from the stories of colonialization and its results. But we need to find our place in them, where we came from, and where we are going.

One way we do this is through Land Acknowledgement. Land acknowledgements are not just words we say at the beginning of meetings. If we take them seriously, they commit us to living into their implications. The following video will tell you about some of those commitments. Please watch it before continuing to read. 

Land Acknowledgements and Why They Matter

As the video shows us, there is so much more to land acknowledgement than words: there’s knowing our own story and telling it truthfully. There is knowing the stories of Indigenous peoples: How residential schools and systemic racism continue to have devastating effects in communities across the country. And there is a commitment to respond. Because this isn’t just about history. It is about people and lives today.

Our origin story is told in a different way in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd – From the beginning, there has always been a plan in the mind of God to bring all of creation to a fullness of life. This History of the Kingdom of God tells us our origins starting with the chaos before creation, through creation, to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and the growth of the church through 2000 years. Beyond that is the blank page, the page of where we are going. God will write this page through the work of human hands, our hands. We have a role in God’s plan to bring all of creation to a fullness of life. And the role we have is directed by our life in the Word who became flesh and lived among us.

So let me leave you with two aspects of that role to think about and maybe act on:

First is the acknowledgement of the land. This was never really meant to be written in stone, the same thing repeated week after week. It is meant to be more responsive to individuals and circumstances. A step toward that would be for us to have more versions, crafted by more people. Try this yourself. What would you say in an acknowledgement of the land? If you feel called to, send me your acknowledgement as a possible option for Sunday morning use.

Second, is learning the stories. The Anglican Church of Canada has excellent resources on its website, particularly the Reconciliation Toolkit https://www.anglican.ca/tr/reconciliation-toolkit/ . It’s a good place to start. The Outreach Ministry Team is currently studying one of the books – The Inconvenient Indian  by Thomas King - in anticipation of work they hope we’ll be doing with St. Matthew’s Maryland. When we are back in the building and able to gather, we will resume the experiential learning we began two years ago.

In the beginning was the Word, and all things came into being through him. There is not one thing that came into being without him. Which is to say that there is not one thing, or one person, in creation that is not sacred. Let us commit to learning our history and changing the way we walk together as children of the one Creator. Amen


* Daughters, Sisters, Wives and Mothers https://onlc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/A-Cree-Reader.pdf