In November 2024, Hamline Church adopted our land acknowledgement statement, after 2+ years of congregation-wide learning, discussion, writing, and re-writing (for background, see October 2024 blog post “Hamline Church’s Transformational Journey Toward Land Acknowledgement”). Because the written statement has not yet found its “forever home” on the church website, the statement is provided in full here.
Land Acknowledgement – Hamline Church
Mni Sota Makoce, the land where the waters reflect the skies¹, has been the homeland of the Dakota people for at least 1,000 years. At the heart of this homeland is Bdote, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. For the Dakota, Bdote is the center of the earth and the place of creation — a sacred place of ceremony and prayer. The homelands of the Anishinaabe and HoChunk peoples are also nearby.
Less than eight miles from Bdote, Hamline Church is built on land ceded by the Dakota to the United States by treaty in 1837. This treaty makes our presence legal, but does not make it just. U.S. government officials and prominent fur traders set up a system intended to drive the Dakota into debt, forcing them to sell their land at very low prices, depriving the Dakota of their livelihoods, communities, homelands, and sacred places. Missionary Mary Riggs called it ‘treacherous cruelty.”²
This “treacherous cruelty” was fueled by the Christian Doctrine of Discovery – a doctrine justifying the conquest, colonization and enslavement of all non-Christians. We lament that Christian individuals and institutions in Minnesota crafted unjust land cession treaties, broke treaty promises, forced the removal of native peoples from this land, and established harmful Indian boarding schools. We acknowledge that Hamline Church continues to benefit from our forebears’ participation in this genocidal system. We confess our moral responsibility as Christians, and as a congregation we seek to repair harm.
Hamline Church United Methodist commits to the work of Sacred Reckonings, exploring ways to;
- tell the truth about our histories,
- deepen our spiritual practice to support us in this work,
- improve relationships,
- stand in solidarity with our indigenous neighbors, and
- return wealth to the original inhabitants of this land.
We are indebted to the many Native American spiritual leaders that call us to this time of reckoning, teach us the histories that we did not learn in school, and model Christian faith and practice from their unique perspectives. Inspired by their teaching, we are on a journey of repentance, reconciliation, and repair — seeking by faith to love and live into a future of mutual respect and dignity for all people.
So We have a Land Acknowledgement Statement – Now What?
Our statement clearly commits the church to not just empty words, but action. At the November Council meeting and Town Hall meeting, church leadership discussed that we would need to continue the conversation of what that action would look like. The church’s transformational journey of Sacred Reckonings continues.
The Hamline Church group formerly known as the Land Acknowledgement Workgroup will continue its work under a new name, the Sacred Reckonings and Reparations Team. This team will work with church leadership to create a plan within the five areas of action named in our land acknowledgement statement. The group is not explicitly part of Earthkeepers will continue to find intersections with Creation Care, along with racial justice and radical hospitality work that Hamline Church is already engaged in.
As a way to continue this conversation, the Sacred Reckonings & Reparations Team recently met to discuss the guide to reparative action stories on land consultant Jessica Intermill’s website. At our meeting, each of us highlighted a couple of stories on the guide that interested us and how they might be adapted to and received by Hamline Church. So many communities have found a wide variety of creative ways to engage in reparative action, with monetary return only one of many stories shared on the website.
We invite you to explore the stories at the link above and consider how Hamline Church, or each of us individually, might take reparative action to put meaning behind the words in our new land acknowledgement statement.
¹ There is some discussion amongst Dakota speakers about the meaning of Mni Sota Makoce. This translation is from Chris MatoNunpa at https://bdotememorymap.org/mnisota/
² Linda M. Clemmons, Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes, and Deception on the Dakota Frontier (St. Paul, MN Historical Society Press), 2014.
³ Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel & Jessica Intermill, Esq., Sacred Reckonings: White Settler-Colonizer Churches Doing the Work of Reparations (Center for Sustainable Justice, 2023) downloaded from https://www.sacredreckonings.com. Perspectives.
⁴ George “Tink” Tinker, citizen of the Osage Nation and professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology helped to lead an “act of repentance toward healing relationships with indigenous people” at the 2012 General Conference.
Rev. Anita Philips, a member of the Keetoowah Band of the Cherokee Nation and Director of the Native American Comprehensive Plan of the United Methodist Church, spoke to the Minnesota Annual Conference in 2015, asking us four questions that are helpful on a journey toward repentance: Can you see us? Can you hear us? Can you find Christ in us? Will you claim us as part of yourself and your community?
Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and Co-Director for Racial Justice at the Minnesota Council of Churches, has led numerous Sacred Sites Tours in the Twin Cities area and has preached at Hamline Church.
Rev. Dawn Houser, from the Sault tribe of Chippewa, is the Chair of the Annual Conference Committee on Native American Ministries and is working with five congregations, including Hamline Church, to develop opportunities for Native American Christians to worship in ways that are culturally sensitive.
