Calgary, Alta.
The possible future shape of the Indigenous church began to take concrete expression Aug. 7 as the 12th Indigenous Anglican Sacred Circle mapped out representation based on language areas—an exercise that, along with a presentation on the Doctrine of Discovery by a representative of The Episcopal Church’s commission on Indigenous boarding schools, left many Sacred Circle members with difficult emotions to process.
During the morning session, Sacred Circle members placed themselves on a giant floor map of Canada according to language groupings. The point was to begin the process of improving representation on the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples (ACIP). Archdeacon Travis Enright, ACIP’s chair of governance, said the council had told him it needed a different process to elect members to ACIP and asked him to present Sacred Circle with a way forward.
Currently, elections to ACIP are by ecclesiastical province; each of the four provinces—Canada, Ontario, the Northern Lights, and B.C. and Yukon—receives equal representation on the council, as well as at Sacred Circle. Enright suggested to ACIP that they throw out the map based on the Anglican Church of Canada’s ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses and instead use a map based on natural waterways and language groupings as the starting point for representation.
However, some members asked where Indigenous people living in urban centres fit into the regions on the map. Others raised objections that the language areas represented did not necessarily reflect the actual experience of Indigenous people across Canada, many of whom have been forced to relocate from their home communities.
Bishop Isaiah Larry Beardy offered the example of health services in his community of Tataskweyak Cree Nation, which are based on a referral system from a visiting doctor. Many people are referred to urban centres for medical treatment, Beardy said, and some are forced to live there because Tataskweyak does not provide the services they need.
“The question of belonging is very important, and Indigenous people, we know where we belong,” Beardy said. “But sometimes we are forced to be at a place we’re not supposed to be because of the circumstances and historical [experiences].”
Enright reiterated that the mapping exercise was merely a starting point that could be changed. He said the Covenant and Our Way of Life are based on regional zones according to land and water. Sacred Circle’s founding documents refer to Indigenous Peoples as “the Peoples of the Land and Waters.” Our Way of Life states, “Our relationship to the Land and Waters and our way of being Nations is a guide and pattern for our discipleship, fellowship, and unity.”
While he apologized for any trauma or hurt the map may have caused, Enright added, “We need to start somewhere.”
Doctrine of Discovery ‘defines reality for Indigenous Peoples today’
In a presentation that afternoon, Sarah Augustine, executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, told Sacred Circle the doctrine embodies a plan not for the assimilation, but for the total eradication of Indigenous people.
The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery is a group that seeks to mobilize Christian church communities to, in its words, “address the extinction, enslavement, and extraction done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands.” She spoke to Sacred Circle about the doctrine—which asserts that lands not inhabited by Christians were considered “empty” and therefore available for European powers to claim—and the pain it continues to inflict on Indigenous peoples.
Augustine was attending Sacred Circle as a representative of The Episcopal Church’s A127 Commission, named after Resolution A127, passed at the U.S. church’s 2022 General Convention, which created a fact-finding commission tasked with researching The Episcopal Church’s role in Indigenous residential boarding schools of North America.
“We need kinship from the Indigenous leadership in the Anglican Church of Canada because you have envisioned and begun to embody self-determination in a way that we aspire to,” Augustine said. She saw her presentation on the Doctrine of Discovery as part of that kinship and a process of mutual learning and building connections across the two churches. National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop Chris Harper noted after her presentation that Anglican Video had produced a feature-length documentary, Doctrine of Discovery: Stolen Lands, Strong Hearts, with support from the Anglican Foundation of Canada and the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada.
“The Doctrine of Discovery is a body of laws and policies that define reality for Indigenous peoples today,” Augustine said, adding that the doctrine determines who has the right to own and have sovereignty over land in regions around the globe.
In the United States, the Supreme Court affirmed the Doctrine of Discovery in 1823 in what Augustine described as a series of policies “put in place not just to own all the land … but to eradicate our people from the surface of the planet.”
Some legal scholars and judges have argued that the Doctrine of Discovery never had legal force in Canada. University of Toronto law professor Douglas Sanderson, for example, noted in a 2022 Globe and Mail opinion piece that the 1823 decision only applied in the United States.
“Indigenous people are land and water protectors and that does not fit with the purpose of the strongest empire that has ever been in the history of the world, the empire of the United States,” Augustine added. “That empire seeks to own all of [the land and water] and they want to destroy anything that gets in the way.”
Augustine pointed to the involuntary sterilization of Native American women after the U.S. government passed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act in 1970. Over the following six years, Indian Health Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, sterilized an estimated 25 per cent of Native American women of childbearing age. A 2019 article in Time magazine suggested the numbers could be even higher.
“Does that sound like a program of assimilation to you?” Augustine asked. “That’s a program of annihilation, is it not? That’s my generation.”
By claiming that Christian settlers from Europe have the right to sovereignty over all land, she said, the Doctrine of Discovery is the basis for the lack of sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in the United States. Unlike U.S. states, she noted, Indigenous tribes do not have formal representation in Congress.
High rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, incarceration and youth suicide in Indigenous communities, Augustine said, are not the result of “trickle-down trauma” inherited from past generations, but “trauma in the here and now … I have friends that say, ‘Why are Indigenous people so angry?’ … I’ll tell you why: because the most powerful nation on earth wants to eradicate us from the surface of the earth, and that makes life pretty tough.”
Augustine said the Doctrine of Discovery informs every civic institution, such as the justice system, where Indigenous people are incarcerated at higher rates.
Department of Justice Canada reported in November 2024 that Indigenous people were overrepresented in criminal courts and experience disproportionate negative outcomes; and that Indigenous adults, particularly women, are overrepresented in federal corrections, with half of federally incarcerated women as of April 2022 being Indigenous.
In the education system fewer Indigenous people graduate from high school, Augustine said. Statistics Canada reported in June 2023 that non-Indigenous youth aged 19 to 30 were much more likely to graduate high school than Indigenous youth. According to the 2016 census, 63 per cent of Indigenous youth had completed high school, compared to 91 per cent of the non-Indigenous population.
The education system “justifies colonization at every level,” Augustine said. “It tells our young people that they’re ugly, stupid, backward, that they have nothing to contribute … Do you think that might have an impact on the suicide rate? I think it might.
“This is the Doctrine of Discovery, friends, not some abstract thing that happened 500 years ago. It is the legal policy structure that defines reality today. For all of us, any institution you look at, the Doctrine of Discovery is defining it and it must be dismantled. It’s not going to fall apart on its own.”
National Indigenous Anglican archbishop: ‘We are strong and resilient people’
Extended reflection and prayer followed Augustine’s presentation. Sacred Circle members spent much of the afternoon sharing with each other the complex and difficult thoughts and feelings her talk had stirred up—a response some described as trauma. In doing so, they drew strength from one another and their shared Christian faith.
A group of several bishops, clergy and elders gathered in front of the altar in the centre of the meeting hall to share their thoughts. “The word ‘eradication’ today was like a gut punch,” Sacred Circle chaplain the Rev. John Giroux said.
The national Indigenous archbishop recalled travelling south to Navajo land on a recent pilgrimage and hearing from U.S. bishops that the Anglican Church of Canada was “about 10 years ahead” in advancing Indigenous self-determination within the church. “In this presentation, you have been taken back about 10 years—the pain that we are going through, the struggles we are going through, the trauma that we went through,” Harper said. He apologized to those who had been re-traumatized hearing the presentation.
“Where we stand right now is, we are trying to find our voice and place within the church—a place of prayer, a place of strength,” he added. Indigenous Anglicans had drawn up the Covenant and Our Way of Life, he said, “so that we would be able to stand and say as equals that we are children of the creator God; that God has a place for us and that we were not displaced, torn apart, but we are strong and resilient people; a people who have survived, and we are still here and our voice is now being heard.”
Bishop Riscylla Shaw, suffragan bishop of Toronto, said, “I can feel the pain in the room. Not everybody’s feeling it, but some people are. And we’re here to pray with you this afternoon, tomorrow, throughout Sacred Circle. We have been called to come together as the children of God, as the hands and feet of Christ.” She said the church had been engaged in this work for many years, including through the 1993 apology by then-primate Michael Peers for the Anglican Church of Canada’s role in residential schools and the 2019 apology by then-primate Fred Hiltz for spiritual harm inflicted on Indigenous Peoples.
ACIP co-chair Canon Murray Still said, “Jesus didn’t promise a life that was going to be filled with joy all the time and that we would never face difficulties … Jesus had to die, suffer and he knew that we too would suffer. So he gave us the greatest gift: the gift of his Holy Spirit.
“That Holy Spirit lives within you and lives within me. We hear his voice in each other at these gatherings. And as we listen carefully to one another, we can help one another to heal and to take the steps forward that we need to bring about the healing and reconciliation in our communities and in our society as a whole.”
Still said even at the first Sacred Circle, then called the Native Convocation, at Fort Qu’Appelle, Sask. in 1988, “there was a lot of hurt in person’s lives about what was happening in their home communities … We’re still living with those same issues of alcoholism, addiction, drug abuse. All those issues we still face in our local ministries.
“Our task at Sacred Circle has been to [make] our family aware of the issues, to continue to develop resources, to teach about the realities of trauma, and in our best way to help to bring love to our family and healing to our family and restoration to our family. The doctrine is an important piece that underpins some of the difficulties that we face.”
Following these reflections, members lined up at the altar as Giroux and Shaw blessed them and anointed their heads with oil and Sacred Circle sang hymns.
Noting attempts to “extinguish the light of Christ that is in us,” Canon Tom Mugford, the diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador’s canon for Indigenous Ministries and Advocacy, said, “Those attempts continue even to this day. But Jesus, the light of the world, lives within us and there is no weapon that is formed against us that shall stand.” He led Sacred Circle in singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
