Alaska: Alaska Native Ministry, Emerging Issues

Summary

Outreach ministries to sustain social, cultural and spiritual values of Native people.

Description

BACKGROUND:

Alaska has five major groupings of indigenous peoples with further sub-language and "corporate" (from the Alaska Native Land Claims Act) groupings spread all over the state geographically. The annual meeting of the Alaska Missionary Conference (AMC) in June of 1997 adopted a petition supporting Alaska Native Sovereignty. The AMC has 27 churches and 31 ministries spread through the state, most of which are on the road system. There are native people within all of the communities where the AMC is working.

HISTORY:

The AMC has had a continuously functioning Native Ministries Committee for over 17 years. The Native Ministry Committee has in the past provided for an urban ministry of presence in Anchorage, helped to facilitate the AMC outreach to Anvik and Grayling, supported the ministries in Nome, advocated for the people of the Chickaloon Village in a hatchery project partially funded by the church. The committee has been made-up of both native and non-native people, working together in common understanding.


MISSION:

In Native Ministry the needs are often immediate and emergent, so it is a necessity that to help and to be effective, the committee has to have some flexible resources that can be used to facilitate program and response to issues that arise. Within the structure of the AMC, planning and resourcing is a focused, future event that leaves little resource with which to make immediate responses. The goals of the project are to have resources to bring together people when there is need to work through an issue or to respond to injustice with a matter of presence, to be able to investigate and respond to requests for programing that would enhance our support of native peoples and their spiritual journey pershaps to recommend further expansion of formal native based ministry of a permanent nature.

EXPECTATIONS:

If we are granted continuance of our Advance status, we could over time, build the resources to more adequately respond to emergent needs and issues which face the native communities around the state. With resources we could visit places where requests have been received from the word-of-mouth recommendations from our Anvik/Grayling monthly fly-in ministry presence. We could respond with help for families who choose civil disobedience in affirming their subsistence and sovereign rights against the state and are arrested trying to place the issues into the court system to be resolved.

PROMOTION:

Current promotion is lacking. However, the committee has responded to donors with a letter and photo of work in progress in the Anvik/Grayling ministry.