Indigenous Justice

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).

-------

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.

The Coastal Link pipeline and the planned Kitimat LNG terminal was heralded as the biggest private sector investment in the history of Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau and B.C. Premier Horgan celebrated this investment milestone in a major news conference in October 2018 as an example of getting resource and economic development right - in collaboration with resource and pipeline companies and First Nations along the route.   

Last week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested peaceful participants of a blockade of a road on traditional Wet'suwet'en nation  territory, based on an injunction order that was issued last month to TransCanada Pipelines. The Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs were blocking access to the land because they have not given their consent to the natural gas pipeline, or two other proposed pipelines coming through their lands. The land is unceded by the Wetsu’wet’en.

A reflection for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls: 

I saw you first walking out of the hotel parking lot to the highway
You had your purse with you and a commitment to go as you zippered up your sweater, bracing yourself.
My first instinct was to yell out to you to not go but I don’t know why you were leaving, maybe it was worse to stay at the hotel on the highway.
Don’t walk to the city on the highway I still am thinking— 
I said a prayer for you in hopes that you are kept safe.
This is the world I live in.

I currently live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the traditional home of the Anishinabe people for thousands of years. I am the daughter of colonizers and settlers, a white, American-born woman on this land. I’m not a first generation settler, but I’m a settler all the same.

We noticed her standing just inside the front entrance looking up. While she was waiting to load her bus with the summer camp kids, she had stepped into the church foyer and saw the land acknowledgement: The Community Christian Reformed Church of Meadowvale is located on the Treaty Lands and Traditional Territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Have you ever seen a tree so large that as you walked towards it you could not see the top and all perspectives of height began to whirl within you?

We live in a land that was once covered in trees so expansive that you would have to make a concerted effort to walk around them. Trees that stood for generations. Trees that were nourished by salmon carcasses strewn about the forest by eagles, wolves, and bears. Trees that welcomed new life into the world, provided clothes and baskets, and then stood watch as lives waned and returned to the earth.

We so rarely know where we really are. We drive around in cars, spend our days under fluorescent lights in artificially re-circulated air, staring at screens and moving so quickly from task to task the actual location where all this happens hardly matters. We move from the city of our birth to another, and then another, and another, following education, jobs, and opportunities.