What's Happening

July 12, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – During a two-day workshop, Healing Stories on Sacred Lands, more than 50 Adrian Dominican Sisters and Co-workers donned the lens of land justice to examine the past 500 years of domination of the Americas by European descendants and to begin the process of making communal decisions about the Motherhouse lands. 

The workshop, held at Weber Retreat and Conference Center last month, was facilitated by Brittany Koteles and Jessie Rathburn of Land Justice Futures. Land Justice Futures is on a two-year journey with the Adrian Dominican Sisters and other congregations of women religious to explore “what it looks like if we hold land justice as the center of our decisions about land,” Brittany said. 

Components of land justice include protecting land from extraction for minerals, oil, or other natural resources; regenerating the health of the land and ecosystems; and expanding land equity to Black, Indigenous, and other dispossessed communities. 

To set the context, Brittany and Jessie spent the first day reviewing the systems that led to the subjugation of Indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples. Some of the forms of domination over the past 500 years included:

•    The Doctrine of Discovery: Jessie noted that papal documents in the 15th Century gave Christian European settlers the right to claim any land in the Americas for their country. The argument was that land not occupied by Christians is “empty” land and can thus be claimed by the European country making the “discovery,” Brittany said. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery recently, these documents have still been cited as precedent in U.S. Supreme Court cases, most recently by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, she said. The harm done by the Doctrine of Discovery “is not going to be undone by one unavailable solution,” Brittany said. “It’s going to happen…through deep commitment to healing and many, many experiments” in land justice.

•    Slavery: Jessie noted that the arrival of The White Lion, a ship carrying 30 captive Africans to Virginia, “began 250 years of chattel slavery, a race-based system of human bondage.” Although slavery was formally ended in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans still own only 2% of the land and have an average family wealth of $3,500, compared to $147,000 for the average white family, Brittany said. 

•    Broken Treaties and Displacement: Jessica outlined the numerous treaties between the United States and individual states with Indigenous peoples. She gave the example of the 1807 Treaty of Detroit, between the United States and the Odawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Nations. They were given only a fraction of the worth of the land and then forced to leave their land. Through the 1830 Indian Removal Act, 60,000 Indigenous peoples living East of the Mississippi River were forced to move west onto reservations, Jessie said. 

•    Boarding Schools: Under the U.S. Boarding School Policy, Indigenous children were forced to leave their families to attend boarding schools to teach them the mainstream culture. “Many grew ill and even died,” Jessie said. “Many were subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and told to let all that is Indian within them die out.”

•    Racial Terror: “Black families faced the terror of intimidation, harassment, and lynching in the Jim Crow South,” Jessie said, adding that African American families who owned land were targeted so that the white mobs could steal their land.

Brittany acknowledged that this history can be difficult to hear, but she also gave the workshop participants reason to hope. “We are in an era of change,” she said. “Now we identify ourselves as stewards of a new paradigm. What if this moment is the most powerful of all? What if decisions about land had the power to change an entire culture?”

On the second day, participants heard from two activists who are operating out of a more just, inclusive vision. 

Julie Dye, a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and the Federal Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names, spoke of her efforts to counter the hurtful appropriation of Indigenous cultures by mainstream society. 

Julie recalled attending and graduating from a high school bordered by other schools that used Native names as their mascots. “It was very hurtful,” she said. “It hurt so bad to see what was being done to the beautiful culture that all of us were trying to reclaim.”

Indigenous people “have always been a resource for white sellers – the land, the water, our children, our art, and ultimately our identity,” Julie said. “They turn us into a monolith of one people when we are hundreds of people. They trivialize and commodify our rich cultures. All of this contributes to our invisibility and our marginalization.”   

Erin Bevel, Board President of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, spoke of her organization’s efforts to foster urban gardening among African Americans in Detroit. 

The Food Sovereignty Network opened the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op, a “Black-led and community-owned grocery cooperative to give Detroit residents greater access to healthy food.” The network has also raised money to help Black residents buy the vacant lots on which they had planted community gardens.

“Growing food and having the ability to cultivate land is the work of our ancestors,” Erin said. “This is how our ancestors created the human civilization – having a relationship with Mama Earth.” Food sovereignty touches on the ability to “determine where our food comes from and how we nourish and take care of ourselves,” she explained. 

The Land Justice workshop ended with a contemplative opportunity in which participants took on the voices of Adrian Dominican ancestors; the present-day Congregation; descendants, Sisters who will be affected by land decisions; and Earth to discuss the possibilities of land justice in future decisions about the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ land. 

Healing Stories on Sacred Lands is the beginning of the Congregation’s process of discernment about the future heritage of the Motherhouse land. 
 

July 12, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – An 18-year-old student who was just starting to turn his life around. A teenager who died by suicide. A woman killed in her driveway in front of her young children. A 3-year-old girl killed in her bedroom during a drive-by shooting. A teenage boy who died while playing Russian roulette with his friends.

These are some of the 17 people whose funerals Sister Joan Baustian, OP, attended during her 27 years of ministry in Detroit, beginning in 1989. All of them died through violence – mostly by gun violence, Sister Joan said. They came to Sister Joan’s mind last month as the United States marked June as Gun Violence Awareness Month.

Sister Joan first ministered in Detroit in the 1950s as a teacher, but the violence occurred during her second time of ministry in Detroit. During this time, she ministered primarily in the neighborhood of Rosary Parish. She ministered for a time at Covenant House, which has a home in 34 U.S. cities for youth at risk of homelessness or human trafficking. Her ministries also included teaching in an adult education program. 

Sister Joan retired from formal ministry in the mid-2000s but stayed in Detroit until 2016, serving as a community organizer, continuing to work with the people in the Rosary Church neighborhood – including people from the neighboring Baptist church. The centerpiece was the community garden, in which about eight families regularly received food, she said. “I was there to help the children, the families, the moms, and the grandmoms – to get people connected with what they needed,” she said.

Sister Joan noted that the work of building community in the Rosary neighborhood had a positive effect. “When I first went there, some of the murders happened, but then after all the years of building up community there, we had no more murders,” she said. “It tells you how important building community is.”

In the earlier days, violence was rampant in that part of Detroit. Sister Joan’s first experience of gun violence – and attending the victim’s funeral – was for a 30-year-old man who served with Sister Joan on the board of Genesis, a community organization. He was shot and killed. “That was the first one,” Sister Joan recalled. “He was buried from the Baptist church. That was a hard one and there was a lot of talk. If they ever arrested anybody, I never heard.”

Several other incidents stand out in Sister Joan’s mind. One family – a Black Catholic family who attended Rosary Parish and adopted nine children – had to deal with the shooting death of their oldest son, Edward. Quite a few years later, Sister Joan said, the couple’s granddaughter was shot and killed while washing a car in her driveway, while her children, ages 1 and 2, were nearby. 

When a 3-year-old girl, Destiny, was shot while playing in her bedroom, Destiny’s aunt – who worked with Sister Joan at Covenant House – asked her to attend the funeral. “The church was absolutely packed,” Sister Joan recalled. “The chief of police was there and stood next to the mom, next to the coffin, and promised they would do justice for Destiny. The mother was in absolute hysterics.”

Sister Joan attended all of the funerals, often visiting the families to offer the support that she could. “I couldn’t say much – just listened to them,” she said. “When each one happened, I felt sad. Some you knew personally or knew the family very well. You just get the strength to do it.” 

The experiences “affected me in my activism against gun violence, war, and violence,” she said. In her ministry in Detroit, she has seen much of the root cause of violence: poverty and racism.

Sister Joan noted that she also had many positive experiences in Detroit. The community garden brought many of the neighborhood people together – including a group of prisoners who lived in a former convent, were tracked by GPS, and could go no farther than the garden. They volunteered in the garden when children were not around, she said. 

Sister Joan also offered nutrition classes to the mothers. People in the neighborhood enjoyed summer picnics together, featuring food donated by the church and grilled by the neighborhood men.

Strong communities such as the Rosary neighborhood bring a sense of hope to Sister Joan amid difficult situations. “Violence is such a big part of this country’s history,” she said. “I’m not sure we can change that, but we have to keep trying. I’m very fond of adding at the end, ‘Hopelessness is a terminal disease.’ Even if there’s not much to hope for, you keep hoping.”