St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin, added a $3,000 "amends" property expense to its budget to be paid to the Wisconsin Inter-Tribal Repatriations Committee.
The church rector, Miranda Hassett said the church building is on land that "used to be someone else's homeland."
"St. Dunstan's is mindful that we gather to worship on Ho-Chunk land, taken unjustly," church leaders said in a statement. "We don't know what it looks like to make peace with that history, but we wonder."
Hassett said the statement needs to be accompanied by "restorative actions" to "make amends" and be "better allies" to the Ho-Chunk people.
The statement also outlines "The History of This Land" on which the church property stands:
The property that was given to St. Dunstan's to become the site for the church was a former farm on the edge of Madison with the original homestead, the red-brick Heim farmhouse, a wing-and-gable structure with a half-round oriel window. It sat at the highest point of the surrounding property west of the old farm road which provided access to Old Sauk Road to the south and University Avenue to the north.
This land first came under the ownership of the U.S. Government after the Blackhawk War, which resulted in the local native peoples being largely exterminated or pushed westwards, after being forced to cede their land in southern Wisconsin.
The denomination's 80th General Convention passed a resolution in July in favor of "the acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands."
The resolution encourages each Episcopal diocese to audit "all Indigenous peoples whose ancestral and territorial homelands its churches and buildings now occupy."
The denomination also resolved to have its Standing Committee on Programs, Budgets, and Finance "allocate an additional amount up to $50,000 per year to fund the implementation of this resolution."
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