|
Photo from urbana.org. |
The drum was enormous.
They say the drum does not come out for many occasions, but they brought it to the Indianapolis Convention Center this week. They cradled it in a blanket to the center of the tall round stage, unwrapped it, and laid it down at the center.
Seven men surrounded the drum and began to beat, their voices raised in call and response. Among them sat the tribal leader who had earlier been wrapped in a blanket as a gift from the white woman leader. She stood beside, wrapped in a blanket he had gifted her. Around them dancers spun, the fringes of their dresses swirling high and low, while around them in circles upon circles sat six thousand of us, watching, listening, singing in our hearts.
The man leading the call sang in his Native Miami language. Before the song, the tribal leader taught us all to understand the chorus: “We love you. We love you.” They sang to the Creator, to Eagle, to all of us here together with a common creator. We love you. We love you.
This was the protocol that began the conference I attended last week. The conference, called Urbana after the place it first took place, happens every three years and aims to help young Christians discern their next steps with a focus on justice and unity in the global church. All week I considered what I could share with you readers, knowing that only some of you consider yourselves Christian, and many have been hurt by people claiming to be Christian. There are many things I might share, but first of all was this drum and this circle of protocol, coming in a way of respect for indigenous people’s ways of being.
These moments around the drum did not come about easily or quickly. In the days before, people planned and rehearsed. For many months, tribal leaders and conference leaders met repeatedly. Even years before, when the possibility was raised of holding this conference in this place—Indiana, the place of Indians, as a tribal leader reminded us—conference planners approached Native people to seek permission and blessing.
But the need to bring people together in a better way goes back much further. In 1970 at another Urbana conference, a Black author named Tom Skinner preached to a nearly all-white crowd, with eight white men and one white woman behind him on the stage. He reminded the crowd that white evangelicals have often upheld the status quo of slavery, lynching, and segregation, whereas real followers of Christ follow the radical Christ who overturned systems and chose “the things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order” (1 Corinthians 1:28). In his talk he traced history back to 1619 when the first European ship carrying African people arrived in North America, and he could have gone further to 1492 when Columbus violently invaded a land already inhabited and beloved.
There is a long, long history to the need for this gathering.
And I wondered, what if such meetings had been done in this way since the beginning of meetings between indigenous North Americans, Europeans, Africans, and all other people of the world? What if blankets were wrapped around each other as gifts of care and honor? What if songs, dances, and drums beat out the message of mutual love?
We can’t know what might have been. But we do know what is happening, and we can watch, anticipate, and participate. I was a volunteer at this conference, and it was my great joy to be assigned the task of interviewing plenary speakers for additional follow-up video footage. One of the speakers I met with was Alexia Salvatierra, a Latina professor and long-time justice advocate in transnational North and Central American border spaces. She told me she had come prepared to speak at the conference, but she had not expected to receive in return such hope. Hope is “in-spite-of-the-odds believing,” she said, and in life you never know what all is possible, “but you can know what isn’t impossible.”
This gathering, this week, was one more thing that is not impossible. I hope you find courage this week to find what other good ways of coming together are not impossible.
|
|
P.S. As you may have noticed, I’m shifting to writing every two weeks rather than weekly as, sadly, my sabbatical days are over. In the meantime, if you’re interested you can watch that opening protocol ceremony or the Urbana talks by Tom Skinner, Alexia Salvatierra, and many others.