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CRC Group Visits Six Nations Reserve

December 11, 2014
Father Norm Casey at the Woodland Cultural Centre

Father Norm Casey at the Woodland Cultural Centre

Humberto Lopes of the Office of Race Relations

Rev. Daryl DeKlerk wonders if reconciliation models used in Israel and Palestine could be helpful in mending the broken relationship between First Nations people and other Canadians.

“I heard recently how Israeli Christians and Palestinian Christians are bridging borders by having mixed-culture youth retreats.

“Maybe ideas like that can bring health and healing to the hurts on both sides here, inspired by Ephesians 2:14, ‘For (Christ) himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility...””

DeKlerk and elder Gerald Nykamp of Ebenezer Christian Reformed Church in Jarvis, Ontario recently joined staff from the Burlington office of the Christian Reformed Church and friends for a tour of the Six Nations reserve near Brantford.

Led by Anglican priest Father Norm Casey, himself a Mi’kmaq from the east coast of Canada, the group of about 20 people had a chance to learn from Indigenous people about the history of the relationship between their people and other Canadians and the current reality.

Afterwards they were treated to a meal by members of Casey’s parish, who joined them around the table.

“The tour let me hear the First Nations’ story from their perspective. I now feel more compelled than ever to listen and learn from them instead of react from prejudices I’ve picked up over the decades,” says DeKlerk.

“Canadians are increasingly aware of (and grieved by) the injustices suffered by First Nations people, including at the hands of some of the Christians in the residential schools.”

He says he appreciated how Casey explained that there have been healthy Aboriginal-Christian relations, especially prior to Canada’s confederation in 1867.

“I found it so refreshing to hear that through the early 1800’s many First Nations people were happily Christian while keeping their Native identity in many ways,” he says. “I want to know more about that time of healthy relations so we can be inspired in the reconciliation that’s needed today.”

Darren Roorda, Canadian Ministries Director, also participated in the tour. Roorda and his family reside in Breslau, Ontario, in what he calls “the centre of the centre of the Haldimand Tract,” a swath of land on both sides of the Grand River given to Six Nations but now a site of controversial development. The tract also includes the site of the 2006 Caledonia land-dispute crisis. 

“Over time, the spirit nor the letter of the treaty was kept and currently, the land reserved for the Indigenous peoples of Southern Ontario in this section is not even 1/20th of its original agreed upon size,” says Roorda.

The land he and his family live on within the tract was granted to his wife’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother by a famous Indigenous leader, Joseph Brant.

“It is this overlap of cultures and treaties, of  ‘first settlers’ and First Nations that has caused me to think of how these two cultures might live under God and with each other in harmony as God would intend,” says Roorda.

The Centre for Public Dialogue and Canadian Aboriginal Ministry Committee have just released a new small group curriculum called Living the 8th Fire that helps churches and their Indigenous neighbours learn together about how to build a renewed relationship, in the spirit of Ephesians 2:14.