BY ELISHA CHI
“ God of hosts, are you not Creator of all that is good? Do you not dwell here too, on Coast Salish territory, where we so often acknowledge the land with words alone yet meet Indigenous death with silence? Where families are born on the frontline, births bruised by colonial blow, where we say ‘unceded’ but not ‘occupied’ for that would make us the occupiers: 1 How do we partake in our portion of rage?”
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Benjamin Hertwig from Benjamin Hertwig and Céline Chuang, “Lament on Coast Salish Land,” in Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization, ed. Steve Heinrichs (New York: Maryknoll, 2018), 133–138, 20. S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 • N O. 1 4 2
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hen I was growing up, my dad (a conservative Irish/ British descendent Catholic) gifted me a story about the nature of relationship and accountability. It went like this: Some kids were playing baseball one day, when one of them batted the ball in the wrong direction, careening it into a neighbor’s window. My dad explained that while it was important for the kids to ’fess up and apologize for the broken window, the window also needed to be fixed. Was this a story from his own childhood the Haller Lake neighborhood on stolen Duwamish lands in Seattle? I don’t remember. I do know he was primarily explaining the need for penance in the Catholic sacrament of confession. But his story gifted me with a crucial understanding of accountability that transcends the individuality of Catholic confession. Apologies are good, but what is necessary when something is broken is to repair the harm. In a similar, though different vein, many institutions recognize that there are problems with our connections to
Photo © Sheila, Moonducks, Flickr
An Ethics of Accountability