I'm attending a cool thing tonight! Think I'll do a lil livetweet.

Dean Thomason opens with prayer and a land acknowledgement that names that the Duwamish people are the first people of Seattle, "past and present."

Canon Nancy Ross introduces the speaker, the Rev. Rachel Taber-Hamilton. She is Shackan First Nation and rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Everett.

TEC formally renounced the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009. That feels... very recent. Glad we did it, but surely it shouldn't have taken that long.

"I have come to be with you. I have not come to shame or blame you. I have come to share this story with you."

The working definition of "Indigenous": "having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them."

(That's from Jose R. Martinez Cobo)

Rev. Taber-Hamilton names the personal impact of the DoD on her family, the way Shackan names and traditions were lost and the measures taken by her ancestors to protect their children from residential schools still couldn't keep them from being assimilated.

In defining the DoD, she describes not only the original stance of the doctrine, but that it's used as legal precedent to this day.

(She doesn't say this but RBG had cited DoD once in a case; this is why many Indigenous folks are less warm to her)

"Discovery needs to be understood as the first adventure capitalism"

Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull in 1493 (to support Columbus) that outlined the essence of DoD: any land not populated by Christians was eligible to be "discovered" and claimed by the European Christians who arrived there.

DoD rests on the idea that non-Christians don't have the same rights as Christians. (European) Christians are allowed to subjugate others by virtue of being Christian.

(Trads still think this should be true, btw)

Columbus thought the Arawak would make good Christians "because they seem to have no religion," per a letter of his to the king of Spain. He also announced his intention to take some Arawak individuals to Spain. No prize for guessing whether he got their permission first.

He also thought they'd make good servants because of how quickly they repeated what the Spaniards said to them. Helluva leap, Chris!

Rev. Taber-Hamilton has moved to talk about North America and Jamestown. She notes that Jamestown was a capitalist venture.

John Smith wrote that he believed that God had reserved the land where Jamestown was set up for Protestant Christians.

Meanwhile, the Powhatan Confederacy was already there, made up of 30 different peoples who had been there for a loooong time already.

Rev. Robert Hunt, chaplain of Jamestown, has a feast day in the Episcopal Church.

And now we're talking about Amonute, aka Matoaka, aka Pocahontas (a family nickname meaning roughly "little brat").

Rev. Taber-Hamilton makes clear that she was abducted and forced to convert. There was no consent here.

Christianity is linked with European culture which is linked with "civilization." To be considered "civilized," aka worthy of respect, Indigenous people had to essentially stop being Indigenous.

Nationalism rose in response to increased immigration, and colonialism became part of American identity.

Now Rev. Taber-Hamilton has moved to talk about Manifest Destiny, aka "DoD Goes West."

Americans moved west in a romanticized self-perception of destiny, "leaving a trail of Native blood and tears"

She reminds us once again that the so-called "Promised Land" for European settlers WAS NOT EMPTY.

All of these people had their own systems of medicine and education, dances and songs, lifeways suited to their environments.

Settlers saw them as "resources to be exploited."

Europeans didn't have a sense of the death toll of epidemics that spread across the continent, because the disease went ahead of settlers and wrecked Indigenous populations (90% over 126 years). Settlers had the impression that there had always been few folks on the land.

Pre-contact, it's estimated that there were 60 million people here.

Tribes who refused to sign treaties with colonists were denied smallpox vaccinations which had been offered to other tribes.

// murder

She's describing various conflicts and executions, including the mass hanging of the Dakota 38, the largest mass execution in American history, conducted by the military after a quick tribunal.

Christian missionaries carried out the work of forced assimilation in residential schools. It was cheaper than making war on them.

// child abuse

Children were taken from their parents and abused horribly, deaths not tracked, and many never reunited with their parents.

Indigenous Americans weren't eligible to vote in all of the US until 1962. Utah was the last holdout. It's still difficult to vote for people on reservations because they lack traditional addresses, and many states require a standard street address to mail a ballot.

"Colonization was in itself 'intrinsically genocidal.'" -Raphael Lemkin

Meanwhile when Rev. Taber-Hamilton tries to use the word "genocide" to describe American colonialism in papers for the Anglican Theological Review, she's told to take the word out.

The massive amounts of death in the continent may have affected the climate itself, causing a slight cooling.

Today, the struggle is often cultural. Rev. Taber-Hamilton talks about the way that Native culture and aesthetic is treated as something for consumption, or like a costume. She specifically calls out the Boy Scouts and the Order of the Arrow.

In response to the sexualization of Indigenous men in settler literature: "Sex with white women is way, way down there on the list of priorities, way below going to Grandma's for fry bread or getting a replacement part for the truck."

"The Doctrine of Discovery is alive and well in how our park systems are managed"; it's the DoD that gives the US government power to claim control over the land, make trails that visitors must follow, and punish Indigenous people who go off-trail to honor the land.

DoD also helps excuse the commercial exploitation of the land. Colonialism has wrecked the continent's biodiversity.

And with declining biodiversity, Indigenous lifeways are also threatened, and so more culture is lost and sovereignty is further threatened.

Whole environmental systems are also destabilized. Rev. Taber-Hamilton gives the example of declining salmon populations in the Columbia River Basin.

Now let's talk about the role of TEC in all of this!

Enmegahbowh was the first Indigenous Episcopal priest. His name means "He that prays for his people while standing." He has a feast day on June 12th.

In 1997 bishops and executives of Episcopal churches in the PNW formally apologized for the church's role in colonization and affirmed the rights of Indigenous people to perform their traditional spiritual practices.

(This was less the role TEC played in colonization and more "Here's some TEC-specific history facts")

So what can we do? To begin with, a lot of reading.

Read the history. Read the UN declaration of the rights of indigenous people. Read about the Doctrine of Discovery.

Churches should connect with local Indigenous communities.

We can feature the work of Native writers and artists.

We can learn about the issues important to our local nations and throw the resources of our parishes behind them.

We can create public Native health resource lists so we can connect our Native neighbors with what they need.

We can teach others in our community about the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation.

"Ultimately, none of us has the power to change the past, but all of us have the power to change the future."

The end!