WELCOME TO ECLC'S INDIGENOUS RIGHTS PAGE

Follow our monthly updates here:

July 2026

June 2026

Indigenous Rights Monthly Email Update Archive
 From this page, you can pull up past email updates.

COMING OPPORTUNITIES

Check our July 2026 update to find many learning opportunities! 

August 14 – 16, Dakota and Anishinaabeg Pow Wows
  *  Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Prior Lake  
  *  Mille Lacs Band 60th Annual Traditional Pow Wow in Onamia

August 23, 1 – 5 p.m. Public Sacred Sites Tour. Meet at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mendota Heights. Click here to RSVP! Tour sites sacred to Indigenous people in the Twin Cities to learn their history and importance, reflect on our own roles in the continuing systems of colonization and extraction, and develop plans for future action on reparation and repair. Participants will move beyond just learning about the history of these places and into a deeper relationship with their own responsibility for honoring, protecting, and repairing our relationship with these places and the Indigenous people who originated here. Sacred Sites Tours are free to attend, but they are not free to put on. Please consider making a donation to support the sustainability of this work. We suggest $50 – $100 per person (or whatever amount is meaningful to you), but please don’t let cost be a factor in your decision to attend!

September 30, Orange Shirt Day. ECLC will be marking the National Day of Remembrance of Indian Boarding Schools on the Sunday before, September 27. Support the efforts of the National Boarding School Healing Coalition by ordering a shirt to wear on the 27th and the 30th, and by contributing to advocacy efforts to pass the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Watch for coming opportunities.

To trace our initial education emphasis during the fall of 2022, you can access lists of curated resources and activities below. Use them to broaden your understanding of our Indigenous neighbors, the sovereign nations who were here before European settlers took over their land. 

In spite of the U.S. government’s and the Church’s intentional, systemic attempts to exterminate their life-ways, their languages, their cultures, and their religions, Indigenous People are still here and are our neighbors. 

This kind of history calls for the long and difficult work of justice, confession and healing, hoping to rebuild the respect and honor our Indigenous neighbors deserve as sovereign nations and children of God. 

For Christian white people, “doing the work” is a baptismal calling, and expresses the mission of our congregation: to give witness to love and justice at God’s welcome table and in the world.

LAND, LAND, LAND

Injustice legitimized by the Doctrine of Discovery spread across centuries and geographies. In the US, treaties almost always forced Indigenous people from their homelands.How might we, who now occupy these lands, acknowledge this history and act in ways that move us toward justice?

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INDIGENOUS STORYTELLING FOR ALL AGES

Indigenous peoples have a long history as storytellers. Take time this week to listen to some of these contemporary storytellers.

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ADVOCATING FOR JUSTICE

There are many opportunities to advocate for a better way. The insidiousness of the assumptions driven by the Doctrine of Discovery manifested in the late 19th Century and forward as Indian Boarding Schools. Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools which forbade their language and other cultural expressions. In our day, Indigenous people continue to disappear, too often murdered, proportinately far more often than other groups. These are just two justice issues that call for our attention.

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A DIFFICULT HISTORY

Our county's history with its Indigenous peoples is a record too often unknown because it is too often unspoken. 
Begin with the Doctrine of Discovery. 
Let learning open your heart.

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INDIGENOUS EXPRESSION - THE ARTS

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INDIGENOUS CUISINE - DECOLONIZED FOOD

Our Indigenous neighbors are taking some fascinating approaches to their own health and wellbeing, 
returning to the foods that sustained them for thousands of years before their economies were destroyed 
when our government used treaties to take the land that had sustained them.  

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LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We acknowledge that Edina Community Lutheran Church is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte*, the Dakota nation. Treaties developed through exploitation and violence were broken.  Tribes were forced to exist on ever smaller amounts of land.   

Acknowledging this painful history, we as a congregation confess our complicity in the theft of Native land and acknowledge that we have not yet honored our treaties. We further confess that Christians and Christian churches have benefited from this land theft. We commit to being active advocates for justice for Native People and to truth telling that leads to healing.