The decision to close nine churches on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota has sparked a growing controversy, with the congregations now preparing to file lawsuits in tribal court to keep their churches open.
The strongest public challenge to the closings to date has come from members of Christ Church, Red Shirt Table, who sent a six-page letter to Bishop Creighton Robertson dated September 10. When asked to comment on the letter, South Dakota diocesan administrator Randy Barnhardt said the bishop’s office had not received a copy. But Lorri Ann Two Bulls, a member of Christ Church, reported that the certified letter sent to Robertson “was returned and had been refused by the bishop’s office.” Mr. Barnhardt subsequently confirmed that the diocese had refused to receive the letter. Copies were also sent to members of South Dakota’s Standing Committee, as well as national church officials and the local media.
Lakota people now turning on their own. It couldn’t have happened to a better man. Robertson should resign immediately.
“The strongest public challenge to the closings to date has come from members of Christ Church, Red Shirt Table, who sent a six-page letter to Bishop Creighton Robertson dated September 10. When asked to comment on the letter, South Dakota diocesan administrator Randy Barnhardt said the bishop’s office had not received a copy. But Lorri Ann Two Bulls, a member of Christ Church, reported that the certified letter sent to Robertson “was returned and had been refused by the bishop’s office.” Mr. Barnhardt subsequently confirmed that the diocese had refused to receive the letter.”
Refusing to acknowledge the legal existance of the opposition was a technique developed by the English when they colonized other lands.
They first used it in several variations in Ireland over many centuries, to displace a very legitimate Irish aristocracy, which they replaced with Anglo-Norman, Welsh-Norman and Anglicised Anglo-Irish aristocrats. The English simply refused to acknowledge that the opposition had any status, legal or otherwise.
The result was a diminuation of Gaelic culture and the replacement of a highly developed Gaelic legal system with a conveniently slipshod version of English common law and political representation.
The English repeated this process in Scotland with a much higher level of sophistication learned from their Irish experiment. The English cultural and imperial intrusion into Scotland occurred well before the Act of Union (between England & Scotland) in 1705(?). The process in Scotland was much less direct and much more insidious than that in Ireland. In the end, the English were able to cause the Scottish aristocracy, with notable and valiant exceptions during various national uprisings, to betray their fellow countrymen.
When the English colonized North America, they applied the same principle of ‘non-recognition’ of existing territorial boundaries and existing culture to those native American ethnic entities that had significant and widespread pre-European cultural dominance and autonomy.
Now I am not saying this as one who does not recognize the fact that just because one cultural entity has occupied a piece of ground for many generations, that that is the way it was on that “piece of ground” before that cultural entity’s arrival or that that cultural entity in the course of events might not be displaced by another culturaL entity. That’s the way things have happened in history, just read the Old Testament.
What I am saying is that the quoted refusal of the registered letter by the diocese is a vestigal example of the English colonial practice of trying to achieve legal and cultural dominance by refusing to even accept the fact that opposition from these particular native American Christians even exists.
Shame on this diocese and on the national church.
They are nothing but bald-faced and shameless hypocites.
These Lakota have certainly been episcopalianized. I leave to you the diversity of interpretations of that eventuation.
Maybe members of Christ Church, Red Shirt Table, should look into becoming Anglicans, they would receive more respect as Anglicans than they do as Episcopalians and they would probably find a more reasonable Bishop in the AMIA, CANA or the Southern Cone.
Episcopalians suing Espicopalians…they really do eat their own.
Intercessor