 We celebrate the presence among us. Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and my ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stone wear coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would be happy to visit with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give building tours after each service. And I know there is someone signed up to do that today. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house across the parking lot, please meet near the large glass window on your left side of the auditorium after the service. In this lively acoustical environment, it is difficult sometimes for individuals in attendance to hear. So we remind you that the child haven back in that corner and the entire commons area behind the auditorium are great places to go. If a child needs to talk, move around, dancing, whatever. And you can still see and hear the services well from there. Also, we have hearing assistance devices available. Please see one of our ushers if you feel that would be helpful for you. This would also be a great time to turn off all devices that might cause any kind of a noise making disturbance during the hour, especially cell phone ringers. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. We have Mary Manoring operating the sound system. Our lay minister for this service is Ann Smiley. Jean Sears was upstairs greeting you as you came in. We have ushers Liza Monroe, Dick Goldberg, and Brian Channis. Hospitality bringers, coffee primarily, are Biss Nitschke and Terry Felton. And John Powell will be your tour guide after the service. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert to your order of service, which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today. This thing is trot full of information and special announcements. So please take a look at it today. I want to call to your attention a couple of things particularly. And they are right here, I hope. I do this every once in a while. Forget something when I come up here. Is it right there, Michael? Black Lives Matter weekend. That's part of what is in your red floors on a full page here in the back. Please join us Saturday, October 14th at 9 AM to help hang prayer flags and again at 4.30 PM to hear poet and performer Christopher Sims speak at our Saturday service with a potluck to follow. On Sunday, we welcome UW's first wave back to our services and cap the weekend off with Dr. Christy Clark Pujara's lecture, Why History Matters in the Landmark Auditorium right here. Snacks and light refreshments will be served and childcare is available. And they ask that you register online for these events at the website. Our FUS Opportunity Fair is this weekend. Wondering how you can become more involved here at FUS? Group members representing those open to you will be in the commons after this service. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and find out about social justice groups, spiritual practice groups, chalice groups, exploration groups, book discussion groups, and more. Walk around the auditorium commons and see ways that you can become more deeply engaged here. This is an excellent way to find out, well, what might I be able to do at FUS? It's such a big place. We'll go talk to these people and see if there's someplace that you feel you'd be comfortable. At our opportunity fair, find out more about becoming a greeter, usher, sound operator, or part of the after-service hospitality team. Sign up and be matched with an expert's, no it doesn't say expert, it says experienced, but they are experts, team member to keep our services running smoothly. And, and smiley, ask me to remind you to please leave your hymnals on the seats when you leave this service. That's it. So, again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. A brief announcement before our opening words. You will note in your red floors that we have a guest this morning, Michael Doyle Olson and some assistants who will be doing a little bit of filming here without any audio portion. They promise to be unobtrusive, but please welcome them. And if you have any reservations about being captured on camera yourselves, then you might wanna move to the balcony. And so our opening words are from the Kiowa author, M. Scott Mamaday, who is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn. I am a feather on the bright sky. I am the blue horse that runs in the plane. I am the fish that rolls shining in the water. I am the shadow that follows a child. I am the evening light, the luster of meadows. I am an eagle playing with the wind, and I am a cluster of bright beads. I am the farthest star. I am the cold of dawn. I am the roaring of the rain, the glitter of the crust on the snow. I'm the long track of the moon on the lake. I'm the flame of four colors, the deer standing in the dusk, the field of sumac and palm blanche. I am the angle of geese in the winter sky, the hunger of a young wolf. I am the whole dream of all of these things. You see, I am alive. I am alive. And so I stand in good relation to the earth. I stand in good relation to the gods. I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful, and I stand in good relation to the daughter of Sientane. You see, I am alive. I am alive. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And please join me now in repeating the words that are printed in your program of the company of the Lighting of the Flame. Our father the sky, hear us and make us strong. Our mother the earth, hear us and give us support. Spirit of the east, send us your wisdom. Spirit of the south, may we tread your path of life. Spirit of the west, may we always be ready for the long journey. Spirit of the north, purify us with your cleansing wits. And now I do invite you to turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm and friendly meat breeding. Please be seated. And at this time I would like to invite any children to come forward for the message for all ages. If you win, I didn't know it was a race. I think that's a little camera, but I can't be completely sure, so we don't want to touch it. So welcome everybody. That was quite a storm we had last night, wasn't it? Yeah, it was rain was coming down in sheets. I even heard there was a tornado in part of our town. Yeah, pretty scary. Pretty scary. Yesterday there was a big storm. You didn't hear it? Ah, well, it was kind of late afternoon. Okay, so how many of you have ever sat by a running stream that kind of runs over rocks and things and it's kind of burbling and bubbling? Have you ever done that? Yeah, well, when I do that sometimes it's almost like that stream is kind of talking to me and it's speaking in words that I don't understand. And then there are other times when I might be walking in a pine forest with the big white pine trees and the breeze will be blowing and what does that sound like? Whispering, because the way the wind goes through those pine needles it sounds like the trees are whispering to you in some kind of a language that you can't understand. Well, a long, long time ago Indians in this country spent a lot more time listening to what was happening in nature because they didn't have televisions and smartphones. So they were communicating with nature all the time. And so this is a story about the Lenape Indians that kind of speaks to that. A long time ago there were seven wise men who lived in the Lenape tribe and they were wise about all kinds of things, all things that had to do with the world down below and the world up above in the heavens. But because they had such great wisdom, the people of the village were pestering them from dawn until deep into the night asking them all kinds of questions. And so the people were constantly bringing to the wise men their fears and their dreams and their worries and asking the wise men to help them with those things. But the wise men were getting really, really old and really tired. They could not even eat a meal in peace and they couldn't fish at the river bank, they couldn't sit around the fire and talk among themselves at night. They just weren't getting any rest whatsoever. And so being tired of never having any time for themselves, they met in secret one night up on a hillside not far from the village. And they asked themselves, what are we gonna do about this? How are we gonna have some time for ourselves? And as they began to talk, one of the wise men had a plan and the others all agreed to it. Now these wise men were very good at doing magic. So what they did on that hillside is turn themselves into seven great big stones or boulders. They just disappeared. And the people in the village wondered where they'd gone and they missed them terribly. But then one day a young, clever, curious young man from the village was walking along this hillside and he saw these seven odd shaped stones and he said, I've never seen these before. I wonder what they're doing here. And so he kind of leaned down to get a better look and he touched one of the stones and the stone said, ha, who woke me up? Oh ho, said the young man, a stone that talks. And quickly he counted the stones and he said, I think that I have found our seven missing wise men and the stones all groaned together. Oh, not so loud young man. Other people are gonna hear you. So the young man quietly sat himself down amidst the stones and in low voices he and the seven wise men began to talk about many, many things. And the young man asked them, why did why did deer have such short white tails? And why did the northern lights sparkle in the heavens the way they do at night? And so they talked about all kinds of things like this. And when the shadows started to deepen and it became time for the young man to go back to the village, he promised the wise men that he would not say a thing about where they were. And they said to him, you know, it's been a long, long time since we've had such a pleasant restful experience as stones here on this hillside. And so the young man kept his word and he held his tongue, didn't tell anybody. But the old wise men's peace didn't last for long because after a few days the people in the village started getting curious. Why does that young man every day head off in the same direction and then come back hours later? And so one of the men of the village said, I'm gonna follow him and see what's going on. And he followed the young man and he stayed far enough away that he could watch the young man talking to these stones. And he said, hmm, I think that we found our seven missing wise men. And so this young man who had been following the other young man went back to the village and told the villagers where the wise men were. And the stones, when they saw all the villagers coming forward, they groaned again because they knew their secret was out. And they had to talk to the people of the village all day long. And by evening they were completely exhausted again. So they held counsel among themselves and said, we're gonna have to go much farther away from the village where people won't find us. And so they walked deep into the woods and when they were a far, far away from the village they turned themselves into seven very tall cedar trees. And for days no one visited them except the birds that would roost in their branches. But then one day a hunting party from the village happened to be going deep into the forest. And one of the hunters said, I've never seen cedar trees this tall and this beautiful. And he counted them and guess what? I think we have found our missing wise men. And so they went back to the village and they told everybody and here comes all the village again to pester the poor wise men. And so that night the wise men were hoarse from answering all the questions and for a third time they counseled among themselves. What are we gonna do? Well, they said, I think we're just gonna have to leave this country entirely or we're never gonna get any rest. And as they stood there pondering, the great spirit looked down upon the wise men and took pity on them. And so sweeping them all up in a big gust of wind he carried them up into the heavens and he turned them into seven bright stars. And those stars are still up there and they are safe because up in the heavens human beings can't help them with all kinds of questions. And today we know those stars, that group of stars by the name the Pleiades. And they are part of the constellation of Taurus up in the heavens. And today we are still trying to recapture all of that wisdom that those seven men took with them when they became stars up in the heavens. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Isn't that a funny story? Well after the story, we're gonna have some great music so we're gonna have you sit right here for a little while longer while our choir entertains us. It's a weird story. The anticipation of the reflections comes from Steve Newcomb, an essay entitled 500 Years of Injustice. When Christopher Columbus first set foot on the white sands of Guanahani Island, he performed a ceremony to take possession of the land for the king and the queen of Spain, acting under the international laws of Western Christendom. And although the story of Columbus's discovery has taken on mythological proportions in much of the Western world, few people are aware that this act of possession was based on a religious doctrine now known as the doctrine of discovery. 40 years before Columbus's historic voyage, Pope Nicholas V issued to King Alfonso V of Portugal a bull entitled Romanus Pontifix. And this bull declared war against all non-Christians throughout the world and specifically sanctioned and promoted the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian nations and territories. And in this papal bull, the pope directed the king to capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, the Pagans, and other enemies of Christ, and to put them into perpetual slavery to take all of their possessions and all of their property. Acting on this papal privilege, Portugal continued to traffic in African slaves and expanded its royal dominions by making discoveries along the Western coast of Africa, claiming those lands as Portuguese territory. And thus when Columbus sailed west across the Sea of Darkness in 1492, he and the Spanish sovereigns of Aragon and Castile were following an already well-established tradition of discovery and of conquest. Indeed, after Columbus returned to Europe, Pope Alexander VI issued a second papal document granting to Spain the right to conquer the lands which Columbus had already found, as well as any other lands that Spain might discover in the future. And thus it is important to recognize that the grim acts of genocide and conquest committed by Columbus and his men and his successors against the peaceful native people of the Caribbean, all of that was fully sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church. And by virtue of these two papal bulls, a Christian law of nations developed, which asserted that Christian nations had a divine right based on the Bible to claim absolute title to and ultimate authority over any newly discovered non-Christian inhabitants and their lands. So over the next several centuries, these beliefs gave rise to the doctrine of discovery as it was used by England and France and Holland as well as Spain and Portugal. And then in 1823, this doctrine was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in a celebrated case known as Johnson versus Macintosh. And according to Chief Justice John Marshall, the United States upon winning independence became a successor nation to the doctrine of discovery and acquired power of dominion from Great Britain. In other words, the court affirmed that U.S. law was based on a fundamental law of nations which made it permissible to virtually ignore the most basic rights of indigenous heathens and to claim that the unoccupied lands of America rightfully belong to the discovering Christian nations. For John Marshall, unoccupied, referred to the lands in America which when discovered were occupied by Indians but unoccupied by Christians. And thus the doctrine of discovery was not only written into U.S. law, it became the cornerstone of U.S. Indian policy for the next century. The second reading is from Kent Nuerburn's book The Wolf at Twilight. Kent Nuerburn lives in Northern Minnesota and he has worked extensively with native communities with the Ojibwa nations and with the Sioux Indians. He became a fast friend of a Sioux elder by the name of Dan and what follows is a piece of the conversation that he had with Dan when the two were taking a road trip together. Americans feel guilty about slavery, Dan told me, but they never had to give anything back to black people that was hard for them to give. What they'd stolen from the black people was their freedom. So they just said, hey, we'll give it back to you. That was easy. Let them go to the front of the line now and then let them do everything that white people can do and Americans can stop feeling guilty. It wasn't that easy with us Indians. Look at what you stole from us. You took our land, our houses, everything that we had. The only way that you can make it right is to give the land back to us and you can't do that because all of America is our land. That's something you can't face. So you have to say, those were different people. That was a different time. And instead you tell us that, hey, you can have some chunks of land that we don't want and here's some casinos for you to make money and maybe that'll shut you up and then you just go your merry way and you do what you want. You know, there's no way you can feel it's okay to bring folks over here from another country in chains. That's wrong and you know it. But with the Indians, you can say, we beat you in a fair fight. Get over it. Or you can say, hey, you signed all those treaties. You made a deal. But what you don't say is that there was never any fair fight because you were beating us with the smallpox, with other diseases. And we made those deals with cannons pointed at us or with some interpreter lying to us or with you calling some guy a chief who wasn't a chief and bribing him into signing a treaty by promising him a lot of money or a big house. None of that really matters. What matters is that you've got a way to lie to yourselves about what you did to us and you don't have a way to lie to yourselves about what you did to black people. You follow me? Ken, I'm not telling you to feel guilty about this. I'm telling you you have to take responsibility for it. You know, guilt is just an inside out way of feeling good about yourselves by saying how bad you feel. And I don't have any time for that. Taking responsibility, that's something different. It's saying that some of the good that you got is because some of the bad that you did to us and that you are going to do something to make up for the bad that you did. I'm not saying that any of this is your fault or even that your grandparents did any of it. I'm just saying it happened. And it happened on your people's watch. You're the one who benefited from it. And it doesn't matter that you're way downstream from the actual events because you're still drinking the water. You could remain seated as we sing together hymn number 1069 in the Teal Hymnals. As we gather here today, images and sound bites from the mass killing that took place in Las Vegas a week ago still are haunting us. And while we mourn the many deaths, the traumatic injuries caused by this lone, affluent male white gunman, we might also be echoing what one of that night's country and Western performers exclaimed afterwards. He said something has changed in this country and it's very scary to see. Yes, it is scary to see. But what if anything has really changed? Ever since two teenagers shot up their Columbine High School in 1999, incidents like these have been happening with alarming frequency. Before that, we had American soldiers in Vietnam slaughtering the residents of entire villages. One of the most notable perpetrators of this gratuitous violence was Lieutenant William Calley. He spent just three years under house arrest and then ultimately was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter. Some commentators called this latest spasm of violence the deadliest mass killing of the modern era. We might ask ourselves, when does modernity begin? European settlement in North America commenced more than 500 years ago, but as recently as 1921, 300 African Americans living in Tulsa, Oklahoma were killed when white mobs torched their neighborhoods. Mary J. Parish later recounted how she fled the scene with her infant daughter as showers of bullets rained on us from machine guns. 1921, a half century before that during the reconstruction period, 150 African Americans were gunned down by white vigilantes in Colfax, Louisiana. When does modernity begin? The historical record is, sad to say, replete with such stories. So perhaps the only thing that's really changed is that our laws about guns have become steadily more permissive and our ability to manufacture cheap weapons of mass destruction now makes it possible for virtually anyone acting alone to go on a killing spree. Still, our forebears didn't need bump stocks and they didn't need large capacity magazine clips. You can buy one that holds 40 rounds for 1999 from Cabello's. They didn't need these things to engage in mass slaughter. To give just one example, shortly before the Revolutionary War, an entire village of Delaware Indians living in Pennsylvania, all of them Christian converts, by the way, were beaten to death with clubs. They had been falsely charged with stealing goods and household items, items that their attackers' claims should only belong to white people. That was their crime. But the root of this matter really lies much further back even than this. From the very beginning, violence has been woven into the warp and the weft of the American experiment. Now, tomorrow, Monday, much of the nation will observe a federal holiday, a holiday that was instituted in 1937, a holiday known as Columbus Day. Parades and other civic celebrations will be held in communities across the country, and particularly in those communities where citizens of Italian descent reside in large numbers. That's not gonna happen here in Madison, because our common council voted in 2005 to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day, a decision that they then reaffirmed just last year. And thus, Madison joined a number of cities and states in an initiative that actually began in Berkeley, California in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first journey to the so-called New World. And with this shift, communities have taken an important step toward rejecting the pernicious doctrine of discovery and acknowledging the grievous harm that it has caused over the centuries. The proper focus, proponents of this new holiday argue, should be on the long neglected rights and interests of our continent's Indigenous peoples. It should also be noted that in most of the Americas, Columbus Day is not observed. Columbus enjoys far less celebrity than he does here. Many of the citizens of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, they are of Indian heritage. And as George P. Horse Capture observes, no sensible Indian person can celebrate the arrival of Columbus. Or as the historian James Lowen puts it, cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history. Our own faith tradition reached much the same conclusion and in 2012, delegates to our annual General Assembly approved a resolution, quote, repudiating the doctrine of discovery as a relic of colonialism, feudalism and religious, cultural and racial biases. That 2012 resolution also called upon the US Congress to implement within our territorial boundaries the standards that are outlined in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, something that has yet to happen. The Episcopal Church, the Disciples of Christ, the Society of Friends, the United Methodist Church have all approved similar resolutions, but the Roman Catholic Church has not. Nicholas V's 1452 Papal Bull that gives a handful of Christian nations the license to exploit Indigenous peoples in perpetuity, that bull still remains on the books. Now to be sure, Pope Francis has recently addressed this issue declaring that native peoples do have the right to prior informed consent in any matter affecting their livelihoods or their lands. But Francis in making that statement was not speaking ex-cathedra, and thus that statement does not have the effect of overturning established church doctrine. Now although symbolic gestures like these, the substitution of one holiday for another, although this is important, it is not a substitute, I believe, for a deeper investigation into the ideological underpinnings of this relentless campaign to subjugate native peoples and to destroy their traditional way of life. The doctrine of discovery, that represented just one piece of a larger set of arguments that were used repeatedly to dispossess tens of millions of American Indians. That particular doctrine focused on their lack of Christian faith, their alien culture. But what also made the Indians dispensable was their perceived racial inferiority because in conjunction with the doctrine of discovery, the Roman Catholic Church developed another concept known as Limpieza de Sangre, blood purity. It was used originally by Spanish and Portuguese Christians to discriminate against and to persecute Jews and Muslims. But eventually Limpieza de Sangre became a useful tool in the hands of colonialists. Now before that time, before this doctrine was put into place, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz writes, this concept of biological race based on blood is not known to have existed in law or in taboo, either in Christian Europe or anywhere else in the world. This ideology of white supremacy was however paramount in confiscating the lands and the properties first of Jews and Moors in Iberia, then of the Irish in Ulster and ultimately of the native and African peoples. One can readily see how convenient this concept proved to be in the enslavement of Africans, but it was equally valuable as a rationale for subjugating and for exterminating Indians. Thus, when communicable diseases introduced by European explorers and settlers decimated the native populations of New England, a Puritan leader's reaction to this horror was to praise God for miraculously creating all this open space for his own people's farms and settlements. Indian lives just didn't matter. So deeply embedded was this sentiment in European consciousness that whites who questioned it were routinely ostracized and driven from Puritan settlements. Roger Williams, he was the founder of the state of Rhode Island. He was one of the very few among the early colonists who did make an effort to understand his Indian neighbors. He studied and he learned their languages. He visited their villages. He invited Indians into his own home. And in the end, Williams was forced to revisit many of the prejudices that he held concerning Indians. And he rejected the racism of his Puritan brethren, writing that nature knows no difference between Europeans and Americans in terms of blood, birth, and bodies because God has of one blood made all of humankind. From his close observations, Roger Williams also gained an appreciation of Indian agricultural practices. He said, they farm the forest. They use the land in a very exact and sustainable way. But what became clear to Roger Williams was opaque to the more casual colonial observers who charged the Indians with a failure to improve the land or to subdue it in accordance with God's command in the Book of Genesis. As William Cronin writes, European perceptions of what constituted a proper use of the environment, thus reinforced what became a European ideology of conquest. And all of these ideological factors, the doctrine of discovery, white supremacy, a Eurocentric concept of land and its proper use, all of these things contributed to the suppression of native peoples. And although many of us were taught in our high school history classes that the West was one in a fair fight between hostile Indians and intrepid settlers, numerous well-documented studies have now rendered that narrative completely false. No fair fight would produce such chilling statistics as these. A reduction of the native population in the continental United States from an estimated 20 million in the 15th century to 250,000 by the dawn of the 20th century. The loss of Indian land, 97.7% of the original land base was taken from the Indians. During Andrew Jackson's eight-year presidency alone, the US government entered into 86 treaties with 26 tribes living east of the Mississippi and every one of those treaties required land concessions or removal of the tribe from their homeland. And in the case of the forced resettlement of the Cherokees, the Muscovies, and the Seminoles, that exodus known as the Trail of Tears, Indian consent was not asked for, Indian consent was not given, and half of the 16,000 men, women, children, and elders who embarked on the Trail of Tears, half of those 16,000 perished on the journey. A volunteer from Georgia who later served as a colonel in the Confederate Army lamented, I fought through the Civil War. I saw men shot to pieces, slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest piece of work that I ever knew. This sort of thing happened all across the country, wherever white and Indian interests clashed. It happened here in Wisconsin. It happened in the Badger state. I'm sure some of you know how we did acquire that particular nickname. But perhaps you didn't know how it relates to the fortunes of our Indian tribes. Beginning in the early 19th century, miners from the East began entering Southwestern Wisconsin lured by rich deposits of Galena, or lead ore. By 1825, as many as 10,000 outsiders had descended on mineral-rich areas like Pendarvis and Platfield and Galena. These men were so intent on their mining tasks that they did not have time to build houses. And so many of them lived in the abandoned mineshafts or in burrows that they had carved in hillsides, just like Badgers do. But as it happened, these fortune seekers were horning in on an enterprise that the Ho-Chunk and Masquaki tribes had claimed as their own for hundreds of years. Indians, Patty Low writes, had long mind led for personal cosmetic use, as well as to trade with other Indians. For the Ho-Chunk led possessed certain sacred qualities and attractive pieces of lead, nuggets of lead, were buried with their dead. And although the 1814 Treaty of Ghent supposedly protected the tribe's ancestral lands, the invasion continued. Like wolves in the plains to dead buffalo, one Ho-Chunk leader observed, they spread out in every direction to dig and to find and to carry off lead from our lands. And ignoring appeals by the Ho-Chunk, our federal government paid no attention to their treaty rights. Instead, it did what they could to encourage the miners by providing them with generous leases in exchange for a 10% royalty. The problem was finally resolved by removal of most of the Ho-Chunk tribe to areas west of the Mississippi. And to this day, the Wisconsin state flag depicts a miner with a pickaxe while his aboriginal predecessors have been rendered invisible. Expropriation of Indian lands continued well into the 20th century. In the late 1800s, the government instituted a policy known as allotment, whereby reservations were converted to private property and small parcels of land were handed over to individual Indian residents of those reservations. But then through a variety of stratagems and loopholes, non-Indians were eventually able to gain title to most of those private holdings, fragmenting the reservations and creating even greater impoverishment. And before allotment ended in 1934, Wisconsin's Ojibwa tribes had lost more than 40% of their territory, including many sites that they held sacred. The land grabs continue. Last Wednesday, at the YWCA's Racial Justice Summit, I listened to Jassy Ross. Jassy Ross is a Columbia University trained attorney and he's a member of Montana's Blackfoot tribe. And he tried to explain to us the politics behind the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline. Now, as we know, that project has been routed just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, home to 10,000 Sioux Indians. And a portion of the pipeline will travel under the Upper Missouri River, from which the reservation draws most of its drinking water. This has been a cause for grave concern, because since 2010, over 3,300 instances of leaks and ruptures in U.S. oil and gas pipelines have been reported, 3,307 years, and should such a leak occur in the Upper Missouri, it would be catastrophic for the tribe. But here's the thing. Ross told us that the original, the original preferred and proposed route for the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline would not have taken it just north of the Standing Rock Reservation. It would have gone through Bismarck, which is a predominantly white community. That option, Ross told us, was considered by the builders to be too risky, but apparently not too risky for the well-being of 10,000 Sioux Indians. Well, apart from the tangible losses that I've just touched on here, perhaps even more devastating for Native peoples has been the spiritual losses that they have sustained over the centuries. The UW historian, Patty Lowe, belongs to the Redcliffe Ojibwe Band, and her book on Wisconsin's Indian tribes describes how the boarding school system that the government put into place affected her own and other Ojibwe peoples. Because for many years, Ojibwe parents were literally forced to send their children to these schools. And as in other states, these schools were used to drill the culture, the religion, and the language right out of these youngsters, often through the free use of corporal punishment and shaming. Moreover, the education that these schools did provide was often totally inadequate. When an Indian of 14 enters a white school, one critic noted, he is only as far advanced as a child would be who was still in Nicaragans. And as a result, young adult Indians often had great difficulty finding employment and thus were reduced to apathy, idleness, and indifference. The loss of sacred sites also produced hardship. Native writers have argued that the sundering of the tribe's relationship to places like the Black Hills, that does more to explain the malaise and alcoholism on reservations than to any number of economic factors. So for example, the Pine Ridge Reservation contains one of the most impoverished communities in the United States. But its members, the members of that Sioux community steadfastly refused to claim $1.5 billion that is sitting in a federal account for their exclusive use. Why is that? Well, in 1980, the US Supreme Court ordered the Sioux be given monetary compensation for the loss of the Black Hills in the 19th century. The tribes declined the award because if they accepted it, it would be to suggest that the land that they regard as sacred, the center of their spiritual life could be commercialized, commodified, that it could be sold off. For them only a return of the Black Hills would be satisfactory. This rejection, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz writes, demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource, but as a relationship between a people and a place. It's still hard for non-Indian Americans to be brutally honest about our history. And even former President Obama has repeated a trope that leaders of our country have been trotting out even as they annexed half of Mexico, even as they conquered Cuba and the Philippines, even as they were driving hundreds of thriving Indian nations into the ground. What was that trope? Well, during a 2009 interview, Obama sought to explain why the US could serve as an honest broker in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, okay? Well, he said sometimes, yes, as Americans we make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record he continues, America was not born as a colonial power. As a highly educated man of color, I have to believe that Barack Obama knew better than that. What does colonialism look like? According to another keynote speaker at last Wednesday's summit, Senali Sanjita Balaji, colonialism involves this, conquering land, eliminating difference, owning and perpetuating the production of knowledge, liberating and prioritizing capital-based systems. Sounds pretty much like tried-and-true US policy to me. And so as Indigenous People's Day draws near, let us perhaps agree that a trope like this is long overdue for permanent retirement. Ketnerburn's old Indian friend, Dan, would say that retiring a trope like that, perhaps that's the first step toward taking responsibility. It doesn't make any difference that we today are innocent of the wrongs that were once done. We still have a responsibility. We belong to the dominant culture and are, as Dan so aptly put it, still drinking the water. Blessed be the dominant. Our offering this morning will be shared with the Justified Anger Coalition, founded by Alex G. You can read about their work in the program. Please be generous. To gather each week as a community of memory and of hope through this time and this place, we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. There was one entry in our Cares of the Congregation book this morning. For Lois Bassler's sister, Dottie, who is at the Stanford Hospital in California, she remains in critical condition with complications following a heart transplant about two weeks ago. So our best wishes and our prayers go with Lois and with her family and particularly with her sister. We wish for her a complete recovery. And they would also acknowledge any other joys or sorrows that were unspoken that remain among us. As a community, we hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a moment in the spirit of empathy and of hope. By virtue of our brief time together this morning, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. We're closing him, number 1073. We heard a rendition of this earlier on from our children's choir, so it should be familiar to her. Do you? It is our mother. We must take care of her dear. We must take care of him older. We must take care of him older. Please be seated for the benediction and the post. Our closing words come from the Creek Novelist and Poet Joy Harjo. Remember the sky you were born under. Know each of the stars' stories. Remember the moon. Know who she is. I met her in a bar once in Iowa City. Remember the sun's birth at dawn. That is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away tonight. Remember your birth and how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life and her mother's and hers. Remember your father. He is your life also. Remember the earth whose skin you are. Red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth, brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, the trees, the animal life who all have their own tribes, their families, their histories too. Talk to them. Listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of the universe. I heard her singing Kiowa Wardant songs at the corner of 4th and Central once. Remember that you are all people and all people are you. Remember that you are this universe. The universe is you. Remember that all is in motion. All is growing is you. Remember. Blessed be.