Behind the scenes at a board meeting, learning about Native history
By Cameron Vickrey
Fellowship Southwest is committed to compassion and justice around four priorities: immigration, racial justice, hunger and Native American topics. To help us navigate our work with Native compassion and justice, we are currently working with Mariah Humphries, a Mvskoke citizen. She is guiding us in a process of discernment toward our place in this conversation.
The board of directors met last week for a meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is home to the Heard Museum, one of the largest private Native American art museums in the country. The board visited the museum as a group, where we were instructed to “look, like and learn.” Following the museum excursion, we gathered in a meeting space at the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, a now-beautiful room on a campus that was historically used as a boarding school to assimilate Native children. In this space, Mariah taught us about the history of Native people in America since about 1880, when they dropped out of our history books. We learned about boarding schools, efforts to restore land and other rights, missing and murdered Indigenous women, ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) and why it matters that we preserve it. We learned about language - the importance of which words we use when we talk about Native people, and which words not to use. It was such a worthwhile educational experience for me personally, and for our board. As Mariah emphasized with us, we cannot try to make a meaningful contribution without having the full story. History helps us to understand our present and to imagine the future.
We are taking our time with this matter, and not rushing into full programmatic development. We want to be learners first, and good stewards of how we can come alongside efforts for Native justice.
Our board is made up of a diverse group of people: Native, non-Native; Black, white, Latino and Latina; Baptist, Methodist, non-denominational; fairly young, and not as young. We are fortunate to have such a myriad of voices to guide us in our work. But we also want our wonderfully diverse audience—you—to benefit from the things we are learning and the people we meet along the way.
Please join us in this process of listening and learning. Follow our Native Justice Consultant, Mariah Humphries, on Instagram and subscribe to her Substack. If you go to Phoenix, visit the Heard Museum and stop by the boarding school (PISVC). Read Native authors. Listen to podcasts like This Land. Follow the rulings of the courts on Native issues. (This week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear Apache Stronghold v. United States, refusing to protect sacred Oak Flat land from destruction.)
One easy thing you can do is to come to our conference in September! Mariah will be one of our keynote speakers. At our board meeting last week, I listened to her talk for an hour and a half, and I wasn’t ready for her to stop. I know you will feel the same way.