“Our churches sit on stolen land, how shall we respond? My project re-examines and re-tells U.S. settler stories and church histories, starting with my own family, alongside Indigenous histories to challenge common narratives that ignore the ways that Christian ideologies like Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery reinforce settlers’ power and harm Indigenous people. ”
The Christian ideologies of the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny helped to pave the way for immigrant settlers and Christian church expansion in the U.S., while also confining and assimilating Indigenous people using religious justification. Church histories, family stories and U.S. history texts often exclude or gloss over parallel and unsettling Indigenous and settler histories. This project asks the core question: How might re-examining and re-telling U.S. settler stories and histories, with awareness of Indigenous displacement create more respectful and reciprocal relationships with Indigenous people in our churches and our communities? This project will engage in the practice of re-telling often silenced stories, starting with one family’s stories from colonial New England to Glacier National Park, and including the stories of Indigenous people that occurred in the same time periods, but are often ignored. The project hopes to engage the practice of owning our history, in order to seek more just and mutually respectful relationships with Indigenous people on whose stolen lands our U.S. churches sit.