Indigenous/Ingenious

Whenever I see the word Indigenous, I for some reason I read as ingenious.

I don’t think I’m dyslexic, maybe, instead, I just know my history. We'll see!

There is so much going on right now, with the Feast of St Michael and All Angels and tomorrow Orange Shirt day that I wasn’t sure where to put my focus, so, I went back again and again to the Gospel reading, what really stuck out for me was the pure truthfulness of Nathaniel. He knew who Jesus was, in a time when so many did not believe.

Now, I confess, when I started to write the sermon, I got it wrong. I focussed on the passage just ahead of today’s Gospel reading instead of the reading itself. But I’m glad I did, because what happened before Nathan’s affirmation of Jesus as son of God carries a resonance in our work toward reconciliation.

In John 1:46, just before today’s Gospel, Nathanial says to John: “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”

Of course, he was speaking about Jesus, but his idea was coloured with his thoughts of the town of Nazareth, and so maybe saying what he had heard from others or experienced himself, that nothing good could come out of that place.

I think this story is the perfect place for putting my focus on Orange Shirt Day, which of course is the day that we openly reflect on the pain and suffering endured by Indigenous families and children.

September 30th was chosen as the date for Orange Shirt Day because it coincides with the time of year when Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and sent to residential schools. 

In my family, many generations were taken to those schools, some from the age of 3, if you can imagine that  - my granny Annie was taken from her mother Siamelaht that way, and her mother never saw her again until she was ten years old. The same again with Annie's sister Mary. I can't imagine what Granny went through in those days. 

Back to John, and that line, "what good can come out of Nazareth?” …. it really hurt me when I read it. It felt flippant, like it was said without much thought. Who was Nathanial to judge? Why were the people of Nazareth not well liked? But we know further on that Nathanial was a man of truth, he saw right away who Jesus was, and so his line, questioning people of Nazareth, was probably something he picked up from hearsay, a common saying of the time. And that maybe it wasn't something he truly believed. 

I feel like more often than not, that is the way people think about our Indigenous brothers and sisters. We can be easily disregarded, as dirty, drunks, drug addicts, uneducated, poor, sickly, criminal, troublemakers or stupid, and needing somebody else to take care of us. Sadly, that list can go on and on. I've been called many of these names and worse, as have my family, historically and currently.

Throughout history we have been portrayed as Troublesome Indians, especially, for example, in television depictions. I grew up thinking similar, what a lot of trouble they must be to be causing John Wayne all that bother. That's how we learned about ourselves, through cowboy movies.

Can we stop here for a moment and consider when maybe you have thought, said, seen or heard something similar? In the media, or casual conversation? That Indigenous people were less than?

Maybe that's the same way Nathanial heard about Nazareth. Something he heard and repeated, but maybe when he thought about it, never truly believed.

I don’t want to shame or blame here, I just hope that we can become more aware of what goes on around us, to people in our very own communities. We need to change casual, flippant thinking and language.

When I came back to the big smoke of Vancouver after years of country living, I can recall driving down the road on a date and seeing an Indigenous man lying on the cold sidewalk right on Broadway, it was December. I was astonished that people were just walking around him. I cried out, not having seen this before and the person I was with also said something flippant like, it happens all the time, people are used to it, and then he said a firm 'no', when I wanted to stop and help and find a phone booth to call an ambulance. 

What have your thoughts been when you see the homeless on the streets of Vancouver, the majority of whom are Indigenous?

But getting back to my word ingenious. Do you know how Indigenous populations worldwide thrived for many thousands of years? With their genius. With keeping balance with nature and each other. By knowing that having a good and right stewardship over the land we live on, praises the Creator. That by respecting and sharing what we have, enables us to continue on for generations, always looking out those seven generations ahead, planning for that future and caring for our families not yet here. We knew science and agriculture and aquaculture and medicine, and music, and nutrition, we knew seasons and we knew the land and how to live on it. This is a far cry from those adjectives I listed earlier.

Sadly with the colonization practices that have occurred around the world, Indigenous populations have suffered. But I’m here to show and tell that once we thrived, and I know we will again.

I saw an article in Smithsonian magazine about a seed. It read:

The record for the oldest seed to germinate is a 2000-year-old Judean date palm seed, a plant previously thought extinct.  The seed was discovered in the 1960s during excavations at the archaeological site of Masada in Israel and successfully germinated in 2005; as of 2021, the plant was over 2 m tall.  This tree, named Methuselah, has been used in cross-pollination experiments with modern date palm varieties in attempts to revive the ancient genetic lineage of the Judean date palm.

(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tree-grown-2000-year-old-seed-has-reproduced-180954746/)

In the Gospel, Jesus promises Nathaniel that he "will see greater things than that." 

And maybe so with us, once we rub the sleep out of our eyes, we can see people in their true light. And while we can’t change the past, we can rectify it and read it correctly. (Sort of what I did when re-writing this sermon!)

Like the seeds of that date palm, I feel that the history and truth of Indigenous lives has been muddled and lost, the seeds lying dormant waiting for today's Indigenous people to water then so they can grow and flourish.

We are still here, and we are trying to bring back our old ways. It's baby steps, but we're doing it because in the end, Indigenous, ingenious; they're both the same to me.

Amen