Indigenous Justice

Happy National Indigenous People’s Day!  With summer upon us we wanted to contribute to your summer book clubs and reading lists with Justice and Reconciliation Mobilizer - Shannon Perez’s Top 5 thought provoking reads.  Covering the spectrum from U.S. to Canada and fiction to non-fiction, this reading list is guaranteed to get you thinking.

The divisions in North American politics are sharp and create upheaval over what exactly it means to be Christian.

There is racial unrest so deep, it threatens to undo the ministry of reconciliation to which the church is called.

Reformed theology is used to justify white supremacy and isolationism.

Political pundits and partisans often use the annual budget announcement as an opportunity to evaluate a government – to sing its virtues or to decry its follies. Many civil society organizations, like the Christian Reformed Centre for Public Dialogue and our partners, also watch the budget announcement closely to evaluate progress on justice priorities. Budgets are moral documents, after all, revealing the priorities of our nation and our leaders.

We bring our prayers to Creator God, who both "takes up our pain and bears our suffering" and will "let justice roll down like a river."

The first few months of 2019 do not give much hope for reconciliation in Canada.

In January, members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in BC were arrested for blocking the construction of a natural gas pipeline through their territory.

We bring our prayers to Creator God, who both "takes up our pain and bears our suffering" and will "let justice roll down like a river."

We're grateful to welcome Richard Silversmith as a new Do Justice columnist! 

Perhaps you have heard about the disturbance and engagement between Omaha Native American elder Nathan Phillips and Covington High School student Nick Sandmann on the major news outlets and social media, January 19, 2019.  

During the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission it was often said that the journey of reconciliation is long. Colonialism has a long and lasting legacy that requires continual commitment to the hard work of reconciliation. Therefore, we urge you today to continue the work as a matter of honouring God’s image in Indigenous people in Canada, to keep striving towards the high bar that Christ set for us: that we become reconcilers, following the example of the Great Reconciler, Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:11-21).

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We bring our prayers to Creator God, who both "takes up our pain and bears our suffering" and will "let justice roll down like a river."

But when the time came for her to leave the community, she didn’t want to leave. Not only did she not want to deliver alone far from her community, but she also had 5 young children that she didn’t want to leave behind. I remember the daily stress of worrying that she would deliver the babies before leaving the community.