Embarking on a Journey of Healing - Post #1 - Mountain Sky Area of The United Methodist Church

Embarking on a Journey of Healing - Post #1

1/15/2014

Mountain Sky Outlook
January 15, 2014
Embarking on a Journey of Healing Blog
Post #1
Bishop Elaine J. W. Stanovsky
Click here to download a PDF version of this letter

January 12, 2014

Come walk with me on a Journey of Healing.

At the beginning of each new year people look for hope, prosperity and healing during the year ahead. The TREE OF LIFE symbolizes God’s promise that the whole creation and all God’s children and creatures will one day live full and fulfilled lives. This year the Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone Annual Conferences of the UMC will focus on healing relationships within God’s TREE OF ABUNDANT LIFE.

The 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre falls in 2014. On November 29, 1864 Methodist leaders, committed to living in faithful obedience to Jesus Christ, wielding government and military power, planned and led the slaughter of nearly 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people peacefully encamped where they were promised they would be safe. Many of the victims were women, children and the elderly. For some descendants of the massacre the word “Methodist” means only massacre of innocents. This year we have an opportunity to change that and to enter into a relationship of honor and respect with people who know us only as the source of their scars.

This is a history of atrocity; a history that has been hotly debated for 150 years, despite definitive findings by congressional and military investigations; a history that has been largely untaught in our schools, lost from the consciousness of the church, and distorted in its telling. It is a history in which respected Christian leaders failed utterly to uphold God’s love for creation and Jesus’ promise of abundant life. It is a history that casts a long shadow of doubt that people who bear the name “Christian” or “Methodist” can be trusted to cherish and protect life at all.

So where’s the hope?

Hope resides in the possibility of forming new relationships between United Methodists and the descendants of the Sand Creek Massacre. As your bishop, I’m convinced that God has set me on my own Sand Creek journey of healing that began in 2009 and has led me along a way of awakening, listening, acknowledging, repenting and honoring. During 2014 I invite you to join me on this Journey of Healing. We begin in earnest with this letter and the blog that will follow, where I will

share an account of my personal journey of healing
suggest ways for you to begin your own journey of healing
explain the context for this journey in the history of the Christian Church and of our nation, and
offer ways you and your church can make this important healing work your own.

Each time I post a new entry on the blog, you will receive a link to the post. There will also be opportunity for you to post comments and questions.

The journey will intensify in June 2014 when both Annual Conferences will commemorate the anniversary of the Massacre. In the Rocky Mountain Conference on Friday, June 20 members, guests and friends will take a spiritual pilgrimage to the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site near Eads Colorado in the company of Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants. I hope you will prepare yourself for this sacred journey to holy ground by learning about the history so that you are ready to hear the voices of descendants. I am committed to ensuring that the Methodists who travel to this site in 2014 will bring a healing presence.

The 150th anniversary is November 29, 2014. During the week prior I invite you to join me at the 16th annual Spiritual Healing Run from the Massacre Site to the Colorado State Capitol. Plan now to dedicate your Thanksgiving week to this powerful part of the journey. You don’t have to run to promote healing during this event. More details will follow.

I know in the core of my being that God is inviting us to participate in this healing work, to develop new relationships with descendants of the Massacre, and to cultivate abundant life where it was cut down.

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.
-Deuteronomy 30: 19b

Working for Healing,
Elaine JWS

14 Comments

Paul Kottke

1/15/2014 08:51:07 am

Bishop Elaine - a powerful statement. I fully support your approach through the use of this blog. Paul Kottke

Paul Kottke

1/20/2014 05:32:45 am

Bishop - Well done. Thank you for helping to address this issue in a way that is life-giving for all concerned. Paul Kottke

Lena Whitson

5/17/2014 10:40:20 am

Agreed! Thank you, Bishop Elaine, for your approach to this and being an active part of the healing. I am inspired by you and will make LUMC aware of connections with the Sand Creek Massacre through our church newsletter with permission, I trust, with excerpts from your blog.
Lena Whits YAC

Rev. Shirley Montoya

1/23/2014 04:00:40 am

Dear Bishop Elaine, I received your link from Glenna since I serve on the Four Corners Native American Ministry Board, located here in my home town of Shiprock, New Mexico. I appreciate your heartfelt sharing on the journey of healing. When I was at Iliff School of Theology and taking a multicultural class from Dr. George Tinker, we were assigned to read about Sand Creek. Never in my life was I so deeply moved and touched by what happened there to our Relatives, especially the elderly, women and children. I remember sitting in class with tears streaming down my face for the pain our people felt during that time. I visited Sand Creek after that and I refused to walk at graduation in Trinity United Methodist Church until Dr. Tinker was given an opportunity to do the smudging ceremony before graduation. After that the graduation site was moved from Trinity to another location. I don't know if Iliff graduation moved back. But I felt the betrayal of a UMC clergy person, whether active or retired to have committed such a crime. To this day, subtle and yet not so subtle, treatment continues within the United Methodist Church. I retired in 2007 so that I could work with the Native American people and returned to Shiprock. There are needs within the Four Corners NA Ministry and we have churches without clergy leadership. But I sit here and it just feels the Four Corners and the UMC are afraid to offer me any type of clerical leadership based on what Paul West has spread about me and blackballed my career. But according to Creator's will, the ministry I have is managing the first Native American Drop-In Center to be located on an Indian reservation here in Shiprock. Everyday, the homeless, relatives (consumers) with addiction of alcoholism/substance abuse and those with mental illnesses come to the center for resources, assistance and just pain support to continue their lives. But I have established the Healing Circle Drop-In Center as a healing, spiritual center and have great support from a United Methodist Church. I know, by experience, that mainline UMC embraces what few Native American tribes and nations who are United Methodist. I am first generation United Methodist as so many others are here in Shiprock. They long for a church such as one you have supported and started in Cortez, which is accepting of Native people as Native people. Where they don't have to apologize for who they are and don't have to leave themselves at the door to enter a church. For that I am grateful. If Native people had more supporters such as you, Bishop Elaine, I know for a face that Native membership in the UMC will increase. I have prominent members of the Shiprock and its surrounding communities who are United Methodist, but refuse to attend any Four Corners related churches because of their fundamentalist theology. We also have many people who are very educated and the Shiprock community was granted approval by the State of NM to open a chartered school, which will offer a bilingual curriculum, Navajo and English.
On a personal side, I have also been on a healing journey myself with Creator always leading. Thank you so much for sharing so much of yourself. Rev. Shirley Montoya

Bessie G. Collins

1/23/2014 09:31:27 am

Very thought provoking! Makes me proud to call myself United Methodist, not for the egregious deeds of the past but for the hope for the future.

Galan Burnett

2/17/2014 03:20:13 am

Thank you for your concern and hopes for healing concerning the Sand Creek Massacre. It is another example of the results of sin in people's lives. Sin twists and distorts peoples thinking so that they believe it is OK to hate, kill and destroy. Healing can only come when we confess that sin and allow Jesus Christ to replace the hate with His love.

Rev. John Wagner link

2/24/2014 11:29:41 am

Bishop Stanovsky, a very good statement. Thanks for standing up for indigenous peoples, and taking steps to correct past wrongs.

John Wagner

Nonie Woolf

3/9/2014 04:10:19 pm

In my part of the country, Browning, MT we have descendents of the Baker massacre. I am not sure if Methodists have any connection with it, but I do know that our community sufferers from the history of oppression just as our brothers the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. Oppressed people have difficulty trusting and invest their hearts slowly. I learned today that our pastor will be leaving us after 5 years of being here. Yellowstone conference leaders have been told by past pastors that our community needs our pastors for 10 years at least. Once again I am having to trust God because people are saying one thing that appears to be the opposite of their actions. I wish you well on your quest to heal your relationship with the Indian descendants of the Sand Creek massacre.

Rev. John E. Pugh, retired

3/10/2014 02:28:35 pm

Having grown up in what was the Southern Methodist tradition, I can share more than the Sand Creek Slaughter. I know personally the aftermath of slavery that was ended in name and not in fact. I have seen share croppers shacks, and the treatment of African Americans in my native Virginia. I personally took ridicule for sitting in the back of the bus... I saw people shunted to the back of the store where I worked and was instructed as to which shoes were not to be shown to them. I saw my high school shut its doors for a year rather than admit black students. As a graduate I grieved for the kids who lost a year of school in the process. Shortly after going to work for the federal Bureau of Standards, I was a member of Foundry Church when the pastor rebuked the youth group for trying to meet together with the black students to be integrated for the next school year. At the Bureau, I worked side by side with a man who had been a principal of a black grade school, and learned that absences in black school were never investigated. Truancy was only enforced for white kids. He left education because he could not stand the conditions in a school system that provided 12 years of school for white kids and 11 for black kids, where black kids used texts discarded by the white schools.
We have much for which we can grieve. I guess that's the price we pay for long life.Hang in there amd know I share your tears of sorrow and your commitment to let folks know, Christ calls us to a higher life. Grace and peace. John

Lynn Price

3/11/2014 01:41:04 am

Thank you.

Cindy Upchurch

3/29/2014 09:30:55 am

As I read the history of the massacre, I am very saddened. What tragedy!
I thank God for his Grace, Peace, and Love.

CandyO

3/30/2014 06:52:05 am

I am half/Arapaho, and half/Kiowa and a member of the Cheyenne/Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma. My parents raised me to have Christian values and they were founders of Hillcrest Christian Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. When you speak about the Tree of Life and hope and prosperity, you forget about trust. The Native people who lived a nomadic life for thousands of years had trust in their Creator that they would have shelter from the weather with the Buffalo hides, food from the meat that they dried in the sun to make it through the harsh winters on the plains. Once the Buffalo was all killed and settlers came in droves to drive away the Indigenous People and to take away the freedoms of my Cheyenne/Arapaho ancestors they were treated like cattle and fenced in cages waiting for them to starve or die from diseases that the white people gave them on blankets infected with smallpox, measles, or whooping cough. They had reasons not to trust what the Government would tell them. They were told to set-up our TP's and lodges in a certain area and the Great White Father would protect us and give us food for our families. We first, had to give up our guns so we had nothing to protect ourselves from the on slaught of horror that happened at the Sand Creek Massacre or the Treaty of Little Arkansas River. They joked about it being a turkey shoot, while children were shot while praying on their knees after watching them tear open their mothers bellies, and cutting out genitals to carry on sticks through Denver and using the skins for covers on their bibles. No human being should be treated in this manner, whether they are Methodist, Catholic or Jewish or Muslim. Then, the Government told them they would give Cheyenne/Arapaho Natives reparations of land 680 acres with livestock, cattle, chickens and goats, and monies each month but our families never saw any of that money at the Treaty of the Little Arkansas River. Where is the trust?
Every Cheyenne/Arapaho member should be given what the Government promised to them because our Chiefs signed the Treaty.

Chris Hicks link

6/17/2014 05:39:48 am

This is my first time attending the conference & the first I have heard of Sand Creek Massacre. I have a strong belief that God wants our country to be strong & He wants us to set right those things that are wrong. May God bless this journey of healing. Thank You Bishop Stanovsky. Chris Hicks

T Copenhaver link

6/19/2014 01:20:49 pm

We are honored by your walk & your courage to reveal TRUTH

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Embarking on a Journey of Healing - Post #1

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