In the cathedral’s Emmanuel Chapel, a young Christ and his blessed Mother watched as Sarah Augustine and Rev. Joe Hubbard led a deeply powerful panel discussion on the harrowing effects of the foster care and boarding school acts on Indigenous children.
The Council on Indigenous Relations (CIR) partnered with the Province One Indigenous Peoples Justice Network and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery (CDDD) to bring the coalition’s co-founder and executive director, Sarah Augustine, and the Rev. Joe Hubbard, Episcopal organizer for CDDD and convener of the Episcopal Indigenous Justice Roundtable, to the Portland area for the weekend of Sept. 12-13.
On Sunday afternoon, Augustine and Hubbard led a panel discussion entitled “Doctrine of Discovery: Land and Child Removal” in Emmanuel Chapel at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. That morning, Augustine gave the sermon at St. Nicholas’, Scarborough, while Hubbard preached at St. Peter’s, Portland. The Gospel appointed for that Sunday was aptly Matthew 18:21-35, with its messages about bondage, freedom, and mercy.
On Saturday, Sept. 12, CIR hosted Wabanaki REACH’s “Interacting with Wabanaki-Maine History” at the cathedral. Welcomed by St. Luke’s new dean, the Very Rev. Carol Morehead, we learned about 400 years of critical events between the Wabanaki people and European settlers.
Both days brought heavy knowledge and hard, strong feelings, but both also brought the joy of the power of the glory of God through solidarity in responding to the call to co-create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
You may watch Augustine’s Sept. 10 talk on “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery” at the St Paul Center for Theology in Boston here.