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\u201cWoe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices\u2014mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law\u2014justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.\u201d (Matthew 23:23-4)

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Last week, Canada marked the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.\xa0 It\u2019s easy to pay attention when everyone else is, but now a few days later and at the beginning of a new week, it\u2019s a good time to ask the question: what stuck with you from that day?

Our church sits on land that was originally a shared territory between the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabeg nations, protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant.\xa0 What does that mean?\xa0 Well, let me share a bit\u2026\xa0

The Haudenosaunee is a confederacy of nations that we might know better by some of their other names.\xa0 It is a confederacy of nations made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Mohawk.\xa0 Later the Tuscarora would also join these five nations, making them the Six Nations that we know today from the Grand River.\xa0 Colonists in North America knew these people as the Iroquois, but their self designation is Haudenosaunee, meaning \u201cPeople of the Longhouse.\u201d\xa0

The Anishnaabeg nations include the Algonquin, Nipissing, Missisauga, Ojibwa, Odawa and Potawatomi.\xa0 The first three in this list you may recognize from local names in this region of Ontario, and the last three I may know better, as they were the Council of Three Fires nations to whom belonged the land I grew up on in my home State of Michigan.\xa0

The Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant is an agreement that binds all these nations together as sharers in the provisions of the land, but also in its protection.\xa0 It was an agreement of mutual respect to one another\u2019s needs, but also to the needs of the land for stewardship.\xa0 As settlers moved into these areas of the Great Lakes, they were invited to join in this land-use covenant together with the nations who had already resided here for millennia.\xa0 This was hospitality and generosity, founded in a belief that there was enough land and enough provision if the land was shared and respected together.

The settlers had a different understanding of land use though.\xa0 Not as a gift to be shared with open hands, but as a resource to be privately owned and exploited to its fullest wealth-generating potential, even if that meant using the resource up.\xa0 The settlers came with their new laws and government and with a decided arrogance against these na\xefve ways of mutuality and sharing.\xa0 Over time, the land would simply be taken from the original nations to whom it belonged through the exploitative use of these laws.\xa0 The Covenant of the Dish with one Spoon was violated; and the mighty Six Nations were confined to piddly reserves and subjected to cultural genocide.\xa0 All the while, many of the new settlers attended their churches and gave their tithes.

We Westerners believe\u2014or at least act\u2014as if our thick codes of civilized law, which includes the subjagative Indian Act, are superior to any of the na\xefve forms of government possessed by the nations we conquered by treaty.\xa0

But weigh it out for yourself: who in this story is more like the Pharisees Jesus proclaimed a woe upon?\xa0 Who are the ones who have neglected the more important matters of the law such as justice, mercy, and faithfulness?\xa0

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