George E. Tinker and Indigenous Theologies of Time & Place (Colossians 1:17-23a)

This message was originally given on the fifth Wednesday of Lent, March 13, 2024, at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.
The livestream of Holden Evening Prayer lenten worship may be viewed here.

This evening's scripture text is Colossians 1:17-23a  (below)

“HE GIVES ALL THINGS THEIR FULL MEANING
17He is the one who is in first place and the head of all things. It is in him that all things come together and find their full meaning and purpose. 18He is also the head of his body on earth, the sacred family. He is in first place before all other things, the first2 to rise to life from among those who have died. In this way, he remains chief in all things. 19It made our Great Father’s heart glad to have all that he is living in his Son. 20Through his Son he brought together everything in the spirit-world above and on the earth below into harmony with himself, making peace through his lifeblood poured out on the cross.
OUTSIDERS BECOME INSIDERS 21At one time you were outsiders, separated from Creator by your hostile thoughts that led to evil ways. 22But now in the physical body of the Chosen One, through his death, he has turned you from an enemy into a friend. He did this so that you can stand without shame before the Great Spirit as a people who have been made holy, washed clean from guilt and free from all accusation. 23Yes, all this is yours as you make your path straight on the road that leads to this hope, trusting in the good story that you have heard.”
— First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament by Terry M. Wildman

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In the fall of 2017 when autumn trees were bursting with color, Osage Theologian George E Tinker stood before a Lutheran audience in St Paul and said, “Beautiful place y’all have here. So how’d you get it?” He recalls it landing as intended -- awkwardly and uncomfortably -- but his query was and remains important: “How did Lutheran folk end up with so much Indian land across the northern tier of the U.S., including in Minnesota? [It] is,” he writes, “a theological and ethical question that most American folk (not just lutheran folk) never get around to asking themselves.” I want us to meet George Tinker precisely because he’s an American Indian who asks the uncomfortable questions about the history of this Place and its people, from the particular “perspective of Native Peoples who were displaced under the Doctrine of Discovery and all the anti-Indigenous laws it birthed” for the benefit of euro-christian settlers, including us.

But first I want to root us in why exploration of Indigenous Christian Wisdom is so important in this Place: We are a predominantly white-bodied Lutheran congregation in a state that was settled by a largely Scandinavian lutheran population. We live in that historical context, in community with the displaced, in this Place with a capital P. So it is crucial for those of us who benefit from European expansion to examine how our culture has interacted and at times clashed with others, across generations. And to get there, we have to understand the “Doctrine of Discovery” and its impact on Tinker’s Native ancestors and living relatives.

​It’s also important because when Pastors John and Lydia and I were discussing how to design these 40 days, we began with roots: Plant roots, human ancestral roots, and Place-making roots. We wanted to ask who are we, How are we, and Where are we as the Church, the Body of Christ. We are not creatures drifting from realm to realm, but settled people who’ve made — and own— homes Here, in this Place called Mni Sota, “the land where the waters reflect the clouds”; which was stewarded by the Dakota Sioux and Anishinabe people who lived in harmony with the land for ages before any Europeans set foot on Turtle Island. 

For many Native cultures, including Dakota People, PLACE is everything. American Indian Ahote Cooper writes that, “ Native American… origin stories are not mere tales but are the sinews connecting the people to their lands and sacred sites, each narrative a map of spiritual geography. Like the roots of an ancient oak, these bonds run deep, anchoring tribes to Places where the earth speaks of their genesis and where…as Chief Seattle [once said] …the rocks themselves hold memories.” 

Dakota Sioux Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs goes a bit deeper into the Theology of Place on his twin cities Sacred Sites tour, explaining that for the Dakota people, Life and Time are not experienced as when but Where. Time isn’t linear but stacks in layers at Places, where everything that ever happened there can be experienced by any who stand in that Place - even as they, by standing there, become part of the Place’s historical memory..

For example, Bdoté -- the Place where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet -- is a Holy Place for the Dakota, because it’s the Place of their creation, where Creator gave first birth to people. It was a place ceremony & ritual; the Place to which pregnant Dakota women, their sisters, and Medicine Women would return in order to give birth in the arms of First Birth Herself, and join in the cycle of birth and rebirth in the Place that Is Life. 

But after the US Dakota War, when the Dakota rose up against the United States for violating its treaty by refusing to provide food and services to the Indigenous people it displaced to create space for European expansion, Bdoté became a US concentration camp that 1,200 women and children were marched to on a 120-mile Great Plains Trail of Tears in December 1852, where hundreds of them died of starvation and disease at the Place of their genesis. That December 26th -- just 5 days before his New Years Day Emancipation Proclamation -- President Lincoln ordered the hanging of 38 of their fathers, husbands, and sons at what remains to this day the largest mass execution in US history. Those who survived the genocide at Bdoté were shipped away to the Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota and north into Canada. 

And so the Place of their creation was turned into the Place of their decimation. And all that life and death remains rooted in that Place even now, where earth Herself, the Great Mother, bears it all, re-membering all who visit.

Now, all this may sound strange, but let me tell you a story about how real it all is. A few years ago while on retreat in Chacala on the Pacific coast of Mexico, I toured the Altavista petroglyph riverbed, a pre-historic Place of sacred life and Divine ritual for the Tequitque people, and which is now protected by the indigenous Huicholes. As I walked through this riverbed, laying my hands on 4- and 5,000 year old petroglyphs, I began to feel dizzy. And the deeper we went, and the more memory-keeping rocks and trees I touched, the dizzier I got. The buzz was almost audible in my body for the rest of the tour until we passed through the exit gate at the end and my dizziness evaporated. Just…gone. I thought I was going nuts, but when I described it to a friend who’d been there before, she kinda chuckled and said, “well yeah -- the energy in this place is massive. Your body was interacting with the millennia of energy anchored and concentrated in this Place, whose rocks, trees, and water carry those ancient memories of life, death, worship, and resurrection to whoever’s feet stand on its ground right now.” 

At that time, my spiritual life was a dead zone and I had no idea whether God or anything “beyond a veil” was real, but this was. My body’s response to ancient energy buzzed in my bones and made static in my head. I can feel it to this day when I talk about it, as my Body re-members that history here tonight.

All of this ancient Indigenous wisdom about Place is a big part of why you hear me go on and ON about the thinness of the veil between “now” and “forever”: because I’ve been physically altered by what lives beyond, and not at specific points in time, but at specific Places on God’s earth and in the Place that is my body, which not only re-member in me what lives in the layers of time below, but in the doing, make me part of the buzzing layers that are currently becoming. 

We also see echoes of Place as the keeper of time & memory all over Scripture. We see it in Jesus’s descendancy from pillars of the faith who met God at different points in linear time but in the same Places -- like the clefts of Mt Sinai where God revealed Godself to Moses and Elijah, who each, in turn, centuries later, witnessed Jesus revealed as God to His disciples at the Transfiguration. The centrality of Place in the Biblical Narrative is revealed in the Places named over and over again, like the Wilderness, the Mountains, The Tabernacle and Temple of worship, like the sites of miracles concentrated around the sea of Galilee, and ultimately at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, where Jesus -- the Place of our being and meaning — was crucified. 

Are you starting to see it?
Jesus’s Body was the Place that held the world’s brokenness; the Place that held sin was nailed to the Place of Imperial Torture -- the Cross -- reserved for enemies of the State; Which was raised upon the ground at the Place of the Skull, where the Place by whom creation came to be and in whom all creation is held together, was stolen by Imperial Death. 

And so, going back to George Tinker, the question we gotta grapple with is How did WE get HERE, and what are we called to do in THIS Place, on THIS ground, given to the Dakota People at their genesis at Bdoté and taken by european settlers in the name of empire?

It all goes back to the Doctrine of Discovery which, Tinker teaches, was “an explicitly theological and christian legal doctrine” Pope Alexander VI devised in the late 1400s to “mitigate competition” between christian monarchs who were on the hunt for territories to conquer. The purpose was to declared that any and all non-christian lands, including those stewarded by Native Americans, could be righteously plundered but by only one christian monarch. Meaning, whichever euro-christian explorers were first to “discover” lands already populated by non-christians, had the divine exclusive right to its plunder for their christian king and country, so that no other christian king could lay claim.

I hope the horrific absurdity of the doctrine is immediately clear: The only way for a nation to “discover” and take already-occupied lands is if they don’t view the original Stewards as human Places in whom God Dwells. So to claim the “right of discovery” is to displace and kill Christ over and over, and always for the sake of Empire.

Perhaps less -- but more painfully -- obvious is this inconvenient truth which Tinker names: The Doctrine of Discovery “has been critically important to the lutheran occupation of american land: It snatched Minnesota away from Native Peoples…and secured it as largely lutheran and catholic properties, using legal and theological language to justify thievery -- and I would add, the later genocide and forced removal of those people -- as righteous christian acts.”  This was “the legal principle used by every protestant christian group who [ever claimed] Native Land…[including] lutheran immigrants.”

Friends, we cannot not shrink away from acknowledging the roots and fruits of this Place. We are here, and so we are obligated to Name how we got here, which is by a Christian pope’s declaration -- and its reiteration in the property laws that followed--  that certain people did not count as human beings in the Places of their genesis, if christians wanted those Places for ourselves.

Now, while most of us, as individuals, may only be passive recipients of the fruits of this vile doctrine, we do still enjoy its benefits, while our Native siblings suffer some of the highest rates of houselessness, poverty, human trafficking, and substance use as a direct result of generational trauma inflicted through the doctrine of discovery.

And so, being here in this Place, and knowing the history of this ground and this town, obligates us to actively consider who we want to become within this Place’s memory, and how we want be re-membered among those who stand here in the ages to come. The obligation is all the more precinct for us as a Lutheran congregation which was founded just 27 years after the Dakota genocide at Bdoté, and which owns a significant piece of property in an ancestral Dakota Place.

It’s a lot to take in, folks. Too much to figure in one night or even one lifetime. 

But what if we started by adopting a new doctrine of Repair and, instead of seeking to increase our holdings, praying as St John did: that we might decrease so that Christ in our Native siblings can increase? 

How can we reject our right of discovery in favor of their right of return? 

What if we became students of this Place’s indigenous caretakers, and learned from them how to steward rather than own the land we occupy, so that all of us -- People, Places, Earth -- can thrive in harmony as relatives?

What would it be like to honor our Bodies as Sacred Places, the keepers of time in our own blood and sinew? 

What would it feel like to worship in this Holy Sanctuary as the Place where God re-members us in Baptism and Holy Communion? 

And how might we, by planting our feet upon the earth and digging our hands into the soil, grow into mighty oaks that provide shade for the generations to come?

In other words: Why don’t we start by acknowledging the depths of our roots, where we stand, and grieving what some of our ancestors did in this Place to its People?

In whatever ways you are stirred and called, Beloved, may you become Good Ancestors in the layers of time to all who may come to stand in this Place. Amen.

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Following this message, Paul Koopman sang "Dakota"
an original song by Fireworks on Ferris Wheels