NEW YORK — Four hundred years after their spiritual ancestors took part in the decimation and dislocation of Indians in New York, one of the nation’s first Protestant churches held a “healing ceremony” to apologize.
“We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love of this land,” representatives from Collegiate Church said in a statement. “With pain, we the Collegiate Church remember our part in these events.”
The Nov. 27 ceremony took place on Native American Heritage Day in lower Manhattan, where in 1628 Dutch colonizers built the first Collegiate Church, then known as the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, at Fort Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company treated Indians “as a resource,” church representatives said in a statement, and “we were the conscience of this company.”
Collegiate now includes four churches in New York, including Marble Collegiate Church, where Pastor Norman Vincent Peale preached from 1932 to 1984.
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