WMJM member Jan Nelson reflects on the Greater Northwest Area’s ongoing truth telling project, which examines harms done to Indigenous peoples by the United Methodist Church and its predecessor denominations.
By Jan Nelson
The first of four priorities in the Western Jurisdiction Plan for Indigenous Ministries, adopted by the jurisdictional conference in 2024, is “telling the truth, acknowledging harms that have been done, and so helping liberate us all…”. The three conferences of the Greater Northwest Area (Alaska, Oregon-Idaho, and Pacific Northwest) are working on a project to tell the truth about harms done by the United Methodist Church and its predecessor denominations.
An invitation was issued to anyone who wanted to participate. Those who volunteered for the project began meeting in November 2024, led by Rev. Allen Buck and Sarah Augustine of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. The group has continued to meet by Zoom on a Saturday morning most months since then. After an orientation to the task, the group suggested possible topics for research. Based on these suggestions and the interests of participants, several small groups were formed that meet between the large group sessions.
I joined a group dedicated to telling an accurate story of Rev. Jason Lee and the early Methodist missionaries in Oregon. The church’s story of Jason Lee is that he came to convert the Indigenous people and establish the church in this “unsettled” land. Two churches and numerous other places in the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference have been named for him as the founder of Methodism in the Pacific Northwest. The truth, especially from an Indigenous perspective, is quite different, as we learned from primary sources and Indigenous authors.
Lee and his team established a mission on land that is now Salem, Oregon, but was previously a gathering place for the Kalapuya and other tribal groups. The missionaries built a school and did their best to recruit Indigenous children in order to teach them to be “civilized.” The mission was largely a failure by the criteria of conversion and teaching white American culture, but it was very successful at encouraging white settlement of the Willamette Valley. The missionaries claimed, with no agreement by the tribes, all of the land that is now downtown Salem, and later-arriving settlers established claims on most of the best farmland in the valley. The mission school failed to attract enough Indigenous students and was eventually sold to a group of white settlers. The school building was on land that eventually became Willamette University. Many of the white settlers became prosperous farming and/or selling land they had paid nothing to “own.” Some of the churches in our conference are built on this “free” land. The original inhabitants were increasingly restricted from their traditional lands and the ways of life that depended on those lands. This inevitably led to incidents of violence, in which the settlers always prevailed, and eventually to the removal of the Indigenous people to reservations that were often far away from their traditional homelands.
Our group compiled a report that was shared at the 2025 annual conference session, which took place in Salem. We were given an hour in the plenary session to present it, and it was a serious and holy time. Since that time, several other small groups have presented their findings in one or more of the conferences in the Greater Northwest Area. Other groups are still working on their initial reports. There are areas of relevant research that have not been started yet, waiting for a group to take them up. Meanwhile, conversation is beginning to shift to the question of “so what?” Some possible actions of repair have surfaced in our discussions, but we understand that most of this work is not ours alone but must be guided by our Indigenous siblings. The “so what?” conversations are ongoing. This work is important but not easily completed.
The work of our Jason Lee work group became personal for us. It turned out that everyone who stayed with the task through our report has deep family roots in the Willamette Valley. Many of our ancestors took land claims with no obligation to pay for them. One of our group members lives on the land that has come down through several generations from the original land claim. We were all forced to contemplate the unearned advantages that have come down to us and what responsibility we have to respond to that knowledge.
There is more information about the GNW truth telling project on the area website: https://greaternw.org/circle/. A print version of the Jason Lee Truth Telling Report is on that site: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JJQty6IgMC7FvSAmqJsXn39JqoPFe3NX/view
