2019-11-14 Cedar Campus

Post date: Nov 14, 2019 12:57:52 PM

A Native Eulogy for Cedar Campus

InterVarsity is giving away our beloved Cedar (old news, I know, but I was holding out hope until recently). A social media post feels like a cheap replacement for what my soul needs. A funeral would be a better place to bring my grief, my feelings of betrayal, and if I have any claim to ancestral memory, a deeper and more existential emptiness. Years ago, our clan mothers and other leaders had to make a similarly agonizing decision. We tried to buy our survival when our homelands were seized. That was, perhaps, when we became "Americans": homeland-less refugees like the rest, money (or at least a promise of it) our sustenance. It was a temporary reprieve. Moving west hardly delayed President Jackson and the voracious "westward expansion."

In Indian Country, there is widespread admiration for the Lakota, a tribe that resists at great cost. "Our homelands are not for sale," they say, refusing to bow to the idols of this nation-state, and receiving, over and over, the punishment for this insurrection. Our sisters and brothers in Hawaii are in a similar struggle even now, after already having lost so much. They retain, at least, their dignity. But on a spiritual level, they also retain their loyalty to the Creator who graciously gave them their Mauna Kea, the Lakota their Black Hills.

That is what is really at stake for us. We humans are not made to be refugees. Our souls were formed to have a deep connection to our Creator God by having a deep connection to a place of his provision. Isn't that what we long for? A home? It is no wonder we behave like a nation of children with an attachment disorder. We treat the land like a hotel for rent, and soon, as a movement, we will have no other option for our camping programs, no opportunity to practice land-justice as stewards, no communal object lesson for our souls. That is what Cedar Campus taught me, long before I began to connect with Native InterVarsity. Cedar Campus felt like coming home -- a sacred place to care for, to meet God. On the last day, the program director would always remind us that God went with us when we left. Yes, but the land remained a tangible tether to that reality.

I was naive, of course. Cedar Campus has turned out to be as temporary as everything else. It was, for a time, a sign-post for me of a deeper reality. Sandy Cove, Pooh's Corner, Narnia. Likely the new stewards, good people, will retain some of those names for sake of sentiment. But for me, the spell is broken. I am reminded again, through loss, that this world is not my home. Where now will we practice what home is supposed to feel like?

A gift from Creator is not a commodity to be bought and sold, and I'm glad that this transaction did not involve that desecration. The new stewards also share our confession, if not our connection. But in truth, the desecration happened long ago. We never had real authority to call it our own. Creator gave it to the first peoples of that land. It was their beautiful place, it was their rest and comfort -- a place to escape the summer heat and insects and receive the cool lake breeze from God -- long before the loggers showed up and renamed it "Prentiss Bay." Now in a small way we share in their greater loss, we feel in part what they have felt. This is a new gift, as hard as it is. For all of us who grieve, whether Native or not: we can join those first peoples as brothers and sisters in solidarity over the loss of our sacred place.