Indigenous wisdom

Review: Shalom and the Community of Creation

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Cover image of "Shalom and the Community of Creation" by Randy S. Woodley

Shalom and the Community of Creation (Prophetic Christianity) Randy S. Woodley. Wm. B. Eerdmans (ISBN: 9780802866783) 2012.

Summary: The “Harmony Way” of the indigenous and biblical shalom between peoples, with creation, and the Creator.

Shalom is one of the most beautiful of Hebrew words. Often translated as “peace,” it signifies far more. Shalom exists where there is health, wholeness, and flourishing in human relationships and communities, with the rest of the creation, and with the Creator. Randy Woodley, whose Ph.D dissertation is on the indigenous idea of “the Harmony Way,” explores how the indigenous vision may enrich and flesh out the idea of shalom.

Woodley begins with our alienation from God, others, and the rest of the creation, so characteristic of modern experience. As a Christian theologian, he recognizes how the expansive, universal vision of the wholeness and peace of shalom addresses this deep human emptiness. Among Native Americans, the ideas of balance and harmony, often including peacemaking ceremonies illuminates shalom. He then discusses how shalom centers in Jesus, who inaugurates a kingdom that is a community of shalom, a community of creation.

Turning to creation, Woodley explores Jesus’ intimate connection to the good creation. Drawing on indigenous ideas of the sacredness of creation, he proposes that Jesus restores the sense of creation as something holy, and not just something to be used, and of our inextricable and reciprocal relationship to the rest of creation. Furthermore, the harmony way challenges the dualism of modern life. For example, this speaks to the dualism of oppressed and oppressors. Instead, harmony understands that we are all related. Harmony and the wholeness of shalom also transcend the thinking/doing divide. Not unlike the Hebrew idea, harmony focuses on experiential learning. One knows something when one has experienced it.

One of the most challenging chapters in the book dealt with the conflict between indigenous and western ideas of time and place. For Westerners, place is often transient and the time orientation is event and future oriented. By contrast the indigenous idea values place and a community’s past and present in that place. This is why things begin when everyone is present. Woodley explores how such a place-orientation is closer to biblical shalom in emphasizing wholistic relationships between Creator, people, and land. Storytelling is also a shalom practice, emphasizing heart to heart and not just head to head communication. Finally, shalom and the harmony way is about generous community, the extravagant pursuit of the lost and the celebration that follows. It’s about justice that restores what has been stolen. Then alienated relationships can be restored.

Woodley’s book is yet another reminder of how much we have to learn from believers who aren’t like us. The Harmony Way of Native Americans turns the concept of shalom into a rich way of life. It illuminates the shalom in scripture that our own cultural blinders have prevented us from seeing. In a country so much at war with itself as well as the land, might God use the wisdom of Indigenous Christians to bring shalom? Might it even mean the healing of our national sins against indigenous people and their treasured lands? That’s a big ask, but not too great for the Prince of Shalom.

Review: The Serviceberry

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Cover image of "The Serviceberry" by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, illustrations by John Burgoyne. Scribner (ISBN: 9781668072240) 2024.

Summary: A day of picking serviceberries leads to an extended reflection on natural abundance, reciprocity, and gratitude.

An invitation to pick serviceberries results in an extended meditation by Robin Wall Kimmerer on “abundance and reciprocity in the natural world,” in the words of her subtitle. She marvels at the abundant clusters of berries, rapidly filling her pail. This is sheer gift, both to her and the birds filling their bellies” with berries. All one can do is give thanks for this gift, and share the abundance. As she does so, she considers the web of reciprocity the berries represent. Bushes nourished by fallen leaves, birds nourished by berries. Birds spreading their seeds, spreading the bushes to new locations. Kimmerer recalls how the berries are part of the traditional Potawatomi food economy.

It’s an economy unlike the market economy that dominates most of our economic transactions. Instead, Kimmerer reflects on the gift economy her serviceberry experience represents. Specifically, it reminds her of the source of the gift and how that implies care both for the source and for the gift itself. And she considers how commoditization of gifts promotes accumulation rather than sharing, scarcity rather than abundance.

I was struck by how contrary to our individualism are the gift economies she describes. Instead of accumulating paper currency or its equivalent, the currency of gift economies is gratitude and connection. The prosperity of each is shared in the anticipation of enjoying the generosity of others. One charts, not the flow of money, but relationships. Kimmerer points to the potlatches of Pacific Northwest people as a well-known example of gift economy.

She reflects on ways gift economies function in our mixed economies. These range from free garden produce stands to Little Free Libraries (and their larger tax-supported counterparts). They include public parks and lands that we all enjoy. The latter part of the book then considers the ethic of honorable harvest in gift economies, versus the unchecked extractive nature of our commodity economies. Through a question posed by a fellow tribal member, she queries, “If the economy requires people to consume more resources than the earth can replenish, just to keep the whole thing from collapsing, isn’t it time for a new economy?”

Kimmerer is not an economist but an ecologist. But what she observes from her ecology and the wisdom of indigenous peoples, makes a case for economists to begin thinking about that new economy. What is most notable for me however is that Kimmerer’s ecology and her gift economy are full of gratitude, generosity, joy, connectedness, and wholeness. It is not an ethic of fear, guilt, or burden, or survival of the economically fittest. There is a goodness about what she describes that is perhaps the most powerful argument for devoting ourselves to learn the gift economy. G’chi megwech, Robin Wall Kimmerer!

Review: We Survived the End of the World

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We Survived the End of the World, Steven Charleston. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Summary: For a culture facing apocalyptic times, Charleston proposes we might learn from the prophets of the Native peoples of North America, who brought messages to help their own people face the apocalypse of the colonists and their successors.

Anyone attuned to what is happening in our world may easily be inclined to believe that we are living in apocalyptic times–a rapidly warming world with extreme weather, extensive fires, droughts, and floods, an endless series of mass shootings, regional wars that threaten to engulf the world, divisive and dysfunctional politics and failing states. We can try to ignore what is around us, whether in some form of narcotized state, or sheer busyness, or in an “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism. If we believe that human beings are meant for better than these responses, we face the challenge of how then are we to live in these times, sustaining both our humanity and our hope.

Steven Charleston proposes that we are not the first peoples to confront such times. In this book he reminds readers that the indigenous peoples of North America faced a similar apocalypse when Europeans came to “Turtle Island,” spread over its length and breadth, “discovered” it, and claimed it for their own. While defeated, displaced, and killed in large numbers, these indigenous people did not disappear. Charleston argues that a critical factor in their survival were the prophets whose visions offered them strategies that sustained them. He considers four prophets in particular.

Ganiodaiio of the Seneca proposed flipping the communal culture of his people upside down. Such a culture contributed to a malaise of dysfunctional behaviors. He advocated a kind of personal responsibility of the individual to the tribe’s survival that built cohesion. Likewise, Charleston proposes that we may need to flip the other way, from our toxic individualism to a communal focus that both values liberty and the common good.

Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee created a fixed place for his people to stand, Prophetstown. First in Greenville, and later in northwest Indiana, he gathered people from many tribes to live alongside each other as a kind of “City on a Hill.” Charleston believes we need to form such communities today, physical, and in his case, virtual that offer a focus of purpose and hope for diverse peoples. Just as Prophetstown went where Tenskwatawa went, Charleston proposed we can carry this city within us.

Smohalla of the Wanapams urged listening to what the earth says. He proposed that we live within a covenant triad of the Creator, the human community, and the earth, also a living entity. Smohalla points us to the truth that the ultimate answer to our environmental crisis is not science but love for the living world that sustains us as well as for each other and the Creator.

Wovoka of the Paiute taught the Ghost Dance, a circle dance without drums but only a shared chant. It was a dance that fostered hope of a better day that ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee in which Ghost Shirts were no protection from bullets. Paradoxically, it was a dance that unified people in hope and challenged others with the long, hard work of reconciliation. Indigenous people have never ceased dancing the Dance,

Finally, he turns to the narratives of the Hopi people of the Southwest. They tell a story of a single humanity, separated by migrations, and also there is the hope of a reconciliation, not only with these people but with the Mother who sustains us.

On one hand, the question may be asked, were these visions for the indigenous peoples or for all? Certainly the focus is on indigenous peoples against the apocalypse of colonization. Yet there are the intimations of a wider humanity. It is on the basis of this that Charleston sees a word for the wider humanity facing a global humanity.

It is striking to me as a white North American that we have often discounted the teachings of those we have oppressed, whether it is a vision of loving not only the Creator but the Creation, a living world that sustains us or the Beloved Community and understanding of suffering that comes through the Black church. What an interesting irony that there might be critical messages from these peoples that might mean life for all who now call “Turtle Island” our home?

Charleston holds out the hope that if enough of us heed, we might avert apocalypse. But it seems that the messages of the prophets he cites have to do with how we might live through apocalypse. That also seems to be the focus of the apocalyptic prophets of Christianity who encourage people to suffer for righteousness without losing heart or faith or communal cohesion, and to hope in a new creation. They don’t promise that we will save the earth or avert apocalypse but rather participate with the Creator in its renewal. So while I differ at this one point from Charleston, it seems that to welcome and listen to the lessons of the indigenous prophets not only offers wisdom for our present time but may also be a first small step of coming in a good way in the work of reconciliation and coming together as a common humanity to meet the existential challenges of our time.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.

Review: Braiding Sweetgrass

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Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Summary: A collection of essays centered around the culture of sweetgrass, combining indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an environmental biologist teaching in the SUNY system. She is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She has dedicated her career to the integration of scientific understanding of the environment with indigenous wisdom. The book is organized around the different aspects of sweetgrass culture: planting, tending, picking, braiding, and burning sweetgrass. The braiding of sweetgrass is a metaphor for the weaving of science and indigenous wisdom in understanding the gifts of the earth and how we give back–how humans and all living things sustain each other.

Listening to other living things, indeed all the elements of the earth and reciprocity are two themes that run through the quietly eloquent essays organized around these five aspects of sweetgrass culture. In “The Gift of Strawberries,” wild strawberries come as a gift, an early harvest, but gratitude and reciprocity involve clearing land for runners to establish new plants, resulting in an even greater gift of strawberries. Likewise with sweetgrass, which comes as a gift. One receives only what is needed, leaving half, which we learns results in sweetgrass flourishing more than if left alone. Usually some gift is left, perhaps a sprinkling of tobacco leaves. And these gifts in turn are braided, given to friends, and burned in ceremony. She reflects on the Thanksgiving address and the giving of thanks to all the living things from the Earth and the waters to the trees. In an essay titled “The Honorable Harvest” she brings together so much of this wisdom in a kind of credo:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
                                                    --Kimmerer, p. 183.

She writes of becoming indigenous to a place, one with its wisdom. This reminds me of the writings of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson who pay attention to what the land is saying and farm in harmony with what they learn.

One of the most enjoyable essays was her narrative of taking students for what she calls “shopping” in a cattail marsh–“Wal-marsh.” Materials for clothes and sleeping mats, rhizomes with carbs, stalks of pith for vegetables–even toilet paper! They learn both about the biology of a cattail marsh, and lessons about the tremendous gifts bestowed upon us. We say “thanks,” we care, and yet the earth gives us so much greater abundance.

There is so much that is attractive in what one finds her, and I think much we might all learn from this indigenous wisdom. Where I respectfully part as a Christian is with her “language of animacy,” really a form of animism that assumes a spirit or soul not only in all living things but even rock, water, cloud, and fire. What I respect is the attentive care and mindful use of all things–what I think implied in the “tending and keeping of the garden” in the early chapters of Genesis, or the knowledge of place we see in Berry and Jackson.

I am also impressed with the ways this professor integrates indigenous wisdom and science in her research and work with students. I wonder how many from other faith traditions make the effort to braid the wisdom of their faith with their research. Whether we accept everything about indigenous religion or not, I believe there is much that can be learned, and crucial wisdom in the American context for the care and renewal of the land we often have pillaged. Kimmerer has shared a gift from her own people. Will we receive it and listen and say “thank you” and share what we can in response? What could be braided together?