Monday Morning Musing: Return Policy

Did you ever have possession of something that, by all rights, belonged to someone else?  A friend of mine tells the story of her free-spirited, “hippie” aunt, who was disowned by their conservative, stuffy larger family.  When my friend’s grandmother died, it was this singular aunt who did not receive anything from their childhood home, which was full of memories, and held nothing of any monetary value.  A couple of decades passed and my friend’s mother died, leaving her to clean out and re-home all of her many possessions, including those things left to her by her mother.  In an act of remarkable kindness, my friend packed some of the things from her grandmother’s home into a box and tucked a note inside:  these belong to you.  There was a small figurine of a girl with her dog; a cast iron skillet that had baked every pan of cornbread the family enjoyed; a tiny vase, big enough for just one flower stem; and the old fashioned dinner bell that had hung outside of the back porch door – calling the aunt and her siblings in when it was time to gather at the table. 

My friend took those things to her free-spirited, “hippie” aunt, now in her eighties and living in assisted living.   And, do you know, the aunt received them with only gratitude.  There was no bitterness, although it would have been understandable if there had been.  Only a spirit of thanksgiving for these small things that were a part of her story, a piece of who she was, and that had been denied her for so long. 

While the metaphorical leap I’m about to make isn’t perfect, I’ve been thinking this morning about the reality that we live on land that rightfully belongs to someone else, our indigenous siblings.  In my case, the Coast Salish tribes.  I live and work and carry out my life on land that belongs to them. 

Now, it’s far more complicated than that.  There are treaties and agreements and later lawsuits and settlements.  I encourage us all to learn more about those and all of the stories that accompany them. 

But I’ve had a very.long.month, work-wise and a terrible five months, so forgive me if I sit in simplicity this morning.  The basic understanding that the land I come home to and take walks on and plant flowers in belonged to my Coast Salish siblings. 

And forgive me if I can’t tie this up with a bow and make it somehow okay.  The very worst argument I hear is that our generation didn’t take the land so don’t blame us.  Sure.  But what are we doing to make this right?  And the anemic, but perhaps well meaning response I engage in almost weekly is a land acknowledgment when we gather as a worshipping community: this land belongs to someone else.

These things are on my mind because it’s Indigenous People’s Day here in the United States, unless you choose to honor the people who took the land and then it’s Columbus Day.  I feel somewhat powerless to make any of this okay, especially in the times in which we are living.  Maybe that anemic land acknowledgment will have to do. 

But there is a hopeful story I want to share that comes out of Ohio and the Church, specifically our United Methodist siblings.

My first call as a pastor was in the small town of Upper Sandusky, OH (not Sandusky, where the giant roller coasters are).  It’s in Wyandot County, named after the Wyandotte Nation.  In 1843, the United States government forced the Wyandot tribe to leave their Ohio lands as a part of the U.S. Indian Removal policy.  (The echoes here…).  Before they left, the tribe deeded a part of their land where a mission church and burial grounds were built to the Methodist Missionary Society, hoping that they would value and protect this sacred parcel of ground.  The government forced the sale of the remaining land, approximate 109,000 acres.*

During my brief years in “Upper” as it is called locally, we would often gather for worship on those grounds – remembering whose they were.   I recall that on those grounds, the holiness, the set-apart-ness was palpable.  It made you want to take off your shoes.

In 2019, the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church returned the land to the Wyandotte Tribe, including the church and burial grounds.

I am thinking today about the grief of the people who had their homelands, including their sacred spaces and burial grounds taken from them. 

I am thinking today about the grief of the people who have been cast out, ostracized from their families because they do not fit into whatever norms and expectations those families have established as ‘right’. 

I am thinking today about the complicated role of being one in possession of something that belongs, rightfully, to someone else.  Even if you are not the one who took it.  The faithful, but hard thing to do is to return it:  return the land, return the burial grounds, return the cast iron skillet that still smells like hundreds of family dinners.  It will not take away the pain of those to whom it should have resided, but it will be a step toward restoration. 

For this day, this prayer, from the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona:

Creator, you bent the earth like a bow until was one, round, shining planet. At your word the land was drawn into mountains and deserts, forests, and plains; the waters were gathered together into rivers, lakes and seas. The circle of your creation has been broken time and again by greed and violence and many lives have been shattered. Renew the circle of the earth and turn the hearts of all your people to one another; that they and all the earth may live, and be drawn toward you and through the power of your son, Jesus Christ, who lives with you and the Holy Spirit now and always. Amen.

The symbol of the Wyandotte Tribe, a turtle

*In 1985 the United States government paid descendants $5.5 million to settle historic claims to the land.