Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kan., wanted to create something to acknowledge that the land it occupies originally belonged to Indigenous groups. It ended up with “An Acknowledgement of Life.”

The congregation dedicated a large painting of a turtle surrounding Indigenous dancers on Jan. 8 in its fellowship hall. It was an opportunity for Tokeya Waci U (Comes Dancing First) to talk about the art and the deep significance it carries.

The Lawrence-based painter is a member of the Oglala Lakota and Haliwa-Saponi tribes. He said every Native origin story talks about coming from the earth. One common creation story among North American groups tells of a turtle that came up from the earth and grew so big that living creatures settled on it, all united in their connection to the “land.”

“Recognizing the land is recognizing you are on a living being. Mother Earth is a living being,” he said. “Acknowledging the land is acknowledging her, acknowledging the grass around you, the dirt, the things people take for granted.

“To acknowledge the land is to acknowledge the being that has allowed you to live this long.”

Phil Dunn, chair of Rainbow’s Peace and Social Justice Committee, said the process got started about three years ago when the congregation considered ways to become more thoughtful and inclusive. The church had been impacted by interactions with the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, a Mennonite group that works to address extinction, enslavement and extraction done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands.

The congregation reached out to the Kansas City Indian Center for suggestions. Tokeya Waci U had worked on some art for the center in the past, so a conversation was started, with the inclusion of a third-party mediator, to ensure a positive working relationship.

“We really wanted to give him as much free rein as possible,” Dunn said. “There was recognition that we’re just a bunch of white people, and we’ll have blind spots. We wanted to educate ourselves as much as possible so that we would not be asking them to engage in education, to educate us.”

Conversation was key, because an initiative like this is more than a transaction.

“Churches are always going to be ignorant of what they are asking about with something of this kind,” Tokeya Waci U said. “I approached them with my ground rules and boundaries. I said, ‘You guys need to understand what you’re asking for. This isn’t a one-time deal. Once you learn about the tribes and what has happened in this area, this is a continuing thing. . . .

“You claim to be progressive and want to help. Well, you have to live that out as much as the Native American community will allow you. Be a true ally.’ ”

Conversations began in the summer of 2021, around the time the discovery of unmarked graves at 20th-century church-run residential schools in Canada grabbed headlines.

Remorse and guilt may have been what Rainbow had in mind, but Tokeya Waci U remembered the suffering-Christ-on-the-cross art he grew up with in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“That’s kind of the route they were going toward, with a picture of people being forcibly removed,” he said. “For me, that was not my kind of art, and I thought I could portray things a different way than ‘you should feel bad for making people leave.’ ”

As details of the residential school graves came to light, the color orange was associated with support for the children. Tokeya Waci U incorporated orange into beadwork and clothwork worn by the dancers in his painting. Some are strong, some are elders, and children dance alongside adults.

They are dancing because they are alive. They dance in celebration and lament. Church-run schools ripped families apart and, in some cases, ripped away lives. It is a painting in homage to children who survived and those who didn’t.

“I wanted to showcase that innocence within the painting,” he said. “But also give the backstory, that it wasn’t always happy like this, because they lived through a hard time. There are those who did survive this, the more adult-looking dancers. These people are still among us and still suffering. . . .

“This is the history, but also something nice to look at, that you could also get a good feeling.”

Rainbow members are pleased with the piece and view it not as a culmination but a beginning.

“It’s a starting point to do other things,” Dunn said. “It’s not one and done: ‘We did a land acknowledgment, let’s move on to something else.’ The land acknowledgment is aspirational. It’s what we’re trying to do long-term.”

Tim Huber is associate editor of Anabaptist World.