National Committee on Indian Work Meets
Diocesan Press Service. May 31, 1972 [72064]
Isabel Baumgartner
TEMPE, Ariz. (DPS) -- "She dances with one feather," the chairman said quietly. Nobody around the table smiled. Heads nodded agreement.
The Rev. George A. Smith was not describing a fan dancer. He was giving a high compliment to a woman whose ability to lead her Indian people is remarkable. The higher the status, the fewer the feathers.
Father Smith, an Qjibway, was speaking during the recent meeting of the Episcopal Church's National Committee on Indian Work (NCIW), in Tempe, Ariz.
Nevada Shoshone, Southern Cheyenne, Standing Rock Sioux, Ojibway, Athabascan, Winnebago.
The people present introduced this first-time observer of Indian Christians to a striking new set of values.
One -- decision-making by consensus didn't begin in some 20th century human relations laboratory. Indian people have used this method for centuries. Everyone listens with great care, no matter how long or wandering the speech. Nobody interrupts. If lengthy talk brings no unanimity, the chairman moves to the next agenda item.
Two -- Indian people feel a strong bond with Creation. Each tribe cherishes a sacred mountain, river, or butte -- the spot on God's earth where the Great Spirit placed a particular family of persons. Traditionally, Indian lands are held in common, not owned by individuals. The land sustains them bodily -- fish, game, fruits -- and spiritually, as nourisher and healer. One man at Tempe put it this way: " When the White man came to survey our land, we said no. God surveyed this land at the beginning of time. If He had wanted the Great White Father to do it again, He would have told us."
Indian people cling to their land -- or at least to hunting and fishing rights -- for deeply religious reasons unrelated to economics. No one needs to teach them the White man's ecological concerns; they have always taken from the land only what is needed to sustain life, never exploiting either nature or fellow man.
Which leads to point three. Indian people, neither aggressive nor acquisitive, act out their bone-deep belief that God's way is the way of sharing. (Echo: the koinonia concept in the Book of Acts.)
Four -- in the words of Standing Rock Sioux Vine Deloria, Jr., whom the NCIW heard in Tempe via video tape, Indian people have a unique sense of tribe, people, from which their sense of identity derives. "Only to White people," he said, "is ethnicity incidental to identity." Episcopal layman Matthew Pilcher of Chicago's St. Augustine's Center works with Indian people who leave reservation for metropolis; yet he protests any "rural and urban" differentiation. "An Indian is an Indian wherever he lives," Pilcher insists. "Don't try to divide us; we are all one people."
The setting of the NCIW meeting was chosen by design -- the inter-denominational Cook Christian Training School where Indians and Eskimos of all ages come to upgrade their education, then go home better equipped to lead their communities. (Episcopal board members of the School: the Rev. Wilbur BearsHeart, Suffragan Bishop Harold Jones of South Dakota, NCIW executive secretary Kent FitzGerald.)
Last fall 35 of Cook's 68 students were Episcopalians from Minnesota, Alaska, and the Dakotas. Alaska's Episcopal Bishop William Gordon told a dinner gathering of Episcopal students and Committee members, " Many of our native people grew up in hunting and trapping times. They have limited schooling, maybe only four or five years. This School takes them where they are and brings them along as far as they want to go, even through college. Cook is essential in preparing our people for leadership, in and out of the ordained ministry, and in giving further training to men already ordained."
While their children attend public or Episcopal parochial school, both husbands and wives study at Cook. Those completing their G. E. D. examination (equivalent to a high school diploma) can stay on, take at least one Cook course, and attend college at nearby Mesa.
Cook celebrated its 80th anniversary last year in a new plant, built in 1967 with proceeds from the sale of its original site. The well equipped buildings are simply but tastefully designed. Air conditioning enables people from frigid climates to cope with Arizona heat. Student body president James Crawford said, "Right after we came here from South Dakota, the thermometer went up to 114. We thought we'd never make it, but we stayed." Crawford joins a mission team back home in June, headed for ordination.
A colorful slide snapped during Cook's celebration depicts its place in the scheme of things. In the foreground on the chapel lawn stands a pure white tepee around which Indian people of all ages are gathered in brilliant native dress. Overhead a 747 plane streaks by, approaching the Phoenix airport three miles away.
Cook students, like NCIW members, react in various ways to the current dilemmas of their people. Some move slowly ahead, keeping patience the prime virtue; others challenge whatever they find oppressive. Those who don't buy confrontation tactics say, "Surely the Gospel can be carried in Indian vessels. Let us be reconciled, one with another. " Matt Pilcher exclaims, "It's time we started questioning, whether it's against the rules or not. If we speak out, maybe things will change. It's time guys like me screamed their heads off."
Somewhere between these two poles the NCIW works at the tasks the 1970 General Convention of the Episcopal Church gave it: to provide leadership as Indian/Eskimo people move into decision-making roles in the Church, and to evaluate and chart new directions for the Church's work with needs, problems, and opportunities of Indian/Eskimo people.
Implicit in the Committee's efforts is the reinforcement of Indian people's pride in their own culture, in values they need to share with non-Indians. Not a social agency, the NCIW gives dollar support to Episcopal Church - related projects as well as to work sponsored ecumenically and by secular groups. (Note: See the attached list of grants just approved.) It advocates no public policies, but speaks rather to the common interests of all Indian people. It centers on the issue of personhood, wrestling frequently with ways to convey more clearly its religion-centeredness, its Christian purpose.
The Committee's 10 Indian Episcopal members were elected by their own people; the Presiding Bishop named to serve with them the Bishops of five Dioceses with significant Indian/Eskimo populations: Alaska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota.
As one member put it at Tempe, " The sooner we can work ourselves out of business, the better; our whole point is to make it possible for local things to happen." A major revision adopted at this meeting decentralizes the Committee's base. With Executive Council approval of the change,* each of six 1972 native regional conferences will elect a seven-person regional board. The six board chairmen (Episcopal communicants in good standing) become the 1973 NCIW. Goal: a voice for Indian/Eskimo people in decision-making -- for themselves and for the Church at large -- at every level of the Church's life. Theme for the regional conferences: the Church's mission, and how to forward it.
Non-native clergy serving Indian/Eskimo congregations gathered May 2-5 at Roanridge, near Kansas City, for an NCIW-sponsored conference directed to their unique needs. As natives become equipped to lead their own congregations, singly or in lay- clergy teams, white priests relinquish their posts. The trick is to make the change-over not so soon as to leave a void, yet every bit as soon as feasible. The Rev. H. Boone Porter and Bishop Lyman Ogilby lead the conference, together with the Rev. Canon William C. Heffner whose experience during a similar transition in the Okinawa churches was helpful.
At Tempe the Committee pondered the current hunting and fishing rights controversy on the Leech Lake, Minnesota, Chippewa reservation. Chairman Smith, rector of Saint Peter's Church there at Cass Lake, explained the tangled issues. The Reservation Business Committee is in conflict with a non-Indian Citizens' Action Committee in the village of Cass Lake which promotes tourist resort development along the Lake shore. The Action Committee is trying to overturn a 1971 court ruling which upholds Chippewa hunting and fishing rights; in protest, the Reservation Committee has declared a Chippewa boycott of Cass Lake merchants. By a vote of four to two with several abstentions, the NCIW endorsed the Reservation Committee's stand. Father Smith (who voted no) commented later, "Deeper issues underlie this situation, issues which have not surfaced. The Church through the NCIW has been taken into supporting the political ambitions of a few, under the guise of protecting hunting and fishing rights. We've disregarded the silent majorities on either side, and one of these silent majorities includes our local Episcopal congregation. These people might, in other matters, agree with one Committee or the other, but they want no part of either's position on this matter."
Strategy/Screening Task Force on Indian Ministries
The NCIW agreed to meet next on August 15-17 in Fort Yukon, Alaska, then adjourned. Mr. FitzGerald, his associate Dr. Howard Meredith, and Father Smith went on to Albuquerque, N.M., to meet with their counterparts from other churches as the Strategy/Screening Task Force on Indian Ministries -- an arm of the Joint Strategy and Action Committee (JSAC). Ten denominations are trying, via this coalition, to increase their effectiveness by combining efforts. Mr. FitzGerald chairs the Task Force.
It appeared, first off, that the brand new group was afflicted with a severe case of growing pains. Its first meeting (in Denver last winter) had generated high enthusiasm as issues were debated and future work envisioned. Now came the nitty-gritty. One form: the need to decide how to act expediently on grant requests which several churches might fund. Could, for example, a Lutheran at one spot on the map become well versed in day care center work and act as nationwide resource person for such requests -- while a Presbyterian in another place offered informed opinion on community development grant applications? Or might one Task Force member, of whatever denomination, try to expedite all grant requests in his home state, whatever their nature? No answer came.
Again -- could the annual week-long family gathering of the National Fellowship of Indian Workers change its style to include the activist concerns of the American Indian Movement? No answer for this sticky one, either.
The Task Force recessed early the first evening, in some disarray. After a night to mull over the tensions which had surfaced on the first day, the members returned to their joint discussions the following morning more conscious of the importance of pulling together on important issues with which Native Americans throughout the country are faced.
A decision was reached to distribute the workload of making on-site evaluations of various projects seeking funding and other kinds of support from the churches to the various members of the Task Force by the geographic areas where the ministries of their respective churches to Native Americans are concentrated. Under this arrangement, NCIW's share of the workload will be concentrated in Alaska, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.
The Task Force reaffirmed AIPA, the American Indian Press Association, as its top priority for support and agreed on ways its members would seek such support. One of these is encouraging diocesan press publications to purchase associate memberships in AIPA at $60 a year.
Russell Means, National Coordinator for the American Indian Movement (AIM), the most activist national Indian organization, with headquarters in Washington and some 30 chapters across the country in both reservation and urban communities, gave the closing address, explaining and seeking support from the Task Force for AIM's strategy. AIM national officers go into Indian communities only upon request of local Indian people who are suffering various kinds of social and economic injustice. They seek to dramatize these issues by confronting the local power structure -- government officials, school boards, law enforcement agencies, local traders and other businessmen -- and challenging them on the forms of discrimination practiced against Indian people. Once they have exposed the injustice and have worked with local Indian leaders to help them understand the dynamics of the situation which support the injustice, they leave with the local people organization of appropriate effective action. This is the way many local AIM chapters have formed. National AIM stands ready to provide further support to the local chapters as the latter may seek such support.
AIM emphasizes the importance of Indian people rediscovering traditional Indian ways and traditional Indian values, including their practice of prayer before they embark on any major undertaking. The Task Force indicated its readiness to consider AIM's request for support upon receipt of a formal proposal.
The Task Force closed its meeting committing itself to bring together in a second annual joint meeting of denominational Indian boards the members of the various Indian boards and staff people from the churches which have organized Indian ministries. Two hundred people are expected at this event in Oklahoma City on November 8-10.
[Contact the Archives for list of Grants approved by the National Committee on Indian Work March 21-23 - Ed.]