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American Indians and Alaskan Natives

Episcopal News Service. May 26, 1988 [88107]

NEW YORK (DPS, May 26) -- The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, which received Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning and the Executive Council as guests in mid-May, is in the poorest county in the United States. Shannon County is located entirely within the Pine Ridge Reservation. They are virtually one and the same.

Indian people and other Native Americans, such as the Oglala Sioux visited by the Church leadership in South Dakota, are the focus of important ministries in the Episcopal Church. Thirty dioceses have organized Native American ministries. In South Dakota, half of all Episcopalians are Indian. On the Pine Ridge Reservation alone, there are 30 Episcopal congregations.

The setting for much of this ministry, though not all of it, is harsh. Dispiritedness is a central characteristic. Unemployment among Indians is over 80 percent. Indians have the poorest health, shortest lifespan, lowest annual income, highest suicide and alcoholism rate, and greatest infant mortality of any group in the country.

In describing the nature of the Church's present ministry among Native Americans (Indians and Alaskan natives), Owanah Anderson (Choctaw), who heads the Native American ministries desk at Episcopal Church Center, says: "Some of the work is limited to a single predominantly Indian congregation; some is an exciting new urban ministry; some dioceses, such as South Dakota, have major and comprehensive Native American work."

Holy Apostles Church on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin (Diocese of Fond du Lac) is the largest and oldest Indian congregation in the Church with 2,150 baptized persons. The Diocese of Minnesota has an especially strong and vital diocesan Committee on Indian Work, and there are now two urban congregations in the Twin Cities. Navajo-land Area Mission is a pioneer in leadership development and is seeking increased autonomy.

In the Diocese of Alaska, there are four major Native American ministries, some of which involve Eskimos or Aleuts rather than Indians: the Arctic coast (Nome environs), interior (Fairbanks), South central (Anchorage), and Southeast (Juneau). Bessie Titus (Athabascan), a lay leader in the Diocese, points out the vast reaches served by this ministry. The Interior Deanery is actually divided into four sub-deaneries.

Native American church leaders agree that a priority in strengthening native ministries everywhere is clergy development. The Rev. Philip Allen (Oglala Sioux), vicar of All Saints', Minneapolis, says: "The key is clergy. There are too many aging clergy. Too many of our clergy die young of heart attacks. Indian clergy should not have to lead five or six missions. To me this is one of the most tragic wastes in the Church today."

The issue is being addressed in part by the ambitious new program for Native Americans at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., where more than a half dozen Indian students will enroll next year for the purpose of entering ordained ministry.

Among the other leading issues are evangelism of "unchurched" Indians and Alaskan natives, genuine partnership and "empowerment" of native peoples in the Church, and racism both inside and outside the Church.

It is thought that 92 percent of all Native Americans remain unexposed to a church of any kind, though fully two percent of all baptized American Indians are Episcopalians. Reservations such as Pine Ridge are filled with churches of all descriptions, but many Indians do not live on reservations now, having flocked to lonely pockets in the nation's urban areas during the post-World War II era. There is a clamoring for inclusion in the real decision-making process of the Church and an end to "paternalism" and tokenism. Native American church leaders say that their people lack sophistication in "processes" because of this.

In addition to overtly racist behavior, other more subtle forms of racism occur. Native American Episcopalians often feel slighted and forgotten, especially in the wake of attention given to relations between blacks and whites. A backlash against Indian land rights and treaties appears to be under way. There are congressional efforts to abrogate treaties that have recently been affirmed by the courts.

The Episcopal Church went on record at the 1985 General Convention for honoring Indian treaty rights, and efforts such as that of Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) to return the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Sioux are receiving support by Indian church groups, and, in the case of the Bradley bill, by the Presiding Bishop.

Much of the funding for Native American ministries in the Church is channeled through Coalition-14, a group of 16 western dioceses. But C-14 is undergoing changes, and this in addition to the restricting of budgetary matters as a result of the Presiding Bishop's Mission Imperatives is likely to change the face of Native American ministries funding to some extent.

The primary advocacy group in the Church is the National committee on Indian Work, which was established in 1969, a year before Coalition-14 was formed. Its Executive Committee is chaired by Phil Allen.

To complement the work of Owanah Anderson on the staff of the Episcopal Church Center in New York, the Church also supports a Field Officer for Native Ministry, Dr. Carol Hampton (Caddo), in Oklahoma.

A covenant to guide new approaches to Native American ministry was made by 84 church leaders who gathered in Oklahoma City, October 1986. The same year the Presiding Bishop established a blue ribbon task force to advise him of pending issues affecting Indian life that came before the Congress. The task force received sweeping new mandates from the Presiding Bishop at the May 1988 Executive Council meeting in Rapid City, S.Dak.

The Covenant of Oklahoma II, as the 1986 document has been called, though acknowledging that racism 'is still a hideous reality in our midst,' is nevertheless framed in a positive and hopeful context, and calls for empowerment of native peoples, examination of alternative modes of Church governance and structure and attention to native ordained and lay leadership development.

Ways to implement Oklahoma II have been discussed in the "Minneapolis Memorandum" of December 1986, and another important discussion of Native American presence in the Church may be found in the "Denver Document" of September 1987.

Each of these documents was the result of an important conference, and involved the broad spectrum of Native American church leadership led by Bishop William C. Wantland (Seminole) of Eau Claire among others.

Will the Episcopal Church live up to its 400-year-old commitment to bring the Gospel to indigenous people on these shores? This is the question that Owanah Anderson posed to the Executive Council when it met in May, and it is the question that Native American Episcopalians everywhere are asking of their Church.

Since 1986, momentum appears to have been gathering for a reaffirmation of that commitment -- made at the Jamestown settlement and carried out with such dedication by evangelists whose names are known only to a few.