From the Editors: Changing Our Lenses

MAYBE YOU’VE HEARD a land acknowledgement at a conference, sporting event, or worship service. These brief statements name the Indigenous territory on which an event takes place, a small sign of respect to the people who stewarded this land for millennia and whose deep relationship to the land continues today. For any of us who’ve settled on that land, these statements are intentionally unsettling, a way “to counteract the ideologies operating in the Doctrine of Discovery by naming that the land was not empty when Europeans first arrived,” as one group of Canadian churches put it.

But land acknowledgements become trite—an easy checkmark in the social justice box—if they are not part of ongoing relationships with local Indigenous communities. These relationships must include settlers being quiet and listening to some hard truths from Indigenous people about history, responsibility, and reparations.

Among these truths: How our Enlightenment-bound Western worldview has distorted our relationship with the earth, divorcing spirit from land, soul from body, the mind from the material. But Jesus didn’t think about the world this way, writes Randy Woodley in this issue. “He thought more like today’s premodern Indigenous people.”

For Woodley, a legal descendent of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, this mind-shift toward a more Indigenous and biblical view of the earth means recognizing that our relationship with the earth is sacred, a co-sustaining partnership. “Throughout the gospels Jesus gave creation a voice. We should do the same,” writes Woodley. What might that look like? If we take our cues from Indigenous people around the world, he says, it could mean living in a way that recognizes and respects the rights of the earth.

THIS MONTH, we are pleased to feature the work of illustrator Merisha Sequoia Lemmer (Choctaw) on our cover. Titled “Salmon Woman,” the original watercolor was inspired by her family member’s recovery from a long illness and the simultaneous return of salmon to a nearby waterway. “The role of human beings is unique,” writes Woodley, “and humans relate to the rest of creation uniquely.”