Indigenous Peoples Day Devotional

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free. - Jesus in Luke 4:18

Today in the U.S. we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day. One great way to honor this day is to do some of the hard work around owning our past as a nation.

One of our heroes around City Church is Bryan Stevenson who wrote Just Mercy and who founded the Equal Justice Initiative to challenge the racial inequalities in our justice system. One of the things that he often does is bring up our past as a nation, making connections between slavery and racial inequities that exist today. Interestingly, he does this not to guilt or shame people or even to make America look bad. In his own words:

I don't want to punish America for this history; I want to liberate us. I want us to get to something better. But to get there, we're going to have to talk more honestly about the barriers we constructed over 400 years. - Bryan Stevenson, in an interview with CBS News.

So if liberation is the end goal, then we’ve got plenty of healthy motivation to do this work. And on this day, that means taking a step towards thinking about what liberation might be for the indigenous peoples who lived on these lands before being killed, displaced, and erased. So read these words from an indigenous Christian writer and allow them to move you to prayer today:

“We talk about the importance of adoption, but we don’t mention that Indigenous children are forcefully taken from their Indigenous families without consent and adopted into white families, not just throughout history but still today. We talk about violence against women of color, but we don’t say anything about missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose families must decide whether they can trust the government to seek justice for their sisters, daughters, grandmothers, and aunties. We talk about police brutality, but we don’t mention that Native Americans are killed by law enforcement at a higher rate than any other racial group in the US. If the church really wants to get to work to face the injustices of our time, the church cannot ignore the injustices against Indigenous peoples that have been happening since before the birth of this nation.” ― Kaitlin B. Curtice, Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God