by Brett Taylor
A number of my fellow Mennonite Workers had previously been on the Christian Peacemaker Team’s Aboriginal Justice Delegation to Grassy Narrows, Ontario. As the fourth member of my community to participate, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from hearing the stories of others who had gone before me. Despite what the name “Christian Peacemaker Teams” calls to my imagination, I knew not to expect any sort of heroic acts of saviordom by myself or any other delegate. I knew going into the delegation that the attitude of White saviordom is one that must be actively dismantled and that, in part, the delegation would help us to do this. However, this is a difficult attitude to undo. Perhaps all the John Wayne movies I watched growing up affected me more than I knew, but when I found out that we had been invited to accompany the community at Grassy Narrows to an environmental levy/blockade, images came to mind of myself standing unflinchingly before a demonic Balrog of a logging truck “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”
The image faded quickly as I recognized the absurdity of it. Yet when I arrived in Ontario, I began to recognize another false assumption rooted in White savior mentality that I had carried into the delegation: that my presence and participation would be an act of service. Having not grown up with a Mennonite background, I have only recently come into knowledge of the enormous amount of institutional energy and resources that are devoted to the idea of service in the Mennonite Church (with such programs and agencies as Mennonite Disaster Service, Mennonite Voluntary Service, Mennonite Central Committee, etc,); subconsciously I had viewed Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) as such an agency, albeit one with more radical and anti-imperial commitments and practices.
I do not desire to nay-say service, nor to even say that service is not necessarily a fundamental part of Christian life; it is. I do, however, wish to challenge this stance that myself and others have assumed, that when we travel abroad to communities that are economically disadvantaged, affected by violence, and torn apart by colonialism, we give of ourselves and do not receive. And that in this we somehow do justice. In Ontario, I was quickly made aware of the reality that the people who had taken time out of their lives to come and share their stories and wisdom with us possessed a gift much greater than we could ever offer them, not the other way around.
A friend and fellow Mennonite Worker, Mark Van Steenwyk, once told me that an important shift in his thinking was when he stopped praying “Lord, may I be Christ to them,” and instead began to pray “Lord, may I see Christ in them.” I think that this is a profound truth that cuts to the heart of what I see as the problem with the mentality of service as lived out by the Mennonite and broader Christian church at large. When we enter a community and attempt to “be Christ,” we have eliminated any possibility for the deep mutuality that is required for solidarity and justice because we have assumed that the community we hope to serve needs us, but that we do not need them. Subsequently, we end up perpetuating oppressions by occasionally going on a service trip or completing a project and then immediately returning to a middle-class bourgeois lifestyle, remaining firmly entrenched in the very institutions and social structures that grant us comforts and privileges at the expense of so many others who are denied those very privileges.
Another friend of mine and fellow delegate, Stefan Warner, reflected one evening at debriefing that “White folks just need to learn to be healthy.” Yes, when the comforts and privileges of our social location are derived from oppressive institutions and social structures, what we need to do is not so much to serve as to learn. CPT delegations provide a unique opportunity for learning that, at least in my experience, is much more powerful than anything that can be acquired from reading a book. I had read about, and was familiar with, the atrocities and acts of cultural genocide committed by the Indian residential school system, but meeting with and hearing about the experiences of a survivor of this system at the former site of his schooling was more powerful than any learning I had previously gleaned from book or documentary.
Similarly, from reading many books, one can have a vague, abstracted idea about the beauty of the creation-centric nature of indigenous spirituality and lament that ones own spiritual tradition has been partially responsible for crushing such a beautiful way of connecting with the source of life. In Grassy Narrows, our delegation was invited to participate in a sweat lodge, one example of a traditional Anishinabe spiritual practice, and the glimpse of life-affirming spirituality that I caught inside was also more powerful than any previous learning that I had acquired outside of such a face-to-face encounter.
Face-to-face educational experiences from people and communities that are engaged in a struggle for justice are vital and necessary experiences that I firmly believe anyone who has felt the creator’s call to solidarity with the poor and oppressed needs to experience. Without opening up oneself to such learning, solidarity and justice remain in the realm of abstract theory never taking root relationally. Resistance becomes disconnected from the people who have the most to struggle for. Christian Peacemaker Teams provides an opportunity to connect and learn from communities engaged in immediate struggles for justice and these opportunities are invaluable. My hope is that what I and other delegates have learned is only an introduction, that we will seek out more, and that as we learn from people’s stories and experiences of struggle we see Christ in them. From there, we can work together, mutually, for justice.
CPT places teams at the invitation of local peacemaking communities that are confronting situations of lethal conflict. These teams seek to follow God’s Spirit as it works through local peacemakers who risk injury and death by waging nonviolent direct action to confront systems of violence and oppression. CPT places teams at the invitation of local peacemaking communities that are confronting situations of lethal conflict. These teams seek to follow God’s Spirit as it works through local peacemakers who risk injury and death by waging nonviolent direct action to confront systems of violence and oppression. Visit CPT.org for more information
