Truth, Reconciliation, and Dollars

 

Soon I will head to downtown Belleville for the event marking the fourth annual Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, also known as Orange Shirt Day. In church yesterday we acknowledged this week and day and I figure that 50 or so people wore orange. The sanctuary was decorated to acknowledge this solemn commemoration -- kudos to those who did so. During the service we offered a land acknowledgment and said we were sorry the complicity of the United Church in Residential Schools. I was grateful to see that the Every Child Matters flag was still on the front of the church building given that it has been vandalized three times. 

I saw an article about several Mennonite congregations that have decided to address Truth and Reconciliation through annual financial payments as a recognition that they are situated on what was once Indigenous land. Some would argue that they still are. Here is a portion of the CBC article:

A Mennonite church in Kitchener, Ont., among four in Canada paying reparations to Indigenous people on whose land their church buildings are located, says its payments are part of efforts to "repair past wrongs."

On July 6, Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church made its first payment of $4,000, representing one per cent of the church's annual budget. 

Pam Albrecht, a member of the church's spiritual covenant working group, said the payment went to Six Nations Polytechnic — a post-secondary educational institution in Brantford. "This is in the spirit of reparation and acknowledging that there was harm done," Albrecht told CBC.

It was back in the spring of 2007 that two elders at Six Nations of the Grand River — Adrian Jacobs and Rick Hill — proposed a spiritual covenant between Canadian churches and the First Nations that first occupied the land on which the churches are built.

Jacobs, a member of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy of the Grand River Territory in Ontario, said he began having conversations with the Mennonite community that year about "a spiritual covenant with churches."

The United Church has paid millions of dollars in compensation to those who suffered in the Residential School system, really a form in incarceration and cultural genocide. Thirty years ago the UCC established The Healing Fund that supports healing initiatives in Indigenous communities to address the ongoing impacts of the residential school system.

 I've heard of a couple of congregations that have used portions of the proceeds from selling property to support Indigenous initiatives. The notion of apportioning part of the budget of a congregation is new to me, and I'm impressed by this choice. While it may seem like a drop in the bucket it a conscious decision by these congregations to put their money where their mouths are, especially in a time when finding sufficient funds to pay the bills is a challenge. Well done.