By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

Changing Clothes

6 Changing Clothes Clothing, Community, and Native Peoples For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling—if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. –The Apostle Paul ( 2 Cor. 5:2-4) It was late June 2007 and we had driven from my parents’ home in California to a little Nez Perce Presbyterian camp retreat in Idaho, situated between Craigmont and Winchester, atop Mason Butte at about four thousand feet in elevation. Known as Talmaks, which means, “mountain on the prairie,” it was established in 1910 and has served as a site for Christian renewal for Nez Perce Presbyterians, but also Native peoples from all over the United States, including Arizona and the Dakotas, and from as far away as the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. As we drove into the camp, I remember seeing the tipis scattered across the campground. They were taller than I had imagined them, some as high as twenty feet. Each boasted an off-white canvas hide wrapped around a set of wooden poles that converged in a small frond of fingers protruding through the very top of the tipi. Some of the more magnificent ones bore beautiful patterns and colorful prints. At least one was painted in the colors of the U.S. flag. Some had fires burning inside with a slender finger of smoke 125 exiting through the top. There were also cabins, simple structures with bunks and perhaps a porch to sit on in the afternoons, and some campers stayed in modern tents and trailers. In the middle of the camp stood the church, an open-air structure, its ceiling made of corrugated tin, with folding chairs and a pulpit area. It could hold 200, maybe 250 people comfortably. This is where worship took place each day. Out of sight, among the tipis and often hidden among bushes and hanging blankets, there were sweat houses. These were covered with faded, castoff blankets of different colors and types, which were heaped one on top of another to keep the heat in during the sweats. Nez Perce and guests might enjoy a “secular” sweat, mostly for its health benefits or its social dimensions. Others would participate in spiritual sweats, full of prayer and the anticipation of God’s presence, our Great-Grandfather, in the womb of the creation. With my family in tow, I had come not to sweat but to lead a Bible study for the two weeks of the camp and to contribute to the daily preaching schedule. I had also come for something more, not only to serve but also, perhaps, to understand. As it turns out, I would eventually need to “sweat” for my understanding, but it was more gift than labor. Before taking up that part of the narrative, I need to confess my ambivalence: I’ve always felt like both an outsider and insider at these meetings, though probably more of an outsider among people who grew up on the reservation than among those who grew up near the village. The source of my ambivalence goes to our family tree. My mother’s grandmother, full-blooded Athabascan, married a White man, Whiskey Jack. While his real name was Jack Burchard, I don’t know him by any other name. He was a bootlegger, an old-fashioned-sounding word, but no less expressive of the kinds of violence committed against Native peoples in North America. When we visited Nenana, an Athabascan village not far from where my grandmother on my mother’s side would have been born, they knew about him. He was notorious. An Athabascan man named Alex took us to the small, out-of-the-way graveyard where my great-grandmother, Evelyn Swenson Burchard, was buried. According to the family story, Burchard “bought” my great-grandmother with a box of whiskey, which he gave to her parents in trade. I suppose this was how he got his name. He was physically abusive. He struck and killed one of his daughters with a set of dog team traces. It was ruled an accident and there were never any charges brought against him. Some of the White men that Burchard’s daughters would marry were abusive as well, as if...