Prayer in the School at Berens River First Nation

Berens River is located in Manitoba, Canada, along the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg. The community symbol with the beaver and the fish on it speak to the historic significance of trapping and fishing in this area.
The First Nations and fur trade community of Berens River was officially started in the 1800s, but the spot was a traditional hunting and fishing area for thousands of years--from time immemorial.

The land along the Berens River has historically been rich in water, forestry, fishing, and animal resources.

Treaty No. 5 was signed at Berens River, Manitoba, on September 20, 1875. Manitoba had become a province in 1870, and settlement around Lake Winnipeg was fast expanding. Lake Winnipeg is a large and valuable sheet of water, being some three hundred miles long. The Red River flows into it from the South and the Nelson River flows from it into Hudson's Bay in the North-east.

Steam navigation had been successfully established by the Hudson's Bay Company on Lake Winnipeg. On the west side of the lake, a settlement of Icelandic immigrants had been established. For these and other reasons, the Minister of the Interior in 1875 reported "that it was essential that the Indian title to all the territory in the vicinity of the lake should be extinguished so that settlers and traders might have undisturbed access to its waters, shores, islands, inlets and tributary streams."

The chief at Berens River at the time was barely able to convince the government agent to increase the annual treaty money from $3.00 per year to $5.00 per year.

The picture above is take of some First Nations at Berens River around the year 1910.

The Berens River community is located near the mouth of the Berens River, which flows west from the Ontario headwaters.

On January 8, 2010, I, Roger Armbruster, was privileged to stand on the historic Berens River along with Raymond McLean, pastor of the First Nations Family Worship Centre in Winnipeg.

Later that day, we visited the Berens River School where the principal is Nancy Whiteway. This picture is taken in the gymnasium of the school. In spite of past injustices, it is a huge credit to this community that the sign in their school still says, "BERENS RIVER Welcomes All."

Here I am in Principal Nancy Whiteway's office along with fellow Healing the Land Ministers--Irvin Wilson and Raymond McLean. Irvin and Raymond had initiated a Healing the Land process in this community back in August of 2006, the month after they had led the protocol in welcoming the Healing the Land Team from Fiji to Winnipeg and to Manitoba.

At that time, a prophetic word came forth that God was going to visit the school in Berens River. The next day, in the grade 8 classroom of Karen Leggett, a heavy presence of God came into her classroom, causing a sense of awe and humility among the students, and then the bright letters "I M" appeared on the classroom wall. The same manifestation took place on four mornings that week, and the fear of God came upon the school.

So it was my privilege to visit Karen Leggett's classroom in Berens River on January 8, 2010. On this picture, from right to left are Nancy Whiteway (principal), Karen Leggett (teacher in whose classroom the supernatural manifestation occurred), and Irvin Wilson and Raymond McLean (fellow healing the land ministers).

Here, Principal Nancy Whiteway is pointing out to me the exact where were the bright letters, "I M" actually appeared in the classroom, accompanied by a holy hush and awesome reverence for the presence of the Almighty, the Great "I Am."

Here I am sharing a word of greeting with the present-day students of this very same classroom, with the principal standing on my right. I took the opportunity to remind them of God's mighty acts in history, one of which had happened right here in this classroom some three years previously, and that God was willing and able to do even greater things in the future.

"Praise Him for His mighty acts; praise Him according to His excellent greatness!" (Psalm 150:2). "Lord, I have heard of Your fame; I stand in awe of Your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy" (Habakkuk 3:2).

The principal of the Berens River School subsequently took us to each and every one of the classrooms in the entire school, and in each case, we were asked to pray with the teacher and the students for God's continued blessing upon the school, and that each one of these children will have a hope and a future, a future much better than the past, and that through the healing the land process, that the abundance of the land and of the water will return!

In conclusion, it is revealing that the schools run by the dominant culture who descended from the the commissioners and agents who signed Treaty No. 5 with the First Nations in Berens River in 1875 are now in some cases petitioning and pressuring our present-day governments to remove prayer from our schools in the southern part of Canada.

Yet there is no way that they will succeed in removing prayer from the school in Berens River, or from other First Nations communities in Canada, since our Native people understand that all humans were created free and equal, and were endowed by their Creator (not secular governments) with certain inherent and inalienable rights. Secular humanist governments tend to suppress all other kinds of freedoms when they begin to suppress freedom of worship, or when they try to make prayer a private matter removed from the public square.