On Eagles Wings - Ron Hutchcraft Ministries

"People here don't want to hear about God. Here you're either Indian or you're Christian - and we're all Indian."

Welcome to the Sandy Flats Reservation. Wayne, a young man who strongly believes in the traditional ways of his people, pretty much summed up the Gospel-resistant thinking of the people of Sandy Flats. He came, like his friends and family, to play basketball, but he came preprogrammed to reject the Jesus option.

Sandy Flats is a small reservation with a lot of hurt. Tribal leaders have gone to prison for pocketing tribal income that could help the people of this struggling reservation. Current leaders seem to be playing the same game, even buying votes with cocaine. There are reports of youth trips where leaders have bought alcohol and drugs for the participants. I don't remember a reservation with no tribal police and no youth programs. But that's Sandy Flats. A place where nobody seems to care. Because nobody cares about them.

The battle for Dry River started several weeks ago, as the pastors and local ministry leaders were working to decide where the On Eagles' Wings events would be held. There were basically two options - the quite nice, comfortable indoor basketball court, or the broken-down, bent-up hoop, weed-covered court next to the graffiti-covered building in A-Town.

After a conference call between our team and theirs where we talked about the team's desire to be where the people are, the decision was made - A-Town.

The restoration kicked into high gear - local leaders spent hours pulling weeds, cleaning up the court, and fixing up the broken-down hoops. By the time the team arrived, there was still a graffiti-covered building, but the courts were ready to go!

"The Chairman would like to see you in his office."

A request like that can be good news or bad news. In this case, it was very good news. The President (known in other tribes as the Chairman or Chief) of the Fort Walker Tribe wanted to meet the leaders of the On Eagles' Wings team.

I went with team leaders who represented the Ojibwe, Nez Perce, Cree (Canada) and Hopi nations. We were told to expect that he would probably want to talk to us about all the great things about their reservation. He didn't. Almost immediately, he said, "Our young people here have a lot of problems." He candidly poured out his concern over more drugs, more alcohol and more gangs than this reservation has experienced before. The saddest part was his admission that "we don't know how to stop it."

It was the reservation that refused to happen. No matter how hard a burdened local believer tried, he just couldn't get anyone who would work together to make an On Eagles' Wings visit happen. Unexplainably, we just didn't feel the Lord wanted us to let the Copper River Reservation go.

That conviction got harder to hang onto when it was 36 hours before our first outreach and we still had no place to stay and no place to hold our events. It was the kind of situation that the annals of OEW history are filled with - things only God could do. Here again, your prayers - and those of our warriors - kick in decisively.