In September, a group from Hamline Church’s land acknowledgement task force met to workshop and revise the current draft land acknowledgement statement. This was a significant waypoint in Hamline Church’s multi-year journey toward adopting a land acknowledgment statement and the Sacred Reckonings that it will require.

The current and final draft statement will be presented to Church Council in October or November. This juncture is a meaningful opportunity to revisit how we reached this point, and the stops for reflection and learning along the way:

Hamline Church’s journey toward Land Acknowledgement and Sacred Reckonings began at least a decade ago, in response to compelling calls from two Native American church leaders. At the 2012 General Conference, 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.” And in 2015, 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. Rev. Philips asked four questions that have shaped our journey: 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?

In 2019, Hamline Church hosted an event discussing dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery Energy was starting to gather around the question of whether Hamline Church should use a land acknowledgement statement, like many other Minnesota institutions had begun to do. In winter of 2023, a group at Hamline Church met to study this topic, drawing on the resource Transformational Journey Towards Land Acknowledgment. An overarching theme of these discussions was that mere acknowledgment without action was simply not enough, and potentially worse than no acknowledgment statement. Another theme was that our discussions were raising many questions that we did not have the historical background to answer. We made a first attempt at writing a statement, but the more we discussed, the more we realized we have to learn.

Members of the study group formed an ad hoc land acknowledgment task force, committed to continuing the discussion and learning necessary to move toward a land acknowledgment statement and related reparative action. As the draft land acknowledgment statement said at that time, “we are listening, we are learning.” This task force sought out local Indigenous organizations and land-back or reparations initiatives with which Hamline Church could build relationships. The group began a partnership with Rev. Dawn Houser, Chair of the Annual Conference Committee on Native American Ministries and member of the Sault tribe of Chippewa, to become one of five locations that will host a space where local Native Christians might worship in a culturally sensitive way. A group of Hamline Church members volunteered at the Mendota Mdewankanton Dakota Tribal Community annual wacipi (powwow), beginning a relationship we hope to continue building. Hamline Church members also participated in a training workshop titled “Sacred Reckonings.” This training, developed by Jewish and Christian faith leaders, including United Methodist Rev. Dana Neuhauser, is a “call to sacred task of reckoning with the histories of colonization and White supremacy” and is “rooted in the relationship, spiritual practice, and faithful responsiveness to a national movement for reparations to Black and Indigenous communities.” This training continues to inform the discussion of land acknowledgment and our congregation’s relationship to our Indigenous neighbors. In April 2023, the taskforce and Hamline Church Earthkeepers planned a church service to share ongoing reflection and learning (Earthkeepers Sunday: Were Our Hearts Not Burning Within Us?, April 23, 2023).

In 2024, members of the land acknowledgment task force worked with church leadership to develop and carry out a Lenten study series around the topics of Land Acknowledgement and Sacred Reckonings. During this series, Hamline Church members attended Sacred Sites Tours led by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs and Dr. Kelly Sherman Conroy, and learned from land consultant Jessica Intermill about the treaties and land theft that transferred Minnesota land from Native stewardship to European-American ownership. This discussion series deepened our practical understanding of how church communities like ours continue to profit from the cruel system that intentionally deprived Minnesota’s Native communities of their homes, livelihoods, and sacred sites. By the end of the series, the discussion groups had marked up the previous draft land acknowledgment statement and provided feedback to inform a major rewrite of the draft statement. Among other critiques of our previous drafts, we wanted the statement to clearly name the genocidal harm done to Native communities, the active role Christians have played in that harm, and our resulting commitments to our Native neighbors.

That overhaul of the draft statement occurred through this summer, which brings us to present: The current version of the draft statement will be considered at the October or November Church Council meeting. The congregation is invited to review the draft and share your feedback with church leadership. An important question, moving forward, is how the church will use the statement and how we will pursue the commitments to action incorporated into it. Please email any comments or suggestions to HamlineEarthkeepers@gmail.com – everyone’s participation is welcome and important in this ongoing work and learning!

In Ijeoma Oluo’s 2024 book Be a Revolution, one chapter relates an origin story of the environmental justice movement:

In the late 1970s, the state of North Carolina faced a major disposal challenge. After cleaning up toxic waste that had been intentionally dumped along North Carolina’s roads, the state government needed to rid itself of ten thousand truckloads of soil contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which had become known as a cause of birth defects and cancer when absorbed through skin or inhaled. The governor of North Carolina landed on the solution of creating a dump site for the PCB-laden soil in rural Warren County. Oluo relates:
“The community living around the dump site was predominantly poor and Black, factors that likely contributed to the appeal of the location. Black and brown communities have often been dumping grounds for the toxic trash white companies and governments want to get rid of. It had done before with little fuss–at least not from people who mattered. Why would anyone care this time?

But the inhabitants of Warren County were not going to be poisoned in silence. For six weeks in 1982 Warren County was the site of a massive Black-led protest. People of all ages took to the streets to fight this blatant pollution of their community. … In the end, the protestors were unable to stop the dumping of poison in their communities. It would take more than twenty years for the land in Warren County to be cleaned. But the protests in Warren County sparked the first nationwide conversation about the intersection of race and environmental harm. People of color across the country who had long decried the pollution and destruction of their communities by governments and business started to come together to discuss their shared experiences and identify patterns in them.”

The Warren County protests are now known as the beginning of environmental justice, “a movement that specifically battles racist environmental harm against communities of color.”

Hamline Church Earthkeepers follow in the footsteps of the Warren County protestors. Environmental justice is the lens through which we view our faith witness of caring for Creation. The Earthkeepers mission statement declares: “We affirm that all of God’s children are part of God’s perfect creation…We seek to stand with and defend the most vulnerable of God’s children who already bear a disproportionate share of the impact of the Earth’s changing climate. We lament that the sins of discrimination, racism, and oppression are often the root cause of unequal access to the gift of God’s creation.”

The environmental justice chapter of Be a Revolution ends with a practical list of ways to work for environmental justice:

1. Support free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for Indigenous peoples.
2. Demand the repair and maintenance of infrastructure in BIPOC communities.
3. Demand the cleanup of toxic sites near residential areas, the creation of safer disposal practices, an end to disposal sites placed in the backyard of communities of color, and more responsibility from manufacturers for the end life of their products.
4. Demand stricter air pollution guidelines for facilities that are near residential areas.
5. Honor treaties.
6. Support the creation of green jobs for communities of color.
7. Support legal funds for BIPOC communities fighting to protect their land and water.
8. Support land-back efforts.
9. Demand accountability from racist and anti-Indigenous environmental groups.
10. Support environmental justice groups.

These action steps bring to mind the work the congregation has engaged in, over the past two years, to learn about the Church’s role in causing harm to Native communities and to draft a land acknowledgment statement for the church. Church members who have engaged in this process have called out that acknowledgment must be accompanied by reparative action and relationship with our indigenous neighbors. We have come to call this broader faith journey “Sacred Reckonings,” after a course designed by Christian & Jewish faith leaders, including United Methodist Rev. Dana Neuhauser. The work of Sacred Reckonings at Hamline Church falls squarely within some of the environmental justice action steps from Be a Revolution. The current draft of our land acknowledgment statement calls out our commitment to “stand in solidarity with our indigenous neighbors, and return wealth to the original inhabitants of this land.” An upcoming blog post will describe the action steps that Hamline Church members have identified as ways to engage in Sacred Reckonings, and will discuss additional directions that this journey could take locally, using the environmental justice steps in Be a Revolution as a guide.

If you are open to engaging in the ongoing work of land acknowledgment/Sacred Reckonings at Hamline Church, a group will meet on September 11 to continue to refine the land acknowledgment statement and action steps for Hamline Church. All are welcome to join this discussion! Please contact miriam.e.friesen@gmail.com to RSVP and receive the Zoom link for the meeting.

Tuesday, August 22 at 7pm in the Parlor
The Hamline Church Council has been authorized to hold a Charge Conference on Tuesday, August 22nd at 7pm for the purpose of approving Sharon Fields as a candidate for ordained ministry. All members are welcome to attend. The regular August council meeting will follow.

Thoughts and Prayers, Policy and Change: Supporting Parents and Caregivers Around the Realities of Gun Violence in Schools

Tuesday, May 9 from 6-7:30pm
At Hamline Church 1514 Englewood Ave St Paul

Join us as we hear from Dr. Jillian Peterson, psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University, about her work around gun violence and how to support ourselves and our children.

Childcare and dinner available, RSVP here. Contact Katie Morris (kmorris@hamlinechurch.org) or HU intern Livy Clemens (oclemens01@hamline.edu) with questions.