EDINA COMMUNITY LUTHERAN CHURCH
WELCOME TO ECLC'S INDIGENOUS RIGHTS PAGE
Follow our monthly updates here:
Indigenous Rights Monthly Email Update Archive
From this page, you can pull up past email updates.
COMING OPPORTUNITIES
The ELCA continues to provide learning opportunities through the Truth and Healing Movement. Scroll down to the Upcoming Events section.
- January 8, 2025, 11 a.m. – noon, private MIA docent-led tour of the MIA exhibit of Pueblo artist Jody Folwell’s exhibit. Thanks to ECLC member Lorraine Hart, 20 ECLC folks can take advantage of this! Carpool from ECLC available! RSVP here
- January 12, 2025, 7 – 8 p.m. ECLC Book Discussion. Join fellow ECLC folks for the hybrid first session of a two-part book discussion of Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins: And Indian Manifesto. Make a point of getting the book from an Indigenous-run store like local Birchbark Books, or used. The second session will be on February 2. Sign up here.
-
January 28, 6:30-8, Zoom, Powerful Invitations Training. Anticipating advocacy in the coming year…Together we will build skills and reflect around inviting allies to our upcoming events in impactful and relational ways. These skills can be used throughout the upcoming legislative session, as we move towards the Rise and Repair Lobby Day and Sarah Augustine’s public events in Minnesota this April.
Register here. - Wednesday, March 12, Rise and Repair Rally Day. Meet at the Capitol to learn and lobby!
- March 31 – April 3, 2025. SW MN Indigenous Sites trip. ECLC and Holy Trinity will be hosting a driving trip into SW MN to learn more about Indigenous history. This trip will support Native-owned and run businesses. The itinerary is here. Sign up to get more information here, and we’ll send instructions for submitting a deposit (due February 1).
- April 4, Sarah Augustine lecture. Dr. Augustine is the author of several books, including The Land is Not Empty, and is executive director of The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. This opportunity is brought to us by Minnesota Repair Communities, Makoce Ikikcupi.
To trace our initial education emphasis during the fall of 2022, you can access lists of curated resources and activities below. Use them to broaden your understanding of our Indigenous neighbors, the sovereign nations who were here before European settlers took over their land.
In spite of the U.S. government’s and the Church’s intentional, systemic attempts to exterminate their life-ways, their languages, their cultures, and their religions, Indigenous People are still here and are our neighbors.
This kind of history calls for the long and difficult work of justice, confession and healing, hoping to rebuild the respect and honor our Indigenous neighbors deserve as sovereign nations and children of God.
For Christian white people, “doing the work” is a baptismal calling, and expresses the mission of our congregation: to give witness to love and justice at God’s welcome table and in the world.
LAND, LAND, LAND
Injustice legitimized by the Doctrine of Discovery spread across centuries and geographies. In the US, treaties almost always forced Indigenous people from their homelands.How might we, who now occupy these lands, acknowledge this history and act in ways that move us toward justice?
Click for more
INDIGENOUS STORYTELLING FOR ALL AGES
Indigenous peoples have a long history as storytellers. Take time this week to listen to some of these contemporary storytellers.
Click for more
ADVOCATING FOR JUSTICE
There are many opportunities to advocate for a better way. The insidiousness of the assumptions driven by the Doctrine of Discovery manifested in the late 19th Century and forward as Indian Boarding Schools. Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools which forbade their language and other cultural expressions. In our day, Indigenous people continue to disappear, too often murdered, proportinately far more often than other groups. These are just two justice issues that call for our attention.
Click for more
A DIFFICULT HISTORY
Our county's history with its Indigenous peoples is a record too often unknown because it is too often unspoken.
Begin with the Doctrine of Discovery.
Let learning open your heart.
Click for more
INDIGENOUS EXPRESSION - THE ARTS
Click for more
INDIGENOUS CUISINE - DECOLONIZED FOOD
Our Indigenous neighbors are taking some fascinating approaches to their own health and wellbeing,
returning to the foods that sustained them for thousands of years before their economies were destroyed
when our government used treaties to take the land that had sustained them.