Study of Matthew 28:16-20 led by Chris Hoklotubbe and Kimberlee Medicine Horn

March 22, 2022, 7:30 PM Eastern Time

In this session, Dr. Chris Hoklotubbe and Kimberlee Medicine Horn delve into Matthew 28:16-20, otherwise known as “the Great Commission,” unpacking how it has been used to drive settler colonialism and justify the cultural genocide of Indigenous culture. They explore the context of this passage and consider how it has been interpreted over time, focusing in particular on how its theological legacy justified Indigenous boarding schools. Dr. Hoklotubbe will further considers how other stories of Scripture represent missed opportunities for imagining how to engage with other cultures, and Medicine Horn shares her work with a national research team tasked with investigating the dark history of Indigenous boarding schools.

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Dr. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Choctaw) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Cornell College (Mount Vernon, IA, located on land home to the Baxoje, Meskwaki, and Sauk nations), where he teaches courses on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice in the Christian Tradition, the New Testament, Roman Religion, Native American Spiritualities, World Religions, and Religion in American Politics. His book, Civilized Piety: The Rhetoric of Pietas in the Pastoral Epistles and the Roman Empire (Baylor University Press, 2017), winner of the 2021 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, brings together his research interests in early Christianity, Greco-Roman archaeology, ancient philosophy, and critical theory. Hoklotubbe has also written on Native American interpretations of the Bible and the concept of “Docetism” in Early Christian studies. He continues to research and write on the Pastoral Epistles and Native American interpretations of the Bible. Hoklotubbe also serves a member of NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community. Read more biographical details at cornellcollege.edu.

Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson, MFA, MA is enrolled in the Inhanktonwan Nation (Yankton Sioux Tribe) located in Southeastern South Dakota. As a Native American Adoptee, she writes and speaks about her experience of adoption under false pretenses and decades later, reunion with her first family on the reservation. Raised 1,000 miles from her homeland in a white Christian home she has studies for 18 years the intersection between Indigenous people and Christianity. Jackson serves as adjunct faculty for the NAIITS Indigenous Learning Community teaching Indigenous Research and Writing and is Co-editor of Journal of NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community theological journal. Jackson is a contract researcher with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. In her spare time she builds her creative writing platform recently as the curator of the NEA Big Read with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. She has taught English Composition since 2011 with Kent State and later with Ashland University Correctional Education Program. Jackson is a PhD student with NAIITS and Whitley College at the University of Divinity, Australia.