Reading Resurrection with the Tlingit

Second wind! I started this earlier in the week. Kind of on the long side…

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When I left for Alaska last week I took Rowan William’s Resurrection with me. This is one of my favorite reflections on Easter and the one book I own with more passages underlined than not. It was a good choice for this particular immersion program. Resurrection provides naming for the particular ways Christians can better understand our place in confronting the way our privilege has exerted and has flourished at the expense of an Other’s culture, language, sovereignty, economic viability or freedom. Great for a trip that focused on issues of tribal identity, conservation, language death and our role in shaping the history of a people.

Williams starts by establishing the “pure victim” who is Jesus. While the rest of us are caught in the web of oppressor and oppressed (White Man, black Man, White woman, black woman), Jesus stands apart from these intricacies as the one who, “when he was suffered, did not threaten” (1 Pet). It is this victim who came not to condemn us, but certainly to judge. Jesus is our victim; it is I who put him on the cross. Jesus confronts this in each of us just as he confronted the disciples who returned to their nets. It is in this Jesus that we find the pattern for every other victim of our presents and our histories.

Williams writes, “The formulation, ‘Repent and believe,’ stresses that God’s forgiveness cannot be abstract and general: the authentic word of forgiveness, newness and resurrection is audible when we acknowledge ourselves as oppressors and ‘return’ to our victims in the sense of learning who and where they are” (14). The memory and the wound must be exposed through encounter. Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances reveal the disciples’ failure and desertion. But it is only as Jesus exposes this memory can it be recovered so that the faithless ones are renewed and sent back into this world. As we confront our historicity we too “learn to act and to hope.” The confrontation is a painful process and Jesus pulls no punch with the deserters. “Peter, will you feed my sheep?” Jesus implores of the one who “would never leave” him.

So we find ourselves among the Tlingit and Haida people where only 50 fluent speakers of the language remain, all over 60 years old. We find ourselves among a people wrestling with land rights, tribes mistrusting tribal corporations which the United State hoisted on them to ensure “proper spending.” We encounter the symptoms of cultural trauma: alcoholism, spousal abuse, neglect. We are walking through clear cut tribal-owned forests where white environmentalist sneer as the desperation for native jobs and resources crescendos. We are being handed “Pure Sitka bottled water” and “native Alaskan Chocolate” from Brazil, economic development that our over fishing and global warming have made necessary to replace subsistence living practices.

Here we are.

We heard stories and more stories, sat the feet of tribal elders, watched in hope as young people showed off traditional dances and stories, wept with women whose sons were bullied in school and waded through the heavy complexities of tribal culture clashing, sometimes violently with an encroaching Western world.

But one of the most fascinating exchanges of the week was with a white administrator of Mt Edgcumbe high school, a boarding school established in the 1970’s for students from around Alaska. If your tiny tribal community had no HS, that’s where you went. Native boarding schools used to be places of deculturation, where native students came to be Westernized. The early photos of students from the northern slope, people who had never spoken English at home, who spent the summers at the fishing camps looks just like my mom’s high school year book.

The woman leading us around was very uncomfortable with any questions that hinted at this kind of past. When one of my students (a native King Islander) asked, “what are you doing to help the early generations at Mt E reconcile the past of this school?” she essentially said, “not our problem.” There were overtones of “we don’t see color here” and a lot of wondering about where our questions were coming from. At one point she stopped her tour and unprompted said, “look, we are about looking to the future at this school. This is now a great school! Can’t we just focus on that?”

Resurrection came back to me again:

“No amount of the rhetoric of ’self-transcendence’ can substitute for the recovery of self, the self as the memory of the crucifixion and crucifying: there are no dead selves discarded or buried to be the foundation-stones of new identities, because God is the God who opens up our graves and gives back our past.”

I understand where the Mt E administrator is coming from. We all like to think we can forget about what happened and move on. But at the other end of every moment of colonial complicity there are a people who are deeply exposed to historic cultural trauma. This is happening in Iraq, it happened in the South with black people, it happened on the reservations and it is happening in Alaska.

The hope is that the one we crucified has risen. Jesus tells us to see in his reconciliation to the redeemed disciples hope for our complicity in the crucifixion/crucified. We have to remember the boarding schools, to engage in repatriation, to listen to the Tlingit language. These are acts of our remembering, not on our behalf but as people in the line of those whose choices brought us here, knowing that we have already made the choice for our benefit at the expense of others a hundred thousand times. To refuse this is to “be trapped in fantasy, in blindness to yourselves and to the reality confronting you.”

And somewhere in this painful confrontation our name is called.

One of the best parts of this trip happened when I wasn’t there. Part of our group was visiting a domestic violence shelter in Sitka which is run by this very hip, very inspiring Haida woman. She really loved the group, their questions, their enthusiasm. But one student, Brian, a freshman, really had her captivated. They talked for a long time after one of the women played a traditional song on the drum about emerging from the darkness of the ice cave. It was a celebration song.

After they talked a while the woman told Brian to hold on and she went and got a drum from her office. It was a beautiful drum she made out of hide and ligament. It looked like she spent a lot of time working on it. The woman said it had been in there a long time, that it was “waiting for someone.” The someone was Brian. She told him to take the drum as a reminder of all the he had to offer the world as he worked to address problems like domestic violence. It was a very moving event.

I think this was one of Williams’ “creative protests,” those moments that names the nameless, empower for the work of the Good and restore us to right relationship with those we have historically oppressed. I hope this moment is repeated in all my students, and in me, throughout our encounters with our selves and our past.

“My self is to be given away in love, not because it is worthless, but because it is supremely precious, given to me by the hand of God as he returns as my memory. Out of my story the Spirit of the risen Jesus constitutes my present possibilities of understanding, compassion and self-sharing. My identity as lover in the community in uniquely coloured by the loves which I have already struggled, failed, learned, repented.”