Heavily dressed for the half-meter of snow covering the hillside, a small group of people stood quietly around what looked like a perfect, if rather large, Christmas tree. Mostly American Indians from a variety of tribes and all members of an Indian congregation, the people were speaking prayers on behalf of the tree.
It could have been most any annual congregational outing to harvest a Christmas tree for their church, except that these prayers were a thorough mixture of Christian prayers and traditional Indian tribal prayers. Some of the people were actually speaking to the tree, speaking words of consolation, apology, purpose, and promise. The two pastors held tobacco in their hands, ready to offer it back to the Creator, to offer it for the life of this tree, to offer it to the four directions, above and below, to offer it in order to maintain the harmony and balance of creation even in the perpetration of an act of violence.
There is a real sense of cultural value being exposed in this gathering. There is here an attitude toward creation and all the createds that sets American Indians apart from other Americans and most Europeans. Yet it is rather characteristic of a great many of the world's indigenous peoples and represents a set of cultural values that perseveres even in those indigenous communities that have been converted to Christianity.
Perhaps an outsider would describe the attitude of these Indians as one of awe or wonderment. We American Indians think of it as neither, but would prefer to call it "respect" -- the appropriate attitude of respect necessary to fulfill our responsibility as part of the created whole, necessary to help maintain the harmony and balance, the interdependence and interrelationship of all things in our world.
Even more important is the underlying notion of reciprocity. The prayers and the offering of tobacco are reciprocal acts of giving something back to the earth and to all of creation in order to maintain balance even as we disrupt the balance by cutting down this tree.
The question Indian cultures pose for Christian peoples, especially those of Europe and North America, is this: How can respect for a tree or rock, animals or eventually other human beings find any place in the industrial-commercial world that has emerged out of modernity and now threatens all of creation with postmodern extinction? And what sort of reciprocity do we engage in, will we engage in? What do we return to the earth when we clear cut a forest or strip mine, leaving miles upon miles of earth totally bare?
Perhaps more painfully, the same question can be put in terms of human justice: Where is the reciprocity, the maintaining of cosmic balance, with respect to those who are suffering varieties of oppression in our modern world -- blacks in southern Africa, non-Jews in Palestine, Tamils in Sri Lanka, or tribal peoples in Latin America?
Like many other Third and Fourth World peoples, I too have worried that the growing concern for and awareness of the ecological crisis facing all of creation might and often has distracted people of genuine conscience from their awareness of and commitment to issues of justice and liberation. The concern for the survival of fish in mountain lakes polluted by acid rain, for instance, is surely noble. However, when that concern distracts our attention from the daily suffering of blacks in southern Africa, it becomes an actual participant in the oppression imposed on those human sisters and brothers.
For my part, I must constantly remind good Christian people in North America of the continued oppression of American Indians: our very high unemployment rate; the destruction of our cultures; the theft of our lands; and our greater victimization by disease and dysfunctuality resulting in horribly short longevity statistics. The need for justice, for churches that will proclaim the "good news to the poor and oppressed," is indeed real, even in the midst of North America's wealth.
Nevertheless, I want to argue that respect for creation must be our starting point for theological reflection in our endangered world. More explicitly, the American Indian perspective is that justice and peace will flow as a natural result of genuine and appropriate concern for creation.
At a theological level, the sequence of words in the World Council of Churches' program Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation is problematic for Native Americans, and I expect for other Fourth World indigenous peoples. And the "integrity of creation" must be understood as much more than a concern for ecological disintegration. It may be that the inherent spirituality of American Indians, Pacific Islanders, tribal Africans, and other indigenous peoples may help point us in the right direction.
AMERICAN INDIANS AND OTHER indigenous peoples have a long-standing confidence that they have much to teach Europeans and North Americans about the world and human relationships in the world. They are confident in the spiritual foundations of their insights, confident that those foundations can become a source of healing and reconciliation for all creation. A couple of simple examples come from an Indian perspective.
My Indian ancestors had a relationship with God as Creator that was healthy and responsible long before they knew of or confessed the gospel of Jesus Christ. This relationship began with the recognition of the Other as Creator, the creative force behind all things that exist, and long predated the coming of the missionaries.
In all that they did, our Indian ancestors acknowledged the goodness of the Creator and of all creation, including themselves. That was the point of the stories, the focus of their prayers, and the purpose of the ceremonies. They recognized the balance and harmony that characterized all of the created universe: Winter and summer were held in balance with one another. So also were hunting and planting, sky and earth, hot and cold, sun and moon, female and male, women and men. Our ancestors recognized all this as good, just as God does at the end of the sixth day (Genesis 1:31).
All American Indian spiritual insight, hence Indian theology, begins with creation, and this is reflected in the basic liturgical posture of Indians in many North American tribes. Our prayers are most often said with the community assembled into some form of circle. In fact, the circle is a key symbol for self-understanding in these tribes, representing the whole of the universe and our part in it.
We see ourselves as co-equal participants in the circle, standing neither above nor below anything else in God's creation. There is no hierarchy in our cultural context, even of species, because the circle has no beginning or ending. All the createds participate together, each in their own way, to preserve the wholeness of the circle.
When a group of Indians form a circle to pray, all know that the prayers have already begun with the representation of a circle. No words have yet been spoken and in some ceremonies no words need be spoken, but the intentional physicality of our formation has already expressed our prayer and deep concern for the wholeness of all of God's creation.
The Lakota and Dakota peoples have a phrase used in all their prayers that aptly illustrates the Native American sense of the centrality of creation. The phrase, Mitakuye oyasin, "For all my relations," functions somewhat like the word "Amen" in European and American Christianity. As such, it is used to end every prayer, and often it is in itself a whole prayer, being the only phrase spoken. Like most native symbols, mitakuye oyasin is polyvalent in its meaning. Certainly, one is praying for one's close kin -- aunts, cousins, children, grandparents. And relations can be understood as tribal members or even all Indian people.
At the same time, the phrase includes all human beings, all two-leggeds as relatives of one another, and the ever-expanding circle does not stop there. Every Lakota who prays this prayer knows that our relatives necessarily include the four-leggeds, the wingeds, and all the living-moving things on Mother Earth. One Lakota teacher has suggested that a better translation of mitakuye oyasin would read: "For all the above-me and below-me and around-me things: That is for all my relations."
These examples illustrate the extensive image of interrelatedness and interdependence -- symbolized by the circle -- and the importance of reciprocity and respect for one another for maintaining the wholeness of the circle. The American Indian concern for starting theology with creation is a need to acknowledge the goodness and inherent worth of all of God's creatures. We experience evil or sin as disruptions in that delicate balance, disruptions that negate the intrinsic worth of any of our relatives.
WE NEED TO COME TO A NEW (or perhaps very old) understanding of creation, one that begins to image creation as an ongoing eschatological act and not just God's initiatory act. We must begin to see creation as the eschatological basis even for the Christ event.
If this is difficult, it may be because the cultures in which the gospel has come to find a home in the West are so fundamentally oriented toward temporality and so disoriented toward spatiality. This characterizes our theologies and especially our interpretation of key biblical themes and texts.
It seems obvious enough that spatial categories do not necessarily exclude the temporal, nor vice versa. The possibility of spatial priority in language for the kingdom of God becomes pronounced in any Native American reading of scripture, however, because the Indian world is as decidedly spatial in its orientation as the modern Western world is temporal. In fact any Indian reader of Mark or the synoptic gospels is bound to think first of all in terms of the question "Where?" with regard to the kingdom.
The image seems to represent a symbolic value, and the parameters of the symbol might be filled in as follows. First, the gospels seem to view the divine hegemony as something that is in process. It is drawing near or emerging (Mark 1:15). Yet it is also "among us" or in our midst (Luke 17:21). It is something that can be experienced by the faithful here and now, even if only proleptically. Its full emergence is still in the future. Second, the symbolic value captured by the imagery in no small part includes a view of an ideal world. And third, the structural definition of that ideal world is, above all else, relational.
I am convinced that the imagery of divine rule is essentially creation imagery, that the ideal world symbolically represented in the image builds on the divine origin of the cosmos as an ideal past and an ideal future. It is relational, first of all, because it implies a relationship between the created order of things and its Creator, and second because it implies a relationship between all of the things created by the Creator.
Human beings may have been created as the last of all the created (Genesis 1), or perhaps a human being was created first (Genesis 2). That is really inconsequential to this point. What is at stake is that the harmony and balance of the created order was good. While that order has been somewhat shaken by the human createds, it is still the ideal state to which we all look forward in Christ Jesus. The process is going on now, and all of creation is a part of the process.
Repentance
An understanding of the imperative "Repent!" in Mark 1:15 is also important to the concept of the kingdom of God. The underlying Aramaic sense of "return" for metanoia is more helpful than the Greek notion of "change of mind." Repentance is key to the establishment of divine hegemony because it involves a "return," namely a return to God. Feeling sorry for one's sins is not a part of repentance at all, though it may be the initial act of confession.
Even in the most Greek of the gospel writers, in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, repentance is not a penitential emotion but instead carries the Hebrew sense of return. In Acts 2:37, people feel penitential emotion as a result of Peter's sermon and come to him to ask what they must do. His response is to say, "Repent and be baptized."
They already feel sorry for their sins. That's not what he requires of them. The Hebrew notion of repentance really is calling on God's people to recognize the divine hegemony, to return to God, to return to the ideal relationship between Creator and the created.
The establishment of any ecclesiastical structure should, then, be an attempt to actualize as much as possible (proleptically) this ideal. A church is an attempt on the part of a community of believers to respond to God's call to relationship, first to relationship with God as Creator, and second with one another as createds. A church is a response to Jesus' vision of an ideal world characterized by love of God and love of one's neighbor as oneself.
But this ideal world can only be actualized through repentance, that is, by "returning" to God as Creator and rightful sovereign of all creation. Hence church is a vehicle of repentance or "return." Moreover, this ideal world which exists only within the divine hegemony is "good"; it is marked by divine balance and harmony.
THE THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATION OF Native Americans, rooted as it is in the dynamic, generating power of creation, can help show new direction for the trinitarian theology of our churches. If we begin with an affirmation of God as Creator and ourselves as created, then perhaps a spiritual transformation is possible that can bring us all closer to recognizing the kingdom of God in our midst. Perhaps we can acknowledge our humanness in new and more significant ways, understanding that confession precedes return, and that both become the basis for living in harmony and balance with God and all creation.
Besides confessing our individual humanness, this means confessing the humanness of our churches, our theologies, and the world economic order in which we participate. Then it is possible to make our repentance, to return, to go back from whence we came, that is, to go back to the Creator in whom we, like all of creation, "live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). We must go back to a proper relationship with the Creator, confessing our human inclination to put ourselves in the Creator's place, renewing our understanding of ourselves and our institutions as mere creatures. We must go back to a recognition of ourselves as a part of and integrally related to all of creation.
The Indian understanding of creation as sacred, of Mother Earth as the source of all life, goes far beyond the notion of such Western counterinstitutions as Sierra Club or Greenpeace. It embraces far more than concern for harp seals or a couple of ice-bound whales. It embraces all of life, from trees and rocks to international relations. And this knowledge informs all of the community's activity, from hunting to dancing and even to writing grant proposals or administering government agencies.
It especially concerns itself with the way we all live together. Perforce, it has to do with issues of justice and fairness, and ultimately with peace.
Indian peoples have experienced and continue to experience endless oppression as a result of what some would call the barbaric invasion of America. And we certainly suspect that the oppression we have experienced is intimately linked to the way the immigrants pray and how they understand creation and their relationship to creation and Creator.
Moreover, we suspect that the greed which motivated the displacement of all indigenous peoples from their lands of spiritual rootedness is the same greed that threatens the destiny of the earth and the continued oppression of so many peoples. Whether it is the stories the immigrants tell or the theologies they develop to interpret those stories, something appears wrong to Indian people.
But not only do Indians continue to tell the stories, sing the songs, speak the prayers, and perform the ceremonies that root themselves deeply in Mother Earth, they are actually audacious enough to think that their stories and their ways of reverencing creation will some day win over the immigrants and transform them. Optimism and enduring patience seem to run in the life blood of Native American peoples.
Mitakuye oyasin! For all my relatives!
George Tinker was assistant professor of cross-cultural ministries at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado when this article appeared. This article is adapted from a speech he delivered at the World Council of Churches' Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation Convocation in Seoul, Korea in March 1990.
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