Conversations with George Tinker

The Rev. George Tinker helps lead an April 27 “Act of Repentance toward Healing Relationships with Indigenous Peoples” at the 2012 United Methodist General Conference in Tampa, Florida A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey.

Conversations with George Tinker

Between the Ridges, an Ecumenical Collaborative on the Yakama Indian Reservation is sponsoring a day of conversations with George Tinker. 

George E. “Tink” Tinker is a prominent American Indian theologian and scholar, author of many articles and books.  Tinker is professor of American Indian cultures and religious traditions at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he has taught since 1985. He earned his doctorate in Biblical studies at the Graduate Theological Union in 1983. He is also an ordained Lutheran pastor of Living Waters Episcopal/Lutheran Indian Ministry in Denver. Tinker is a member of the Osage Nation, and is also on the leadership council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado and director of the Four Winds Survival Project.

Tinker’s works can be categorized into many areas. Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide critiques how the Christian church and its missionaries, regardless of best intentions, were complicit with the cultural, political, and social genocide of Native Americans. Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation is concerned with eliciting the difference between Native American and White cultures and providing a critique of White categories of thought. A Native American Theology explains how Native American cultural symbols can be used to re-interpret Christianity. Throughout all Tinker’s work he is concerned with the health of the environment, the recognition of communal, not individualistic, values, the importance of being tied to the land, and the interrelatedness with all of Creation that comes with living in a spatial, communal attitude.

Two opportunities are scheduled.   A free will offering will be taken to support these events.

• Dr. Tinker will preach at Wilbur Memorial United Methodist Church, 90 1^st St, White Swan WA.  Sunday May 20 at 10 am.  This event will be followed by a brunch at the church to continue the conversation.
• A community meal followed by program will also be held at Toppenish United Methodist Church, 210 N Beech St, Sunday Evening May 20 beginning at 5 pm.  Dr Tinker will speak and engage a diversity of voices in the community in conversation. 
• We are also arranging other small conversations and tours for Monday, May 21.

Dr Tinker will have just led the National United Methodist Church through a season of repentance at their national convention in Florida.  The World Council of Church’s Executive Council has recently repudiated the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, a series of papal bulls and theological statements that justified the 15^th Century Age of Discovery and unpins the current legal framework of international property law, tribal treaties and the dominant culture’s relationship with indigenous people.  Also in May the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous People will have the Doctrine of Christian Discovery as the main theme for their international conference.  This is a perfect time to learn more about the history of Christian mission and do the creative work necessary to explore a way forward beyond theologies that justify oppression toward a new vision of the church’s role in standing in solidarity with First Nations here in the US and with indigenous peoples around the world.

 

For more information and to RSVP Contact: 

David Bell, Yakama Christian Mission dave@yakamamission.org

Derel Olson, White Swan and Toppenish United Methodist Churches derel.olson@gmail.com

David Hacker, Christ Episcopal Church davidhacker916@gmail.com  509-961-4692

Between the Ridges

April 12, 2011

“Between the Ridges” the title of this community blog, refers to the borders and boundaries of this valley on the Yakama Indian Reservation, this particular land in which we live.   The title suggests a common relationship to the land shared by all the diversity of people who live here.  It suggests the possibility of a common bond, a common set of values, a common spirituality that grows out of the relationship to this particular land.

Yet each different community,  the First Peoples, and the many people who have come after them, each have their own story of injustice, in relation to this land, of conquest, invasion, migration, oppression, discrimination, marginalization and racism.  For European Americans, as Wendell Berry says in his book the Hidden Wound, who “have inflicted the wound of racism [upon communities of color], the cost has been that [they] would receive the mirror image of that wound into [themselves].  As members of the dominant race, [they have] felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply [they have] hidden it within [themselves].  But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder.”

“Between the Ridges” then also suggests the boundaries and barriers that divide the diversity of people who live here and raises many questions.  What is it like to live in that in between place on the border between peoples and is it possible to live there well?   Borders are both places of rich cultural, spiritual and economic exchange as well as barriers that defend and protect us.  Borderlands can be places of great celebrations, a marketplace of activity as people discover new ways to be together and find a unity in diversity.  Borderlands can also be wildernesses where people wander with no clear sign posts in search of some promised land they have only the vaguest notion about.  It is easy to get lost along the borders.  They can be places of grave danger and risk far away from the supports we know, even as our only desire might simply be to know the other.  They can be places of profound mistrust in which the slightest miscommunication can be deadly.  Borders can be fortified walls to keep the other out.  They can be littered with land mines in violent attempts to defend territory.  Throughout human history they have been places of conquest by invaders, littered with the dead and wounded victims along the way, as the path of conquest leads relentlessly to take over the heart of our home.

As I come to this blog with this image of borderlands, I come with more questions than answers.  As a “white man” who has all of his adult life worked and lived among people of diverse cultures and ethnicities, from many socio-economic backgrounds,  I have found plenty of opportunity to rejoice in the wonderful relationships I have formed.  I have also often felt myself as someone negotiating a field of hidden land mines, uncertain where I can safely walk, where I will not harm myself and others and uncertain exactly where it is I am headed.

I know in some way I am leaving my own people behind, heading out into the wilderness.  Am I on a spiritual journey, seeking to heal myself and my people of the wound I know is there?  As Wendell Berry says,  “I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it.  And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children.”  Am I seeking to stand in solidarity with some other people to be an ally in their particular struggle?  I know I have been seeking to do this all my life, but I am still after all this time at the beginning,  wondering how to do this, and if it is even possible.  Am I in search of some larger vision of unity in which we can celebrate diversity, in which all people can live in peace, and we can know ourselves one with all of creation?   Definitely, I do have some vision of a new promised land, completely unlike all the other attempts at finding “promised lands” in which one people has conquered and displaced and violated another people in order to fulfill their own dreams.  But is this possible?

I do hope that we can find our common bond in the unity of all things, that we can find it here “Between these Ridges,” and that we can find it before it is too late throughout the whole world.  This tension between a vision of the unity of all of creation in all its diversity, and the experience of the reality along the borders I have walked has been a defining tension in my life.  I really have no idea where we are headed, how we will get there, what it will look like when we arrive.  I begin and end with questions.  I only know that I am called to make the journey, called again and again to head out into the wilderness, to walk along the borders, to climb the ridge and make my home there for now.

David Hacker

The Kinship of Land and Lasting Relationships

April 5, 2011

Welcome to Between the Ridges, an organization whose only focus is to create stable and lasting relationships.  You can find a little synopsis of what Between the Ridges is all about on the link above named “Between the Ridges.”

On this page, you will find different authors who are writing about what it means to live out the struggle of living into kinship with neighbors, friends, and new acquaintances.  From January until August, a number of people are working and playing and thinking together to learn what it means to embody terms such as multi-cultural and anti-racist.  To be sure, this is neither easy nor simple, and this forum is a place to speak about the walk they are taking.  As in all walks taken through a landscape, we notice new sights even if we have walked the path a hundred times before.  Prepare yourself to hear about walks that are rich, challenging, and thought provoking!

With that said, let me get this started with a reflection of my own.

The Yakama Valley is an ancient landscape that has been home to a people from the beginning of time.  Many an anthropologist would say, “Well that is close, but not quite right.  Rather, humanity came out of North Africa eons ago and slowly migrated around the world.  The ancient people of the Yakama valley are one of the many different wandering peoples of ancient times.”  Many Christians have a similar point of view believing all people arise from two created beings long ago from whom all the world is populated.  Then there are scientists who say human creation arose from primordial gunk and the possibility of that happening in multiple places around the world is just this side of impossible, so everyone probably came from one place.  Everyone wants to be right.  Yet, sometimes this desire to be right gets in the way of being in right relationship with one another.

How do we get out of our own way, our established mindsets, our desire to always be right and in turn allow people to be fully and wholly themselves?  How do we honor our kin and ourselves at the same moment?

There are times of the year when the wind blows through the valley of the ancient people.  Sliding down off the foothills between the mountain whose name is Pahto and the ridge of Toppenish, the wind blows from west to east.  The wind blows across a landscape where people have walked, birthed, and died from untold years.  The lives and stories of these people are alive in the soil and as the wind blows over the soil it listens and carries these stories within its twists and gusts.  When one listens closely to the wind, these stories come alive, as if they happened yesterday.  But when a little more time is taken, when listening goes a little deeper, when clarity is grasped for, then other stories are found flowing between the ancient Yakama valley stories, for the wind visited countless other landscapes before arriving in the western foothills of the valley.  A close listening to the wind helps us remember all people, our people, have been since time immemorial, embedded in the landscape of all Creation.  We may not have always known one another, but we have always been kin to one another for our landscapes, though separate, are sisters and brothers whose mother wind has forever folded her arms around and held close as eternal family.

David B. Bell

April 5, 2011

Welcome to Between the Ridges, an organization whose only focus is to create stable and lasting relationships.  You can find a little synopsis of what Between the Ridges is all about on the link above named “Between the Ridges.”

On this page, you will find different authors who are writing about what it means to live out the struggle of living into kinship with neighbors, friends, and new acquaintances.  From January until August, a number of people are working and playing and thinking together to learn what it means to embody terms such as multi-cultural and anti-racist.  To be sure, this is neither easy nor simple, and this forum is a place to speak about the walk they are taking.  As in all walks taken through a landscape, we notice new sights even if we have walked the path a hundred times before.  Prepare yourself to hear about walks that are rich, challenging, and thought provoking!

With that said, let me get this started with a reflection of my own.

The Yakama Valley is an ancient landscape that has been home to a people from the beginning of time.  Many an anthropologists would say, “Well that is close, but not quite right.  Rather, humanity came out of North Africa eons ago and slowly migrated around the world.  The ancient people of the Yakama valley are one of the many different wandering peoples of ancient times.”  Many Christians have a similar point of view believing all people arise from two created beings long ago from whom all the world is populated.  Then there are scientists who say human creation arose from primordial gunk and the possibility of that happening in multiple places around the world is just this side of impossible, so everyone probably came from one place.  Everyone wants to be right.  Yet, sometimes this desire to be right gets in the way of being in right relationship with one another.

How do we get out of our own way, our established mindsets, our desire to always be right and in turn allow people to be fully and wholly themselves?  How do honor our kin and ourselves at the same moment?

There are times of the year when the wind blows through the valley of the ancient people.  Sliding down off the foothills between the mountain whose name is Pahto and the ridge of Toppenish, the wind blows from west to east.  The wind blows across a landscape where people have walked, birthed, and died from untold years.  The lives and stories of these people are alive in the soil and as the wind blows over the soil it listens and carries these stories within its twists and gusts.  When one listens closely to the wind, these stories come alive, as if they happened yesterday.  But when a little more time is taken, when listening goes a little deeper, when clarity is grasped for, then other stories are found flowing between the ancient Yakama valley stories, for the wind visited countless other landscapes before arriving in the western foothills of the valley.  A close listening to the wind helps us remember all people, our people, have been since time immemorial, embedded in the landscape of all Creation.  We may not have always known one another, but we have always been kin to one another for our landscapes, though separate, are sisters and brothers whose mother wind has forever folded her arms around and held close as eternal family.