OWNING OUR PAST: CHRISTIANITY AND NATIVE AMERICANS
Earlier this year (2022) Grace Episcopal Church sponsored a series of Native American speakers to help us learn about and understand the complex and often violent history of the relationships among the Native Peoples of North America (especially Wisconsin) and white settler colonialism, the role that Christianity has played in that history, and how contemporary Christians might begin to heal those relationships and take necessary actions toward restorative justice.
In addition to rescheduling the Ada Deer event, we hope to offer additional programming to help us learn more the Native Americans of Wisconsin and take action toward greater justice for our Native American neighbors.
February 7: “United States relationships with Native Peoples”—Art Shegonee (Menominee and Potowatomi). For a recording of the session and other materials related to the Shegonees’ presentation and their work, click here
February 21: “The Legacy of Boarding Schools”—Prof. Kasey Keeler, UW Madison (Tuolumne Band Me-Wuk Indians and Citizen Potawatomi). For a recording of the session and other materials related to the Shegonees’ presentation and their work, click here
March 7: “The Tribes of Wisconsin”—Prof. Patty Loew, Northwestern University (Ojibwe). For a recording of the session and other materials related to the Shegonees’ presentation and their work, click here
March 21: “The Wisconsin Oneida and the Episcopal Church”—the Rev’d Rodger Patience and Tribal Councilwoman Jennifer Webster. Pastor and Member respectively of Holy Apostles Episcopal Church, Oneida, WI. The session recording and related materials are available here
May 1: “Exploring the Effigy Mounds”—a tour of some of the thousands of effigy mounds in and around Madison, led by Larry Johns (Oneida) A summary of our visit is here
September 12: (Rescheduled from April 4): “From Anger to Advocacy: Ada Deer’s Life”—A conversation with Ada Deer Menominee). A recording of the session is available here
Meet our Speakers
Art Shegonee. He is a member of the Menominee and Potowatomi tribes in Wisconsin, and his name is Canasa (Little Golden Eagle). As a member of the wolf clan, he is a traditional dancer in pow-wows throughout Wisconsin. He has performed as lead dancer for the Native American Music award-winning (NAMMY) Native American Contemporary Brulé, as head male dancer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison pow-wow, as well as with folk singer Bill Miller and musician Michael Jacobs. Shegonee has served as the Affirmative Action consultant for Tellurian UCAN, and as director of the former Native American Resource Center. He is also a certified instructor of Nonviolent Crisis Intervention for the National Crisis Prevention Institute, Inc. He has been a cultural consultant, teacher and presenter at over 300 schools throughout Wisconsin and neighboring states
Kasey Keeler is an enrolled tribal citizen of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians and is also a direct descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Keeler considers herself a “suburban Indian” who was raised in the Twin Cities on Dakota homelands. Keeler completed her undergraduate degree at UW-Madison before returning to the Twin Cities to work in the Native community. After completing her PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Keeler spent two years at the University of Virginia as the Native American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies. At UW-Madison, Keeler continues to focus her research and teaching on American Indian communities and histories with a particular emphasis on land, policy, housing, place/placemaking, memory, and pop culture. Keeler’s first book, American Indians and the American Dream is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press and is scheduled to come out in Fall 2022.
Patty Loew is a professor at Medill and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew is the author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, now in its second edition, which won the Wisconsin Library Association's 2002 Outstanding Book Award; Native People of Wisconsin, also newly revised and expanded, which is used by 20,000 Wisconsin school children as a social studies text; and Teachers Guide to Native People of Wisconsin. Her latest book, Seventh Generation Earth Ethics, won the 2014 Midwest Book Award for Culture.
Rodger Patience is Vicar of the Church of the Holy Apostles on the Oneida Indian Reservation near Green Bay. Holy Apostles is the oldest Native mission of The Episcopal Church, beginning in the early 1700s in New York and continuing since 1822 in Wisconsin. Rodger serves on the Commission on Ministry and the Formation Committee of the Diocese of Fond du Lac and offers daily videos of Morning Prayer on the church's Facebook page @holyapostlesoneida.
Jennifer Webster is a Tribal Councilwoman who has been engaged in Oneida government for 33 years in various capacities. She has served on the Oneida Judiciary for three consecutive terms as an Appellate Court Judicial Officer and is currently serving her third term on the Oneida Business Committee. Jenny hopes to strengthen the Nation's efforts to preserve the Oneida language, culture and tribal identity; protect tribal assets; and assure fiscal responsibility and accountability. Jenny is a lifelong parishioner, vestry member, and church schoolteacher at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Oneida.
Ada Deer was the first member of the Menominee to earn an undergraduate degree from UW–Madison — in 1957 — and the first chairwoman of her tribe. She was the first Native American woman to run for Congress in Wisconsin, winning the Democratic primary in her district. She was the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs during the Clinton Administration. Deer taught for many years in the UW–Madison School of Social Work and directed the American Indian Studies Program from 2000 to 2007. She is a distinguished lecturer emerita.
Larry Johns is a member of the Oneida Nation which is a part of the Six Nations, Haudeneshonee (Iroquois) Confederacy and has been involved in native issues since 1973 when the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over Wounded Knee, South Dakota. After being arrested attempting to enter Wounded Knee with medical supplies and later being charged with five felonies (all later dropped or the conviction overturned), he spent the next few years as an activist for AIM. Because of that work he became involved with the American Indian Business Committee in Chicago as a researcher. In the early 1980’s he went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied Wildlife Ecology and Environmental Studies. Towards the end of that he became involved in working for Dane County attempting to identify as many of its Indian mounds as possible until the project ran out of funds after about three and a half years. Since then, he worked for the Wisconsin Ho Chunk, Prairie Potawatomi, Oneida (and many others) in trying to preserve sacred sites mostly in the eastern half of the U.S.