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.