“Are you willing to kind of jump off a cliff and say yes to God?” Norman asked his wife, Diane, as they sat in their driveway with their three children. Everyone prayed and said they obeyed the call to the mission field. Norman’s friend served in Native American ministry and encouraged the Norman’s to live on a reservation during the summer of 1984, followed by a months-long, cross-cultural training with North America Indigenous Ministries.
Images of Pilgrims in conical hats eating turkey with Native Americans wearing feathers encapsulates the myth of the first Thanksgiving. Few images can be farther from the truth. Today’s Thanksgiving is an image based on a lie; a falsehood made to soften history.
Learn about the Doctrine of Discovery and how it justified colonialism and exploitation of indigenous peoples, and what we can do today to dismantle it.
WASHINGTON (RNS) The Rev. Graylan Hagler, senior minister of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, has been speaking out for more than 20 years against what he calls the "R word."
On the way home from a trip with my niece to visit her mom (my sister) down in Louisiana in July, we routed back through New Mexico to see the celebrated Anasazi ruins of Chaco Canyon, which has been on my bucket list for some time. Punctuated by wandering cows and bugs languid in the summer heat, the road into the park is a long unpaved bumpy washboard, the result of litigious private landowners unable to reach an agreement with the Park Service on paving. Perhaps this is a blessing, for it keeps visitors to a trickle, limited to those whose curiosity to see the place overcomes worries about the resilience of their vehicle’s suspension.