Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer

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PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010) p. 2

Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

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I came upon the delightful account of the Wise Women of Waban as I was researching my chapter on “Equality and Native Americans in North America” in the recent book I had the delight to edit with our CBE president, Dr. Mimi Haddad, and my wife, the Rev. Dr. Aida Besancon Spencer, Global Voices on Biblical Equality: Women and Men Serving Together in the Church. My appearance favors my mother’s side of the family—she was second-generation Greek and Czech—so that I often joked, when we were side by side meeting people, that “he who had seen me had seen the mother.” However, my father and sister were decidedly blessed with the “Algonkin” Lenni-Lenape heritage on his side of the family, both of them favored with the striking features of the eastern coastal Amerindians: high cheekbones, a perceptible hook in the upper nose, olive skin, jet black hair, and deep brown eyes. As well, my father had a peripatetic temperament. One could drop him in the woods at any spot, and he could not only live off the land, but unerringly find his way home. He would leave in November, roam around his favorite farms and forests hunting first small game and then large game through December, and then come home with his buck on his car fender, butcher it the backyard, and give a welcome and generous portion to the pastor and the poor, a do-it-yourself approach perhaps rarer in “safe-serve” conscious central, urban New Jersey today, but a common activity of a fundamentalist church trustee back in the 1940s and ‘50s. When he was not hunting, he was digging for arrowheads in the local park—no “keep off the grass signs” in those days—and plying me with a steady schooling of Native American lore. Much later in life, I returned to his birthplace in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and, researching in the wonderful archives and museums there, discovered the Walam Olum or Red Score of the Lenape, the tribal legends that so remarkably parallel the biblical account of the creation, with its stories of disruption of peaceful humanity by an evil snake, a subsequent flood destroying hum...

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