By Amy Lloyd
For years, I’ve heard complaints about yet ‘another DEI’ training. White girl though I am, such complaints hit my heart like daggers.
DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, refers to classes, trainings or workshops designed to help all of us to gain awareness of various identities and the implications of being one vs another identity within specific contexts. For example, white cisgender males will have a very different experience as an American than a white trans male or an African American woman and so on.
I was taken off-guard one day with a colleague who is African American, made that complaint. She explained that she’d never been to a DEI training that actually accomplished anything. They barely scratch the surface and often feel like a box for a company to check.
Years later, when I received an email from Pastor Laura inviting me to an anti-racism training, others’ dubiousness had rubbed off on me. By now, I’ve been involved in a handful of DEI and anti-racism trainings and workshops and yep, I’m always left wanting. I leave feeling like that white person who gets to pat themselves on the back because they sat through a 2-hour meeting in which they learned nothing and nothing in their life will ever change, least of all their preciously held limiting beliefs.
I reminded myself that this is Pastor Laura. She has never struck me as a waste everyone’s time, going through the motions, box checker.
Reviewing the material I’d missed in the first meeting that she shared with me, I knew I had to be a part of this. First, it’s not a 2-hour workshop but a 6-month commitment. Second, it’s not even just Pilgrim, but many churches throughout Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. This is what I’ve been naively expecting all along.
Where are we now?
The first assignment took me back to childhood. Growing up in the south, I’d wander around my farm, the surrounding fields of a commercial nursery, and the woods, imagining who lived there during times of slavery, during early colonialism, when the first white Europeans arrived in this ‘uninhabited’ land. What non-human animals? What plants? How old are these trees? Were they there then? It wasn’t lost to me that the men working the fields of the commercial nursey were all Filipino. So many centuries and too little change.
Our first assignment invited us to develop a kinship with the land. Walk the land. Meet the inhabitants.
[“We Shall Remain” video shared by Jillene Joseph – check out this video which was part of our first lesson]
Then to revisit with a zoomed-out focus. Sit with what we know about the land and also what we don’t know. Who lived here before colonizers? Are there other painful, hard to look at truths that long to be seen?
I arrived at Pilgrim on afternoon to join up with Pastor Laura, Danielle Rogers and Sarah Hollier to walk the land here at the church. Remember that crazy snowstorm in late March? We thought it’d be a great idea to tromp through the snow, post-holing thigh deep. I mean, that’s how things are done in Montana. How else would we come out to meet the land?
It was a lovely time of climbing out of deep snow with every step, of saying hi to the rocks and the lichen growing on them. To stand under the pine, appreciating its shelter. To make eye contact with the deer.
Then back inside to share our experiences, the acknowledgements we made, the questions that came up. This is what healing looks like.
Currently, we are diving into building a land genealogy of the land Pilgrim sits on and maybe to some extent, the larger Bozeman and Gallatin Valley area.
Here’s Where You Come In
I’m writing this to catch you up on what we’ve been up to because it’s pretty cool!
And also, to ask… what questions do you have about this land? What experiences, stories or people do you know that might be relevant that you could share?
Some of the questions we’ll be exploring are…
What pieces of the land story are hard to find? Why is that? Who benefits from them staying hidden?
What resistance or tension do we notice in ourselves as we learn hard truths?
How are we honoring the ‘both/and’ about the people we learn about?
What opportunities might we discover or create as a result of this?
Reach out to me with the experiences and stories you know that would support this project.
And let me know if you’d be interested in joining us on any local field trips we might plan as we’re conducting our research.
What’s Next?
Remember, this isn’t a 2-hour workshop. We’re in this for the long haul.
While the official nature of the Reckoning with Racism project concludes in June, we are just getting started.
The land genealogy alone will be ongoing. And then there are those inherent yet still unknown opportunities that we all get to flesh out.
This is the real deal. This is what it looks like to be doing God’s work. This is why I am proud to call Pilgrim, home.