Dreaming of Cherokee

Rev. Mary Louise Frenchman (Lakota Sioux), Pastor, Living Waters Lutheran Church, Cherokee

I had no intentions of ever being involved with organized religion. I grew up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota hearing horror stories of the religious and government boarding schools that forced Christianity upon native peoples including my parents and grandparents.
 
Everywhere I looked, I observed native people in conflict with Christianity. Some had bought into it, leaving behind their own tribal dance, songs and spirituality, accepting that the church said “Christ or Indian- you must choose one or the other.”  Others, like most of my family, had nothing to do with Christianity. However, my paternal grandmother was proudly both traditional Lakota and Christian.  She never seemed to have a conflict, and from her I learned you can have both.  I do know she argued with Christian missionaries sent to our reservation and stayed set in her ways.
 
My family relocated from Pine Ridge to Phoenix, Arizona, when I was a teenager. It was there I first encountered members of the Lutheran church working with the Phoenix Indian Center helping natives who were relocating to the urban area. This impressed me, and it was the first time I really heard Indians saying nice things about a church. As I grew more active in the Indian community, I noticed that the Lutheran church was an advocate for social justice and encouraged native people to be involved in the community through advocacy and community organizing. I saw this as a healing process. Here were Indian people being empowered to have some say in their future with no one standing over them asking if they had been saved! That was a turning point in my life and my view of churches. 

I am a second career pastor, finally relenting and becoming involved in ministry after much discernment and introspection. My thought is that if the church hurt so many people, then the church can heal people, too. I believe that Christ and Culture can, and do, walk hand in hand.
 
It was not my wish to come to Cherokee in North Carolina, but after refusing to even consider the call, an elderly Cherokee woman visited me in my dreams three consecutive times bringing more people with her each time, all beckoning me with their hands to come to them.  Finally, I called the North Carolina Lutheran Synod and accepted the call to Cherokee. I believe that God speaks to us in many ways and sees in us that which we cannot see ourselves. With all certainty, I knew I must go to Cherokee. I have been here eight years now, and it has been good to be about healing and preaching the empowering good news of a risen Christ.  
 
We use Native symbols in our worship, such as an eagle feather to brush the smoke from the cedar, tobacco and sage into the air.  We know God hears our prayers, yet some of us also believe that the Eagle is a special helper for us in carrying our prayers to God, as well as the herbs and the smoke which they send forth.  We use the drum to sing a Muscogee chant as our Gospel Acclamation. In addition we have a women’s drum choir, and we call to worship by dipping hands in water in memory of the ancestors and to acknowledge the four cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, as well as three other sacred points: earth mother, God the creator, and God within each of us.  Generally, the children do this dipping of water in a wooden hand carved bowl, but we welcome anyone who wishes to “come to water” to join in.