Indigenous Worldviews Offer Hope to a Besieged Planet

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(This blog entry offers a summary of an article written by the Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley. The highlighted parts of the entry represent direct quotes from Woodley. His article is entitled The Fullness Thereof: How Indigenous worldviews offer hope to a besieged planet and can be found in the May 2019 edition of Sojourners, pp. 15-19. Sojourners is a magazine devoted to “faith in action for social justice.” Susan and I have been reading this influential journal for decades. Randy Woodley is a Cherokee descendant, an ordained Christian minister, an activist, and a promoter of Indigenous values as an alternative to Western values. He is author of Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, a book I highly recommend!)

Woodley begins his article by suggesting that we who are seduced by an Enlightenment-bound Western worldview need to change our lenses. He sees the influence of Platonic dualism within the Western worldview as especially sinister and ubiquitous. Such a focus elevates and absolutizes the spirit, soul, and mind while reducing or dismissing the importance of the earth, the body, and the material. Such dualistic thinking has been disastrous for every aspect of our culture. Related to this Platonic dualism is the presence of “hierarchy, individualism, patriarchy, utopianism, racism, triumphalism, religious intolerance, greed, and anthropocentrism. Woodley sees dualism as the root of all kinds of evil in Western civilization. 

Indigenous Peoples can offer us ways to heal this earth as well as hope for a future that is a desirable alternative to the nightmare predicted by climate scientists if we continue our present patterns of greed, production, and consumption. 

This Native defender of creation points out that most of the rest of the world does not understand life through such a Western worldview. He also maintains that Jesus thought and lived more like premodern Indigenous people than today’s Western thinker. In fact, he argues that not a single writer of the Bible saw this world and life through a Western lens. If this is true (which it is), then one could assume that Indigenous Peoples would understand Jesus and the premodern Scriptures far better than Enlightenment-cursed Westerners. With such wisdom, Indigenous Peoples can offer us ways to heal this earth as well as hope for a future that is a desirable alternative to the nightmare predicted by climate scientists if we continue our present patterns of greed, production, and consumption. 

The following are some quotes (in bold print) and insights from Woodley’s article that I find instructive and provocative. We ignore this wisdom at our and future generations’ peril. 

  • Each area of creation is working with the Creator to maintain earth’s balance. The rain and snow, oceans and sun all sustain life on earth. Animals regulate each other within their various natural cycles. Plants provide oxygen, food, and shelter for all creation to exist together. As human beings, we are co-sustainers with the rest of creation to ensure the abundant life for all creation the Creator intended. And God said that is good. Woodley goes on to point out that the New Testament recognizes Jesus as the earth’s creator and sustainer. (See John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1). As followers of Jesus, we simply cooperate with him in these tasks of maintaining the balance and harmony of creation.  
  • Like Jesus, Indigenous Peoples understand their relationship with creation as paramount to the abundant life God intends for all humanity. In other words, to be human is to care for creation. This feeling we have of ourselves as a people, including our history and cultures, being connected to the land is perhaps the single most glaring difference between an Indigenous Native North American worldview and a Euro-Western worldview. . .But if we are all to survive the 21st century, things must change so that our Euro-Western friends can sense a similar connection. 
  • Woodley applauds the work of secular environmentalists in addressing the climate emergency and the need to change our unsustainable ways of life. However, he finds such initiatives helpful only in the short-run, because they focus on preserving earth and water for a particular use. Unless there are guiding values that become rooted in a familial love of creation, these short-term initiatives simply may represent a more sanitized version of utilitarianism using the earth without deeply loving the earth as sacred creation. Utilitarianism (using the earth out of self-interest, for good or bad) has been, in part, the problem.
  • Inculcating a love for the earth as sacred creation is where Woodley believes Indigenous Peoples can be most helpful because they understand:
  1. Creation exists because of a Creator.
  2. Life is intrinsically valuable because it is a gift from the Creator, and, therefore, it is sacred, meaning that sacred purpose is crucial to our existence.
  3. The role of human beings is unique, and humans relate to the rest of creation uniquely. This includes restoring harmony through gratitude, reciprocity, and ceremony between the Creator, humans, and all other parts of creation. 
  4. Creation does not exist to be ignored in isolation, but creation is the Creator’s first discourse in which humanity has a seat of learning and in which the discourse is continuous. This observation reminds me of the Franciscan belief that creation is the First Bible.
  5. Harmony is not simply understood as a philosophical idea; it is about how life operates and the only way that abundant life can continue, if life is to be lived as the Creator intends.
  • At this point in human history, we must realize that the Industrial Age has written a check to our world that has insufficient funds. Only a worldview encompassing the interconnectedness between Creator, human beings, and the rest of creation as one family will sustain abundant life. St. Francis understood this interconnectedness when he spoke of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.”
  • Woodley promotes the “radical” idea that nature has rights. Such an idea sounds radical simply because of our own addiction to greed and our blindness regarding the inherent rights of a creation valued as precious by a Creator. He says that we can pass laws to protect Christ’s creation—not just because of the current climate crisis but because we love what God loves, and we want to understand the world more like Jesus, earth’s creator and sustainer. The author references laws and constitutional amendments to protect the earth in Ecuador and Bolivia and suggests we in the U. S. and Canada can do the same. In fact, more than three dozen U. S. municipalities have adopted similar “rights of nature” laws and regulations, including Pittsburgh. (I can see Mister Rogers smiling on such efforts. Pittsburgh was his headquarters for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.) At the World’s Peoples Conference on Climate Change held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in April, 2010, more than 35,000 people from 140 nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. (See TheRightsofNature.org.) Woodley laments the travesty that in the U. S., corporations are legally protected “persons” but the earth that supports them has no real voice or rights. This is, in part, due to the disastrous Citizens United decision by our corrupt and insane U. S. Supreme Court. 
  • Woodley ends his article suggesting that Euro-Western people might also consider developing new ways of expressing their thanks through outdoor, earth-honoring ceremony. Through expressing gratitude in ceremony, Indigenous Peoples reveal to others and themselves the connection between Creator, human beings, the earth, and all the rest of creation. If creation is sacramental—which it is—then we Western Christians might do well to discover “the cathedrals and shrines” that surround us in the natural world. Worshipping in nature and with nature might sensitize us to those holy vital connections which weave the web of life upon which everything depends. By returning to the First Bible, we may reconnect to the Original Source and discover in transforming ways what it truly means to be made in the image of God.
  • RZ here: The Bible is full of references to God, our relationship to creation, our vocation to care for the earth, and the amazement and wonder creation should inspire in us. The opening chapters of Genesis, the prophets, the Psalms, the wisdom literature, Jesus’ teachings, Paul’s letters (especially Romans 8, I Corinthians 15, Colossians, and Ephesians), and even Revelation (when interpreted with an awareness of its context and symbolism) all bear witness to the connections we have to creation which are inherent in our identities as human beings. I end with Job 12:7-10 as translated in The Message. (I have altered the translation to refer to God as a She since Wisdom is described as the feminine character of God.)

G. Harvey – Peaceful Encampment – ArtUSA.com

BUT ASK THE ANIMALS WHAT THEY THINK—LET THEM TEACH YOU; 

LET THE BIRDS TELL YOU WHAT’S GOING ON. 

PUT YOUR EAR TO THE EARTH—LEARN THE BASICS. 

LISTEN—THE FISH IN THE OCEAN WILL TELL YOU THEIR STORIES. 

ISN’T IT CLEAR THAT THEY ALL KNOW AND AGREE 

THAT GOD IS SOVEREIGN, THAT SHE HOLDS ALL THINGS IN HER HAND—

EVERY LIVING SOUL, YES, EVERY BREATHING CREATURE? 

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