From the Grounds Up: A Model for Contextually Attentive Decolonial Movements between Indigenous and Christian Communities

This paper seeks to model an attentive, locally informed approach to studying and supporting decolonial Indigenous-Christian relationships. It will examine and reflect on the values and practices of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin (Onʌyoteˀa·ká· or People of the Standing Stone) and the Norbertine or Premonstratensian Order of Canons Regular in northeastern Wisconsin, how these groups have understood and practiced their values in history, and how they interpret and live out their heritages today. From its reflection, the paper will identify core elements of Oneida and Norbertine thinking and acting: relationality, reciprocity, and attention for the Oneida Nation, and communio, contemplatio, actio, and stabilitas loci for the Norbertines. With these values discerned, the paper will detail areas of harmony and dissonance between each community’s worldview. Based on these similarities and differences, the paper will suggest concrete ways for the two communities to walk, talk, and worship with and for the benefit of each other and the Green Bay region as a whole. The paper will end with insights from the exploration of the relationship between the Oneida Nation and the Norbertines for wider Indigenous-Catholic and -Christian interactions in North America, including the use of terms like “religion” and “spirituality” for Indigenous rituals and value systems.

Indigenous traditions and values have much to teach Western ways of thinking and acting, including Euro-American forms of Christianity so often involved in the vilification, destruction, and exploitation of Indigenous lifeways, Indigenous lives, and ecosystems. Collaboration between traditional Indigenous, Indigenous Christian, and Euro-American Christian communities merits exploration. Such cooperation can bring greater flourishing to human and other-than-human beings. However, Indigenous-Christian collaboration and the best methods to begin and maintain it must begin in concrete environments where these communities are interacting rather than abstractions that flatten the complexity of Christian and especially Indigenous worldviews and practices. Many Indigenous communities in North America have historically operated and formed identities at the level of villages and/or through clans rather than at the level of nation-states or through universal dogmas.1 Drawing on historical precedent and the contemporary example of Orthodox Christian churches, the Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality has promoted the institution’s operation as “Church of Churches” rooted in and reflective of their distinct local contexts.2 Attention to the particular historical, environmental, and ritual circumstances of neighboring or intermingled Indigenous and Christian communities will offer those communities reliable paths for dialogue and cooperation, who in turn can offer principles distilled from their distinct situation as information or inspiration to broader Indigenous-Christian movements toward decolonization.

This essay is indebted to works within Native American and Indigenous Studies, religious studies, and Catholic theology for its framework, but it starts with the history and contemporary lives of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Norbertines, and their affiliated institutions in the Green Bay area. Photographs, letters, news articles, and self-produced histories from the archives of the Oneida Nation, St. Norbert Abbey, and the Diocese of Green Bay provide a wealth of information on how these groups have understood themselves and each other, what they have stressed as their beliefs and values, and how they have expressed these intangible elements through time. Compiled interviews of Oneida citizens and a collection of essays on the longstanding relationship between the Oneida Nation and the Episcopalian Church will also serve as valuable sources. Both the Oneida Nation and the Norbertines offer plenty of information on themselves through their online presences, so web pages on each group’s values and practices will ground and guide the paper. Scholarship on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and on Norbertine spirituality will add language and details not explicitly covered by each group’s own publications. Other sources outside the Oneida-Norbertine ambit include Mark Freeland’s and Philip Arnold’s works on Indigenous and Euro-Western worldviews, Leann Simpson’s development of Nishnaabeg internationalism, and the Catholic Church’s 2019 Synod on the Amazon and 2023-2024 Synod on Synodality.3

Systematic inquiry and theory can powerfully summarize and disseminate decolonization, but the process and vocabulary of decolonization itself are sustained and vitalized by the diverse people on the grassroots who receive, implement, re-vision, and revise the process through their concrete, localized experiences, not abstractions.4 Indigenous and Christian communities’ and individuals’ path toward freedom from colonial logics and harms is best trod through tense, honest, and creative dialogue and collaboration attentive to their shared environments. In its reflection on the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the Norbertines of St. Norbert Abbey, this paper offers a model for such a shared journey begun in, guided by, and fruitful for the particular and the local. 

Endnotes

1. Mark D. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language and the Logics of Decolonization, American Indian Studies Series (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021), 41.

2. Pope Francis, XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, “For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission” (Holy See, October 26, 2024), https://www.synod.va/content/dam/synod/news/2024-10-26_final-document/ENG---Documento-finale.pdf, Paragraphs 17, 38. 

3. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi; Philip P. Arnold, The Urgency of Indigenous Values, Haudenosaunee and Indigenous Worlds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2023); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 56-58; Synod on the Amazon, “The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for Integral Ecology,” Vatican, June 2019. secretariat.synod.va/content/sinodoamazonico/en/documents/pan-amazon-synod--the-working-document-for-the-synod-of-bishops.html. 

4. Pope Francis, XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, “For a Synodal Church,” Paragraph 142.