The more I learn about history, especially when it comes to the displacement of native peoples in the US and the systemic and strategic disempowerment of the Black community, the more big emotions well up within me. I think this is common. Sometimes those feelings can make white folks in particular feel overwhelmed. Guilt, despair, discomfort, and more can manifest as anger, denial, or hand wringing. We’re tempted to say things like I didn’t take the native land or I never discriminated against folks. Just because things might not be our fault in specific terms doesn’t mean that the responsibility of privilege, injustice, and brokenness aren’t ours now. When institutions and people take responsibilities for the sins of racism beautiful healing can occur, which transforms the present.
I have been fortunate in the past few years to witness several such moments of repentance and redress. Most of these have been in the church as we claim the fact that missionaries and land transfers stripped ancestral lands from people, especially the Nez Perce. A few years ago we returned a portion of the Wallowa Lake camp property to the Nez Perce. This month the land of the Wallowa United Methodist Church was given to the tribe. We have held worship services, listening sessions, and classes to help us lament and make a new way forward. We cannot undo the past, but we can co-create a future of restoration, healing, and honesty.
This holy work is also happening within Portland Public Schools. Our headquarters sits on land that was taken from the Albina community, the historic Black neighborhood in Portland. When the freeways were built that community was torn in two. As PPS looks to the future we have agreed to offer right of first refusal on a sale of the building to the Albina Vision Trust, a group working to restore and support the Albina neighborhood. At the meeting to vote on this clause last Tuesday elders from the Black community shared their stories of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and pain. They also shared their hope and their tears of joy. A clause in a contract bringing healing, signaling a different way of being, and a promise to our Black community to continue to dismantle unjust systems. PPS is also working to center the success of Black and Native students, again as a response to the institutional factors that minimize and undermine these groups of students.
We have more work to do. In the church this works comes as we explore how our churches have been centers for white supremacist thinking and action (as depicted in the image below from a church service for the KKK that occurred in Portland in the 1920’s). This then calls us to look at our images, mission work, service to the community, and language as a means of transformation. Our leaders here at the Parish are boldly engaging in these conversations and there will be more places for all of us to reckon with history and our own pasts (and present) and find ways to bring about the Beloved Kindom here on earth.
-Eilidh
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