My Soul in the Sacred Landscape of Creation

A Conversation between Brian Palecek and Reverend John Floberg

BRIAN PALECEK: Can you give us the basic story of coming to North Dakota.

REVEREND JOHN FLOBERG: I was living in Fargo-Moorhead, but my work in youth ministry would bring me out to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, North Dakota, places I had not grown up in. It involved getting to know people in Cannonball, in Fort Yates.

I grew up in Minnesota, in a town called Hawley. Interestingly enough, when they published a history of Hawley, in its centennial year of 1972, it has the picture of General Custer coming through with his troops. When I was eighteen, I left home, I joined the Coast Guard, so I was out in western New York for the next four years serving on Lake Ontario. Water was always a big part of my life growing up in Minnesota in the lakes, or on Lake Ontario and Niagara River.

BP: When you arrived here to the western part of North Dakota, how did you see this place? The geography of it, the history of it, the culture of it?

JF: Most people who come out here and are visiting us for a while, their first comment is about how beautiful it is. How expansive the horizon line is, and how beautiful the prairie grasses are, but I realized that they were coming for a visit. I’m a Minnesota guy coming to change his life, and I look at the grass and wonder, Where are the trees? I look at the vast expanse of prairie and wonder, Where are the lakes?

I noticed the first three falls I was here, when I first came here in ’91, that I am missing the changing colors of the trees, and I realized that by the third year, that the trees go from green to yellow to dunn. There’s no reds, oranges, no vibrancy. And then I found that in the spring of the year and into June, I was finding color in places I was not expecting. The little cactuses. They would have pastel colors. Those little cactuses had to replace all of the vibrant colors of hardwood trees. I really missed that.

BP: When you first came here, were you sent here or did you choose to come here?

JF: In the Episcopal Church it’s both. I left Fargo, back in ’88, to go to seminary. My bishop wanted me to go to seminary in Chicago. I went to visit there, and I found out it took forty-five minutes to drive there into the seminary from the highway, and it was constant city blocks one after the other. I came back to meet with him and told him I couldn’t go there, that it was claustrophobic.

I found a seminary in Rochester, New York, that was on a hill. And it looked over this great expanse of land. I could see trees and colors in the fall, so I chose to go to seminary there. But when a person is coming out of seminary, if the bishop has a place that he can place them, that first call really belongs to the bishop. After that, a person can move within three years. And go find their own congregation based on an open call system.

For me, a year before I was to graduate from seminary, the bishop and I were sitting in his car, and he said to me, “Next summer I want you to take the call at Standing Rock.” Because I had been working for the diocese before I went to seminary, I had a good sense of where I was being sent and the people I was being asked to serve. And so, that sense of call that clergy sometimes wrestle with wasn’t much wrestling for me. I accepted that placement, that call, pretty quickly. What was different here was that the bishop wanted me to stay a minimum of five to eight years. That’s a long time for your first call. As it’s turned out, I spent twenty-five years instead.

BP: When you came, where did you live?

JF: I lived right there on the church property for fourteen years. It was only after we elected another bishop, his management of the diocese shifted things. In addition to Standing Rock, I was asked to work with our Native church in Dunseith, Fort Totten, White Shield, and our Sudanese church in Moorhead, Minnesota, and support them in their leadership, in their congregations.

I couldn’t do that from the South Dakota border. Going to Dunseith means that I’d be overnight in a motel. But if I’m living in Bismarck, part of my work for Standing Rock would be right there by going to the hospitals and doing visitations. My work at Standing Rock hasn’t changed in the miles that I drive, whether on or off Standing Rock.

BP: The congregations you serve tend to be minority congregations. How did that impact the way you see yourself here? What does it mean to be part of a sacred landscape?

JF: It actually came about by working with the Sudanese, who were completely out of their landscape. What is it to be a people who have gone through displacement? If you’re still on your land, or if you are refugees on this land, Native people have been displaced— their lifestyle, their culture. And so have the Sudanese. So when I work with the Sudanese population, I’d bring into that conversation some things about how they adapt, and what they do with their culture as they’re adapting.

With the first generation of folks, there’s a strong emphasis about assimilating. There was a strong emphasis on assimilating the people on Standing Rock at around 1900. But then you come two or three generations down the line, and those generations want to regain what was lost in this new place, in this new way. So I encouraged the Sudanese not to lose their language, and not to be so concerned with learning English that the children not learn their parents’ language. Language gets tied too much to identity, and it’s tied to how you describe things, and how you describe and interact with the environment around you.

So when the Lakota people talk about the months, they have a descriptive way. This is the month when the trees crack. This is the way of passing on identity through language that connects you to the area that you’re from.

BP: You raise this idea of someone who is dispossessed or a refugee, or someone who has left home or community, like the Lakota people who are living at home, but are somehow undermined. Is there some theological or scriptural way that you might interpret those experiences?

JF: Some of the readings are uncomfortable. In my first go-around with the Old Testament, there are the Hebrew people who are dispossessing the people who have been living there. How do you make that preach? The answer is to talk about context, but it isn’t to give God or God’s people a pass. Because whether things happen personally or as a people, we all have to wrestle with the goodness of God, the justice of God, and the love of God. We wrestle with these things in the context of our lives. People wonder how it is that they can go through difficult times and at the same time believe in a loving God. And people go through hard and difficult times that are caused by other people and wonder where is the justice of God.

BP: As I get to know you, Father John, you seem to have a real connection to your ethnic or indigenous roots in the Scandinavian world.

JF: Norway exclusively.

BP: As Americans, we think about these identity questions. I refer to myself as a European-American of Bohemian and Czech ancestry. I am an American. I take it seriously. It’s part of my life, and I am part of that world. I am also connected to that European tradition of people who came to America looking for a land of opportunity. I’m deeply rooted in the Czech Republic and Bohemia. Almost all of the people in my community in Kansas spoke Czech; we ate Czech foods, we thought about the Czech world. One of my sons now lives in Prague with his wife and daughter. This is a really important part of my life. Can you describe this Norwegian world, and how that impacts the way you see your life here?

JF: I can only speak for myself. Last year I was on sabbatical, and my family and I traveled to Norway for three weeks. When we got into Norway, and when we got to my family’s farm, when I stood on those stone slab steps, and I looked out over the Numedal Valley, where my great-grandfather stood as a young man, my soul was at home. It was an experience I had anticipated but had never felt. I am a veteran. I’m a citizen of the United States. I grew up knowing that I was Norwegian. What is primary in my identity, is Norwegians who lived in Minnesota.

BP: Bring that “Norwegian-ness” to your Standing Rock experience. These are Indigenous people, and there you are now doing your work as a priest of the Episcopal Church.

JF: I had to figure out, am I here as a pastor, or am I here as a missionary? I scuttled the idea of being a missionary quite early. I saw other clergy come and go. Non-Native people primarily, and they weren’t trying to be the pastor for their community. They were trying to build a congregation for themselves. There’s a fine line here. As an Episcopalian coming in here, as a person rooted in the Anglican tradition, our clergy, our focus, is going to be on the congregation. We see things geographically. All people within that geography are in the parish. People might be Roman Catholic. They might be United Church of Christ. They might be Baptist. They might be Mormon. They might be traditional. But they’re all in the territory of which I am responsible. This is the touchstone with an Indigenous way of thinking, that it’s territory to which you relate, then it’s people within that territory who are your closest relatives, and you have responsibility for their welfare. You have a responsibility to know what their hopes and their dreams are and to relate to them, whether they are members of your congregation or not. This isn’t saying that I’m trying to take over the role of another tradition and steal their members. It’s that the whole of the Standing Rock Nation is what I’m concerned about, and our members within it.

BP: There is the biblical phrase that one should go out into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. So there’s the sense that you’re supposed to go out and go places, at the same time in this pastoral world you’re here in this Missouri River Valley region. And there is a geography to it that you are caring for, and it’s a theological and spiritual way of interpreting that world.

JF: It’s also a matter of assisting the Christian Church that is particular there. To engage the world with the faith that they have been developing. That this sense of catholicity, that the Christian faith has brought here, but then the Christian faith has become incarnate here. That what it means to be a Christian on Standing Rock, means to go back out again, and engage the whole of the Church, and the whole of the world that still needs to hear the Gospel. But it should look and feel that it has integrity where it is.

I use the stave churches as an example. The stave church building was constructed primarily in Norway, but some other places as well. It is a building that when you see its outward form, you can see that it was inspired by the landscape around it, the trees. And so it has cascading roof lines. Some of them have changed over the years as they’ve had to remodel, but there’s this cascading roof line effect that looks like the pine trees.

As the Roman Catholic Church spread north, it came into contention with Celtic Christians. The Roman Christians wanted Scandinavians to build with stone. The Norwegian Christians know wood, and have built ships that have gone lots of places, and so used that technology to build their churches. So they created buildings that were at home with the people.

If you go into a stave church, any church in Norway, and you go in blindfolded, and you have no idea in the world where you are, when that blindfold is taken off, you will see that you’re in Norway, and you will see that you’re in a Christian building. Until recently, Native Americans have not looked like they belonged in the place that they are. The building, the design, was not from among the people, and not of the land. When people walk into St. James in Cannonball, and they are Native, there’s a sense that they’ve come home. Our ceiling is like a tipi, and it even has a canvas wrapped around it on the inside and has twelve timbers like the twelve lodge poles.

The church in Norway is a church of the landscape and of the people. We’re starting to become that here. When Dakota Goodhouse made a winter count of the Gospel of Luke, and gave it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church [in Fort Yates, ND], to my knowledge, it’s the first time that a Gospel has been translated into Lakota in a Lakota way. Not with words, but with pictographs. And the person who knows the story can point to the pictograph and tell the story in a way that is consistent with an oral tradition.

BP: Let’s talk about November 3, 2016. Can you describe what happened that day, and could you tell about the discussion of the Doctrine of Discovery?

JF: November the 3rd is connected to October the 27th, and September the 3rd. October 27th and September 3rd were two violent days in this conflict [the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers confluence]. On October 27th, law enforcement came in and upended the 1851 Camp that was put onto the Cannonball Ranch. September the 3rd was the day when dogs came in and attacked people while they were trying to protect land that a noted historian of Standing Rock had identified grave sites on and were being bulldozed. We had witnessed an escalation in their tactics in security and escalation of tactics with law enforcement. And we [the clergy] needed to disrupt that. We needed to de-escalate the tension and put the focus and energy back into being prayerful, peaceful, and nonviolent, and to follow the direction of the tribal council and its chairman, and elders, to be lawful.

I met with Chairman Archambault II; he said that he should have been the only one to be arrested. The count is over seven hundred. So I put out a call for clergy. I was hoping for a hundred. Anything less than a hundred wouldn’t bring much attention about this. It wouldn’t be a disruptor. A hundred meant that I could take of logistics, but in a short time, we hit 524. We claim that number, because that’s the number of years since the Doctrine of Discovery was written.

BP: Explain the Doctrine of Discovery.

JF: A year after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World, the Pope wrote the Doctrine of Discovery giving permission to the Christian states of Europe to discover undiscovered lands, and to dispossess their people if they were found to not be Christian. If they were found to not be Christian, to enslave them. The next step was to convert them. It’s not just simply a church’s doctrine; the United States Supreme Court has used this to justify taking of land. The whole of the western expansion of the United States is based on the Doctrine of Discovery, and it became Manifest Destiny.

BP: What happened then on November 3rd?

JF: We had twenty-five faith traditions that came, making up that 524 people. Of the twenty-five faith traditions, eight of them are Christian. These eight traditions, in their churchwide gathering body, voted to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery on their own. The ELCA [Evangelical Lutheran Church in America], the United Methodist, the United Church of Christ, and others were there. The Episcopal Church too, the Episcopal Church was the first of these denominations to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009.

I was at that convention. People have been asking, “What’s next with this repudiation? What does this mean?” I called forward those denominations to have a representative who would read the World Council of Church’s repudiation. Because most of us then would belong in the World Council of Churches. That would be an umbrella all of us could stand under and read this together. I wouldn’t be forcing the Methodists to read the Episcopal version of this. It would be one that we’d all come to together.

We gathered at the sacred fire at the camp in order to read that to the Indigenous people in that camp, of which there were over 350 flags flying. Eight different tribal groups, elders listened to the reading. After the reading, we handed them a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery as it is written in Latin. We said, “You may do with this as you wish.” And their wish was to burn it.

Someone called out, “Now are you going to give us back our land?”

In this case, we don’t have the authority to return land. We don’t have the authority to undo what’s been done. But we have the responsibility to work for justice going forward and to assist Native people with the healing of their nations as they see fit.

BP: How would you describe your best vision for the future? For the sacred landscape, and the people that are part of it?

JF: On this day, the best word for vision to describe is respect. To respect the people of the land who are Indigenous. To speak for themselves, to not only say that you’ve listened, but the way in which the future unfolds, their approval is given in order for it to unfold that way. That it’s not simply consultation. It’s more than going to a council chamber and hearing them say “no,” and that is sufficient for having done our duty.

The Indigenous have regained their voice about the care of creation. It was Pocahontas who went to London and couldn’t fathom how people could live in such filth. I grew up with a commercial of a sad-eyed Native man who canoed down a pristine river then into polluted waters, and a tear came into his eye. The image of a sad Native person is not the image of this day. Their image is one of resilience exercising their responsibility—not power—to the land and the water, and to the seven generations, something that the dominant culture doesn’t understand.

I hear the argument that Native people should “get over the wrongs of the past.” I ask them if they remember who their great-grandfather is. Most people know who their great-grandfather is. That’s as far into the past as we’re going to talk about injustice. Is your understanding of human life and responsibility so short that it only matters what we’re doing right now? When a Native person is talking about seven generations, they may be talking about the past, the future, or now in the middle. They are linking their great-grandparents to their great-grandchildren, and they stand in a place of responsibility in this place to link them.

On December 4, 2016, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe says that the way ahead is through forgiveness and reconciliation. That maybe we don’t have answers that are readily satisfactory to our souls about why the things are the way they are, but the future can be different from the way that things have been in the past. That’s reconciliation, but it’s through forgiveness. l

BRIAN PALECEK was born and raised in a Czech community in Kansas and came to North Dakota in 1967. He has taught English and humanities at United Tribes Technical College since 1987. Palecek loves going out to the community and doing programs for the curious, general public.

REVEREND JOHN FLOBERG is supervising Episcopal priest on the Standing Rock Reservation.