A FEW MONTHS AGO, I was driving from Peterborough, Ontario, to my home at Six Nations Reserve. The route took me through the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe.
I began to feel and smell the spirit of the ancestors. On the right were farmlands; on the left, townhouses. In the distance, I could see the metropolis of Toronto. This is where Anishinaabe walked, hunted, gathered, and lived for years before first contact with Europeans. When the settlers came, they built structures to suit their needs. They took over the land by force, trickery, and other means. The concept of buying and selling land is absent from the Indigenous way of life. You cannot sell what the Creator has given you.
Many churches in Canada were built on Indigenous land, first by the Church of England and then the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC). Six Anglican churches were built on the Six Nations where I live. They are a part of my Anglican history; I can trace my Anglican roots to the early 1700s. It is a rich history. And complicated.
The ACC operated a number of residential schools for Indigenous children, where many students were abused—physically, emotionally, and sexually. In 1993, the ACC began addressing residential school system atrocities by promoting a process of reconciliation, including making restitution for harm. The church established a Healing Fund to promote projects that help individuals and communities heal from the trauma. Many abuse survivors have received cash. These projects seek to restore what was lost—language, culture, innocence, family, belonging, traditional values, and ceremonies.
The ACC acknowledges that the Doctrine of Discovery, rooted in 15th century papal edicts and asserting that “lands not inhabited by Christians were empty, unowned, and available to be discovered and claimed,” shaped both the residential school system and the takeover of the land. The loss of land, however, has not yet been reconciled.
Last spring, the Diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia passed a resolution to tithe church property sales to Indigenous causes. The resolution suggested that 5 percent of proceeds from these sales be returned to the Indigenous Nations and communities who are the ancestral caretakers of that land, for use as they see fit; 2.5 percent be used to fund Indigenous ministries in the diocese; and another 2.5 percent go to the Indigenous Ministries department of the ACC to support the planned self-determining Indigenous Anglican Church. Those behind the resolution—including Vivian Seegers, the first Indigenous woman to be ordained in that diocese—are committed to seeing it to fruition. It is a bold step toward reconciliation.
In July, the General Synod of the ACC established a Jubilee Commission made up of “settler” and Indigenous members to address the loss of Indigenous land. The commission is charged with “examining historic and current funds made available for Indigenous ministries at various levels of the church’s structure, assessing current funds designated to Indigenous programming, and assessing broader property questions.”
I was raised on the Onondaga Nation Territory, south of Syracuse, N.Y. The last time I drove through, I saw the historic Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd among the Onondagas, where my grandmother was a steadfast member. I almost cried. It was abandoned in the 1990s. Last I heard, the land was returned to the Onondaga Nation, but the church is still in disrepair. If it was returned to the Nation, that’s good. But either way, the spirit of that land lives on.
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