We’re back at the Ute Museum this coming Sunday, April 16th. After worship, those who wish to stay can help assemble homeless kits to share with our friends at Shepherd’s Hand. Even though we won’t meet in person those whom our efforts are meant to bless, we can touch with loving intention the many materials Inreach/Outreach have gathered up. Just as bread blessed and offered brings us into the Presence, so our blessed and offered hygiene kits can enable those who receive them to feel the love of Christ.
On Monday, April 17th, I will head off to LaForet for a post-Easter retreat with several special Rocky Mountain Conference colleagues. I will also be making a pilgrimage to the Sand Creek Massacre site east of Colorado Springs. I will resume my pastoral responsibilities on Monday, April 24th.
This setting was where one of the United States’ most egregious acts of betrayal and violence against our Native siblings occurred. In 1864, 750 Arapaho and Cheyenne people were directed by our government to encamp here, and they did so peaceably. Instead of honoring its promise to keep the people safe, our government directed the military to move in and surround the encampment; soon after, they slaughtered 230 people, mostly women and children. Learn more at nps.gov/sand.
The day following my pilgrimage to the massacre site, I will travel to Denver to visit History Colorado’s new interpretive exhibit focused on the massacre; Cheyenne and Arapaho people played a vital role in bringing this exhibit into being.
My pilgrimage to the massacre site and then to the exhibit in Denver is one I am taking most seriously. I do not want to go, but I most certainly need to go. In my work with the RMC’s AntiRacism Ministry Team since October 2022, it has become increasingly clear that the work of antiracism begins by looking down at our feet to ask, “What happened here? What happened to those who had little power? What happened here to those whose rights were denied or diminished on account of their skin color?”
If it has been a while since you have toured the Ute Museum, I want to encourage you to give yourself over to take in the full scope of the museum’s offerings. (On Sundays, the staff will let you in a discount.) It is easy to marvel at the beadwork and basketry on display or to tap a toe to the beat of the Bear Dance drums playing through the sound system overhead. It’s another thing altogether to sit with the story of how the Ute lost the only home they had ever known as they were rounded up and set down in reservations in eastern Utah.
The point of pilgrimages like the one I’ll be making and the one I’m encouraging you to just inside the Ute isn’t to feel overwhelmed by history we cannot change but instead to humbly learn what happens when we humans intentionally or unintentionally lose sight of the humanity and agency of others. History can teach us what our own times cannot—but only if we let it.
While I am away, you will be in my prayers; please hold me in yours.
With you on the journey,
