In the Lenten Fiddlesticks you requested all of us “To write a reflection or record a short 1-2 minute video about how you have responded in your life to the problem of racism”. Keeping in mind the 1-2 minute suggested length, I share these thoughts and experiences.
1. I know what I don’t know so I intentionally enter other people’s reality.
North Dakota Native American Nations have five designated geographical areas. I have lived in three of them; student teaching at Standing Rock High School (Lakota), teaching school in the Turtle Mountains (Chippewa), and as co-pastor with my husband, Ken, at Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara).
When I came home from the Peace Corps (agriculture in India) it was the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement, of which I was totally ignorant. I volunteered with a Christian organization called Young Life and spent a summer with a black church in south Chicago working with the Youth Program. The youth, church and neighborhood ‘educated’ me. I now have shelves filled with Native American and black history, authors and spirituality; and a life full of intense learning.
2. We did what we could, we do what we can. My husband, Ken, and I couldn’t stop the death and destruction during the Vietnam war; however, we could stop paying the telephone tax which helped pay for it and we also adopted one Vietnamese orphan into our family. Vietnamese orphans were not allowed for adoption into North Dakota at the time and so we learned advocacy all the way to the state Capitol. I also need to include immigrant grandparents and a challenging rural childhood as lasting forces that help me recognize privilege and discrimination, patriarchy and racism, despair and faithfulness.
Thanks be to God, Dale Carmen O.E.F.