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Native Episcopalians Join in Celebration of First National American Indian Museum

Episcopal News Service. September 24, 2004 [092404-3-A]

Jan Nunley

[Note: September 24 is observed in many U.S. states as Native American Day. This week on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution sponsors a First Americans Festival, celebrating the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian.]

When the Washington National Cathedral hosted a service of celebration on September 19 for the opening of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) [www.nmai.si.edu], it was not only to honor a long-overdue recognition of the many contributions of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere to the rest of the world.

It was also an acknowledgement of how closely the Episcopal Church and the First Peoples of the Americas have been tied for the past 425 years -- since the first Anglican services were held on a Northern California beach in 1579.

Entering the cathedral to the singing of the White Oak drum group and the blowing of a Hawai'ian conch shell, Native and non-Native alike joined in a call to worship from the four points of the sacred circle. Indian groups represented in the service included the Cherokee, Native Hawai'ian, Micmac, Mohawk, Ojibwe, Navajo, Pascua/Yaqui, Poarch Creek, Potawatomi, Shinnecock, Tlingit, and Ute nations. Celebrant for the festive Eucharist was Bishop Michael Smith of North Dakota, a member of the Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma, with Alaska's Bishop Mark MacDonald as the litanist and a concelebrant.

Bishop Suffragan Carol Gallagher of Southern Virginia, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the first Native woman in the worldwide Anglican Communion to serve as a bishop, was the preacher as well as a concelebrant.

"We are people who have been blessed by the creator," Gallagher said following a Gospel reading of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. "This might seem to most Americans to be an incredible contradiction. But Native people understand -- we know what it means to be blessed.

"We have surely been poor; some people might have pitied us. We have certainly been hungry and thirsty; our people have suffered much over the past 500 years and many are still without the basic needs of life. We have been described as meek, merciful and pure in heart; often, we have been called this when people really meant we were foolish, childish and ignorant. We have been insulted and misunderstood and persecuted, although we have always been people of great love and wisdom. We have been tortured and killed because we cared for our children; we protected our mother earth and we honored and treasured the gifts we had been given-even when we had to whisper and hide, even when our people seemed at their end. We have honored and treasured the gifts we have been given-and it is to people just like us that Jesus was speaking.

"Today, we pause to celebrate the opening of a museum. But we can make a big mistake if we think that this museum is just about the old ways-the things that are past. We make a big mistake if we think that today's celebration is about beauty and art alone. Actually, today is really about blessing-blessing lived out loud... The blessings we have received are not able to be contained in a museum alone, they must be shared in every encounter, every meal, every moment... We are responsible to our people, we are called by God to be a blessing wherever we go," Gallagher concluded.

A Native place

"Welcome to a Native place," emphasized the publicity for the NMAI, the first national museum devoted to Native Americans and the first to present their stories from their own viewpoint rather than that of anthropologists and archaeologists.

The museum's main message is that Indian life is not all artifacts and art, but that the descendants and cultures of the Western Hemisphere's first inhabitants are "still here," despite five centuries of disease, dispossession and domination by other cultures and peoples in their own land.

Anglican and Episcopalian influences within Native communities are scattered through the museum's initial exhibitions of Native philosophy, history and identity, in ways not always apparent to the casual observer. But the exhibit makes it clear that the churches' relationship with Indians leaves a mixed historical legacy, and the Episcopal Church is no exception.

A display case contains Bibles and other Christian literature translated into various Indian languages, including a Book of Common Prayer translated into Mohawk by Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader who served the Loyalist cause during the American Revolution.

Well-known Episcopalians are also integral to the struggles of Native Americans for recognition and respect, particularly in the "Red Power" movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The "Our Lives" exhibit refers to the efforts of Native leaders such as author, historian, scholar, political scientist and activist Vine Deloria, Jr.-son and grandson of Episcopal priests and a member of Executive Council in the late 1960s-and American Indian Movement leader Russell Means, who was baptized at the same Episcopal church, Holy Cross in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, which sheltered the victims of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1873 and played a major part in facilitating negotiations between AIM and federal agents during the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. (Means' main Indian opponent, Oglala Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson, was also baptized at Holy Cross.)

A new music CD released in conjunction with the museum's opening, entitled "Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages," features music written by Hawai'i's Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands and a confirmed member of St. Andrew's Cathedral, established by King Kamehameha IV's queen, Emma, in 1867. There are also selections by singers from the Church of the Holy Apostles on the Oneida reservation in eastern Wisconsin-the direct result of the Episcopal Church's first mission outreach efforts in the early West.

"It's important for us to celebrate and support these historic and momentous steps forward, for the dignity, respect and honoring of so many Native American Indians who have gone before us in the struggle to survive," remarked Janine Tinsley-Roe, the Episcopal Church's missioner for Native American Ministries. "My hope and prayers are for the continuation of the remembrance, reconciliation and healing we've seen here in Washington this week, so that indigenous people all over the world may not give up hope. We in our ministries have an important role to play in these times of transformation, with God's help."

More information about Anglican and Episcopal mission among American Indians can be found in the book "400 Years" (Forward Movement: 1997) by Owanah Anderson.