Calgary, Alta.
The second day of the 12th Indigenous Anglican Sacred Circle saw members discuss governance in their own context as they advanced the concrete expression of what it means to be a self-determining Indigenous church.
Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, delivered the sermon at worship that morning on Aug. 6, a date Christians celebrate as the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus appeared radiant with light on a mountain in front of his disciples. Parker recalled climbing a mountain in his parents’ native Ireland when a thick fog rolled in, leaving him lost until the fog lifted. At that point, he said, he knew where he was and where he was going.
“All of us have been in a fog like that some time,” the primate said. “The Indigenous Anglicans of our church have been in that fog, a fog placed upon you … When a fog lifted for me, I paid careful attention to it. I knew it was a moment given to me to find my way home.
“Thirty-one years ago, members of the Indigenous Anglican church had a moment like that. A covenant was revealed with clarity to members of your church,” Parker said—referring to the 1994 Covenant in which Indigenous Anglicans called their people into unity in a self-determining community within the Anglican Church of Canada.
“The covenant was revealed with clarity and the way forward was made clear to you,” he said. “The legacy of your ancestors was reclaimed as you saw the way forward. This was from God for you, a covenant to be followed in your own way, in your own time.”
The primate pledged to work with National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop Chris Harper on the fifth of six “pathways” recommended by a primatial commission, which General Synod approved in June. Pathway 5 calls for Sacred Circle as the Indigenous church to walk in partnership with the “historic settler church” consisting of General Synod, ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses.
“I will continue to walk with the Indigenous church,” Parker said. “I will continue to walk with you as your resurgence continues and grow stronger,” working with the national Indigenous archbishop “as we together bring into being a truly right relationship with one another.”
After worship, Sacred Circle watched a pair of powwow dances, in which the dancers wore full traditional regalia. Harper said that when he was younger, he would never have expected to see a powwow dance as part of a church service. Members of Sacred Circle then participated in a round dance.
Comparing worldviews
An afternoon session, “Walking to Representation: Rooted in the Sacred Circle,” was the first of several at Sacred Circle seeking to lay out procedures and structures to put the Indigenous church’s founding documents, the Covenant and Our Way of Life, into practice.
Archdeacon Travis Enright, chair of governance for the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples (ACIP), facilitated the session. He laid out differences in worldview between European-Canadian and Indigenous-Cree traditions—Enright is a member of James Smith Cree Nation—and how these have influenced church governance.
“The call [of Sacred Circle] has been always to be a Canadian Indigenous Anglican church—not simply a ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada, but something that we can call and identify as our own and find pathways forward,” Enright said.
Calling Indigenous peoples into a new self-determining community within the Anglican Church of Canada, however, is a complex and difficult task, Enright said, due to what he called cognitive dissonance between non-Indigenous culture and Indigenous culture.
On the one hand, he said, “There’s a way in which the dominant culture has said, ‘This is the way you do things. This is the way you do church. This is the way you gather. This is the way you make decisions. This is the way you use language. This is the way you do liturgies. This is the way you worship.’”
On the other hand, he said, “Jesus Christ is a God that dwells among us, deep within us and gave us story, gave us ways, gave us the trueness of who we are. Built into our DNA as Indigenous peoples is an innate connection to the land and how we are land people.” Yet the Europeans who began arriving several hundred years ago, he said, also “brought something good. They brought the good news of Jesus Christ in their very particular form.”
Where the European-Canadian worldview stresses homogeneity and dominion, Enright said, the Indigenous-Cree worldview emphasizes kinship—and the Indigenous church could use the latter model to find kinship between diverse expressions of culture and language. “It’s not about being homogenous,” Enright said. “It’s about finding profound relationship within our diversity.”
Enright also distinguished between the European-Canadian focus on the nuclear family, which restricts the family to two parents and children; and the Indigenous-Cree view of what he called the “covalent” family, which extends the definition far wider.
When James Cree First Nation signed Treaty 6 with the Canadian Crown in 1876, Enright said, its negotiators—including his own great-great-grandfather—believed they could consider Queen Victoria family. The covalent family, he said, is “not only who your blood relations are. It’s who comes to your door hungry and alone, and you bring them in and you welcome them home.”
Finally, Enright compared governance structures in the European-Canadian and Indigenous-Cree worldviews. The former included the concept of a sovereign as a source of authority, with both God and the Canadian monarch identified in these terms. It placed authority in a book, whether the Bible or law books, which “then become more powerful than the relationship that we have,” he said. It placed authority in professionals such as priests, professors and judges. It demanded that the mass of the population adhere to the book and to the professional.
Indigenous-Cree traditions, meanwhile, centred social cohesion or kinship around ceremony, mentorship, and consensus, Enright said. It centred all these forms of governance around the idea of a creator, rather than a sovereign.
“Everything—our waking day, our sleeping nights, our interactions with our children, our interactions with our ancestors, our interactions with who we are, the ones that come after us, come before us—are all rooted in our desire to be in relationship with this great and powerful creator,” Enright said. He argued that identity is rooted not just in one’s place, but in their relationships with the creator, with other creatures and with creation, and that these relationships must be centred on God’s grace.
Enright said four components in particular would help the Indigenous church determine a shape for itself based on the Covenant and Our Way of Life. These included collaboration with others as kin—choosing to belong together despite differences; consistency with the gospel at the centre of governance; consensus that seeks to know and hear the voices of others to acknowledge a way forward based on trust, commitment and responsibility; and catholicity, or being universal and inclusive with other Christian denominations.
“Catholicity is for me, the biggest pillar of our relationship that we’re going to have to have with the Anglican Church of Canada, with the United Church, as Indigenous people,” Enright said.
On that day at Sacred Circle, members wore orange shirts to honour Indigenous children who were sent to residential schools. Enright noted that the vest he was wearing over his orange shirt was given to him by a residential school survivor whose brother died. The two brothers attended a non-denominational residential school in Fort McPherson, N.W.T., where Anglicans and Roman Catholics were separated by a fence. One brother was on the Anglican side, Enright said, and the other was on the Catholic side.
That fence, Enright said, represented a fear of the other, which he rejected. “Catholicity,” he said, “to me is, how do we find strength in knowing that Jesus Christ does not only speak in one voice, but in many voices?”
Members emphasize kinship and consensus
Sacred Circle members then discussed in table groups what governance and leadership meant in their own traditional and current contexts. They shared their stories with the rest of Sacred Circle, expressing common themes of kinship, respect and consensus.
Joseph René de Meulles, a Sacred Circle member who is also district 9 captain for the Otipemisiwak Métis Government—formerly known as the Métis Nation of Alberta—spoke about the importance of inclusion and unity between First Nations, Métis and Inuit as Indigenous peoples.
“I just love that we are celebrating all these cultures,” de Meulles said. “You hear this, ‘It’s not appropriation, it’s appreciation.’ I think that’s how we need to approach everything we do, by inclusion of all of our uniqueness and distinct cultures, and celebrate each other.”
ACIP member Yvonne Gesinghaus, who hails from Alert Bay, B.C. and is a member of the Nam’gis First Nation, compared Indigenous governance to a Christmas dinner. “Who organizes it? Who makes the decisions? … The answer is it was all done by consensus,” Gesinghaus said. “The family’s agreed. It starts out with tradition.”
Another model of governance she pointed to is the potlatch. “We’re potlatch people,” Gesinghaus said. The chief makes the decision to have a potlatch, she noted. “Then all the women get together and we start planning. What are we going to cook? … What are we going to give away? Then the bigger heads of families, they get together and they look at our dances and songs. Who is going to transfer their dance to which young person? All of that is done, again, as a family, and it’s done with consensus.”
Annie Bernard, a teacher fluent in Gwich’in, spoke about the importance of language as part of consensus. She recounted teaching her younger brother how to say prayers in Gwich’in, then translating them into English, in hopes that the next day he would say the prayer in school. “Consensus means we pass on yesterday … The more language, the more translating, the more we know about our culture,” Bernard said.
The Rev. Vincent Solomon, who also serves as urban Indigenous ministry developer for the diocese of Rupert’s Land and priest at Epiphany Indigenous Anglican Church in Winnipeg, spoke about how his church had torn out its pews and replaced them with comfortable chairs arranged in a circle.
“That to us says all of us here are equal and that there is a balance here in that the priest, me, is not above everyone else,” Solomon said. “I sit in the same circle that everyone else does. In fact, I don’t put my stole on until it is time for me to do my priestly duties, and that’s the only time that I will put it on, because I come from a priestly people, so I am not above everyone else.”
Métis elder the Rev. Norman Meade spoke about how there are different governance circles at different levels, but that all must keep Christ at the centre and be guided by the Spirit.
“If we don’t follow that spirit that we have been given … we are going in different directions,” he said. “One spirit will bring us together in a good way. I see some of that happening right here. I see some of it out at the sacred fire. I see some of it with the drum teaching. I see some of it with the dancing that we just witnessed here.”
Meade also said the Indigenous church cannot have proper governance without resources to back it up. “There has got to be some way that we can generate some resources for the work that is expected of us,” he said. None of the major churches operate without money and resources, Meade said.
As Indigenous people, he said, “We hear that all the time: ‘They’re always asking for money.’ You know what? We have done a lot without money in the 20 years that we’ve been doing service right at this table and many tables. We have done it without stipends. We have done it without resources. We have done it from the spirit of our heart. But we’re getting old”—Meade noted that he is 81 years old—“and that resource is going to deplete itself … And we’re going to have to turn to the larger body of believers.”
Historically, as it was transferring the role of ministry in Indigenous communities from missionaries to Indigenous clergy, the church often made the new positions non-stipendiary, and many Indigenous priests in the Anglican Church of Canada continue to work without salaries.
Following the session, Sacred Circle took part in a mapping exercise in which members stood within their ecclesiastical provinces on a large floor map of Canada. The exercise set the stage for the next day’s sessions, which would use the mapping to set out representation for different parts of the country in Sacred Circle’s governance.
