Trail of Broken Treaties

a sermon preached by Tony Lorenzen

at First Parish Church in Weston

Sunday, October 8, 2006

I arrived in St. Louis for this year’s General Assembly early. I spent the day before GA at the Jefferson Memorial of Westward Expansion. I had intended to see the Gateway Arch and ended up spending the entire day at the Arch, the museum, and on the Mississippi River, ruminating once again on the delicate balance of promises that made this country. Promises made by a land of rugged beauty calling out like angels beckoning souls to heaven to the sturdy men and women of European descent gazing on its prairies and rivers and mountains for the first time. Promises made and then broken to the native peoples of this land, all too willing at first to share the vast expanse of space with the new comers, having no concept that any human being could own the land, the rivers, or the air we all breathe.

I was in St. Louis to attend my first UU church conference and my first religious experience there was in an underground museum. My spirit was caught off guard as I wandered through the museum and saw the story of American westward expansion told through photographs, artifacts and handsomely mounted quotes. There were portraits on the wall of famous Native American heroes: Tecumseh, Sequoyah, and Geronimo. The museum tried to be even handed, but I noticed things missing. There was the obligatory mention of the massacre of George Armstrong Custer’s men at the Little Big Horn, but there was no mention of the brutal slaughter of the Sioux women and children at Wounded Knee. There was mention of fierce native warriors such Geronimo, but not as much about the struggles of native chiefs and statesmen to have treaties enforced. There was nothing about how Standing Bear of the Poncas was declared a person and a citizen of the United States under the 14^th Amendment in 1877.[1] In the end the attempt of the museum to be even handed still created a cognitive dissonance for me because in the end the story the museum told was once again the story of manifest destiny and how the west was won, not how it was lost.

I bought a replica Lewis and Clark journal for $5 in the gift shop and wrote and wrote and wrote for almost an hour. Why is the story never fully told? I had tears in my eyes. I felt like I was sitting in a holocaust memorial, but I was the only one who saw it as such. I looked up to see one of the many plaques containing quotes from Native Americans; it was one of the few that spoke truth, the words of Yellow Wolf of the Nez Perce in white letters, read:

“The whites told only one side, told it to please themselves, told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians has the white man told.”

When I arrived at the opening plenary of General Assembly, I learned that it has been the custom of the UUA since the late 1990s to invite local Native American leaders to greet the assembly. This has been the UUA’s way of recognizing that the land upon which General Assembly takes place was once taken from native peoples. This year, the Osage people, who used to inhabit millions of acres that included St. Louis, refused the invitation. The closest Osage to St. Louis now live in Kansas City. Their reply to the GA planning committee was read to the assembly:

“Why should we drive four hours to come to St. Louis to speak to your Assembly for two minutes so you can feel good about yourselves? We have our own issues in our own communities that we need to deal with. We are not going to carry your water for you. This is your work, you need to do it.” [2]

I was one of the first in the hall to start applauding.

Since 1492, promise after promise, covenant after covenant, treaty after treaty with the native peoples of this land has been broken, beginning with the most simple covenant to treat one’s neighbor as one’s self; to not dehumanize another.

According to the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, beginning with the Treaty with the Delawares in 1778, through to the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868, the Federal Government made no less than 30 major treaties with Native American groups, not to mention countless other arrangements and promises or agreements Native peoples made with European governments before 1776 or treaties made between 1868 and 1909.

Yet, for all of the deal making, rarely if ever was the Great Father in Washington good for his word. “They made us many promises,” said Mahpiua-luta or Red Cloud of Oglala Dakota, “More promises than I can remember, but they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.” The federal government’s dealings with native America are quite literally a trail of broken treaties.

The reasons for not keeping the treaties were many, but always the same really. The Native Peoples of America were living on land that lighter skinned people of European descent wanted. When the Americans had cut down all the eastern forest and needed the land that they had given to the Cherokee, the Shawnee and others, it was time to march them all off to Oklahoma on the trail of tears so we could establish villages and plant cotton. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, it mattered not that these mountains were considered to be like Mecca and Jerusalem and Vatican City to the Lakota, the very center of the Universe, the place from which life itself had sprung. It mattered not that the land had previously been ceded to the Lakota and the Dakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 because when gold was discovered in 1874 all the people the whites call the Sioux were forced off the land and the Homestake Mining Company has been there ever since, operating a functioning mine until 2002. [3]

Once again on Columbus Day Weekend, recognized by the Native Community as a time of mourning, we are confronted with the questions of history and how to heal broken relationships between communities. There are no easy answers, and as the Osage told the UUA General Assembly organizers it is personal work that we have to do ourselves. Perhaps we can find a way to heal the broken relationships between different communities by looking at how we heal the broken relationships in our own lives. After all, our individual lives can also become a trail of broken treaties, filled with relationships or instances in relationships where our covenants are broken and need healing.

What made the series of broken treaties so maddening for Native Americans was that they saw the treaties in a different light than the white government. Native culture is based on family relationships, its obligations sacred and promises made, a person’s word given, are never things to be done or to be taken lightly. The culture that entered into treaties with the Choctaw and the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the Arapaho viewed the treaties as legal documents to be enforced by a system of laws and courts and if necessary to be negated and rewritten by this system, a system they knew the native peoples didn’t understand and therefore would not and could not manipulate effectively for redress of grievances.

The difference between these worldviews of the treaty is one that helps us understand the meaning of covenant. Paul Palmer contrasts these competing ideas of covenant and contract in an article from the journal Theological Studies in 1972. He says

“Contracts deal with things, covenants with people…Contracts are made for a stipulated period of time; covenants are forever. Contracts can be broken, with material loss to the contracting parties; covenants cannot be broken, but if violated, they result in personal loss and broken hearts. Contracts are secular affairs and belong to the market place; covenants are sacral affairs and belong to the hearth, the temple or the church. Contracts are best understood by lawyers, civil and ecclesiastical; covenants are better appreciated by poets and theologians. Contracts are witnessed by people with the state as guarantor; covenants are witnessed by God with God as guarantor...”[4]

What happens when we break the treaties in our own lives? What happens when things such as divorce or infidelity become part of our lives? What about lives that are affected by abuse, addiction, or neglect? The reality of being violated, broken hearted, the loss of trust, fear of intimacy and the inability to form close relationship are among the many common ailments of the soul and the psyche we have to deal with when the covenants of relationship and the promises we make to each other within these relationships are broken.

Some covenants, once broken, leave scars that affect us for a lifetime. Sometimes the violation of trust is so great, the breach cannot be repaired. Sometimes the broken heart is shattered into too many pieces to put back together, what then? We must somehow, in some way, learn to heal and forgive. For some, it means finding the courage to say, “I’m sorry.” For others, it means finding the courage to accept an apology sincerely offered.

Traumatic violations of our covenantal relationships are not the only ways we hurt the many people in our lives. We work late and cancel out on time we were supposed to spend with a spouse or children, perhaps we manipulate loopholes in tax laws instead of paying our fair share, maybe we sometimes park in the handicapped spot when we have no right to be there. There are little ways to break hearts and violate trust just as well as big ones.

That even the best of us and the most well intentioned of us will break our promises once in a while is a given. Not one of us perfect, we are but human. Even Saint Paul questioned why? Who among us can’t relate to Paul’s statement from Roman’s in today’s reading, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Even when we know we might be letting someone down, we sometimes do anyway.

And we all know how it feels to be let down, even Jesus knew. Peter would deny him three times, and in his hour of prayer before his arrest and torture, he asks his friends to stay awake and pray with him, and they all fall asleep. To come up short in our relationships, although painful, is not something, I’m afraid we are going to eliminate. So what to do, when after making efforts at improvement, we still fall short? I think there are only two things we can do: apologize and change our behavior so that our apologies are not empty ones.

In the movie What’s Up Doc, Barbara Streisand says to Ryan O’Neil that love means never having to say you’re sorry. He responds by saying, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” I agree. Love means not only having to say you’re sorry, but also demonstrating it by changing your behavior. If you’re falling asleep on your friend when he asks you to stay awake, then start staying awake. If you’re constantly apologizing for being late at work and missing dinner, get home on time. If you’re lying, tell the truth. If you’ve stolen somebody’s land, give it back. That’s what Canada did.

While the American Indian Movement developed as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement in the United States, a similar movement developed in Canada. In 1973 the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada or ITC began a land use and occupancy study of the Inuit people in Northwest Territories and other Arctic regions of Canada. In 1980 the ITC called for the creation of Nunavut or “Our Land” as an independently governed aboriginal Inuit homeland as part of Canada. In 1990, the Inuit and the Federal government of Canada agreed to a land claims agreement in principle, which was passed by a vote in the Northwest Territories in 1992 and adopted by Parliament 1993. In 1998 Amendments to the Nunavut Act were adopted by Parliament and received Royal Assent.

The Nunavut Territory and Government were born on April 1, 1999.[5]

The government of Nunavut is one of the only governments in the world that operates on the consensus principle, blending the British Parliamentary system used in Canada with the aboriginal consensus seeking system used in Inuit villages, thus incorporating the traditional Inuit cultural into the operation of government on a territorial level.

In 1972 when the march toward Nunavut began, The American Indian Movement in the United States outlined a 20-point plan for repairing the broken covenant between the U.S. government and Native Americans. It was called "TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES": FOR RENEWAL OF CONTRACTS- RECONSTRUCTION OF INDIAN COMMUNITIES & SECURING AN INDIAN FUTURE IN AMERICA!

Some of its points included: the creation of a 110 million acre land base, a review of broken treaty agreements, protection for native land rights and environmental concerns on those lands, and an address to congress by native leaders.[6] Over thirty years later none of the 20 points has been realized.

In the end, repairing covenants requires forgiveness. In order to heal, even when we have been hurt in very traumatic ways, we must find ways to confront our pain, to deal with it, and in some way, to let it go. Instead of making demands in the Trail of Broken Treaties, maybe the American Indian Movement would have had more success by starting with a statement of forgiveness. Perhaps not. Unlike arctic Nunavut, the land they want back is the American breadbasket.

We have a choice when the covenants in our lives are broken. We can apologize, change our behavior, and make reparations, or we can refuse to admit we’ve done anything wrong, and continue to let mistrust and broken hearts define our relationships.

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[1] Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, chapter 15, Standing Bear becomes a Person

[2]“General Assembly 2006” by Tom Stites, UU WorldVol XX No 3 Fall 2006, pg 40

[3] http://www.dlncoalition.org/dln_issues/blackhills_whitejustice.htm

[4] Paul Palmer, “Christian Marriage: Contract or Covenant” Theological Studies 33, 1972

[5] http://www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/English/about/road.shtml

[6] http://www.aimovement.org/ggc/trailofbrokentreaties.html