DIVERSITY
Training
THE
2003 GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH affirmed
resolution A-010, which calls on the church to continue anti-racism
training and to reaffirm its “ historic commitment to eradicate
racial injustice in the Church and in secular society.” Courses
in the Diocese of Nevada are one day in length.
DIVERSITY
TRAINING TEAM in the Diocese of Nevada:
JoAnn Roberts Armstead (Certified Trainer)
Laurie Chappelle
Paul Colbert
Melvin Stringer
In
the Diocese of Nevada participation in this workshop is REQUIRED
annually.
————————————
NEXT SCHEDULED COURSES
Saturday,
September 8, 2007
9 - 1
TRINITY CHURCH, Reno
Please have your
parish contact the Diocesan
Office
one week prior,
so that the meeting space &
lunch and materials can be provided.
————————————
BACKGROUND
For more than ten years the Episcopal Church of the USA has been called
by convention resolution and by pastoral letters from the House of Bishops
to examine and take actions to address the many aspects of racism that
are endemic in ourselves, our parishes, and our communities. The time
has come for the Diocese of Nevada to respond to these calls. These sessions
will help us in self-examination, attitude adjustment and skills development.
We will be guided into a commitment to take action individually and corporately
to reduce prejudice and dismantle racism in our churches and our communities.
Who should attend these workshops? All active members
of the Episcopal Church in Nevada. This includes members of the Diocesan
Council and the Standing Committee, deputies to General Convention and
delegates to Diocesan Convention, members of the Commission on Ministry,
vestry members, clergy, parish educators, youth workers, lay eucharistic
visitors, postulants and candidates for ordination, and all who proclaim
by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.
For more information contact
Peg McCall for
Reno Workshops and Barbara
Lewis for Las Vegas Workshops
————————————
DIVERSITY RESOURCES FROM The Episcopal Church Center
The
Global Hierarchy of Race by
Martin Jacques
Racism
in Malaysia
Women’s
empowerment
“If you haven't already, you absolutely MUST see
this short news clip about a critically important documentary that
has ignited the controversy about race relations in this country.
Click on the picture of the beautiful, young African-American woman and
be prepared to be stunned....
Please do watch this. And then we have to get a grip, get up, get going, and
start all over again.”
----------------------------------
Here is the whole video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGDMevuZZVM
and here is where you can buy a copy
http://www.reelworks.org/watch.php
--------------------------------------------------
This is the edited news story about the above video that appeared on
TV
_http://www.komotv.com/home/video/5001856.html?video=YHI&t=a_
(http://www.komotv.com/home/video/5001856.html?video=YHI&t=a)
--------------------------------------------------
Comment from one of the readers of the HoB/D list
“WOW, incredibly powerful, and a must see for our vestries as well,
especially those who resist training in racism awareness.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Both of these short video’s are excellent stories of gay and lesbian
young people and what they face.
Item # 2
http://www.itl.tv/inthelife/watch/
Look at “I’m still Emily” - “Just in case you
don't know what churches are doing to our Gay and Lesbian youth - watch
this site”
and “Good as You”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Item #3
Winter Talk XIX centers around Jamestown experience from Native point
of view
By Jan Nunley
Friday, February 02, 2007
?
[Episcopal News Service] A Winter Talk photo gallery is available
here.
In many Native traditions, winter is the time for gathering to
share stories. Out of those ancient ways came Winter Talk, an annual
retreat for American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawai'ian Episcopalians,
lay and ordained.
For most of its 19-year existence, Winter Talk was held in Oklahoma.
But the 2007 retreat, held January 12-16, gathered more than 70 participants
at Chanco on the James, a retreat center owned by the Diocese of Southern
Virginia. The center is across the James River from the site of one of
the first encounters between the native peoples of North America and
immigrants from Europe: Jamestown, founded in 1607 as the first permanent
English settlement in what became the colony and later the state of Virginia.
It is from Jamestown that the Episcopal Church traces its origins in
the Americas.
According to Native American national missioner Janine Tinsley-Roe, holding
Winter Talk there was a way of kicking off a year of reflection on the
impact of the Jamestown settlement, reaffirming the Episcopal Church's
1997 Jamestown Covenant, and inaugurating a second Decade of Remembrance,
Recognition and Reconciliation with indigenous peoples in the Episcopal
Church.
Winter Talk is a place and time for native Episcopalians and Anglicans
to laugh and cry and pray -- and laugh some more. For despite 400 years
of struggle against displacement, poverty, and attempted cultural genocide,
no gathering of native peoples is without abundant laughter.
"One of the ways first peoples overcome oppression is through humor," explained
the Ven. Dr. Hone T. Kaa, from the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand
and Polynesia, representing the Mâori people of the "Land of
the Long White Cloud."
"We tell jokes about each other as a way of easing the pain, a way
of masking exactly how we feel about things," he said. "We are
struggling to find our identity in the midst of a majority culture, but
it doesn't have to be gruesome. It is what you make of it."
Not that there is no anger -- it is there, and very real. What may be
dry narratives in a history book for non-Natives are deeply personal
and living family memories that still affect the daily lives of Native
people.
At Winter Talk XIX, participants were asked to respond to the story of
the Jamestown settlement. What emerged after several days were stories
and artwork reflecting the pain that reverberates from the impact of
the European invasion as it swept from the East and Gulf Coasts to Alaska
and Hawai'i.
Each story was grounded in the Biblical narrative brought by the Europeans,
a story native Christians embraced as their own. Yet there was also a
certain ambivalence, a recognition that the Gospel message of salvation
came with an unnecessary and cruel price attached: the destruction of
human cultures and lives.
"I was born 35 miles from here," said the Rev. Lewis Powell,
an enrolled Cherokee, now a deacon at St. Thomas of Canterbury in Albuquerque,
New Mexico and a member of the Executive Council's Committee on Indigenous
Ministry (ECCIM). Recounting the history of Virginia's Indians, he pointed
out that the state still has no Federally recognized tribes, though eight
are recognized by the state and six more are petitioning for recognition.
A bill that will grant the Nansemond, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy,
Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi, along with the Monacan Indian Nation,
federal recognition is being introduced in the 110th Congress.
It was the same in Hawai'i, said Linda Sproat, a member of ECCIM's board,
veteran General Convention deputy and senior warden of Christ Memorial
Church, Kilauea, on the island of Kaua'i. Her grandmother was a parishioner
at the Cathedral of St. Andrew on Oahu when Hawai'i's last queen, Lili'uokalani,
also a parishioner, was held prisoner in ‘Iolani Palace in 1895. "Until
today we are not recognized by the USA as native people," she said,
and many are being "priced out" of land and fishing rights
held in their families for a thousand years because of high taxes.
"I think we all suffered from the same colonizer," agreed Hone
Kaa. "We were discovered and we didn't realize we were lost!" "Found" first
by the Dutch and then by British explorer, navigator and cartographer Captain
James Cook, the Mâori "were taught that we could not navigate" --
and yet just in the past 15 years, he said, elders have been found who
can "read the stars in the old way" that sent his people in oceangoing
canoes across the Pacific.
The central focus of Winter Talk was the building of the altar, in which
each participant was invited to present an item and offer a story about
its significance. This is a patient and respectful community, one that
listens for as long as each one needs to talk. Yet no one seemed to hold
the floor for too long. Schedules and agendas bowed to the needs of the
gathering, and soon the altar was piled with gifts ranging from paua
or abalone shells, a greenstone carving, a green stole and two New Zealand
Prayer Books from Aotearoa, to sacred eagle feathers and leather gloves
trimmed in wolf fur from the Yukon.
Also placed on the altar was an icon of the young Powhatan woman Matoaka
-- better known by her childhood nickname, Pocahontas -- the daughter
of the leader of a confederation of indigenous tribes in the Chesapeake
Bay area, which they knew as Tsenacomoco. It is the centerpiece of a
triptych in progress, commissioned by Malcolm Naea Chun of Hawai'i, ECCIM's
chair, and written by the Rev. Robert Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota priest,
artist and educator who is director of the Department of Indian Work
for the Diocese of Minnesota and vicar of All Saints Indian Mission,
Minneapolis. The icon is a startling image, about as far from the Disney
Pocahontas as can be imagined, with evidence of Plains and even Hawai'ian
cultural influences.
Wrapped in a brilliantly colored Mexican serape, the icon was later taken
in procession from the assembly hall to the foot of the cross on the
banks of the James for a blessing ceremony during the Sunday Eucharist.
After prayers, many came forward to drape it with a ti leaf lei, honor
it with the piercing sound of an eagle-bone whistle and the brush of
a sacred eagle feather, or cense it with white sage smoke.
On the afternoon of January 14, faculty from the Minneapolis-based Indigenous
Theological Training Institute (ITTI) presented three workshops. With
the Rev. Robert Two Bulls, participants could explore how making art
is a form of prayer and viewing art an aspect of the spiritual journey.
The Rev. Debbie Royals, regional missioner for native ministry development
in the Diocese of Los Angeles, led a conversation about models of indigenous
ministry, while ITTI executive director Donald Whipple Fox explored the
use of the Biblical accounts of the Israelite invasion of Canaan as justification
for missionary efforts in North America.
On January 15, the final day, the group boarded a bus and a ferry across
the James to the Historic Jamestowne site that will be the focus of much
of this year's commemorations. They toured the James Fort excavation
site, still in progress, and the National Parks Service's visitor center.
But the real story of Matoaka-Pocahontas was on their minds. "For
her to have died alone in a foreign country is not our way," remarked
Tinsley-Roe. She recalled another story, related to the group the night
before by Upper Mattaponi chief Ken Adams, that told of the massacre
of the Powhatan village of Paspahegh in 1610 by order of the English
governor, Lord De la Warr.
English forces under George Percy, youngest brother of the ninth earl
of Northumberland, killed 70 of the village's inhabitants and burned
their houses and corn, taking the wife of the chief, or "werowance," and
her children hostage. Percy himself wrote that "my soldiers did
begin to murmur because the queen and her Children were spared. So upon
the same a Council being called it was Agreed upon to put the Children
to death the which was effected by Throwing them overboard and shooting
out their Brains in the water yet for all this Cruelty the Soldiers were
not well pleased And I had much to do To save the queen's life for that
Time."
The "queen" was later stabbed to death in Jamestown. The atrocity
shocked the Powhatans, for whom the killing of women and children in
war was unacceptable. "We perceive and well know you intend to destroy
us," the Paspahegh chief had told Captain John Smith earlier that
spring, and it proved prophetic: remnants of the Paspahegh were absorbed
into other tribes and disappeared from history.
So on the return ferry trip, Tinsley-Roe and two of the women participants
prayerfully threw a Hawai'ian lei woven from ti leaves into the James
River. "Ti leaves are medicine, food, protection, cleansing," explained
Sandra Leina'ala Padeken of St. John's By the Sea, Kaneohe, who said
she felt called to recognize the pain of the Paspahegh victims. "It's
used for burials at sea. This is an offering to those past, and for all
of us."
Winter Talk XIX is just the first of a series of meetings, sponsored
and facilitated by the Office of Native American Ministries, and centered
this year on the Jamestown Covenant. They include Paths Crossing, a cross-cultural
exchange program between Native and non-Native congregations; Mountains
and Deserts, which helps build leadership among Natives living in rural
areas; a Women's Conference, Clergy and Lay Conference, and Youth and
Young Adult gatherings in the fall; and the Jamestown Covenant Call to
Action, set for November 1-3 in Jamestown.
-- The Rev. Jan Nunley is deputy for communication for the Episcopal
Church.
?
On the ferry back from Jamestown, native Hawai'ian Sandra Leina'ala
Padeken tosses a braided ti leaf lei--a symbol of healing used in Hawai'ian
funerals--into the James River as Native American missioner Janine Tinsley-Roe
and Rose Samuels join in prayer.
(ENS photo by Jan Nunley)
?
The Chanco conference center's cross on the banks of the James River,
facing Jamestown on the opposite shore.
(ENS Photo by Jan Nunley)
\
|
