A season for introspection

A long time ago, in the time when most Anishinaabe still knew how to talk with and listen to the animals, the deer abandoned us. This was a serious decision, and not one that the deer took lightly, because it meant breaking a promise. As each new layer of creation had formed, the previous layers, having more experience with living in this world, took responsibility for the care of what came next, and so the rocks and the waters promised to care for the plants and animals, then all the life that was here collectively promised to care for humans – who are the last and most needy of all creation.

But humans forgot that, as we seem prone to do. In some places, people imagined their own creation stories, naming themselves as the stewards of it all, alone in their creation as God’s own image. In their hubris, these people treated creation as if it was their birthright instead of a shared home, centralized authority replacing collective living. In Mesopotamia they built towers, huge vanity projects that imposed a single language and a single way of living on those who, only a chapter earlier in Genesis, had their own languages and ways of living. But the God of the Hebrews despised imperial projects and restored diversity, allowing people under subjugation to return home. It is meaningful that this small story of the destruction of a tower was written while the people were living in, or recovering from, their exile in Babylon where they had lived beneath the shadows of such imperial monuments.

In the deep past of my father’s homelands, our hubris caused the deer to abandon us much as the Mesopotamian builders abandoned the upper classes who demanded towers. One after another, our hunters came back empty and reported that the deer had gone. Most likely other animals as well and so the Anishinaabe went into the winter months prepared for hunger. With little else to do, the Anishinaabe told and retold their stories and in that way, they returned to themselves. At some point, they realized that they had been living in a harmful and terrible way. Stories that had once been funny, the impulsive greed of Nanaboozho who took more than he needed or deceived others into doing his work for him, began to feel uncomfortable and awkward. Other stories taught them how to regain balance.

Returning to ourselves

The Anishinaabe concept of returning to oneself carries the idea of going into the woods, which makes sense, because we are a woodland people. We emerged in the lake-dotted woodlands that stretch from what would become known as the Atlantic coast to the western shores of Lake Superior, memorialized by Longfellow as Lake Gitchee Gummee. So, having realized the truths of our own stories over the course of that winter, recognizing ourselves as the greedy wrongdoer rather than the victimized other, we returned to the woods and sought out the deer.

I’m not sure what the deer were doing at this time. They were likely returning to themselves as well, safe from concern that they would be displaced and eliminated. Telling their own stories perhaps. But surely, they were also watching us, or it might be that they enlisted the support of over-wintering birds and animals so that their hoof prints in the snow would not lead us to their hiding places. Somehow they must have known that we had changed, that we had remembered old promises and relationships, because when we went looking for them, a single deer allowed herself to be found.

Just listen

The Anishinaabe were abject and humble before this young deer, and, with offerings of tobacco, they requested a meeting to make things right between our nations. The young deer had a message of her own. Hoof nation would agree to a meeting under certain conditions: the Anishinaabe would send representatives of the whole community, not just the leaders, and they would listen without interruption to what the deer had to say. It was agreed, and we sent our leaders and hunters, as well as our spiritual people and elders, our musicians and storytellers, children and parents with babes in arms. People from every clan went to meet with the deer and then they listened. They listened for as long as the deer needed to speak. There was no interruption, no shaking of heads, insisting this was not who they were, no justifications or protests from one group or another that they hadn’t known or they weren’t the ones who did it. Nobody claimed that the people who caused harm weren’t real Anishinaabe because real Anishinaabe wouldn’t act like that. The people just listened. And when the deer were finished speaking, the spiritual people lit their pipes and a new agreement was forged between these nations.

Stories make us

Where we read ourselves into our stories is deeply important.

I mention this because, as I bring this story into the present in order to consider the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its various calls to action, the current balance of power means we need to think carefully about how we read ourselves and our communities into the stories that make us.

Although this is a story about the Anishinaabe, in our current world we aren’t the ones who are personally imposing a violent and extractive way of life on those with whom we had previously lived in peace; it’s a system that’s doing it. And although you, dear reader, did not likely build this system, it is a system in which you may be safe and insulated from the worst harms. We don’t often think about power when we talk about injustice; the passive voice preferred by media and mainstream political analysis has taught us to think about bad things happening rather than bad things being done by specific people. Even an awareness of systemic injustice doesn’t prevent that kind of thinking; we blame systems while forgetting that systems are created and maintained by people. Too often systems thinking allows us to exonerate those who operate within them, but following orders is no justification for the harms that follow.

When we have wronged people, or become aware of our complicity in wrongs done by others, we want to rush to reconciliation. We want to distance ourselves from those who caused the harm, and too often Christians will insist that those who cause harm aren’t real Christians. But what does that even mean? Is there a singular Christianity that you alone have managed to find yourselves believing? Or are there multiple strands, emphasizing different aspects of the text towards multiple ends? If they are just as real as you are, what is your obligation to them as theological kin? Alexis Shotwell has a wonderful essay on “Claiming Bad Kin,” in which she examines her relationship to white supremacists who may, as she says, despair of her politics but are nonetheless creating a world in which she will be safe. What if, as part of our commitment to Truth and Reconciliation, Christians claimed our own bad kin, instead of simply disavowing them? In the gospels, Jesus, quite possibly a Pharisee himself, provides a strong model of calling in and confronting his theological kin by expanding or honing in on particular themes.

Introspection

In the rush to reconciliation, we also forget about something very important in this story: the months that came before. The months of deep introspection and examination of the stories we tell ourselves, the theological cover they provide to justify harm we may not even recognize as harm. This is where the Anishinaabe began, not with apologies and action, but with a deep examination of how these harms happened in the first place and their own varying levels of responsibility.

The Calls to Action require that kind of introspection, because, without it, they can be mobilized in a way that causes further harm. They can become what are widely seen as “white saviour projects,” attempts to save us or fix us, without ever addressing the reasons why we are living with injustice decades after the last residential school closed. The deer took the time they needed, the Anishinaabe took the time that they needed, and when the deer decided that the Anishinaabe were ready they allowed themselves to be found.

Justifying conquest

In my first book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, I ask people to do this introspective work. I review many of the stories that early colonists and later settlers told in order to justify their conquest of these lands. I wonder what might have been different had they entered this place as Abraham entered the land that would become ancient Israel, in humility and peace, rather than as the conquering Hebrews who saw themselves charged with tearing down pagan places of worship and killing even the women and children.

How we read ourselves into these stories matters deeply, and the church has, for far too long, seen itself only as Israel rather than as invading Babylon.

Think about the songs that you sing, the ways in which parables are understood. Jewish writers Amy Jill Levine, through her books and lectures, and Jessica Price, through betterparables.org, offer other ways to read familiar stories. For example, reading the story of the Samaritan in the context of 2 Chronicles 28 emphasizes rekindling old relationships and has nothing to do with purity rules. It was, as Price points out, a failure of compassion but not a failure of Judaism, as is frequently taught. Jesus reminded his followers of distant kin who were also living beneath Roman occupation and had helped them before. He called them to examine their stories and history so they could find their way back to restored relationships.

Likewise, honouring the calls from the TRC means implementing them at the congregational and denominational levels, as well as examining your own stories and histories for the theology that allowed the schools to happen in the first place. Without that examination, you will not only remain estranged from old relationships, but you will simply build different towers – more inclusive perhaps, but the imposition of a single language and a single way of being will persist.

Return to yourselves, then you will be ready to listen, and we can make a real peace between us.