Native immersion explores culture, horrors
Yewon Park’s feet provided some welcome levity as a group of United Methodists immersed themselves in Native American culture and reckoned with injustices the first Americans suffered.
“You’ve got little feet!” said Henrietta Mann, an accomplished academic and Cheyenne prayer woman, while performing a “smudging” ceremony on Park.
“Wonderful little feet!”
The comment cracked up the solemn group at the Clinton Indian Church and Community Center, Park included. Earlier that day, they had toured the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, where Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a slaughter of 200 Native Americans, most of them women and children, on Nov. 27, 1868. Six hundred horses kept by the Natives were also killed, and the composition of the soil where it happened is still affected by the blood that was spilled.
The battlefield had an eerie, haunted aura, especially at a sacred tree where the group tied colored ribbons to show respect for the victims. Some people claim to have heard the voices of children playing there, believing it is their ghosts.
“It’s not a fantastic story,” said Kate Roesch, a park ranger in charge of education at Washita. “But it’s an important story. It may help it not happen again.”
Henrietta Mann, a retired college professor, Native American activist and Cheyenne prayer woman, performs a smudging ceremony on the Rev. Nancy Tomlinson, a district superintendent in the Great Plains Conference. The ceremony, performed on March 10, 2023, at the Clinton Indian Church and Community Center in Clinton, Okla., is used to cast out negativity while also putting protection around a person to ward off threats. Photo by Jim Patterson, UM News.
Smudging is a Native American ceremony intended to cast out negativity while also putting protection around a person to ward off threats. A feather bathed in the smoke from burning sacred herbs is tapped on various parts of the body, with an emphasis in the area of the heart.
Park, a student from South Korea at Boston University School of Theology, was one of eight participants from the university taking part in the five-day Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference Immersion Experience. In addition to students, the group of almost 30 included pastors, laypeople and church officials. Most were United Methodist.
The group traveled more than 500 miles in central Oklahoma over five days with hundreds of tall, white, tri-pronged windmills as the main attraction along the interstate highways.
Stops included museums, modest United Methodist Indian churches and battlefields — or massacre sites, depending on a person’s interpretation of the history. In addition to Mann, they heard from Native American United Methodist pastors, tour guides and a child psychologist who spoke about the abuse suffered by Native American children at boarding schools.
A visitor to the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City on March 9, 2023, examines a Native American drum in the Voices from the Drum exhibit. Photo by Jim Patterson, UM News.
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