Dear Friend,

I'm working on a sermon, which I will be giving this Sunday, at Manhattan Mennonite Church. I was asked by the pastor there, my friend Jason Storbakken, because of our work around Land Acknowledgements. 

I’m impressed with the work they’ve already done: building relationships; engaging with the Repair Network, a Mennonite-initiated network that stems from the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery Coalition; and a lot of listening. Given how much they are already doing, I admit I was a little surprised they asked me to speak about this particular topic.  

So I sat in prayer, to see what might be said. 

The title for the sermon came quickly: By What Name Do I call Thee? 

I feel like I’m surfing/floating/swimming amongst a confluence of mighty rivers here…: Names that God calls us and names we call God; the sheer importance of naming; the relationship between names and discovery, especially the Doctrine of Discovery; land acknowledgments as re-naming and re-turning to older names; the power of changing the meaning of a name, especially family names; shifting the shared collective imagination of place through names and their meanings….

Names are entry places to change stories, especially origin stories, and stories of lineages, and stories of possibilities. 

Shakespeare:  the rose by any other name is still a rose, Juliet tells Romeo. But at the end of that story, the star-crossed lovers die. Because names, and what we associate with them, matter.  And, as the feuding families eventually (fatally?) recognize, the meaning we give a name can change. All is possible in communication.  

And in communication, so much goes wrong. or at least perpetuates problems.

Which is part of where land acknowledgments can fall flat. And where they can be distinctly unsatisfying.

I like to think that they should be unsatisfying. Their continued unsatisfaction is part of what can prompt groups to keep searching. To keep going. To unlearn. To relearn. To shift stories and actions and consciousness and future possibilities. To change what the names that we give ourselves and the names  (of the roles) we are given - administrator, actor, participant, leader, environmentalist, peacebuilder, investor, writer, educator, inheritor - mean.  Storytellers, all of us.