A Reflection on Practice, Witness, Resistance, and the Enduring Hope that We Are Still Here
The life of Enmegahbowh speaks across generations because it is not merely the story of one remarkable Indigenous priest. It is a story about what it means to stand before one’s people with courage, humility, and faithfulness in times of profound upheaval. It is a story about leadership rooted in relationship rather than power. It is a story about practice, witness, and resistance. And it is ultimately a story that echoes in the enduring declaration of Indigenous peoples across this continent: We are still here.
Born among the Anishinaabe and later becoming the first Indigenous priest in The Episcopal Church, Enmegahbowh lived during a period when Indigenous communities faced extraordinary pressures. Treaties were broken. Lands were taken. Traditional lifeways were disrupted. Federal policies sought assimilation and control. Colonial institutions often assumed that Indigenous peoples and cultures would inevitably disappear.
Yet Enmegahbowh refused to accept that narrative.
He stood before his people—not above them, not apart from them, but among them. He carried their stories, their grief, their hopes, and their resilience. He navigated relationships with church leaders, government officials, and tribal communities, always seeking the wellbeing of his people. His ministry reminds us that authentic leadership begins not with authority but with belonging.
His life can be understood through three interconnected movements: practice, witness, and resistance.
As we heard so clearly from Bishop Loya, Practice comes first.
Before there can be public witness, there must be a way of life. Before there can be resistance, there must be a community rooted in something deeper than opposition. Enmegahbowh’s ministry emerged from practices of prayer, relationship, service, and faithfulness. He lived among the people he served. He shared their struggles. He knew that spirituality was not an escape from the realities of life but a way of inhabiting those realities with courage and hope.
For Indigenous peoples, practice has often been inseparable from survival. The preservation of language, ceremony, kinship, memory, and relationship to the land has required generations of commitment. Every song remembered, every story retold, every prayer offered, every child taught becomes an act of continuity. Cultural survival itself becomes sacred practice.
Practice forms character. It teaches communities who they are when the storms come.
From practice emerges witness.
Witness is the public expression of what a community knows to be true. Enmegahbowh bore witness to the dignity of Indigenous peoples at a time when that dignity was routinely denied. He bore witness to the possibility of remaining fully Anishinaabe while fully embracing Christian faith. He bore witness to a Gospel larger than empire and a God whose love could never be confined by race, nation, or culture.
Witness is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is found in simple persistence. Sometimes it appears in the quiet refusal to disappear.
Generation after generation, Indigenous communities throughout Minnesota and across North America have continued to gather, remember, pray, teach, and care for one another despite every prediction that they would vanish. Their very existence becomes testimony.
And where there is witness, there is resistance.
Resistance is often misunderstood as confrontation alone. Yet resistance frequently begins with refusing to surrender one’s humanity. It begins with preserving dignity in the face of forces that seek to diminish it.
For Enmegahbowh, resistance was rooted not in bitterness but in love. It was grounded in faithfulness to his people and commitment to their future. It was the determination to remain present. It was the courage to advocate, negotiate, protect, and preserve life amid systems that threatened it.
Resistance is not simply saying no.
It is saying yes—to memory, to dignity, to community, to hope, and to future generations.
One of the reasons Enmegahbowh’s witness remains so important today is that the forces of displacement that shaped his world have not disappeared. They have merely changed form. Across the globe, millions of people are being uprooted by war, climate disruption, environmental degradation, extractive industries, white Christian nationalism, political instability, and economic systems that place profit above human wellbeing.
The experience of displacement that Indigenous peoples know so deeply continues to shape our world.
This is why the vision of Migration with Dignity resonates so profoundly. Rather than treating migrants as problems to be solved or threats to be feared, it insists that every person bears the image of God and deserves to move, seek safety, and build a future without surrendering their humanity. It calls communities toward accompaniment rather than exclusion, solidarity rather than suspicion, and beloved community rather than borders of fear.
Migration With Dignity invites us to recognize that migration is not a failure of humanity. It is often a response to humanity’s failures. People move because homes become unsafe. People move because systems become unjust. People move because survival requires movement.
The biblical story understands this reality well as Lisa noted this past Sunday.
Abraham leaves home without knowing where he is going. Israel wanders through the wilderness. Ruth crosses borders seeking survival. The Holy Family flees violence as refugees. At Pentecost, scattered peoples hear good news in their own languages.
Again and again, God works through displaced people, wandering people, and searching people.
Migration is not a footnote in Scripture. It is one of its central themes.
For Christians, this commitment is grounded in the life of Jesus. Again and again, Jesus is found among those pushed to the margins by the powers of his day. He stands with the poor, the occupied, the sick, the stranger, and the forgotten. He is born among a people living under imperial occupation. His family becomes refugees fleeing violence. His ministry unfolds among those burdened by political oppression and economic exploitation.
The Gospel reveals a God who consistently moves toward those displaced by the machinery of empire.
If we wish to find Jesus today, we should not be surprised to discover him standing beside those whose lands have been taken, whose homes have been lost, whose labor has been exploited, or whose futures have been threatened by the relentless demands of wealth and power. To follow Jesus is not simply to feel compassion for those on the fringes. It is to stand where he stands—in solidarity with those displaced by the forces of economic empire and in faithful resistance to every system that denies human dignity.
This brings us back to the words of Indigenous elder and Episcopal leader Bishop Steven Charleston:
“We are still here.”
These words carry the weight of centuries.
They are not merely a statement of survival. They are a declaration of presence.
We are still here despite removal.
We are still here despite boarding schools.
We are still here despite broken treaties.
We are still here despite every unimaginable effort to erase language, culture, memory, and identity.
The phrase speaks not only to Indigenous peoples but to all communities who have endured displacement, exclusion, and oppression. Yet it carries a particular power when spoken by those whom history repeatedly declared would disappear.
Enmegahbowh’s life belongs within that declaration.
His witness reminds the Church that reconciliation begins with truth. His ministry reminds us that discipleship requires solidarity with those pushed to the margins. His example calls us beyond remembrance toward responsibility.
The question is not simply what Enmegahbowh did in his own time. The question is what it means for us to stand before our people today.
What practices sustain us?
What truths and false truths are we called to witness?
What forms of resistance are required in the face of injustice?
The legacy of Enmegahbowh suggests that the answer begins where it always has: with relationship, courage, faithfulness, and hope. Standing before his people, he helped ensure that their story would continue.
We are still here.
