JV EnCorps (JVE) members across all 7 of our Oregon and Washington locales seek a better understanding of their relationship to the Indigenous people whose land they occupy and are committed to making the Land Acknowledgement they offer at each gathering meaningful and intentional.
Last spring, the Spokane JVEs took this commitment on the road. Spokane JV EnCorps member Mary Lee Gaston invited her fellow Spokane JVEs to take a trip to visit sites significant to the Spokane people and Jesuit history. Mary Lee’s own history and experience provided guidance and narration for 8 JVEs on a memorable day. Mary Lee said, “It was my great honor to take people to some of the sites.”
The group traveled to The Old Mount St. Michael’s Mission on Palmer Rd, near both Orchard Prairie and Peone Prairie, and the Treaty Tree site. Mary Lee’s family has deep roots there. “You see, my German Family came from Germany, Canada, and down to Spokane to live in The Old Mount St. Michael’s Mission house. My mother was about 8 years old when they moved there. They moved into that Mission House when the new Jesuit Seminary was built on the hill above the Old Mission. There were many Native American people still living in that area, so my mom and her family were raised among them.”
Mary Lee’s mother’s experience belied common perceptions of the treatment of the Peone people at that time. Mary Lee remembers her mother reporting that “When Treaty Tree happened, it was often and erroneously stated that Colonel George Wright was being very kind to the Peone Tribe. The opposite was the truth. The Tribes moved out to the Spokane Reservation to stop the horrible atrocities that were committed against them on this land.”
Mary Lee’s own relationship with the Indigenous folks whose land she occupies started when she was a young woman asked to teach catechism on three reservations. Later, while attending Gonzaga University, she founded a club that took students out to the surrounding reservations to teach catechism and do physical work. The “Mission Club” as it was called, also invited their catechism students to attend events at Gonzaga on occasion.
In their second pilgrimage this October, Mary Lee led 5 of her fellow Spokane JV EnCorps members and 2 Spokane JVs some 60 miles to the far eastern corner of Washington state to visit the Kalispel reservation on the Pend d’Orielle River. They visited the tribal center with its new Community Building, the Pow Wow grounds, tribal cemetery and its little church. An additional 5-mile drive took the group to the Manresa Grotto, a series of sandstone caves in the hillside, where Fr. Pierre-Jean DeSmet, Belgian Jesuit missionary to the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1800s, gathered the Native people for Mass. Mary Lee said, “We actually hiked up to the caves and could see the stone altar that is still there.”
A picnic lunch at the Grotto gave the group a chance to share impressions and grow in community.
Mary Lee hopes to lead another trip to Wellpinit and West End, “both areas where the Spokane Tribes went after leaving the Spokane area.”
As part of their deeper engagement with Land Acknowledgement practices, the JVEs in Spokane are also reading Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage and reflecting together on the words of hope provided by its author, Choctaw Elder and Episcopal priest Steven Charleston.
Finally, the Spokane JV EnCorps members, along with JV EnCorps members in all the other 6 locales, will be exploring elements of a curriculum called Beyond Land Acknowledgement created by the Program Team at JVC Northwest.
Mary Lee hopes that the pilgrimages, along with the other work that the Spokane JV EnCorps members will be doing this year, will create opportunities to make their Land Acknowledgement more than words. “I know that these experiences can lead us to prayer and discernment as we listen, see, walk in the footsteps of these people, and be inspired. It is my hope that we, as JV EnCorps members, can be inspired to do something active that is relevant today.”
Pictured in the group seflie at the top of the post: Bottom row, left to right – JVs Jaycie Calvert and Abby Adams, JVEs Sue Feulner, Sr. Kathy Roberg, FSPA, Mary Lee Gaston. Back row Sr. Marianne Wilkinson, SNJM, Dean Duncan, Bob Feulner.
