'This is something we owe.' Wisconsin church pays 'voluntary tax' to Indigenous nations during gathering at Oneida Nation

The history of Indigenous peoples in Wisconsin is deep and abundant, yet it’s a history that has long gone glossed over without proper attention or, in many cases, unacknowledged completely.

St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Madison is looking to push against narratives of erasure by giving back through adding a new voluntary land tax into their budget. The church presented a check for $4,000 to Wisconsin Indigenous leaders meeting at the Oneida Nation last month.

“We started researching to understand how the land that the church stands on came to be the church's land. We had a real conviction from early on in the conversation that we didn't feel comfortable just having a spoken land acknowledgment or printed land acknowledgment,” said the Rev. Miranda Hassett, rector of St. Dunstan’s. “We felt like that needed to be accompanied by some restorative actions. Taking some actions to kind of make amends, and move toward restoring wholeness and being better allies, even in small ways.”

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After learning more about the history of the Ho-Chunk people around the Madison area and the ways in which they were dislocated or forcibly removed, Hassett brought the idea to her parish’s Land Acknowledgment Task Force.

“Our understanding is that the land where the church actually stands was historically Ho-Chunk land. We're pretty close to a historic Ho-Chunk village, in a part of the south western corner of Lake Mendota,” she said. “That was part of the territory that was ceded in the 1832 Treaty that dislocated and removed the Ho-Chunk, so our initial thought was to make a gift to the Ho-Chunk tribe.”

Hassett’s next call was to the Rev. Kerri Parker, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches (WCC). As an organization with 75 years of history that connects 21 different Christian traditions across the state, the WCC is no stranger to facilitating solutions to modern social issues.

Beyond working with social issues such as COVID safety, racial justice, and refugee aid, the WCC is also committed to acknowledgment and restorative justice when it comes to Indigenous histories and current issues facing Indigenous communities.

“Nothing starts and nothing works well without person-to-person relationships,” Parker said. “You can say you want to give money, but you're not really doing the work unless you have that meaning level between people. It's just a transaction, it's just more capitalism. You're not doing the transformative work of trying to change hearts and minds. It’s about understanding why this money is changing hands, and how it all came to be.”

The voluntary land tax paid by St. Dunstan’s is something that Parker reflected on as the exact type of reaction that can be created through putting in the work to educate and act when considering the history of Indigenous peoples.

“You get a creative, committed pastor such as Miranda (Hassett),” Parker said. “She goes back to her church to do the work together, and they find out the history of the land. What's the history of the people who have been on this land? This isn't just ours, this has a history. We owe something by being here, and we should do something about this.”

Parker provided another bridge when she connected Hassett to Bill Quackenbush, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation. On Quackenbush’s advice, the group decided to pay the voluntary tax to the Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee, which serves a number of Indigenous tribes and peoples in Wisconsin.

“That seemed like the appropriate entity,” Hassett said. “I think Bill (Quackenbush) was thinking, if this church does it, maybe other entities will follow suit. Rather than parse it out tribe by tribe and try to figure out exactly whose territory everybody's sitting on, it makes sense for this organization that represents all the Wisconsin tribes to have that role here. Then they’ll take it from there and figure out what that looks like. I think that has been the first step. They haven't received a donation like this before, so this is new for them as well as for us.”

'We all have a creator'

Hassett presented the $4,000 to Quackenbush at the Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee’s Aug. 16 meeting at the Radisson Hotel on the Oneida Reservation.

At the meeting, Quackenbush said he had worked with pastors in the recent past in crafting the wording of land acknowledgments and said this donation was another step in the right direction. Rather than accepting the donation on behalf of the Ho-Chunk Nation, he said he wanted it to go to a statewide organization representing all tribes in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriation Committee includes tribal historic preservation officers from other tribes in the state, and their work includes efforts to repatriate artifacts to Indigenous nations from individuals and state museums and preserving historic sites, such as effigy mounds.

“We all come from the same source,” Quackenbush said. “We all have a creator. All of this (land acknowledgments and donations) is symbolic of a healing process, but also a step forward. … The tribes can’t do it alone. We need state agencies and other organizations. What drives everything is the almighty dollar.”

The check was presented in a purple envelope, which Parker said is the color of repentance.

“We acknowledge that our ability to worship on Ho-Chunk land came at a great cost to those people,” Hassett said at the meeting.

Importantly, the aspect of this $4,000 voluntary land tax payment that Hassett and her congregation wanted to be most worked on is how it could be more than just a one-time gift or single act of reparation. The decision to structure it as a voluntary land tax and part of the church’s annual budget was a way for St. Dunstan’s to truly integrate a philosophy of accountability.

“We intentionally put it with our buildings and land expenses, with the other expenses related to owning our property,” Hassett said. “This isn't an outreach donation, because we also have outreach stuff in our budget. We have money we give away to organizations that are doing good in the community. This is different from that. This isn't from our charity, or generosity. This is something we owe. That was important to me.”

Isaac Trussoni is a reporter at Madison365. Frank Vaisvilas covers Wisconsin's Indigenous nations at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. This story was as part of a collaboration called the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab. Learn more about the effort to enhance local journalism: ggbcf.org/community-initiatives/new-news-lab/.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Madison church paid voluntary tax to Indigenous nations last month