From Mild to Meddlesome

Adapted from a sermon delivered July 26, 2026 at First Unitarian Church of Omaha. (Video available below or on YouTube here.)

​Special thanks to the indigenous UU colleague who commented on the first installment of this series in early 2026, asking thoughtful questions about how the history of colonization would be included. It was an important reminder to speak to not only the positive Midwestern values that we can draw upon to face today's challenges - but also the failures that we must name and learn from.

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“We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name.” So says Kate Walker, editor of The Through Line, a recent book that looks back on two hundred years of the Berry Street Essay. This annual lecture has been given by Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist ministers, to their colleagues, as a reflection and critique on the profession. 

"We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name." That’s one of the through lines of my reflection today. The other comes from historian Jon Lauck, who traces the history of the Midwest throughout the 1800s. Lauck offers a largely positive picture of the region, but he also admits, 

“The Midwest’s greatest failing occurred in the arena of race relations.” (Jon Lauck)

As I return to an occasional series on our Midwest heritage and our Unitarian ancestors here, it is to look squarely at that part of our heritage that is most challenging. This is a history that includes faithful work and major triumphs in the realm of racial justice, but also deep harm.
 
As I draw from this history here, I invite you to consider what work remains to be done to remove from the soil of our culture – Midwestern culture and inevitably, Unitarian culture here too – all the grains of oppression that were layered in long ago. I’ll save for another time issues related to gender and sexuality, focusing here on colonization and white supremacy. 

(Photo: Steve Payne / Unsplash)

Little church on the prairie. That may have been an apt description of First Unitarian Church of Omaha, and many other Unitarian churches in the Midwest, upon their founding. Images of pioneers, homesteaders, and frontier towns loom large in the mythos of our nation. The “little house” stories written by Laura Ingalls Wilder – historical fiction as much as

memoir – both reflected and helped create that mythos. In stories inspired by her life, growing up in frontier locations in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota, Wilder depicts lands and peoples of the region.

The Little House books were the first chapter books I remember reading as a kid. Here’s my set, which my mother saved all these years. You might remember NBC’s development of the tales for television, that ran from 1974 to 1983, bringing those images of frontier families into millions of living rooms. Just this month Netflix dropped the first season of a new Little House on the Prairie show.

​I don’t actually remember the books that well. When my own daughter was getting to the age where the Little House books might be age-appropriate reading, I wondered how well they had stood the test of time. I discovered, to put it mildly, that they were too problematic in their treatment of people of color.
 
Historian John E. Miller observes that the stories “assumed that white settlement of lands previously controlled by American Indians was both inevitable and just.” Another historian, Michael Patrick Hearn, remarks on the “endemic racism of the times that is reflected in the series.”

​I did not share the books with my daughter.
 
I wondered if the new Netflix series would do better. Indeed the narrative tone has shifted. Without big spoilers, I can say that the black doctor from the Little House on the Prairie book is not just a brief cameo, but a full character with his own story arc and full personhood. Another key character is a black woman who runs the general store, with whom Ma forms a friendship.
 
Writing before the new show came out, Miller observed that the Little House world promoted “progress and equality in the region,” but also that

“the central narrative that nineteenth-century midwesterners devised about themselves centered around bringing of civilization to the wilderness.”

The subject of colonization is dealt with more forthrightly in the new T.V. series. An indigenous family are full characters, and their perspectives on events are conveyed. Laura becomes best friends with an Osage girl, Good Eagle. Ma has a change of heart about the Indians despite an early scare. And over the course of season one, good-hearted Pa goes from blind naiveté about the opportunity to homestead that lured them there – to realizing that he and other settlers have been deceived and manipulated by the railroad company, to gain leverage over the native Osage.
 
In general, the mythology of the frontier leaves the impression that Native Americans disappeared along with their ways of life, when settlers like the Ingalls displaced them. When I was growing up in southeast Iowa, indigenous people were invisible except as part of a tragic history of the vanishing Indian that I learned about in school. I don’t remember actually learning about the history and culture of my own area’s indigenous peoples. (After this sermon, I was pleased to hear from an Iowa-raised congregant  who is younger than me that she *did* learn about local native peoples as part of her public school curriculum.)

Replica of the original Fort Madison, built when I was a teenager. Photo courtesy of the City of Fort Madison, Iowa (https://www.fortmadison-ia.com/280/History-of-Fort-Madison).

That’s ironic since my hometown, Fort Madison, grew from what originally was a fort – the first military fort built in the upper Mississippi region, established by the U.S. government to manage trade and keep in line the Native Americans of the region, e.g., help open it to settlers. The fort was built in 1809. Native forces repeatedly attacked and defeated the fort as part of the War of 1812. My hometown grew up after the fort was abandoned.
 
If you are a settler, I wonder how visible indigenous peoples have been in your own experience. Here in the Omaha metro area, almost 20,000 indigenous Americans reside, as native peoples live in cities throughout the Midwest. We also have nine Indian reservations in Nebraska.

Your Turn:  Where are you from, and growing up, what did you learn about the indigenous people from that area? You might journal or chat with a friend about this.

The Ingalls family was part of waves of migration that brought settlers to Nebraska as well as Kansas after the Civil War. These states were popular destinations not only for white settlers, but for black folks seeking opportunity, too.
 
I draw largely from historian Jon Lauck’s book The Good Country in this next section. Midwesterners played a critical role in the movement to abolish slavery. The numerous Christian colleges located here were particularly hotbeds of activism. Abolitionist lawyers, courts and grand juries deliberately blocked southern slave-catcher efforts, and many abolitionists won popular office. While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had banned slavery in most of the Midwest – between the Ohio River and the Missouri River – that step came later west of the Missouri. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery in the territory that would become the states of Nebraska and Kansas.

But the Nebraska bill of 1854 reopened the question, leaving it to the citizens of each state to decide. Slavery was violently contested in “Bleeding Kansas.” The feisty Unitarian church in Lawrence made important contributions, as I described in an earlier sermon in this series. The issue was not as contentious in Nebraska. Still, the Nebraska legislature did not ban slavery until 1861 – and then, had to override a veto from the governor. Just five years later, in 1869, First Unitarian Church of Omaha was founded.

Banning slavery was one thing; welcoming African Americans and providing for equal opportunity was another. Lauck reports that during the nineteenth century “acts of anti-Black terror” occurred in Detroit, “Decatur, Akron, Springfield (Ohio and Illinois), East St. Louis, Chicago, Omaha and smaller and forgotten places.” 

The motto Equality Before the Law, as seen on the Great Seal of the State of Nebraska, refers to black voting rights -- a controversial issue in the state's early history. (More at https://history.nebraska.gov/how-equality-before-the-law-became-our-state-motto/)

The Midwest’s early history of race relations was regressive, with the upper Midwest more liberal from the start, and the middle latitude like we are in coming along over time. States like Iowa, Illinois and Indiana had laws banning free blacks from even entering them in the 1850s. (Nebraska never had a ban.) In Iowa, those laws were repealed by 1860, through the influence of the Iowa Anti-Slavery Society. By that time, Ohio and the upper Midwest states also allowed unrestricted immigration of free blacks.
 
Activism for black suffrage was successful in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, in the mid-1800s, at a time when other regions frequently saw defeat. Black suffrage was voted down in fourteen northern states from 1865-1870, including Connecticut and New York, for example. The successes in Iowa and Minnesota encouraged leaders to advocate for the federal Fifteenth Amendment, which was a way to get around the uneven success in state referenda. The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing voting rights to black men, was ratified in every single midwestern state. It might surprise us, today, to learn of some of the states that failed to ratify it – like California and New York.
 
Other Midwestern advancements that you might not expect:  Iowa’s was the “first successful school desegregation case in U.S. history.” School districts in Nebraska could decide for themselves how to handle race in public education; Lincoln’s schools were integrated from the start, with Omaha’s schools following suit by 1872.
 
Ohio and Iowa led the way in adopting civil rights laws, and ensuring equal access to things like hotels, public transportation, theatres, restaurants, and more. The following year, in 1885, Jon Lauck writes, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois also passed civil rights laws.

“The passage of these statutes and their enforcement across the Midwest,” he notes, “led to a period of hopefulness and racial integration in midwestern cities such as Chicago while southern states were adopting sweeping laws to impose rigid Jim Crow segregation.”

Lauck is realistic in acknowledging that even as laws changed, many white people and communities resisted African American migration and legally won civil rights. Though present throughout the Midwest, resistance was especially strong in the southernmost states of the region. What’s notable and perhaps surprising, from the present vantage point, is that progress was made relatively quickly in the Midwest, compared to other parts of the country.
 
In the grand scheme of history, Midwestern states made radical change in some areas – extending the principles of democracy and equality through work toward the abolition of slavery, and suffrage for both African Americans and women. Yet in many ways, both in their aims and their methods, the approach of these states could be characterized as one of “mild reform.” Lauck describes the Midwest after the Civil War as “a region willing to consider and adopt incremental, but not radical, reforms to make their region better.” How “Midwest nice,” in both the positive and negative senses.

​This pattern of internal contradictions, hard-won improvements, and setbacks, continues into the 1900s and into the 2000s. 

“We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name." ~ Kate Walker

Let me try to name some of it, briefly. One of the most important factors to understand is the effect of redlining – housing segregation that was driven by federally drawn maps of cities, starting during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The impact of this discrimination cannot be overstated, with generational effects that reach into the present day. Racial bias, whether overt or unconscious, continues to play out in discrimination in every sector of society, including jobs, housing, education, and religion.​

The New Jim Crow of criminalizing and warehousing black people shows up in every city, as do disparities in policing and police violence. I don’t know how it was for you, but as the Black Lives Matter movement of the past decade plus took shape – starting when I was raising my precious mixed race child in Indiana, and continuing through our move to Nebraska in 2020 – I could not help but notice how many of the flashpoints were in Midwestern cities. Michael Brown killed at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri (in the St. Louis area), a string of such killings in Chicago, and of course, George Floyd in Minneapolis. Then at a protest against Floyd's killing, here in Omaha - mere weeks before my family moved here - James Scurlock was killed (though not at the hands of police). “We cannot dismantle what we refuse to name.” The sand of racism is still ingrained in the soil of our not-always-nice Midwest culture.

Soil of Oppression refers to the Time for All Ages paired with this sermon. Result illustrated here by a photo from TFAA creator mandi huizenga, as I forgot to get a photo when I did this with our kids.

Your Turn:   How have race and racism affected people where you have lived – and what was named, or what remained unnamed, about that?  Again, you might journal or chat with a friend about this.

So, where do Unitarians fit into all this? I turn once again to Charles Lyttle and his history of the (Mid)western Unitarian Conference. It chronicles a distinctive flavor of Unitarianism that was freer of social hierarchy, freer in religious thinking and sources of inspiration than its eastern counterparts.
 
Reading Lyttle, who wrote in 1952 about the preceding hundred years of Unitarians in the Midwest, I hear an enthusiasm for westward expansion that sounds much like that found anywhere else in American culture and history. The title of the book itself is Freedom Moves West – which begs the question, freedom for whom?  The first chapter of the book is titled “Settling, Civilizing, Missionizing the West.” Civilizing. Yeah.
 
It’s a white settler’s point-of-view. This perspective takes for granted that both people and churches have a right to build a life on lands that indigenous people have called home for millennia prior to Europeans’ arrival.

“Never in recorded history,” Lyttle avers, “had any religious faith so free and unobstructed an opportunity to plant and extend its institutions and culture as the West offered American Protestantism from the very first.” He notes that little is left of indigenous peoples’ religion, except for the mound builders’ mounds. He does not mention the native people who were - and are - still here in the (mid)west, and the indigenous religious practices they continued to carry on.

I’m struck by an observation from Kate Walker, looking back over two hundred years of lectures by Unitarian ministers on the practice of ministry. She notes that until recently, these speakers rarely acknowledged their own social locations, their own identities. 

“Benefitting from white privilege,” Walker notes, “[Berry Street] speakers saw no need to talk about racism; benefitting from patriarchy, they saw no need to talk about sexism.”

Where does Lyttle direct our attention? Because Americans have freedom of religion, Lyttle writes, “the American spirit created within seventy-five years of the pioneers’ entrance into the West the most vital and powerful segments of both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism on the face of the earth.” Whew! Sounds triumphant.
 
By the time the Unitarians began to organize congregations in “the West,” Calvinist Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, as well as Methodists, Universalists and Friends (Quakers), were already there (here) and well-organized. Lyttle describes a very inhospitable climate to both Unitarian churchgoers and clergy due to the cold and condemning attitudes of the more conservative Christians.
 
From the history of this congregation comes an anecdote from Grace Holdredge, an earlier leader of the group, illustrating that, whatever advantages early settlers and church leaders may have had, it wasn’t always easy to be a Unitarian.

“It took courage and many other fine qualities to start a liberal religious movement in that setting,” Holdredge wrote in her journal. “Even the children realized it. Young girls of ‘God-fearing’ parents could not play with children who did not believe in ‘the devil.’ Even as late as high school days one careful mother refused to let her son be seen on horseback in company with a ‘Unitarian girl.’”

Lyttle indicates that the coming of railroads brought “more vigorous missionary activity,” as Eastern ministers and indeed, Unitarian settlers, could more easily get to points further west. The establishment of a liberal seminary closer to the frontier also helped solve the problem of not enough educated ministers ready and willing to fill (mid)western pulpits. Still, many more churches were planted on the prairie than survived.
 
Charles Lyttle asks what motivated settlers in general to take a chance in this (mid)western terrain. He quotes an unnamed “pioneer” minister from St. Louis in answer:  “The grand motive which actuates all who come here is to make money – not liberty of conscience, not intellectual improvement, not the desire to do good, but to better our own condition, to make ourselves rich and influential members of society.” The St. Louis pioneer minister then offers this warning: 

“… in the universality of this motive I discern our greatest danger: that religion and learning and morality and education and everything which makes a people truly prosperous shall all be forgotten, all made to bow to one god, Mammon.”

Unitarians in the region have long been (and are) engaged in social justice work, everywhere along the spectrum from mild reform to meddlesome in ways that more deeply threaten power structures - including socialism and economic radicalism. Doubtless some individuals have historically remained more embedded in the status quo.

​In Walker’s commentary on the Berry Street essays, she traces “a long-standing tension in our faith between individualistic concerns often reflected in a more personal theology and an outward-looking theology focusing on social change.” I imagine this has been true in each of our congregations, and perhaps even within each Unitarian.
 
In terms of racial justice, Lyttle’s chronicle of (mid)Western Unitarians is full of references to activism in the causes of abolition and the underground railroad, and later civil rights and racial integration. Not mentioned is whether or how Unitarian churches in the western conference worked to make their congregations less Euro-centric and more inclusive of many cultures.

With regard to Native Americans, I find very few references to the relationships between Unitarian communities and native peoples in the Midwest. Charles Lyttle does not address it, nor does the volume chronicling this congregation’s own history. From a UU State Action Network, I learned that there are three known instances of Unitarians attempting to participate in what was then called “educational work amongst the Indians.” Today we know them as residential boarding schools that took indigenous children from their families and communities. They practiced forced assimilation, cultural genocide, and were part of the process of dispossessing indigenous communities of their homelands.

One of those sites was in the Midwest, working briefly with the Chippewa in Minnesota in 1855. The other two sites were in Colorado and Montana. All were abandoned after a relatively short time, due to lack of funding. We are left to wonder what the rank and file of Unitarians thought about this – if they were aware of these “missions,” if there was shared understanding of what went on in​​

such schools, or support from congregations. I would like to think that the reason Unitarian involvement in these schools was limited and brief was because Unitarians were not generally supportive of the aims and methods of such schools. But I don’t know.
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The Unitarian Universalist denomination as a whole has committed to Indian Rights, “insisting upon adequate reparations for past and present injustices perpetrated upon them.” The first such statement was in 1970 – just 50-some years ago. 

​Where does this leave us in the present day? Are we getting better at naming those oppressions that are in our soil, so to speak, in the cultural air that we breathe - naming being a prerequisite to constructive action? I hope so.

​What might constructive action look like? I am especially interested in this question, on behalf of this church (First Unitarian Church of Omaha), in relation to native peoples. I don’t want to keep saying our land acknowledgment without also being in (deeper, more institutionalized) relationship with native peoples, and listening for how we might be genuine allies and accomplices today. We've made a start but it is just that - a start. I welcome anyone and everyone in our community who is interested in this, or who has connections, to get in touch.

Standing Rock was the indigenous justice movement that opened my eyes and galvanized me as a new minister in 2016.

Dakota Access Pipeline Route -- through the heart of the Midwest, disturbing sacred native sites, and threatening water resources (photo - Wikimedia Commons)

Oceti Sakowin Camp, indigenous-led activism against DAPL. Many UU clergy supported the movement, both traveling to Standing Rock and (as I did when I served in Fort Worth), raising funds for activists, protesting corporate villainy, and supporting indigenous political prisoners.

Protesting outside the Dallas headquarters of Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline and the violence at Standing Rock (November 2016).

We are right now making the history that our descendants will look back on. What we do now will become part of their heritage in fifty or a hundred years. May the steps we take build on the best of our Midwest heritage. The Midwest heritage of democracy that includes more and more people. The Midwest heritage of education and learning that leaves less unnamed and unknown. The Midwest heritage of egalitarian social and economic norms. And the Midwest heritage of pragmatism – may we lean into that practical, can-do spirit, as we continue to build the common good.

​So may it be. Amen. ​

This is the full service in which the above sermon was delivered. The Time for All Ages begins around 11:00, the sermon around 34:00. 

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Sources

    1 - “Conclusion” by Kate R. Walker in The Through Line: 200 Years of the Berry Street Essay, edited by Kate R. Walker (Skinner House Books, 2021).
    2 - The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900 by Jon K. Lauck (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022).
    3 - “Little Myths on the Prairie” by Michael Patrick Hearn, in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017).
    4 - “Laura Ingalls Wilder as a Midwestern Pioneer Girl” by John E. Miller, in Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal (South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017).
    5 - On the history of Fort Madison, Iowa:  http://www.iowahild.com/indians-of-iowa.html and https://www.fortmadison-ia.com/203/History-of-Fort-Madison
    6 - Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference 1852-1952  by Charles H. Lyttle (Beacon Press, 1952; revised edition 2006 by Blackstone Editions).  
    7 - Pillars & Dreams: A History of the First Unitarian Church of Omaha, by Dave Richardson (2018).
    8 - Unitarian Indian Boarding School and WA Interfaith Response to the Burials, July 2021.
    9 - First UU national Social Witness statement on Indian Rights, 1970. See also full list of denominational justice statements related to Native Americans.