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The sun doesn’t always sport its own halo, but it did that morning. It was a Sunday in Vancouver, near the campus of the University of British Columbia. Foregoing the nude beaches, I was hunting for a place to attend church. It happened to be the Feast of Pentecost. I found my way into a Lutheran pastors’ conference that was gathering for Sunday worship. When the third pastor tried to outdo his colleagues with his ability to pronounce German theological terms, I grew sufficiently exasperated that I slipped away.
I soon found myself before the totem poles placed behind the Museum of Anthropology built by the famous Haida carver Bill Reid (1920–1998). As I stood before them, I looked up and saw a staggeringly large sun dog, an optical phenomenon that, until that point in my life, I had never witnessed. I was aware of the scientific explanation for it (something about reflective atmospheric ice crystals), but such information did little to blunt its inherent wonder. As I walked in front of select totem poles, the sun dog endowed each one with its own personalized nimbus.
As I left the poles, I was baffled that people seemed to be minding their business around Vancouver without noticing the celestial miracle looming above them. I wandered down to the beach to see if I could spread the word, forgetting this beach’s unique sartorial etiquette. Approaching one group, I noticed their lack of clothes and quickly retreated. But the fact that they too were not looking up into the sky frustrated me. The phenomenon was obvious if only one’s eyes were angled slightly upward. But most were not.
I wandered back over to the Museum of Anthropology and, in the gift shop, casually opened a book titled Coast Salish Essays by the American anthropologist Wayne Suttles. As I leafed through the pages, my eyes caught the subheading “Indisputably Christian Elements.” Suttles describes the embrace of Christianity by the Salish use of the name šišikli′, “which is undoubtedly a Native version of the French pronunciation of the name ‘Jesus Christ.’” I tried to pronounce it out loud, showing off to myself the same way the Lutherans had with their German. Still, what I thought was a chance, or serendipitous, discovery soon turned out to be commonplace. Serious Indigenous scholarship now constantly points to a fact as obvious as the sun dog in the sky that morning—namely, the embrace of Christianity by Indigenous persons, a faith that was used as a defence against colonization just as it was used as a tool for oppression by colonizers.
These same ideas were confirmed when I entered the Vancouver Anglican Cathedral later that week to see commissioned Indigenous windows by Susan Point alongside a Coast Salish–inspired Trinity composed of three dancing salmon that graced the high altar. Theologian Sarah Coakley once pointed to a trio of encircling rabbits carved at Germany’s Paderborn Cathedral in the sixteenth century, which she commended as a suitably playful, non-literal evocation of the Trinity’s dance of coinherent love, and here I had found its North American equivalent. Maybe the salmon Trinity could catch on, I thought to myself, giving the ubiquitous evangelical fish bumper stickers a necessary break.
Maybe the salmon Trinity could catch on, I thought to myself, giving the ubiquitous evangelical fish bumper stickers a necessary break.
When, shortly after this experience, I enrolled in a faculty seminar where I met many Midwestern Native Americans, my preconceptions were dismantled again. Scott Manning Stevens, a Mohawk Indian who now directs Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University, related to us that he is frequently asked (by white people mostly), with hushed tones of reverence, if his ancestors were of “the traditional religion.” He loves to reply by saying, “Yes, they’re Anglican, and so am I.” He explained to us that the word-hoard that enables some tribes to reconstruct their nearly lost languages is often only what was used to translate the Kings James Bible.
But important as this seminar back in my American home may have been, to really keep up these experiences, I found I had to head north again and again. To toggle back and forth between the United States and Canada (where my wife is from) was to travel not just in space but also in time. Canada, most Canadians realize (but fewer Americans do), is a good ten to twenty years ahead of the United States in its acknowledgement and celebration of Indigenous life. This means that many American Christians are missing out on a crucial, even central, dimension of the church, which (were we to acknowledge it) might go a good way toward restoring “the love [we] had at first” (Revelation 2:4)—that is, the joy many of us experienced when we first came to Christ.
I had been catechized in my American education with the priority of Puritan arrival to North America at Plymouth Rock (1620). But at Port-Royal in Nova Scotia I learned that in 1605, fifteen years beforehand, the Mi’kmaq embraced Europeans in part because they bore the crosses they were waiting for. This is reported matter-of-factly in secular Canadian anthropology textbooks: “One of the main reasons why the Mi’kmaq became followers of Christianity,” says a Mi’kmaw woman named Eva, “is because of the vision of the three crosses.” Pre-contact petroglyphs testify to this, which are famous enough to be adopted in the Mi’kmaq chiefs’ insignia and on their nation’s flag. What lends these accounts authenticity is that news that the cross came before the missionaries is on record as a point of annoyance for missionaries. The eighteenth-century French Recollect priest Fr. Chrestien Le Clercq found it rather frustrating when he was told that the cross was prophesied by Mi’kmaq ancestors, not just brought by him.
Whether this is definitive evidence that the Mi’kmaq foresaw the Christian cross may still be debatable. What is not debatable is that the Mi’kmaq embrace it today as an act of continuity with their ancient history, announcing a deep compatibility of Christianity with Indigenous thought. “We are Indigenous and followers of the Jesus way,” explained Terry LeBlanc to a conference of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies (NAIITS, which has since expanded beyond North America). “We’ve been at it ever since my ancestors exercised their agency by choosing baptism for themselves here at Port-Royal, Nova Scotia over four-hundred years ago.”
On a trip to Ottawa, Ontario, I made my way to that city’s Anglican cathedral to see whether it was as celebratory of Indigenous life as was its sister cathedral in Vancouver. I was not disappointed. The land acknowledgement at the building’s entrance was not a hollow gesture to conform to politically correct directives, but evinced genuine gratitude. A large stained-glass west window also foregrounded Indigenous life. The neo-Gothic pulpit was gracefully covered with a decorative image of a loon, evoking not only European natural forms but North American wildlife and Indigenous mythology as well. At the National Gallery of Canada, which had been recently overhauled to foreground Indigenous culture, a massive portrait of the Rev. Peter Jones, the Ojibwe missionary also known as Sacred Feathers, greeted visitors as they left. Canada’s notorious secularism seemed to be unravelling, and it was the First Nations who were untangling the threads.
Canada’s notorious secularism seemed to be unravelling, and it was the First Nations who were untangling the threads.
On the same trip, I attended a powwow for the summer solstice. The Christian emblems on the regalia of several dancers betrayed that this was no pagan festival. The cross, in fact, tends to be a buzzkill for many white participants seeking an “exotic” experience. As I made my way up to the bleachers and looked over the pulsating circle, I saw that the cross of the nearby Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine crested the tent that enclosed the sacred drum, turning the powwow itself into a worship service. Inside the Ukrainian shrine there was an Orthodox icon of the Feast of Pentecost, but thanks to the powwow, the church and the park that surrounded it became an icon as well. It was as if the sun dog had crested the totem poles again.
Attending to this continent’s Indigenous history involves lamentation as well as celebration, and fittingly, my deepest experience of lament came not in Canada but in the United States. It was not a pleasure to learn of the northern equivalent of the more famous Trail of Tears, known today as the Trail of Death (1838), where over eight hundred Potawatomi, who had embraced Catholicism, were ejected from their home in Indiana and deposited in Kansas. Every five years Potawatomi Indians trace that journey, and in the bicentennial year of Illinois statehood (2018), I joined them. Our group was composed mostly of Citizen Potawatomi Indians, some Catholic nuns, and a few accompanying settler descendants like myself. Following the Potawatomi in this way changed my relationship to the land that I call home. I have since grown tired of cursing strip malls and highway overpasses or unimaginative McMansions as unsightly intrusions on my environment. Instead of hating middle America, or attempting to transcend it by seeking beauty and exoticism elsewhere, I now have learned, because of the Trail of Death, how to grieve.
Attending to this continent’s Indigenous history involves lamentation as well as celebration
At one point as we wound along dirt roads to find an obscure marker where a child on the Trail of Death died, the dust from our seventeen-car caravan became so intense I could barely see the vehicle in front of me. Beams of sunlight then pierced through this pillar of cloud. The lesson seemed evident enough: without kicking up the dust, without uncovering the history that American shame has suppressed, the light of mercy cannot be perceived. As if to emphasize this fact, church signs along our nearly seven-hundred-mile route read things like “Come as you are,” “Glorify God the Creator,” “Prayer is the fastest connection,” “Jesus Christ I trust in you.” On this drive, the continent itself was swept up into a colossal liturgy, and I had arrived just in time for the confession of sin. Because of the flags appended above each of the cars in our caravan, many thought it was a funeral. One man stood reverently beside the highway with his dog, cap on his breast as we passed.
As the caravan stopped at one trail marker, we ripped up the weeds that concealed it, and almost immediately the commemorative stone and plaque was blanketed with ants. We recognized a fitting symbol of what Potawatomi removal meant in the Midwest. The Native population was uprooted and my descendants overcame the land. But there is mercy for such swarming settlers as well. One of the markers was placed next to a public school in Missouri, and the teachers decided that all the students, from awkward middle-schoolers to varsity-football-team seniors boasting monogrammed jackets, should come out to greet our caravan. One of our Potawatomi guides, himself a deacon in his Baptist church, delivered a moving speech about hospitality and forgiveness to hundreds of students. He then sprinkled blessed leaves of tobacco in each of the four directions, an ancient form of prayer now directed to the Christian God. On that occasion at least, two chief American public school taboos—tobacco and prayer—were happily received as emissaries of needed grace.
The terminus of the 2018 Trail of Death caravan was the Sugar Creek Mission in Kansas, where the US government sent the Potawatomi to die. There we celebrated a concluding Mass, and a Navajo (Diné) man, who had become a friend of mine in the course of the journey, was invited to contribute Indigenous elements to a service presided over by a white priest. The song he sang in Navajo, which we had rehearsed together, had more theological integrity than many American praise songs. At the service’s conclusion, all of us, including local ministers from a variety of denominations, gathered for a photograph. After one shot, though, came another. A Baptist pastor then walked up to my Navajo friend, pulled out a kitschy Christian cross on a keychain, held it up to him, and said, in a tone that felt like a rebuke, “This is my medicine,” and walked away. This response angered me. He had dismissed a meticulously crafted Indigenous Christian song as intrusive pagan superstition. But to condemn that Baptist pastor would be to condemn myself. Decades ago as a new evangelical convert I might have done—or at least thought—the same thing. The pastor had just not yet caught the Pentecostal vision. Like the sunbathers at the Vancouver beach, he still had his eyes to the ground.
After travelling the Trail of Death, it was time to return to Canada. This time my goal was Teaching Rock, the largest cache of Canadian rock art in existence. It dates between AD 900 and 1400, which is to say, before any contact with Europeans. Teaching Rock features nine hundred separate glyphs made over several centuries, enabling stylistic developments to be observed. What puzzles researchers is that here the rule to not depict the Great Spirit may have been broken in the person of the Sun Figure. As the best study on the glyphs puts it, “Available ethnohistoric literature confirms that this glyph is either a representation of Kitchi Manitou, the Great Spirit itself, in its manifestation as the sun, or else a depiction of the most powerful of shamans, the prophets . . . who have received their power from the sun.” The Ojibwe Midewiwin scrolls tell us that “the Great Spirit is said to be invisible in form,” and yet here the Great Spirit may be depicted as a radiant human. Perhaps Teaching Rock illustrates that God could be one of us. I spoke with Ojibwe knowledge keepers who tend the site about this, and they did not dispute the interpretation.
My visit to Teaching Rock also happened on the Feast of Pentecost, five years after my sun-dog sighting amid the Vancouver totem poles. By this point in my journey, however, I realized that embrace of Indigenous culture need not be accompanied by a despising of my own heritage. More than a few Indigenous scholars complain of white people who come to Native culture seeking what they should be pursuing in their own ancestry. This was the elementary error I had fallen into when I disdained those German-speaking Lutherans.
Accordingly, on the same day as my visit to the famous petroglyphs, I followed up with a trip to St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in nearby Peterborough. When I arrived, I was puzzled by tents in the churchyard. They were there, I later learned, because the congregation offered shelter to the homeless and was facing significant pressure from the city because of it. The liturgy that morning offered unintentional commentary on the dynamics of Indigenous displacement: “They covet fields and seize them, / and houses, and take them away” (Micah 2:2). The minister who led congregational prayer guided us in an Ignatian meditation that was perfectly fitting, hearkening back to the original Jesuit missionaries among the First Nations of Canada who—recent studies reveal—were initially far more embracing of Indigenous life. In the margins of the bulletin was a gracious statement of fact: “We acknowledge that we are in Nogojiwanong, the traditional territory of the Mississauga, Anishinaabe, adjacent to the territory of the Haudenosaunee, on whose land and by whose waters we gather by the Williams Treaty to worship, listen, learn, share, and heal together in the name of our Creator, the Holy One of Blessing.”
Once on a tour of the Vatican Scavi, the necropolis beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, a reverent guide showed me the mosaic of Christ-Helios, the rays of the sun emanating from his head as if he were Apollo. She argued that paganism was fulfilled in Christianity, specifically in the Mass that would soon be offered at Bernini’s altar just above us. My guide was right. And by visiting the similarly nimbed figure at Teaching Rock and then worshipping at this Anglican church on the same day, I experienced the same fulfillment.
Should we Americans keep our eyes northward, I expect such convergences will occur more frequently south of the border as well. Send the sun dogs, Lord (but keep our beaches clothed).
