Truth, Healing and Repair: 
​A Resource for Churches on Environmental Justice with Indigenous Peoples

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Over the past few years, Creation Justice Ministries has embarked on the Truth and Healing Project to collaborate with Indigenous, environmental, and church leaders. We aim to connect movements addressing historical wrongs with solutions to today’s environmental challenges, such as pollution, land degradation, and climate resilience. Through this project, we invite churches nationwide to reflect on their relationships with the land and Indigenous peoples in their regions.

Here are some sneak peeks of the resource:

Introduction
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Truth, Healing, and Repair, is a comprehensive resource designed to guide churches in their journey towards environmental justice in partnership with Indigenous communities. This resource explores the vital connections between the historical injustices of land dispossession, genocide, and slavery and today’s environmental crises. As we heed the call of truth-telling, we open the path toward healing and restoration, seeking justice in line with Christ’s teachings of compassion and redemption.

What is the Truth and Healing Project?
We are living during an incredible moment in time. Movements of racial reparations and environmental justice are increasingly addressing the connections between the “original sins” of America – slavery and Indigenous land dispossession and genocide – and our contemporary crises of pollution, land degradation and social inequities. Our Christian church communities are called to truth-telling and healing work in the name of Jesus the healer.

This work begins with telling the painful truth about our own traumatizing involvement in colonization and enslavement. The violence perpetrated in the name of Christianity through the seizure and subjugation of others’ lands and bodies left scars and continued wounds on the landscape. We seek to listen to the land and to Indigenous Peoples who are still here in order to find healing today.

 Creation Justice Ministries initiated a fellowship program to explore opportunities for church communities to join the Truth and Healing movement in California. Several convergences drew us to listen to Indigenous, environmental justice, and church leaders on the ground in California. First, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a historic apology in 2019 to Indigenous tribes and acknowledged the harms the state caused as genocide. He established a Truth and Healing Council of Indigenous leaders to advise the state on healing strategies that will continue until 2025.

Model of Zacchaeus
​In Jesus’ time, the Roman imperial economic system extracted the resources of the land and imposed heavy taxes on poor people. Some scholars estimate the tax rate was as high as 40 percent, a burden that left many struggling to survive. Like many colonial powers, the Romans created an internal hierarchy of oppression among the colonized and divided Jewish people against one another by giving some power and access to wealth.

Zacchaeus was a pawn in this colonizing system as a chief tax collector among his own Jewish community. Tax collectors like Zacchaeus commonly charged additional fees to enrich themselves, which is why they were so often grouped with “sinners” in the New Testament and despised as a class of political traitors.
In the story, Zacchaeus climbs a tree to look down over the crowd gathered around Jesus in Jericho, and Jesus “looked up at him” (Luke 19:5). [Notice the physical elevation difference that corresponds to the hierarchy Zacchaeus occupies over poor people within the Roman power structure.] Surprisingly, Jesus invites himself over for dinner at Zacchaeus’ home, to the consternation of the grumbling crowd who label Zacchaeus a “sinner,” and Zacchaeus climbs down the tree.

Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus results in a change of heart related to his economic practices. 

Movements of Truth and Healing
We offer four “movements” of truth and healing from this story as we consider how the Zacchaeus story might apply to our work for truth and healing with Christian faith communities:

Remembering Through Jesus’ invitation, Zacchaeus remembers on multiple levels. He remembers the ways he has harmed people. He also remembers who he is (a child of Abraham, a child of God). Zacchaeus is “re-membered,” that is, restored as a member of the covenant community. 

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Repenting
In a radical extension of grace, Jesus asks Zacchaeus to “come down” from his position of power to welcome him. Zacchaeus responds with truth-telling about how he has benefited from defrauding others and commits to redistribution as a tangible step of repentance.

Repairing
Zacchaeus commits to direct repair for the harm he has committed. Jesus proclaims this process as saving Zacchaeus; his restitution is related to his salvation! The process of repair isn’t just an apology; it involves making amends for the harm done and seeking to make things as right as possible. 
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Reimagining 
We don’t know what happened next to Zacchaeus or the community in Jericho, but we wonder how this story of reparative justice may have disrupted the Roman structure of domination. Did it challenge the status quo and lead to “right relations” among oppressed and oppressors? 

In this resource, we invite you to apply this Restorative Justice cycle to situations of ecological and social harms to the land and to Indigenous communities here in California. How might your church community respond? The first step is to learn more about the story of the lands and Indigenous territories where you live, which we dive into in the next section.

On Whose Lands Do You Live, and What Is Their Story?
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Can you name the Indigenous lands where your faith community gathers? Land Acknowledgement statements can be a powerful first step in recognizing the long time Indigenous presence and stewardship of lands where you live. Without acknowledgement of the history and presence of Indigenous Peoples where we live, we cannot move toward repair today; though alone, this step is not sufficient...

​Tribes throughout California used and continue to use periodic cultural burns at regular intervals to renew the land for habitat, medicine, food, and basketry materials. Smaller fires were part of the landscape of California for thousands of years, and nowhere near the intensity and severity seen today. Before the Gold Rush, an estimated 4.5 million acres of land burned annually in California through cultural burns and naturally caused wildfires.

Colonization and Ecocide

At the time of this writing, the K-12 public school education system in California does not include in depth curriculum about the pre-colonial history of Indigenous tribes, nor about the history of colonization. You may feel a range of emotions including surprise, anger, shame, or grief when you encounter for the first time information about the major eras of Indigenous and white settler history. We invite you to pause, breathe, and use our lament and repudiation resources below with your church community.
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A timeline  is included in this section of the resource,  that gives oversight to several significant eras that impacted Indigenous Peoples in California since European colonization, especially as this history relates to the Christian Church. This timeline is not comprehensive, but we offer resources for further learning in the bibliography section of the resource.

Case Studies in Healing Initiatives

In this section, we highlight four Indigenous-led healing initiatives that our fellowship project identified, which are open to church community involvement and support. We encourage you to learn what is happening in your region as well and to get involved wherever you live! A starting list of opportunities for engagement by region follows these four initiatives.

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Case Studies Highlight

​California Chinook salmon are an endangered species increasingly impacted by climate change and a state water system designed for industrial agriculture. Approximately 80 percent of the state’s water is used for irrigation, and dams such as the Shasta Dam create barriers for historic salmon runs.
The Winnemem Wintu people have a deep cultural and spiritual connection with Chinook salmon, called Nur. In the Winnemem Wintu origin story from Mt. Shasta, the Nur gave humans their voice; in return, humans promised to speak for their relatives, the salmon.

Further Learning and Action

Church communities can take meaningful steps toward truth and healing by engaging in learning, advocacy, and relationship-building with Indigenous Peoples. This section includes 10 action steps that you can take, in addition to providing resources for videos, articles, books and maps to further your learning.  

Our Christian education resources are
made possible by grassroots contributions.
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