Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia’s video recording of this sermon.

Remembering my schooling, I learned very little about anyone who was Native American. Even those who were mentioned were only mentioned in the context of something they had done for or to white people. Squanto taught the Pilgrims to plant corn. Sacagawea guided Lewis and Clark. Generic Indians or maybe Crazy Horse got a mention defeated Custer.

Of course, television also told me things about Indians. Indians fought wars with white people. Indians scalped people. According to the Westerns, there didn’t seem to be any reason for the Indians to attack white people. Whites were never portrayed as invaders of tribal lands. TV shows and movies also never noted that American colonies paid bounties for scalps of Indians brought to them.

I am not a regular viewer of war movies, but I have seen enough to have heard the term “in country” to mean behind enemy lines. I thought “in” was the preposition “in.” It was not until I very recently read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States that I learned that “in country” is short for “Indian Country” and is still used by our military today for “behind enemy lines.”

In my own family, I knew that a great-grandfather’s home had been known as Indian Dell, because he gathered neighborhood children and told them Indian ghost stories. We regularly borrowed his arrowhead collection from my great-aunt to take to school. Along with the arrowheads, there was a grotesquely carved coconut head, presumably meant to represent a fierce some Indian. Not a family history to be proud of.

But I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, and so as well as the scary Indian, I also grew up with the “noble savage” image. That antipollution ad of a man in Native American attire shedding a single tear debuted in 1971. In 2023 the rights to the ad were transferred. The Associated Press reported that “Keep America Beautiful wanted to be careful and deliberate about how we transitioned this iconic advertisement/public service announcement to appropriate owners,” said Noah Ullman, a spokesperson for the nonprofit, via e-mail. “We spoke to several Indigenous peoples’ organizations and were pleased to identify the National Congress of American Indians as a potential caretaker. NCAI plans to end the use of the ad and watch for any unauthorized use.”

“NCAI is proud to assume the role of monitoring the use of this advertisement and ensure it is only used for historical context; this advertisement was inappropriate then and remains inappropriate today,” said NCAI Executive Director Larry Wright, Jr. “NCAI looks forward to putting this advertisement to bed for good.

Dr. Jennifer J. Folsom, a journalism and media communication professor at Colorado State University and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, remembers watching the public service announcement as a child … as she grew up, Folsom noticed how media devoted little coverage to Native American environmental activists.

“There’s no agency for that sad so-called Indian guy sitting in a canoe, crying,” Folsom said. “I think it has done damage to public perception and support for actual Native people doing things to protect the land and protect the environment.”

My first Unitarian Universalist General Assembly was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. On the plane there I sat next to another UU minister. She had a drum in her lap. She told me she was excited by her plan to get it signed by a Native medicine man who would be at the annual meeting. Somehow it felt to me more like getting a souvenir at Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show than a religious, spiritual encounter.

Not only was I and probably you not taught much of anything–and when we were, not necessarily complete or true things–about Native Americans, many Native American children received the same non-education and miseducation in their own heritage.

Native American communities have taken actions to change that for their own communities. We also need to change that for the wider community.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land.

“In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.”

We include a land acknowledgement at the beginning of every Sunday service mentioning the Lenni Lenape, but do we know anything about who they are today or their history? A Wikipedia article that includes a note that it needs more citations begins, “The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation (also known as the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape or the Nanticoke Lenape) is a tribal confederation of Nanticoke of the Delmarva Peninsula and the Lenape of southern New Jersey and northern Delaware. They are recognized by the state of New Jersey, having reorganized and maintained elected governments since the 1970s. They are not a federally recognized tribe.

“The tribe is made up of descendants of Algonquian-speaking Nanticoke and Lenape peoples who remained in or returned to their ancient homeland at Delaware Bay. Many of their relatives suffered removals and forced migrations to the central United States and Canada. The Nanticoke and Lenni-Lenape peoples were among the first in what is now the United States to resist European encroachment upon their lands, among the first to sign treaties in an attempt to create a peaceful co-existence, and were among the first to be forced onto reservations on the Delmarva Peninsula and in New Jersey. The tribe’s current headquarters is in Bridgeton, New Jersey,” 

The tribe has its own website with a portal for content only for its members, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation – Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Nation of South Jersey.

Another Wikipedia article begins, “The Ramapough Mountain Indians (also spelled Ramapo), known also as the Ramapough Lenape Nation or Ramapough Lunaape Munsee Delaware Nation or Ramapo Mountain people, are a New Jersey state-recognized tribe based in Mahwah. They have approximately 5,000 members living in and around the Ramapo Mountains of Bergen and Passaic counties in northern New Jersey and Rockland County in southern New York, about 25 miles (40 km) from New York City.

“They were recognized in 1980 by the state of New Jersey as the Ramapough Lenape Nation but are not recognized federally or recognized by the state of New York,”

They also host their own website, Ramapo Munsee Lenape Network – NJ STATE RECOGNIZED TRIBAL NATION.

“Three Lenape tribes are federally recognized in the United States:

• Delaware Nation in Anadarko, Oklahoma
• Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma
• Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Bowler, Wisconsin.

”The Lenape who fled  (the) United States in the late 18th century settled in what is now Ontario. Canada recognizes three Lenape First Nations with four Indian reserves. Each is located in Southwestern Ontario:

• Munsee-Delaware Nation, Canadian reserve near St. Thomas, Ontario
• Moravian of the Thames First Nation, Canadian reserve near Chatham-Kent
• Delaware of Six Nations (at Six Nations of the Grand River), two Canadian reserves near Brantford, Ontario.

“Three groups who claim descent from Lenape people are state-recognized tribes:

• Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware in Delaware
• Nanticoke-Lenni Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey
• Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey

“More than a dozen organizations in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere claim descent from Lenape people and are unrecognized tribes. Organizations in Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Kansas have petitioned the U.S. federal government for recognition. One of these includes the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania based in Easton, Pennsylvania,” according to the
Lenape – Wikipedia page.

Somehow, I always thought Delaware was a Native American term until I began working on this sermon. But no, the place name Delaware that then was also applied to the people honored Thomas West, Third Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman and the Colony of Virginia’s first colonial-era governor.

Tomorrow is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Let us make a commitment to undoing our own and our communities’ non-education and miseducation about Native Peoples. When we lose one people’s history, one people’s heritage, one people’s language, one people’s culture, something has been lost not just by those people but by all people.

The early twentieth century Lakota holy man Black Elk said, “Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

“And I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy….”

“One earth, one people, one love.” (From our Time for All Ages Indigenous People’s Day Song).

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