Repairing Relationships Through Action
By Rev. Breanna Illéné, WCC’s Content Curation & Ecumenical Innovation Coordinator
A group of people gathered around tables for a committee meeting in a hotel conference room in Green Bay may not seem 
like big news, but powerful moments occurred that represented the beginning of healing, connection, reconciliation, and movement towards something new.
The conversation that led to four representatives of the Christian Church joining the Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee (WITRC) as guests at their August 16th meeting began long before that day. Rev. Kerri Parker, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, talked about how important it is to “let things unfold in relationship” and that sometimes takes time. It is in these forming of relationships and actions that movement begins.
During Lent of 2021, the people at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Madison, led by Rev. Miranda Hassett, participated in a study that looked at the native dispossession of the land and the history of redlining in their region. They began asking questions and started on the process of writing a land acknowledgment for their church. As they worked, they realized that they wanted to move beyond words and began to explore how they could pair restorative action with their acknowledgment, specifically asking about a financial commitment.
Rev. Hassett said in a recent WCC Wednesday interview that they pay property taxes on some of the land that they rent out, they pay other expenses as a part of owning and maintaining their land, and that they began to wonder what it looked like to acknowledge that they were basically given this land and the Ho-Chunk were not adequately compensated for it. They asked, how they could begin to include an amount in their yearly budget that they labeled “amends funds”? They have also talked about it as a “voluntary land tax”. They decided to allocate $4000 to be paid on a yearly basis and because it’s a part of their general budget, they must examine it every year, giving them a chance to continue to ask hard questions and learn as a congregation.
Their next question was how to make this payment. They reached out the Wisconsin Council of Churches in search of resources. The WCC had been writing its own land acknowledgment and building connections with leaders in the native tribes in Wisconsin. The WCC was able to connect the leaders at St. Dunstan’s with Mr. Bill Quackenbush, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Ho-Chunk nation, the tribe whose land St. Dunstan’s is on. Conversation with Mr. Quackenbush led to a larger vision of connecting with the Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee (WITRC), in the hopes that this process could be a model for others and be inclusive of all the tribes in Wisconsin.
And so representatives of St. Dunstan’s and the WCC gathered at the August meeting of the WITRC to present the first payment. Along with a $4000 check and a handwritten note in a purple envelope (the color of repentance), Rev. Miranda Hassett also gave jar of black walnut syrup, a result from the Church’s first sap boil on their property. This was a gift from the land. She said it seemed important to bring items that reflected their church’s gratitude and their relationship with the land in the “spirit that we’re trying to deepen our awareness and our care and move our mindset towards relationship and stewardship”.
It was a moment of connection. Mr. Quackenbush spoke about how the “main thing is that we work together as human beings” and Mr. Benjamin Rhodd, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Forest County Potawatomi Community, reminded everyone that “we must help each other in this world” and that “no one can do it alone.”
The WITRC is a committee that deals with the past – working with universities and museums to repatriate native ancestors by returning human remains they hold in their collections to their tribes, returning cultural artifacts to tribes, and working with how to handle new archeological discoveries (such as ancient dugout canoes recently found in Lake Mendota in Madison) but also the future – Mr. Quackenbush spoke of the “passing on of our history” through educational events, including events focused on teaching native youth the history of their people.
The hope is that this payment is the first from St. Dunstan’s and that St. Dunstan’s is just the first church of many to start this process. The goal is to continue to grow relationships and restorative actions among Wisconsin’s Native American Communities and churches across the state. As Mr. Rhodd, said in his invocation of the meeting, “We can call ourselves nations, we can call ourselves separate, but we are not.” If your church would like to join in this movement, please reach out to the WCC for a conversation about how you can get involved.
Rev. Kerri Parker, WCC’s Executive Director, speaks with Rev. Miranda Hassett, rector of St. Dunstan’s Church on last week’s WCC Wednesday. Click here to view the entire conversation.
