Participants learn about Indigenous worldviews and experience.

Of the 250 or so gathered for Native Assembly 2014, held July 28-31 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, non-Native folks overwhelmingly outnumbered Native people.

A few months earlier, planners were concerned that not enough white church folks would attend.

The theme for the gathering was “Ears to Earth, Eyes to God,” which focused on the many references in Scripture that tie people to creation, to the land they occupy and the implications this holds for people of faith.

Vince Solomon led a workshop called “Where do Aboriginal Beliefs and Teachings Intersect with Scripture?” Solomon, the Aboriginal Neighbours Coordinator for MCC Manitoba, said, “There’s only one reason I became an Anglican priest, and that is Jesus Christ.”

Even as he underwent religious training, Solomon was rejected by white society. Fellow students marked his dorm room door with an X, warning others not to associate with him. Many of his own people have rejected him, asking why he chooses to be part of a church that hurt his people and why he is perpetuating that hurt. But in the midst of all that, Solomon recalled hearing God say, “I don’t think I ever told you to stop being Native.”

Since then, Solomon has been recovering the theology of the land he grew up with. At the same time, he is studying Scripture to understand where Christianity lost the knowledge that the created order is the “stage of God’s revelation in history. … If you don’t take care of it, the earth will vomit you out” (Leviticus 20:22).

“We see creation in everything. This does not mean animism, monism, polytheism or pantheism.” It was the Creator’s intention for First Nations people to understand God through the attributes revealed to them through the land, he said.

During the question-and-answer time, someone in the audience asked what bugs him most about Western non-Native culture. Solomon said: “Individuality. It should not supersede or get in the way of community.” Individuality, he added, exists in every culture at some level. But he is stunned by the way it trumps community and caring for one another in a non-Native society, he said.

Brander McDonald, the Indigenous Relations Coordinator for Mennonite Church British Columbia, led a workshop exploring Indigenous worldviews. “My grandmother taught me that I shouldn’t look someone in the eye when I first meet them,” he said.

“She told me to look at their feet until I got to know them.” He said the Indigenous perspective is about harmony of body, mind, soul and our relationships with others. It places an emphasis on relationships, just as the Bible does, and it’s rooted in the land, a gift of the Creator, designed to provide all we need.

Another workshop explored the loss of Turtle Island, the Indigenous term for North America. Led by Sue and Harley Eagle, Mennonite Central Committee Canada Indigenous work coordinators, the Blanet Exercise had about 30 participants stand barefoot on an array of quilts. Each held a card detailing their fate: skulls, trains and buffalos, residential schools, medicine wheels.

Someone read the history of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people. The British North America Act put “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians” under the control of the federal government. Spiritual practices were forbidden. Women were relegated to nonentities. Corners of blankets were folded up, forcing participants closer together, some onto foreign territory. The blankets are folded again and again, growing smaller and further apart.

Eventually only a handful of participants held cards of the Medicine Wheel. They were the survivors. The exercise brought history to life in a new way for the non-Indigenous, who formed most of the group.