Land Acknowledgment
At its meeting in February, the Vestry adopted the following land acknowledgment:
As we gather for worship at 224 North East Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas, we, the people of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas, acknowledge with gratitude and humility that we stand on the ancestral homelands of the Kadohadacho (Caddo), O-ga-xpa (Quapaw), Wahzhazhe, Osage), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux), and Tsa-la-gi (ᏣᎳᎩ, Cherokee) peoples.* We honor their enduring relationship with and faithful stewardship of this land, its waterways, and all living beings, and we offer deep respect to the Indigenous ancestors, elders, and communities of the past, present, and future.
We explicitly acknowledge and lament The Episcopal Church’s complicity and the abuse of Christianity in the colonization, genocide, forced removal, forced assimilation, and cultural destruction of Indigenous peoples.
Seeking to build beloved community as a witness to God’s reconciling love in Christ and guided by our Baptismal Covenant to “respect the dignity of every human being” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people,” we commit to working to dismantle the historical and ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples through accountability, conversation, representation, connection, and education. We commit to learning from Native wisdom, supporting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, pursuing healing and justice, and working toward the restoration of dignity, rights, and culture of Indigenous communities.
May we, the members of this church, walk humbly in this work of repair, united in the love of Jesus Christ, and sustained by the hope of God’s love for all Creation.
*Kadohadacho /kəˌdōhədəˈchō/ ; O-ga-xpa /oh-GAH-hpah/
Očhéthi Šakówiŋ /oh-CHEY-tee shah-KOH-ween/ ; Tsa-la-gi /cha-la-gi/
As you can tell from that carefully crafted statement, a lot of hard work, research, thought, and conversation went into it. Sometime last year, our bishop asked Sara Milford and the Taskforce on Justice and Belonging, which has since become a diocesan commission, to draft a land acknowledgment for the diocese. After some discussion, the taskforce recognized that land acknowledgments, by their nature, must be personal and local. Thus, instead of drafting an acknowledgement for the whole diocese, Sara and Allen Carney, a member of the taskforce and a member of our parish, volunteered to draft a statement for St. Paul’s as a model for other parishes and institutions in the diocese.
Last year, Sara and Allen presented an initial draft to the Vestry—a starting point for the Vestry’s engagement on this issue. In the discussion that followed, the Vestry acknowledged its desire to do more than simply adopt a statement, which would then be placed in a file and never thought of again. On the other hand, the members also named their desire that the land acknowledgment be more than an exercise in self-congratulation—a performative recitation of past grievances that ironically serves as a prideful statement of our humility and repentance. In other words, the Vestry wanted to take this seriously.
As a result, the Vestry created an ad hoc committee to work with Sara and Allen to revise the land acknowledgment into a statement that would convey not only our respect for those who occupied this land before us and our regret over the ways in which our forebears treated them but also our intentions for the years to come. The committee wanted our land acknowledgment to look back and to look ahead—to be a reminder of the past and a call to action for the future.
I think this version of the land acknowledgment does a good job of that. It has a particular trajectory—coming from what is behind us and heading toward God’s reconciliation of all people in Jesus Christ. As a minister of the gospel, I wanted to be sure that our identity as Christians was somehow reflected in the land acknowledgment—that it was not merely something that could be adopted by the City of Fayetteville or the local Rotary Club but a commitment that was grounded in the hope that God gives us in Jesus Christ.
At its meeting, the Vestry had a spirited discussion about the proposed land acknowledgment. Some of the concerns that had been named by a previous manifestation of the Vestry were restated. Is this merely a performative gesture? Will it be put in a frame and tossed on a shelf? Do we know enough about the history of Native Americans and their relationship with those of European ancestry who encountered them to acknowledge our complicity in the forced removal of indigenous peoples from this land?
The short answer is that I don’t know. I think land acknowledgments are largely performative. I think they usually serve the interests of those who adopt them rather than those whose historic presence in the land they seek to acknowledge. As one Vestry member reminded us, when Chief Standing Bear of the Osage Nation visited St. Paul’s and someone asked him about land acknowledgments, he rolled his eyes. Even the act of adopting a land acknowledgment risks devaluing and dehumanizing the native peoples who once lived here—the very opposite of what we hope will come from this effort.
In the end, what matters is not the words that have been approved by the Vestry but what comes of them—what happens next. I am glad the Vestry adopted this land acknowledgment because I think it is an important next step in the work our parish is doing to explore and celebrate God’s infinite grace, acceptance, and love. It took a lot of work to get us to this point, and it will take a lot of work to make this more than words on a page. That work belongs to all of us.
How will we learn more about the people who lived here before white settlers arrived? How will we give priority to the stories and cultures of those who were forcibly removed from this land? How will we learn about the traditions and wisdom of those who were forced to assimilate into our way of life? How will we confront the violence and theft that our ancestors enacted upon Native Americans, and how will we acknowledge the ways that we have benefited from those sins? How will we seek reconciliation with God and our neighbors that is only possible through the cross of Christ?
A few years ago, I went to see one of my children perform in the school musical about Arkansas history. At the time, I was still new to the state and was curious what I might learn about the history of the place I call home. Not long after the performance started, however, I was dismayed to hear one of the characters announce that Arkansas history began almost 500 years ago, when Hernando DeSoto and his group of explorers became the first Europeans to cross the Mississippi River and enter what would become our state.
The ignorance and erasure of thousands of years of history reflected in the script was stunning. How can we do better if we are teaching our children that our version of history is the only one that matters? Thankfully, a few years later, when one of my younger children was in the same musical, the script had been changed to acknowledge that the history of Arkansas is a lot longer and more complicated than the part of the story that began with European settlement. We have a long way to go, but that acknowledgment is a step in the right direction.
I think the same is true about our parish’s land acknowledgment. It is just a step, but I believe that it is a step in the right direction on a journey that leads us closer to God.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
