We Belong to the Land: What Indigenous Voices Teach the Church About Kinship

During our Season of Creation public witness events in Washington D.C., we were joined by a gentleman named Adam Greene. Adam’s title is the Emissary of the Great Tayac of the Piscataway Indian Nation to the Indigenous European People in the Western Hemisphere, a lofty title with an important mission. Adam is an ambassador of his local tribe to the dominant culture in the D.C. area. But as I listened to him at both events, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Adam was more than an ambassador, he was a missionary. Adam’s mission is to try to lead people of the dominant culture back to an understanding of themselves as a part of the land in kinship with the rest of Creation. As I heard him speak, it felt like he was trying to save our souls from the corrosive influences of wealth, power, isolation, and technology. It wasn’t that he was trying to bring us a new Gospel. He was attempting to help us to hear truths in our current gospel that we often overlook. 

I was struck in the first D.C. gathering by Adam’s insistence that the texts of the Bible, particularly those of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) are an indigenous text. He pointed to the second creation story in Genesis 2 and highlighted how God’s command to “keep and till” the land echoes the “original instructions” that Creator gives in other indigenous mythologies about how to care for the land.

It’s an idea I’ve heard from Christian theologians, but it was encouraging to hear an indigenous person speak these thoughts aloud.

It was a call for us to not only honor the indigenous voices that surround us today, but to find the indigeneity of our own texts and tradition and to be informed by that heritage. 
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In recent years, many Christians in the West  have begun to take ownership of the harmful legacies their ancestors’ encounters with Indigenous people have left behind. Concepts like the Doctrine of discovery and Manifest Destiny have left in their wake cycles of genocide, displacement, and marginalization. The othering of those native to the lands that were conquered and occupied continues in rhetoric that is uttered today. Yet we who are trying to take responsibility for those legacies often participate in a different kind of othering. It is one where we look at our Indigenous brothers and sisters as mystical beings with otherworldly connections to the created order, one which we are incapable of attaining for ourselves. 
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What I heard in Adam’s words, thoughts that I have also heard reverberating in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Randy Woodley, and others, is that it is important for those of us who have been steeped in Western culture to recognize our own indigeneity, not in a way of cultural appropriation, but in a way where we can hear our own texts as the voices of indigenous wisdom that call us into greater relationship with the Creator through the Created.

It is a call to recognize ourselves as connected to place in a way that makes it clear that our actions on the land (or on behalf of the land) have a real and definite impact. It’s an insistence that we belong to the land, air, and water and those things can never truly be owned by us, not without eroding their identity and our own. 

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Earlier this year we released a resource entitled Truth, Healing, and Repair: A Christian Call to Environmental Justice and Solidarity with Indigenous People. As the title suggests, we don’t imagine that true justice for Creation can happen without pursuing justice for those who have historically guarded and tended to the land. Among the many elements of the resource, we present a four part movement toward restorative justice with our indigenous kin: 
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1) remembering - this process begins not by ignoring our history, but by recalling it
2) repenting - embracing the truth of the damages done by dominant culture with humility and intention for change
3) repairing - this requires moving beyond land acknowledgements and apologies into actions that genuinely heal and restore relationship. 
4) reimagining - what could a future look like where we work hand in hand in creative and courageous ways to honor people and the land? That is a question worth pursuing! 

As we observe Indigenous people’s month, we recognize that the gift our sisters and brothers offer us is not a mysticism that is beyond our reach. It is an invitation to a way of being that is more like what God created us to be. In her essay from All We Can Save: Truth Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, Sherri Mitchel of the Penawahpskek nation offers us this reflection: 

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Human beings have fallen out of alignment with life…As a result people have forgotten how to live in relationship with the rest of Creation. They have lost their respect for the elders in the natural world, such as trees, waters, soils, and millions of other species that thrived on Mother Earth long before humans arrived. Therefore the greatest contribution that Indigenous people may be able to make at this time is to continue providing the world with living models of sustainability that are rooted in ancient wisdom and that inform us how to live in balance with all of our relations on Mother Earth. ​

May learn from those models and imagine a new way of living on this planet. 

Derrick Weston
Director of Theological Education & Formation 
Creation Justice Ministries