Rev. Rachel Taber-Hamilton Is Guided by Her Indigenous Worldview

While playing in the backyard of her Ohio home, sunlight streaming through a crabapple tree, then 3-year-old Rachel Taber-Hamilton realized she was part of creation.

“I recognized that just as creation is generous and Creator is generous, we are of creation and need to reflect what creation does,” says Taber-Hamilton, now an Episcopal priest and rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Everett, Washington.

Taber-Hamilton’s parents recognized she was a leader but neither expected—nor wanted—her to become a priest. Her father, the late Julian Taber, was a clinical psychologist known for his pioneering work in addiction. His book, Addictions Anonymous, advocated for a nonreligious, inclusive 12-step program for addiction.

Her father’s great uncle, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, was a renowned orator known as the “Great Agnostic” for his outspoken advocacy of agnosticism, skepticism, and secularism in late 19th-century America.

Taber-Hamilton says her father grew up under that influence and held that mindset throughout his life.

Warrior Healer

Taber-Hamilton’s maternal grandfather was a member of the Shackan First Nation community, one of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. She describes her grandmother as “Lutheran to the core.”

“My mom cherished her father and identified with his indigenous heritage spirituality,” Taber-Hamilton says. “She was raised in a household with this dialogical strain between indigenous worldview, Christian worldview, colonialism, and the impact of that. My mother’s father didn’t want my mother to have the kinds of cultural challenges he encountered as a native person.”

From her mother, Taber-Hamilton learned that creation is sacred, all beings have the right to exist, and we’re responsible for being in right relationship with creation and other beings. She also learned she was expected to be a leader.

“The potentials recognized in me for leadership had to do with what are also identified with warrior attributes in my indigenous culture,” she says, such as “the protection and spiritual well-being of people and of the community itself, including responsibility for the well-being of people emotionally and psychologically, relational well-being and healing—and an appreciation of the sacred.”

College Challenges

It wasn’t until college that Taber-Hamilton got the message that she had no right to be claiming an understanding of the sacred. That message was first delivered by a white, male professor. In his undergraduate anthropology course, he introduced Taber-Hamilton to the works of influential theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. She also learned about a Trappist monastery near campus. When the professor tasked the class with identifying a community to research and write a paper about, most of her peers opted to study the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois, one of the primary Indigenous people in upstate New York. “Those are my friends and my kin and I get them upside and down,” Taber-Hamilton explains, so instead she chose the Trappist monks.

When the professor asked her if she thought the monks would accept her, she told him, “I know I come at it with an indigenous and agnostic background, but I think they’ll be okay with that. I’m okay with them.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she remembers him saying. “I meant that’s a male community that’s celibate and you’re a woman.”

She laughed. “The idea that me being female would keep me from anything I wanted to do was utterly absurd,” she says. Taber-Hamilton proceeded with her plan, living in a retreat house near the monastery and interviewing—and befriending—the monks.

“These were people living and caring for each other,” she remembers. “They were intentional about study. They were intentional about their relationships. They were intentional about their relationship with Creator. They were intentional about being faithful because of that relationship.”

After attending services at the monastery, she felt called to become Christian and was baptized during an Easter Vigil service. When she went home for summer break, she wore a tiny cross necklace.

“It might as well have been as huge as a house in my mom’s mind,” she recalls. “She looked at me and asked, ‘What have you done?’” Her father called her crazy and her brother asked, “What did we do to make you do this?”

Taber-Hamilton didn’t waver.

Focus on Social Justice, Outreach

She planned to become a Catholic nun, but while in seminary, she met her husband, an Episcopal priest. After seminary, she was received into the Episcopal Church to address a long-repressed call to priesthood. She worked for years as a professional board-certified chaplain before seeking ordination.

When the monks learned Taber-Hamilton was pursuing the priesthood, one called her a “spawn of Satan.” Some leaders within the Episcopal Church questioned whether she was “sufficiently Anglican.”

“It was ironic to me that feeling called within my father’s culture—dominant culture, white culture—to express my culture to both leadership and spiritual leadership was basically met with closed doors and iron bars by the white men protecting it,” she says.

As an indigenous woman, she continues to push against those barriers even today.

“If I can make a doorway, I’ll make one,” she says. “That’s my preference. Otherwise, I’m going to be scaling walls or tearing them down.”

When Taber-Hamilton was seeking ordination, her bishop advised her to transfer to a different diocese due to bias raised against her indigenous spiritual heritage. She and her husband moved across the country, and in 2003 she became the first indigenous person to be ordained in the history of the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia in western Washington state.

Over the years, she has served on various councils and committees of her diocese and of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. She advocates for indigenous rights, racial reconciliation, environmental justice, and creation care. She serves on the board of the international Anglican Indigenous Network.

Advocating for BIPOC

When Taber-Hamilton was out of the diocese for three years in the mid-2000s while developing a professional chaplaincy program, cuts were made to programs and staffing in her diocese that had benefited Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). After attempts to address her concerns with leadership failed, she turned to social media.

Her BIPOC peers, recognizing the risk she’d taken, “gathered me to them,” she says. With their support, Taber-Hamilton developed Circles of Color, a network of BIPOC people within the diocese, and served as coordinator until 2022.

In her Episcopalian ministry, she has found small ways to incorporate her indigenous spirituality. During special services, she’s used sage or tobacco and smudged congregants with an eagle feather instead of with frankincense and myrrh and a thurible. Even that simple act can be met with resistance, fear, and ignorance.

“I just try to stay available and encourage them to talk to me about it,” she says.

Twenty-one years after her ordination, Taber-Hamilton says she’s “just getting started.” She’s writing a book and leading workshops and retreats, including one for Episcopal women that explores indigenous and Celtic Christian beliefs.

The work is important, she says, “because Christianity will only continue to be used as a tool of destruction and hatred, legitimating genocide and white/male supremacy.

“We have to change the baseline understanding of what Christianity is—and it’s not patriarchal. It doesn’t belong to white men only.”

This article appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of Spirituality & Health: A Unity Publication®. Subscribe now.