For our Staying Connected this week, I just want to offer a word of thanks to you all.

This past Sunday, I preached on “Learning to be a Guest” both as a spiritual practice and a tool for reckoning with our culture’s history of settler colonialism. This was a sermon a long time in the making, beginning last summer when my partner and I took a 20 day, 4,000 mile Amtrak journey to move to Portland, Oregon from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I spent many hours of those weeks watching the landscape go by, reading and thinking about this continent and what it means to me to be making a home on it.

There is a lot to be said about the mobility that is becoming the norm in my generation, and that has been a necessary part of following this career path for me. I am in a time of craving roots, and not knowing how or where to grow them. That was also a time of learning more about my ancestry, about the ways my lineage is full of nearly four centuries of white southerners who have both embraced, inscribed, and upheld white supremacy culture and those who openly rebelled against it. It has felt important not only to learn about the history of this land as a whole, but also to integrate that learning into these particular stories of my own family. 

I share this today because I want to affirm for you all that this can often be really hard, gut-wrenching, soul work. It brings up questions that seem unapproachable, like “Who has a right to this land? Can we earn the right to be here?” I don’t feel like I have any answers, but I see that together we’re learning to be ok with not always knowing the answer. So many of you spoke to me after the service or emailed me notes telling some of your own stories about reckoning with race, learning to welcome in the stranger, and more. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your soul-level engagement in this conversation. In the hours and days since I preached this sermon, I’ve already learned so much from you all, about what this work has been like for you, in this place.

One resource, in particular, is something that I want to pass on. The PNW environmental nonprofit Ecotrust offers a call to action in place of a land acknowledgment in their work. This is a list of actions that we can all be taking to support the sovereignty, well-being, and cultures of Indigenous peoples on these lands. I encourage you to read through this list and imagine what this work looks like for you.

1. Give land back to tribes.
2. Protect the environment and salmon. Tribal cultures depend on them.
3. Insist that the United States respect tribal sovereignty and uphold its trust to tribes, which includes appropriate levels of federal funding to support tribal needs. Many promises to tribes still need to be kept.
4. Elect officials and judges that understand tribal governments, relationships, and law.
5. Invest in tribal economies.
6. Challenge and reject all stereotypes about Indigenous people.
7. Insist that your children and grandchildren are taught accurate information about the histories, cultures, and contemporary lives of Indigenous peoples in your school system.
8. Inform yourself about issues impacting Indigenous communities and speak up.