In observance of Indigenous Peoples Day, we will welcome Anthony Trujillo by Zoom on October 1o and 24 at 9 am. The Zoom invite will be distributed Sunday morning.

“Mannahatta and Manhattan: Locating the Church within Indigenous and Imperial Space”

Where is Manhattan? What is Mannahatta? How is New York City a site of Indigenous erasure and survivance? This two-part series offers an orientation to the Indigenous history, present and future of a global and cultural metropolis that has often forgotten its deep and ongoing entanglements with Indigenous peoples. Over the two sessions we will engage with history, theology, polity and ethics, as framed by two Native thinkers, as a way of approaching the questions and quandaries that come to the fore when the church engages with Indigenous land and life. It is guided by the conviction that having a sense of where one is and the stories a particular place holds is one of the most important aspects of being a faithful, justice-seeking church. 

Anthony Trujillo is a member of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, one of the six Tewa speaking pueblos located in the upper Rio Grande Valley. He is a first-year PhD student in American Studies at Harvard University with a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. His research focuses on Indigenous engagements with – and resistance to – colonial/imperial religious and political systems in the 18th and 19th centuries while seeking to draw connections with the sovereignty movements of contemporary Native nations and descendent communities. He is the coordinator of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Working Group at Harvard. He also serves on the Native American Coordinating Council of the Presbyterian Church USA which seeks to address the denomination’s embrace of the Doctrine of Discovery and its entanglements in settler-colonialism.  Anthony is a candidate for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament under care of the Presbytery of New York City.