WELCOME TO ECLC'S INDIGENOUS RIGHTS PAGE

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September 2023

August 2023

Indigenous Rights Monthly Email Update Archive

From this page, you can pull up past email updates.

COMING OPPORTUNITIES

ECLC’s Indigenous Rights group invites you to join us for some educational experiences this summer and fall!

On Saturday, October 7, we have an opportunity to participate in a Sacred Sites Tour, led by a Native guide. The Tour will help you see familiar Twin Cities sites from a deeper, Indigenous lens. The tour takes a long morning and is best suited to those in high school and beyond.

If you are interested in attending, send an email to indigenousrights.eclc@gmail.com. 

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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INDIGENOUS EXPRESSION - THE ARTS

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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.  

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LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We acknowledge that Edina Community Lutheran Church is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte*, the Dakota nation. Treaties developed through exploitation and violence were broken.  Tribes were forced to exist on ever smaller amounts of land.   

Acknowledging this painful history, we as a congregation confess our complicity in the theft of Native land and acknowledge that we have not yet honored our treaties. We further confess that Christians and Christian churches have benefited from this land theft. We commit to being active advocates for justice for Native People and to truth telling that leads to healing.