Archdeacon Travis Enright was raised Roman Catholic, then Anglican, and attended an Anglican seminary. But he says he feels most connected to Jesus in the sweat lodge—a traditional site of spiritual ceremonies, healing and prayer for many Indigenous peoples.
In his own spiritual journey as a young man, Enright—rector of St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Highlands in Edmonton, and a member of James Smith Cree Nation who is of both Cree and Irish background—sought to rediscover his Cree heritage and to reconcile Indigenous traditions with Christianity.
His Cree mother “tried really hard to hide her Cree-ness to the point where she did not want me to learn Cree,” he recalls. “She did not want me to go to ceremony, any of these things that she thought that would diminish me as a person.” Meanwhile, when Enright travelled to Ireland, he realized despite being one-quarter Irish, he could not pass as white.
“I knew that I was functionally and historically different than the vast majority of the white people who I went to school with,” Enright says. “That made me want to find my identity.” He listened to stories from Cree elders. “These stories were our education,” he says. “Built into those stories was a high level of spiritual contact and spiritual inspiration.”
Indigenous Anglicans are still early in the process of incorporating cultural traditions into their practice of Christianity, National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop Chris Harper says—and views of Indigenous Christian identity and what practices are appropriate vary greatly across Canada.
“From coast to coast to coast, we have such a diversity of understanding about what is traditional … Indigenous or local practice,” Harper says. “Trying to fit that … into the Christian [context] has been one of the biggest tasks and challenges that we’ve had.”
A continued factor, Harper says, is the legacy of the residential school system, “which basically said everything that we practiced … the way we thought theologically, spiritually was wrong and was evil.” The resulting mentality in which “anything Indigenous is wrong” persists in some Indigenous communities, he says.
“At the same time, those reserves that have incorporated a little bit of Indigenous traditional teachings and [practices] have found that it has helped their sense of identity,” he adds.
Where some Indigenous people “absolutely reject anything Indigenous,” Harper says, others “have gone the other way to the other extreme. They’re totally traditional and want nothing to do with Christianity. So we are an incredibly complex, broken, wonderfully diverse community of peoples within the church and outside the church.”
“We’re still very much early in the morning of change, if you will, for faith and faith development, especially Christian spirituality for Indigenous Peoples,” the national Indigenous archbishop says.
He recalls that it was only 15 years ago when he first smelled sweetgrass, sage, seed and tobacco being burned as sacred herbs in a smudging ceremony—a traditional practice among many Indigenous peoples—inside a church. The experience of listening to an honour song—a type of song showing respect traditional among some Indigenous cultures—within a Christian context was profoundly moving for Harper.
“The first time I heard an honour song being sung inside the church, I cried, because I never thought I would ever hear or see that,” he says.
Christ transcends cultures: Enright
Enright—who as chair of governance for the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples (ACIP) is tasked with creating Indigenous forms of representation within ACIP and Sacred Circle—sees a long-term trend among Indigenous Anglicans towards greater inclusion of their own traditions in worship and liturgy.
Sacred Circle’s founding documents, The Covenant and Our Way of Life, envision the living out of Indigenous traditions in harmony with Anglican Christianity. The Covenant stresses that Indigenous Anglicans “initially experienced God through our own languages, cultures and worldview.” It continues, “By and large, there is a strong correspondence between our traditional spiritualities and biblical theology, with our Creator being the God and Living Christ of the Bible.” Sacred Circle’s nine guiding principles include respecting “the spiritual traditions, values, and customs of our many peoples.”
Our Way of Life also ties together Indigenous cultures with governance of the Indigenous church. Sacred Circle—the national gathering of Indigenous Anglicans—will, it says, “be guided by Indigenous values, accords/rules, customs or procedures, found in the circle of gathering, smudging, or greeting as well as the oral traditions handed down in our stories, art, ceremonies, and the music of the Peoples. This is where Indigenous law is found, and it is our spiritual governance.”
When he attended seminary, Enright wondered if Indigenous traditions and Christianity clashed, but concluded they did not. “Jesus Christ is lord of the world, not just lord of the cathedrals in Europe,” he says.
In Cree creation myths he finds parallels to Jesus. The coming of the second person of the Trinity, he says, is “not something that can be tied down to one cultural experience.”
At the Aug. 4-10 meeting of Sacred Circle, Enright proposed changes to the election and representation process for ACIP and Sacred Circle, which have until now been based on the Anglican Church of Canada’s four ecclesiastical provinces. Enright instead suggested 12 regional “council fires” based on historic and current Indigenous linguistic and cultural habitation patterns and natural land and water boundaries. Enright says the ways Indigenous Anglicans across Canada incorporate their traditional practices into Christianity follow broad trends in different regions.
Practices vary among Indigenous Peoples across the country
The Rev. Sheila Cook, an ACIP member and priest at St. Columba’s Anglican Church and Christ Church in Alert Bay, B.C., says liturgies vary in context. “You have to know your setting and hold your people where and as they are,” Cook says. “I am Cree and smudging is a part of my ancestral teachings … I would not try to impose those teachings within a Coastal Indigenous setting on a Sunday worship.” Cook herself was ordained with a smudging ceremony in September 2022 at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria.
When blessing a house, Cook will ask residents if they want a smudge or water blessing. “Setting, context, and the people need to be consulted and held in this ongoing walk of reconciliation,” she says. “Curated liturgy is a huge part of that reconciliation walk.”
Jenn Ashton, a Coast Salish author and member of the Skwxwú7mesh (also known as Squamish) First Nation in B.C., serves as Indigenous cultural sensitivity leader at St. Clement’s Anglican Church in North Vancouver. She notes that one church in her area does cedar brushing every Maundy Thursday—a traditional practice that uses cedar boughs to promote healing. Her own church, she adds, is one of many that has written its own land acknowledgement, and currently uses the Indigenous Catechist Training Manual, a document published through the Office of the National Indigenous Anglican Archbishop that summarizes basic principles of Christianity from an Indigenous perspective.
Enright believes denominational identity is particularly important to Indigenous Christians in the Prairies. In Edmonton, many Indigenous people might identify themselves as Catholic even before saying they’re Christian, he says. For First Nations Christians in the Prairies, Enright says, it’s important that “the liturgy is still Catholic or Anglican, but the surroundings around it are very Indigenous.”
At St. Faith’s Anglican Church in Edmonton, where Enright serves as rector, 90 per cent of the liturgy is in English. At the same time, he says, “We smudge and we’ve changed the liturgy to be as Cree-inspired as we possibly can.”
Joseph René de Meulles, district captain of Fort Edmonton Métis District 9 and a delegate at August’s meeting of Sacred Circle, says there tend to be few specifically Métis cultural practices in Christian worship.
Opinions vary among Métis regarding the incorporation of First Nations traditions such as smudging into Christian worship, De Meulles says. He personally observes First Nations ceremonies because his mother was Cree. “I honour my mother by participating in that,” he says. But being baptized and raised Roman Catholic, he also wears a cross to honour his parents and that spirituality.
“There are Métis people that believe that when you observe the more traditional [First Nations] approaches, the Cree side, the smudge, that that’s not spiritually our tradition,” De Meulles says.
The Rev. Catherine Askew—an ACIP member, Ontario-based military chaplain to the Canadian Armed Forces, and member of Moose Factory Cree Nation—notes that a translation of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) into Moose Cree has been in use in northern Ontario Indigenous communities for nearly 150 years. She cites other Indigenous practices in worship such as inclusion of drums and using smudge rather than incense.
“Part of Indigenous spirituality that is giving life in those communities is about Indigenous people having self-determination in liturgy,” Askew says.
Her own grandmother was from the community of Waskaganish on the Quebec shores of the James Bay coast, where the first sailing ship from the Hudson’s Bay Company landed in Canada more than 350 years ago. “You can imagine the impact that colonial presence has had on the communities up in those trading areas,” Askew says. “The practices that existed 350 years ago are just not present anymore.”
Traditional practices are more prevalent, she says, in the Indigenous Spiritual Ministry of Mishamikoweesh, which encompasses parts of northern Ontario and Manitoba. Indigenous Anglicans in Mishamikoweesh are “holding culture camps,” Askew says. “They’re going out onto the land and teaching in the [traditional] language. They’re raising up elders and recognizing in their own way that these people are the spiritual leaders of the Anglican church in that area.
“It is unique to that area. That training model and ordination model is something that they have decided is right for their people. It is not something that would’ve been allowed coming out of the residential schools. But it is most definitely Anglican.”
When it comes to practicing Indigenous traditions, Askew cites beadwork as a vital spiritual exercise. “For me, it’s connecting with the teachings of my grandmothers and keeping connected with them,” Askew says.
“There are many Indigenous churches where you will go in and you won’t see quilted banners or altar frontals that are done with silk,” she says. “You may see an altar frontal made of moose hide with beadwork on it. Again, those are cultural skills that they tried to erase. So to revive them within a church setting is saying that these are sacred gifts; these are things that give us life and definition.”
The Journal tried to contact Indigenous Anglicans from the diocese of the Arctic for this article, including members of ACIP and current and former bishops, but did not receive any responses.
On Oct. 6, Harper gave a dedicatory prayer at a ceremony unveiling a new stained-glass installation in the chapel of The Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, designed by Inuit artist Ningiukulu Teevee. The original drawing by Teevee portrays the Inuit legend of the Owl and the Raven, a folk tale that explains why owls are white and ravens are black as the result of a disagreement between the two birds.
Reflecting on the story’s significance, Harper finds a Christian theme within this traditional Inuit tale: of God using messengers to spread a message of unity and peace.
Young people finding identity through traditions
Enright says generations of Indigenous people have struggled in their spiritual identities because of the erosion by colonizers of their traditional identities, cultures, languages, and spiritual beliefs. Indigenous youth today continue to suffer from intergenerational trauma and racism. “They’ve never had an opportunity to have an authentic journeying of their own spiritual identity,” Enright says.
He says his hope is that through the regional council fires, “these young people [find] some spiritual vocabulary, spiritual liturgies, spiritual ceremonies so that they can have some way of using the sacred to cope with [trauma] … Drugs, alcohol, suicide are real things for young Indigenous people and they don’t have the spiritual tools to even combat them.”
Among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people, Harper finds a growing desire for a sense of identity that often manifests itself in rediscovering older cultural traditions.
“Young people across the board, whether you’re Indigenous or not, are more inquisitive … They want to find something that actually speaks to them and that moves them in their thinking and in their heart,” Harper says.
The national Indigenous archbishop points to reports of a resurgence of interest among young people in Gregorian chant, or use of the BCP. Roman Catholic publications such as The Catholic Weekly in recent years have described young people embracing Gregorian chant. U.K. magazine The Spectator reported in 2023 that millennials were leading a revival in use of the BCP within the Church of England.
“That speaks volumes as to how things are transitioning and changing, and where we as a people are starting to find value, especially the young people, [who] are finding value in ritual,” Harper says.
“A lot of people, especially the older people, were told through residential school, ‘Don’t do that’ … All young people, whether you’re Indigenous or not, are finding identity. They’re finding their voice and something that is unique and speaks to them.”
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the date of the unveiling of a stained-glass window at The Bishop Strachan School, and the name of the school itself.
