living through pain also is a promise ...
... to live beyond and whole
An interview with Carol Gallagher by Martin Brokenleg

Carol Gallagher, formerly a parish priest in the Diocese of Delaware, will become Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia early this month. A member of the Cherokee nation, Gallagher will be the first native woman in the worldwide Anglican Communion to serve as a bishop. In this interview with Witness contributing editor Martin Brokenleg, a Lakota priest and professor of Native American Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., Gallagher reflects on her experience in the church as a native woman – and on the alternative vision she will bring to her new role. Her commitment to work that fosters the honoring of family and community relationships comes, in part, out of deep personal knowledge of family and racial violence.

Martin Brokenleg: Carol, I remember another native person, who is a bishop right now, who at one time asked me, "Should I leave my name in?" for nomination. And I said, "Well, God won’t say, ‘Yes’ if you take your name out and God will say, ‘No’ if he doesn’t want you there." So, how were you nominated?

Carol Gallagher: A colleague of mine, with whom I had served as a deputy to General Convention and on other committees, sent my name in. Southern Virginia is his home diocese, and it’s the home diocese of Delaware’s bishop, Wayne Wright.

I was a little bit hesitant – just the basic, "What, are you, crazy?" But one of the things that Gary said was that they were looking for somebody to be the pastoral bishop for the clergy. Working with clergy issues is one of the things that I had been doing in Delaware – the health and well-being of the clergy is primary to me. The other thing Southern Virginia wanted was someone to encourage small congregations, many of which are poor and the more ethnically diverse parishes in the diocese. I also have a lot of passion around that sort of work. So I said, "Well, okay." Pretty reluctantly. But I thought it was a really nice thing that my friend wanted to nominate me.

I made it through several of the hoops and hurdles and then went on what they were calling a walkabout – which all the rest of the church calls a dog and pony show. I came away saying, "Well, that was really nice that they included me, but it’s never going to happen!"

M.B.: What did you tell people? What did they want to know?

C.G.: Well, most people were concerned about the kinds of programs we’ve developed here in Delaware. Many were concerned about my family, about how they would respond to this and all those kinds of things. Many of them were questions I find that are fairly commonly asked of women clergy. "How do you balance your home life and being a mother?" and all that kind of stuff.

M.B.: Women are expected to do that, but men aren’t!

C.G.: It’s still so new for the church in many senses – particularly around positions of what would be perceived as authority. I guess people were really concerned that I would leave the church for my family or some such thing. When they came here and interviewed me, one of my parishioners was really clear with them. She said, "You know, she DOES put her family first! I mean if one of her children is sick, she’s going to stay with her children. But she would also encourage any of the rest of us to do that for our family, too. That’s just the way she lives her life."

M.B.: Well, the only bishop I know who has resigned his episcopacy because of his family is Steven Charleston, a native person! Is that significant for us – for native people, that is? What’s that gift to the church?

C.G.: Well, I think that as native people we have an integrated awareness of how much we’re grounded in our family – and in our tribe and community – and that we really can’t go forward if there is overwhelming pain and distress. The family or tribe has to find a way to heal together. So would I walk away from being a bishop if I had to? I wouldn’t think twice about it! You know, my family will always be my priority. That’s a gift that we as native people can bring to the church and to the rest of the world.

M.B.: Well, in Lakota culture women are more important than men and that’s the reason that women are in charge of home and family and children. That stuns my mostly Norwegian Lutheran students! They’re stunned to think that that’s such an important thing, and that that’s why we put the women in charge of it.

C.G.: Right! I was in Oklahoma – in Tahlequah – the weekend before Christmas.

M.B.: Cherokee center-of-the-universe!

C.G.: Really! Lois Neal, who just recently retired from the Methodist Church, and Chad Smith, the principal chief, were talking about matrilineal cultures and he said, "I may be principal chief, but we all know who’s in charge!" So there’s an importance to the role that the rest of the world would call "women’s work." Those things have a different honor than in the mainstream culture. Lakotas and Cherokees would not say that the roles are the same, but there is that commonality of the importance of that role.

M.B.: Well, in our mythology, our revealer, our savior, our messiah is the White Buffalo Calf Woman! What do you imagine that kind of a psyche about women is going to bring into the church as a whole? To the House of Bishops, I mean. You’re going to be a revelation to the House of Bishops!

C.G.: Well, maybe I’ll have the opportunity to ask why things are done a certain way, or point out assumptions that are being made – about roles and who people are and those kinds of things – where other people might not even see that assumptions are being made.

I also hope I can bring into the House of Bishops the sense of really honoring families. I mean honoring whatever that means where people are, honoring how we’re related so intimately. I’m hoping that that will be helpful to the process of real dialogue.

M.B.: You speak of going home to Tahlequah. What is this Cherokee business in your life and your identity?

C.G.: There was a time in my life when I wanted it to just be a little place of visitation as opposed to going "home," but it’s become sort of the major stream, the major artery of my life. I got a call from Willa Mankiller after Thanksgiving and she said, "We’re having a service and we want you to come and speak. We want to do it before Christmas because I really think the Cherokee people need it before Christmas." And folks said to me, "Well, you’re crazy. You’ve got all that work to do at the parish." And I said, "You don’t say no to Willa Mankiller!"

M.B.: She was principal chief of the Cherokee nation for how long?

C.G.: Nine years, I think. So I went and spoke and they honored me afterward. My mother and I went out together. The service was incredibly powerful. The Cherokee Nation Children’s Choir sang and several pastors spoke about healing and reconciliation and hope. One of the things I spoke about was how my mother had to leave Oklahoma when she was 11 years old, because of family violence and alcoholism. She was put on a bus with her name pinned to her dress at 11! In many senses it saved her life, but it also was in some senses a place of no return for her. Her mother and brothers and sisters joined her within a short period of time. But her childhood then became a difficult historical period that she just didn’t look back on at all, because it was too painful. At the service in Tahlequah, when my mother heard the children singing Christmas carols in Cherokee, she realized she knew every word. She said, "You know, somebody sang these to me when I was a tiny child. And I was able to sing along."

So for me, being a Cherokee is being able to more than just survive, but understand that living through pain also is a promise to live beyond and whole. We’re always seeking that in our traditions.

M.B.: Non-native people in the church often ask, if not straight out, somehow implicitly, "Can you be Christian and be native?" My answer is that for me all of my spiritual and cultural tradition is my Old Testament. God would never have lied to my grandfather, a medicine man born in 1854 – the first Brokenleg. And so, all the imagery, all the hopes that God put in the heart of my grandfather were not lies. They were what my grandfather understood to be the nature of God.

And so, in my generation, I would say that if God was powerful then, God can be powerful now. The ceremonies and tradition of my own people are the vehicle God has given to us – like God gave Leviticus to the people of Israel to codify their worship. But we have our own customs and as long as I’m grounded based on that tradition – on my own Lakota tradition – I can understand what Jesus means when he says I have to be a "good relative" to the people who are mine, because the most common phrase in Lakota worship is, "You are all my relatives." And it doesn’t just mean human relatives. It means plants, animals, spirit beings, everything. Everything is my relative.

I suppose for the Cherokee, it’s probably much the same?

C.G.: It is. And it is important to note that there was a point in history when this question was not without economic or survival value. Federal government policy was about extermination and removal. Lots of kids that went to boarding school had to be Christians. If you practiced your tradition, you weren’t welcome in the church. But there were economic incentives for those children to go to boarding school. It wasn’t like parents had many choices. In the case of my people, they have been Christian for many generations. My great-great grandmother who walked the Trail of Tears in the 1830s was singing hymns, in Cherokee, with a little hymnal in her hand.

There have been a lot of politics between traditionalists and the church, but a lot of it had to do with the way Christianity was imposed upon us. In my generation we’ve been encouraged to incorporate our Old Testament and New Testaments. We’ve learned that we cannot thrive without a grounded identity in who we are, which includes our antiquity and the on-going traditions as well as being Christians. If we turn around and just discard all the stuff that’s in the history or in the tradition, then we discard a huge part of ourselves.

I also don’t think that God told our people lies. Each tribe, I think, interpreted their tradition and their experience of God in their unique way. So many of our stories tell us about our relationship with one another and with the Creator. And how we are to be to one another and why we are the way we are, and those kinds of things. That’s also true of Jewish tradition and its teachings about a way of life so that people remain healthy and faithful.

We take an oath when we are ordained that we believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to our salvation. And I fully believe that, but that’s about salvation as opposed to my personal identity. I’m not separating those two. I don’t discount the Old Testament as it appears in Scripture. I think some of the most powerful stories in the world are contained in the Old Testament. I do think that there are powerful stories that companion with them that are essential for my understanding of myself, but also for our place in the world in North America.

M.B.: Let me push you one notch further. Unless Anglicanism can be completely incorporated into the theological world of Native American people, will it always be foreign to North America?

C.G.: I think so. Integration is the ultimate challenge because Anglicanism will always remain sort of a British thing, foreign, unless we native people are willing to integrate it forward.

M.B.: I’m right in line with you. But I would say that the Old Testament in our published Bibles – and that was a political decision also – is the history of God’s relationship with those people. But it doesn’t mean that God hasn’t talked to my people at the beginning of the world until now.

C.G.: Exactly.

M.B.: I know you’ve been a part of the conversations about justice for native people in the church – that whole Pan Pacific conversation involving native people from Canada, the U.S., Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia.

C.G.: Yes. I guess there’s been an in-breaking of justice, a breaking through. It hasn’t been something that’s been legislated as much as it’s been brought about by people being willing to be vehicles or advocates or stand in the in-between times, because not always has the church been emotionally or politically or in any other way ready to welcome difference. Or welcome the people who have already been in the church.

What happened with my election in Southern Virginia was that God moved for something different and the people understood that. I wouldn’t say my election is about justice as much as it is about people turning toward a way of being that embraces a just understanding of life in the church. And a healthy understanding of life in the church.

I also think that part of what happened in Southern Virginia had to do with the fact that I had been there in 1997, playing a prominent role in organizing a service of remembrance and reconciliation at Jamestown in preparation for the 400th anniversary of the first settlement at Jamestown, which signifies the first missionary thrust of the Anglican Church outside Britain. A new covenant between the church and native people was signed as part of the occasion. We worked hard to include the local native people in that diocese along with other folks from the diocese. And so it was a big cross-section of people who were there. And there were people from all over the country, from Canada and Hawaii and from some far-flung places, too. It was a moment of people recognizing that there were other ways to do ministry in native communities – instead of ministry to native communities, ministry with native communities and raising up leadership from native communities. My commitment to raising up leadership from all communities was made very clear at that event. Finding ways to help people, or at least non-traditional folks, get a place in the church is what I’ve been committed to doing all along.

M.B.: I have a friend who lives in the Diocese of Southern Virginia, who I think would define herself as kind of on the fringe. And she said, "I was certain Carol Gallagher would never be elected, because I liked her!"

C.G.: Well, yeah, that’s what everybody said.

M.B.: So what does that tell you about the grace of God?

C.G.: Complete and pervasive.

M.B.: One of the divisive issues in the Episcopal Church today is same-sex orientation and what to do about all of that. But you and I both come from a native tradition in which homosexual relationships are sanctified. Among us Lakota most of our medicine men are gay men. Most of our medicine women are lesbians. How do you see that aspect of what you bring into the episcopate influencing the rest of the church?

C.G.:When I was getting ready to leave my parish, a gay couple came up to me and said, "One of the things we want to thank you for is never making us feel any different. You accepted us from the moment you got here." One of the ideas that I’ve been brought up with is that difference – whether it is sexual orientation or artistic talent – is a gift as opposed to a threat. That’s where we should be as a church.

In Delaware, the bishop gave approval for same-sex blessings last fall and he caught a lot of flack from outside the diocese for doing so. But very little flak from his own diocese. We had decided to examine the issue as a community long before Wayne Wright was even elected bishop. By the time he had come on board, council had already voted to approve blessings. The community really worked through this together. No voice was left out and there was an ongoing conversation for the past six or seven years. The opinion of the people was, "It’s the right thing to do."

Now, saying that, that is not the case in the diocese where I will serve as suffragan bishop.

M.B.: So how is that going to mesh?

C.G.: Well, I consider my job to be one of education. I don’t think it’s one of confrontation, because I’ve never known that to work well. There are some diverse and accepting communities in the diocese and some very non-accepting, but I think Southern Virginia is not unlike most dioceses that I’ve been in. I don’t have the authority to set that kind of policy, but I can be an instrument of justice and reconciliation.

M.B.: What’s coming down the interstate at us as issues for the church?

C.G.: At some point as a church we’re going to have to deal with our environmental issues very seriously. I was talking to somebody the other day about oil and drilling in the Arctic and places like that. You know, that little bit of oil is not the problem. We need to look at how we use and abuse money and at the huge disparity between poverty and wealth that we have in this country. And there’s got to be a better way of bringing justice to other places, places where every waking moment is a terror all the time.

So I hope the church is willing to take on its own sense of need to have pretty things as opposed to having a healthy world.