IRIS DE LEÓN-HARTSHORN MA ’05 has served Mennonite Central Committee (1996-2007) and Mennonite Church USA (2007-present) in various leadership roles. Previously the church’s director of transformative peacemaking, the Portland, Oregon, resident is now its associate executive director for operations, a new position that encapsulates the roles of chief of staff and key advisor to the executive director. She has been a strong advocate for racial and gender justice in the church and its related institutions.

ON AUG. 18, GLEN GUYTON WAS INSTALLED AS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MENNONITE CHURCH USA. HE IS THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND NON-ETHNIC MENNONITE TO HOLD THE POSITION. CAN YOU SHARE SOME OF YOUR FEELINGS SURROUNDING HIS APPOINTMENT?

I am both excited and cautious. Glen is an exceptional human being who loves God and the church. He believes the church can be better in living out the Gospel and he wants to work with others, including the next generation, to help shape the church’s future. At the same time, I am cautious because racism is alive and well. People often can’t seem to see how it operates in the church. My hope and prayer is that Glen will have enough support to see him through some of the racism he will encounter.

WHAT MOTIVATES YOU TO CONTINUE YOUR WORK WITH MENNONITE AND ANABAPTIST-ROOTED INSTITUTIONS IN SEARCH OF CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION?

I was brought up Catholic and dabbled with the Presbyterians and Baptists, but found my home in the Anabaptist tradition. No church tradition is perfect because it’s filled with human beings. My experiences as a Latina ingrained a deep concern for justice, both in itself and as a way toward right relationships with God, humanity and creation. It’s been an honor to work with many in the Mennonite church with that same conviction and vision of transformation. Relationships within the church and outside provide motivation to continue God’s reconciling work.

WHAT STRATEGIES HAVE YOU UTILIZED TO CONNECT AND INTEGRATE COMMUNITIES OF PEOPLE OF COLOR IN CHURCH INSTITUTIONS?

Sometimes the work of transformation takes trial and error. Early on, the goal was educating about systemic racism and how it operated in our church institutions – a difficult lesson for many in the dominant culture who have the luxury to think in relational terms and be unaware of the systemic nature of racism and how it privileges white people. Real change has to happen at the systemic level, but there is an essential interpersonal piece rooted in being allies or agents of change in partnership with people of color (POC).

In recent years, Mennonite Church USA and related institutions have sponsored a yearly gathering called “Hope for the Future” – a wonderful, safe place for POC in leadership positions, including staff and board members, to forge relationships and determine what we need to work on within the church and what we need to publicly articulate. This space has been especially important in the current atmosphere that has given permission for people to openly act out their racism. We have tried to provide both respite and encouragement so that we POC can continue to be in the church.

YOU ONCE WROTE, “RECONCILIATION CAN’T HAPPEN WHEN PEOPLE LEAVE; IT HAPPENS WHEN WE CHOOSE TO STICK IT OUT TOGETHER.” THESE WORDS RESONATE BEYOND THE CHURCH CONTEXT INTO OTHER REALMS OF PEACEBUILDING. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT “STICKING IT OUT TOGETHER” MEANS?

Tom Yoder Neufeld [professor emeritus, Conrad Grebel University College] has talked about equating the Holy Spirit with the wind, which blows things together that don’t seem to go together. Tom says that as the church, we come together not because we necessarily belong together, but God has brought us together and now we need to figure out how we live together.

Finding ways to stick together can be painful but as followers of Christ, that is what we are called to do. That is the work of God’s reconciling mission for the world. It’s hard to work things out if one party leaves the conversation. When we have theological or ideological differences in how we see the church or our organization, we need to find ways to talk with and trust each other. If we can do that, we can find a way forward.

SINCE GRADUATING FROM CJP, IS THERE ONE PARTICULAR LEARNING THAT HAS BEEN OF PRACTICAL USE?

I learned so much at CJP. Most useful was the exercise of putting my experiences within a theoretical framework and then the permission to consider other options. The quote I use often from Jayne Docherty, “I am not married to one theory, but I date around.”

Most impactful, though, was the encouragement and push to see myself as a capable academic. In high school, I was told Mexicans don’t go to college – a message that has plagued me most of my life. Halfway through the first meeting of a theory class, I walked out and cried in the hallway telling myself there was no way I could pass. [Academic Programs Director] Jayne Docherty came outside, listened, then pushed back and challenged me. I owe Jayne much gratitude in helping that message to stop playing in my head. She was a mentor and is still a friend.

Traumagenic refers to events or circumstances – like colonization, civil war, slavery, genocide, systemic discrimination – that cause traumatic reactions and impacts, typically embodied in generation after generation. The victims (and their descendants) of such trauma obviously carry wounds, but so do the perpetrators, though these roles may shift over time, with changing circumstances. Think of the Hutus and the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi – at different times each group has been among the victims and each among the perpetrators of violence.

“Historically traumagenic circumstances that have not been healed, reconciled or made right can have continuing consequences at the individual, family, organizational, communal, regional, national and even international level for generations,” write Hooker and Czajkowski in Transforming Historical Harms, published in 2011 by EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

The authors emphasize that the mere passage of time does not heal trauma. For this reason, EMU’s STAR program offers trainings centered on the teachings in the Transforming Historical Harms (THH) manual.

“The THH framework requires an understanding of trauma, historical trauma and harms, the mechanisms of legacy and aftermath, and finally a holistic healing approach that’s inclusive of these understandings,” explain Hooker and Czajkowski.

The “healing approach” is grounded in these values:

• truth, based on understanding and facing what really happened in the past;
• mercy, based on developing an empathy for the “other” in his or her context;
• justice, based on righting the wrongs of the past by taking corrective steps today;
• peace, based on recognizing each other’s dignity.

Hooker, assisted by STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, led a two-day THH workshop for 11 participants in April 2013 at EMU. In it, Hooker stressed the importance of “narrative,” or listening to each other’s stories, as a key step in the healing process.

As an example, the THH manual cites Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone (), a national movement of reconciliation and healing to address the aftermath of an 11-year civil war in that country. Sparked by John Caulker and Elisabeth Hoffman, Fambul Tok spread through villages and the countryside, with circles of neighbors sitting around bonfires sharing their experiences, including many instances of confessions, apologies, and forgiveness. At the end, cleansing ceremonies were held.

In the United States, Hooker pointed out that racism remains prevalent through various belief systems and social structures that can trace their roots back to slavery and other events and institutions that many people would consider bygones.

One specific example that came up at the April training was how the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, assessed property values in hundreds of American cities in an attempt to mitigate a foreclosure crisis during the Great Depression. In Richmond, Virginia, the HOLC assigned grades of A, B, C or D to rank neighborhoods from high (A) to low (D) in terms of desirability and property value. Reflecting the prejudices of the time, race figured into the HOLC assessors’ work in a way shocking to any sensibility today: every neighborhood where African-Americans lived got a D regardless of other factors. Every white neighborhood was given an A, a B or a C, and proximity to “negro” areas was sometimes listed as a reason why a white neighborhood received a lower assessment than facts would otherwise dictate.

That was in 1937, and it would be unthinkable today for an agency of the federal government to engage in such blatant racism. Even so, the effects of those 75-year-old policies continue to inflict pain in Richmond.

“The areas that were ‘Ds’ are impoverished neighborhoods now, and thedy were not necessarily that at the time [they were assessed],” says workshop participant Cricket White, national director of training and project development for the Richmond nonprofit Hope in the Cities.

The HOLC assessments directly affected property owners’ access to credit and depressed home values in low-rated neighborhoods. Before long, well-to-do people of any race who lived in D neighborhoods left. Poorer ones stayed, concentrating poverty in specific areas. In ensuing decades, policy-makers picked these exact neighborhoods for public housing redevelopment. Today, residents in these neighborhoods face the full gamut of trauma-causing structural problems that plague the urban poor in America: limited access to education, transportation, jobs, healthy food at market prices, and other basic components of comfort, security and dignity.

Another aspect of historic trauma addressed in the THH training is the role of “legacy,” or beliefs and biases in perpetuating trauma rooted in the past. In the case of the HOLC neighborhood assessments in Richmond, an example of this legacy would be modern-day explanations for the poverty that persists in the neighborhoods assigned a “D” rating decades earlier: laziness, irresponsibility, self-destructive choices, and residents’ other personal shortcomings. Using the THH approach, these explanations are seen to be focused on the symptoms of a social illness – a modern injustice – that began with a past harm inflicted by racist policies.

“Even if we are ‘past’ it in terms of policy, we’re not past it in terms of attitudes that people have passed on,” says White.

Identifying, understanding and changing the persisting legacy of trauma-causing events in the past is “the heart of transforming historical harms’ work,” says Hooker, who has been affiliated with CJP for a decade and regularly teaches at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “Everything else is form and function behind that.”

The THH manual by Hooker and Czajkowski was originally prepared for Coming to the Table, a program developed at EMU that adapted the STAR model to address the specific historical trauma of slavery in America. (Czajkowski now works with the Women’s Peacebuilding Leadership Program at EMU.) The two undertook the project as it became clear that the historic trauma-healing framework developed at Coming to the Table had wide applicability to other historic traumas in other settings. 1

At the April workshop, Hooker encouraged each individual participant to imagine specific steps to begin healing the ongoing traumas connected to their lives.

In Richmond, White and her organization have begun to address the legacy of the HOLC neighborhood assessments by creating a PowerPoint presentation to publicize resources available to address specific problems – e.g., access to transportation – that persist today.

The April training at EMU, attended by nearly a dozen people with varying professional and personal interests in the subject, was one of the first official THH trainings offered through the STAR program. Hooker has also been using the methodology for the past three years in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he is part of an effort to address the city’s history of racism.

Karen B. Froming, assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, wrote in a follow-up email to Hooker and Barge, “I have found the material to be haunting me as I think about all the ways in which historical harms operate in our lives. While I may do work in Rwanda, it is quite apparent how much work we have to do in this country.”

Several participants said the opportunity to spend two days with other people who share an interest in the understanding and healing of historical trauma provided encouragement.

“It feels good to know you’re not alone doing this stuff,” says Iris de León-Hartshorn, director for transformative peacemaking of Mennonite Church USA. De León-Hartshorn is involved in addressing historical traumas related to boarding and mission schools – including several run by the Mennonite church – where Native American children were sent for assimilation into white American culture.

1. Coming to the Table continues its work confronting the legacy of slavery as an “associate organization” to EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, while the STAR program has begun periodically offering the more general Transforming Historic Harms training.