It’s the first word in our mission statement: “Partnering.”
Partnering with the people of the White Earth Reservation is that important to how we do what we do.
So as I wrap up my graduate studies with NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community, I’m making my final project a community survey checking in with community councils across the reservation to see what great things are happening in their communities and how we can best partner to support them. This is a project Hope for the First Nations’ board of directors has wanted to do for years.
That’s what we did this past week (Nov. 7 to 11) on the White Earth Reservation, meeting with community councils in Elbow Lake, Pine Point, Naytahwaush, White Earth and Rice Lake.
I have been volunteering with HFtFN since 2000. This was before it was incorporated as a nonprofit, back when my Lutheran high school in Springfield, Illinois, was paired with a church in a town called Ponsford, Minnesota, on the edge of the reservation to help organize a summer vacation Bible school program there under the direction of a teacher named Lynn Wilson. In the decades since, we’ve outgrown the high school and the church. We’ve become Hope for the First Nations and that vacation Bible school, Hope Camp. We’ve moved into the nearby Pine Point Community Center on the reservation and partnered with churches across the country to organize Hope Camps each summer in several more communities on White Earth. We’ve added many more trips to the reservation throughout the year, including Restoration Week, a week of “class on the road” each spring in Pine Point for students at Lincoln Christian University in Lincoln, Illinois. We’ve also traveled to Pine Point and other communities to help out and spend time with friends at powwows, Christmas parties and other events as we’re invited.
Pretty quickly after it became a nonprofit in the early 2000s, HFtFN settled on that mission statement I mentioned: “Partnering with the people of the White Earth Reservation, Hope for the First Nations is building unity through relationships with individuals in the community and sharing the love of Christ in culturally relevant ways.” That statement continues to guide our work today. Just before I joined its board of directors and was elected president in 2015, it also added a vision statement: “Uniting with the Anishinaabe people to restore hope, relationships and respect, we will continue to grow in faith and love as we move toward establishing a permanent presence on the White Earth Reservation.” That statement reflected our founders’ desire to eventually open a children’s home and perhaps a drug and alcohol treatment center on the reservation.
However, after six years of study under NAIITS, I’m not sure that vision is the best way for the churches and other groups we work with to partner with the people of the White Earth Reservation. In particular, Cherokee theologian Randy Woodley’s journal article “Mission and the cultural other: In search of the pre-colonial Jesus,” which includes his 10 missiological imperatives, has stuck with me. Woodley’s first two guidelines for mission are, “There is no place we can go where Jesus is not already present and active,” and, “Since Jesus is present and active everywhere, the first responsibility of mission among any culture is not to teach, speak, or exert privilege, but to discover what Jesus is doing in that culture.” This suggests to me that HFtFN should be looking for the good things already happening on White Earth and asking if there are ways we can join what we would say Jesus already is doing there. Rather than come thinking we have the answers to problems we might perceive in communities across the reservation, we should come full of questions and ready to learn, to humbly step into the background to play a supporting role. To me, this is what a true partnership with the people of the White Earth Reservation would look like.
From the time I have joined HFtFN’s board of the directors, we have discussed conducting a survey of the White Earth Reservation to see if the needs perceived by our founders years ago line up with the needs currently felt by members of the community. We want to know if there are ways we can better partner with communities to meet those needs or to support people and organizations there who are already doing that work.
I’m conducting that survey now with input from HFtFN’s board and trip coordinators, my NAIITS professor Dave Skene and my community supervisor Mike Swan for the final project in my NAIITS career. They already have advised me what questions to ask, what an Indigenous research methodology might look like, what appropriate protocol might be and who might be best for me to survey. I am beyond grateful to the community council members who graciously made time to meet with us this past week and thrilled about all the amazing things happening in their communities. Next up, I will analyze the results of the survey, share my report with my community collaborators and discuss recommendations with the HFtFN board of directors.
Ultimately, I hope to put into practice what I have learned in my time studying at NAIITS — particularly Indigenous research methods and Woodley’s missiological imperatives — and find practical ways to apply it to my work with Hope for the First Nations, to step into what Woodley calls “a new era of humility and mutual submission toward those to whom we are sent.”
