October 12, 2025 · Rev. Derek van Gulden · Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 24; Revelation 22:1-3
On Indigenous Peoples' Sunday, Rev. Derek van Gulden tells of the Pawtucket people who lived on Cape Ann, the Doctrine of Discovery that was used to take their land, and the hardships that continue on reservations. Seeing the image of God in everyone means listening to those who know how to live in harmony with creation.
Transcript
People of God, would you join me in a moment of prayer? Gracious and holy God, I ask you this day to move the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts by your love, and help each of us not to be the instrument of our own or anyone else's oppression, but to be an instrument of peace in every step, in every breath, in every moment of every day. Amen.
Friends, we gather here on the lands and waters where we live and play and work that were inhabited for thousands of years by the Pawtucket people, an Algonquian speaking tribe, part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. When I'm going in and looking at and researching the Pawtucket people. Like anything else, you find stuff that goes from one end to the other. A lot of what I read said that the Pawtucket people lived in what we know as Essex County, but came to Cape Ann more so in the summertime. Like I guess a lot of people do, but in reality, they lived here as well. If you go around Cape Ann Gloucester, especially in Rockport, you can find places where they actually lived, fields where they planted corn and squash and beans. And yet there's not many of them left. Actually, one resource I looked at said, there are no Pawtucket people left, but I've read many others that say there are integrated into the local culture or other tribes. What I have learned is they were a very peaceful group of people, and when the settlers came. They worked with them, showing them, or at least I can't say because I wasn't there. But hopefully the settlers learned from the way that they grew things, the way they lived off the land, lived off the sea, and lived in harmony with everything that's going on. But in this country has in a lot of countries that have been colonized. Indigenous people have been thought of as being less than for hundreds of years.
We've been talking a lot about creation and how we are part of creation. Humans, and I think I say it every week, and I apologize if I get repetitive because somebody pointed that out recently. You keep going back to Genesis to when humans were created out of the earth, created in their image. We get it. Do we? We were all created in the same image of God, but in so many different images of God. And we're created to, as God says, have dominion over the earth, which is in some translations. And some people take that to be dominion, meaning you're going to do what I tell you to do. The earth and everything in it. Dominion actually means that we manage the world with love, not to exploit it with greed, but to live in it with harmony.
How many of you have heard of a little thing called. The Doctrine of Discovery? Anybody know? It's amazing because they don't teach it in schools much. The doctrine of discovery dates back to the fifteen hundreds, when the church, which at the time was the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. Created a doctrine that said, based on Scripture, that a Christian, coming from a Christian nation who discovers a new land can claim it for that nation. No matter how many people live or didn't live there, because if they weren't Christian, they were less than. It allowed them to take their land from them. It allowed them to treat them as less than. And if we follow the true history of places which a lot of history comes and goes in different ways, that's how this country has treated the native people. Actually, part of that policy is still used today. A little bit of that policy ends up in the Declaration of Independence. It's fascinating.
So what happened over a number of years? Well, not that many years, is that the native people were pushed off their land. Now, these are people that were part of the land. They lived there. They were in harmony with it, and yet they were pushed off and eventually either wiped out in many different ways or put on reservations. That was land that almost nobody else wanted because it really had no agricultural aspects to it. And many native people still live on reservations where the land is not good, and where the cost of food is insanely higher than what we pay for it.
There's a great series on NPR did, and I'm going to forget the gentleman's name. Native American, and there's two seasons of it. And I think he does six episodes each seasons. And it's talking about what native people go through, went through and continue to go through. And I was stunned when I was watching one on food resourcing that on a reservation. Chicken is sixty seven percent higher. I could be off a little bit with that than it is off the reservation. It's insane. We complain when the price of eggs goes up a couple dozen as we should. But that's just I mean, it blows my mind.
Traditionally, when people came to this country, they found that the native people, the indigenous people, they lived in harmony, as I said, and they lived with what they had. So this I wish I remember his name, who was doing this documentary said we didn't have cheese. Our ancestors dairy wasn't a big thing with them where they grew up. And he said, it's fascinating that eighty percent of native people in this country today are lactose intolerant. And yet when they were put on reservations and the government saw, oh, there's not enough food for them, they started a program which I believe became government surplus food that we know nowadays. I've experienced that because it was given to organizations like schools and camps and other places to help increase the nutrition. Growing up in a in a camp, we had government surplus peanut butter that came in number ten tins and could have been used to side a house. It's so thick and sticky. key. We got government surplus cheese, which. These are things also. They get on reservations that I'm never sure if it's real cheese. My mother called it American cheese, and that's what we grew up with. But these were some of the subsidies that were given to them. Everything was either canned or frozen, not fresh. A people that lived off the land harmoniously and always had what they needed, never took any more than they needed. Part of that whole ecosystem.
And then people from another country come in, discover a country. I mean, I think it's believed that when Columbus discovered the Americas, there were always something like four million people living there throughout the Americas. But he discovered it and he claimed it in the name of Spain. Now, there's a lot of countries around the world that were discovered and colonized by Europeans and other groups.
On this Indigenous People Sunday, on this weekend that we celebrate indigenous peoples. It's important for us to remember that the stories that we were taught, the stories of Columbus bringing the Western world here, the stories of the colonizers, both the first ones here and later on, like many countries, are horrible story and not true for the native people. There were tribes that were decimated not just from violence, but also from the diseases that the Europeans brought with them. And where do we find these native people these days? The very people that we need to be listening to, to learn how to live in harmony with creation, that we are called to be stewards of or to have dominion of, in relationship with. It's not to say that there are people throughout this country that don't already do that. There are a lot of them. But as a whole. We all need to listen. We all need to learn the truth about the past. We all need to learn about what it means when somebody considers another person less than. And it happens to more than just the native people. But today we're focusing on them.
In the scriptures today we heard that when we live in harmony, that's what God wants. God created the world in all creation to be in harmony. Every aspect of creation. We can't do that when we ignore the fact that we all created the same, but totally different. That's the beauty of creation. We can't do it when we think, well, they're less than because. And we know in our culture we do that to all kinds of people, even sometimes those sitting right next to us, those we grew up with.
On this Indigenous People's Sunday weekend. And November actually is Native American month a good time to learn. And there's a great book written on the history of the early history of Cape Ann. And I'm going to forget her. I'm having trouble with names recently. But if you ask me, I can give you. It's an amazing book. I've been able to read part of it really in depth into all that's going on or all that went on here. Even the point of finding that there was a meeting place the Pawtucket met at, where there was a wigwam right where their house sits today, or right on the street where it is in Gloucester. And there's lots of different places throughout, just Gloucester and Rockport where you can find spiritual places where you can find burial grounds. Fascinating. Both in the content and the richness and the fact that most people don't know about it.
As we go forward into our day, into our week and the rest of our lives. May we listen. To the native people who understood and understand what it means to live in harmony with creation. And may we see the image of God, the beauty of God, the love of God in all aspects of our world here, beyond here, even in the virtual world. And may we speak up for those whose voices have been oppressed. It's a lot of work, but especially in this moment, in this day, in our world. It's work that needs to be done immediately. Amen.