How Evangelicals Helped Shape Indigenous Reconciliation In Canada
(ANALYSIS) Evangelicals and indigenous peoples' rights are not often put in the same sentence, but in Canada, they are deeply intertwined.
June 21 is Canada’s national Indigenous Peoples Day. It has been celebrated since 1996, stimulated by the federal government's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
The commission itself was a response to a 1995 Sacred Assembly held to bring reconciliation and healing between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. The Assembly had been called by Elijah Harper, an Oji-Cree member of the Canadian Parliament, and was attended by over 2,000 people. It brought together a wide range of people from across the country, including, perhaps especially, spiritual leaders.
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Harper was then the most prominent indigenous person in Canada and was a man of deep Christian faith, a faith instilled in him by his father, who had been a Pentecostal pastor for more than 50 years. Later in life, Harper worked with World Vision in Tanzania, Kenya and Taiwan.
Indigenous people — First Nations, Métis and Inuit — have a much greater presence in Canada than they do in the U.S. Some 1-2% of Americans are indigenous. In Canada, the number is closer to 5%, with an additional 6% having some indigenous ancestry. This total of about 11% is close to the 12% of the American population who are African American. Hence, what affects them affects the country as a whole.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the umbrella group for most Canadian evangelicals, was involved as an organizer and active participant in the Sacred Assembly and helped craft its ground-breaking Reconciliation Proclamation.
Previous EFC Presidents Bruce Clemenger and Brian Stiller were active participants. Stiller gave a major speech, while Clemenger helped craft the Proclamation as a vision of what a right relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples should look like. (Full disclosure: Brian Stiller is an old friend and colleague, and Bruce Clemenger is an old friend and former student of mine.
Among its other achievements, the Sacred Assembly brought the tragedy of Indian Residential Schools to the forefront of Canadian society, and national leaders of the Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican and other denominations renewed their apologies for their role in what had taken place.
The residential schools were created through cooperation between the Canadian government and churches in an attempt to both educate and convert indigenous youth and assimilate them into Canadian society.
However, the schools isolated children from their families and stripped them of their languages, traditions and cultural identities. Students routinely suffered severe neglect, malnutrition, and emotional and physical abuse. Over 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forced to attend these schools.
The EFC was involved in the reconciliation efforts partly because there are many evangelical indigenous people, but also because, unlike the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, its members had not been involved in the scandals of residential schools.
In his forthcoming memoir, Brian Stiller recounts:
“It was becoming clear to those of us in evangelical circles that, while our denominations had not been co-opted by the government to run the Residential Schools, we could not simply stand apart. Children, be they treaty or Métis, had been torn from their homes and placed in institutions that, whatever their stated intentions, were designed to strip away language, culture, and identity, and remake them in a European image. We were not the architects of that system. But we were not innocent bystanders either.”
Asked to address the Sacred Assembly, he declared:
“You have much to teach us. At the beginning of all your public ceremonies or dialogues with government —or whoever it is — you have spiritual invocations. You absolutely defy the secularism of our culture and say ‘no’: at the heart of life is spirituality. And I love it when you do that. You also have much to teach us that we are linked to creation. You have a soul, and you tell the barren secular materialism of our western culture: ‘You have got it all wrong, because at the heart of life is a soul, repentance, forgiveness.’ I can only walk with you when I’ve learned to weep with you."
The EFC continues to celebrate the Reconciliation Proclamation as a guide towards a right relationship with indigenous peoples.
In 2020, it announced seven commitments toward a right relationship, and in January 2026, there was a 30th anniversary gathering to remember and recommit to the principles outlined in the proclamation. (There is a forthcoming documentary about these events, and a trailer may be found here.)
Another fruit of Harper's life and his stress on education is NAIITS, formerly the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies. It is the only indigenous-designed, developed, delivered and governed graduate and post-graduate school of theological studies. It can grant master’s and doctoral degrees and is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools. It has relations with a wide range of Christian and other groups, but its closer relations are with evangelical Canadian schools such as Tyndale University and Acadia Divinity College.
Evangelicals and indigenous people are often thought to be quite dissimilar, but in one country at least, they both overlap extensively and are also committed partners.
Paul Marshall is Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, director of the Religious Freedom Institute’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and author of over 20 books on religion and politics. His latest book is “Called to be Friends: Called to Serve,” on the unlikely friendship of John M. Perkins and Howard F. Ahmanson Jr.