CPTnet
13 August 2007
BEAR BUTTE, SD REFLECTION: Honouring our ancestors
As part of our trip to Mato Paha (Bear Butte), we attended a spiritual
encampment set up to pray for the protection of the sacred mountain. There
we met a Lakota woman who spoke to us of white people who ask to join First
Nations rituals, to take part in Sweat Lodges and watch the Sun Dance. She
told me she asks them what they do to honour their own ancestors, what
rituals they have.
As a Christian, I do not perform religious rituals that relate to my
ancestors. But I do make an effort to honour my ancestors; I work for
justice towards Aboriginal North Americans on my behalf and theirs.
My great-great-great uncle, William Spragge, signed the Manitoulin Island
Treaty on behalf of the Crown. I don't know his actual attitude towards the
First Nations he negotiated with, whether he truly wished to make the
encounter between two cultures as just and fair as he could, or whether he
mainly wished to move Aboriginals and their cultures out of the way of
European settlement. In a sense, it does not matter very much. The
Europeans who first encountered First Nations people shared the difficult
task of reconciling two very different cultures with very different views of
the world, and I believe in evaluating even their worst failures with
compassion.
But whatever my ancestors did or failed to do right in the centuries that
preceded this one, their actions form part of an ongoing relationship. I
can choose to honour the best things my ancestors did by doing everything I
can to foster a just relationship between the Aboriginal and Non-aboriginal
people of this continent. If enough of us do so, in the end I believe
history will see even the worst mistakes of our ancestors as slips at the
rocky beginning of a positive relationship. If we and the generations that
follow us fail, then all that our ancestors did, the good and the bad, will
blend into a history of genocide, of the destruction of a people. I do this
work, I strive to steer our relationships in a positive direction, because I
have the honour of my ancestors in my keeping.
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