Indigenous Theology

Welcome to our Sacred Covenants series! You can find other posts in the series here. 

Susie Silversmith and her husband Richard visited the Standing Rock Sioux camp recently to answer a call to people of faith to stand with Standing Rock. For more reflection from Richard and Susie and background on the situation in North Dakota, visit this Banner article. Susie was interviewed by Danielle Rowaan after her return.  

This post, detailing a CRC member’s participation in and appreciation of a full moon ceremony with Ojibway Indigenous people, provoked a lot of discussion at Synod 2017. Some people believed that the post promoted syncretism, inappropriate blending of one religion with another, and worship of a false god, while some people believed that the writer was turning away from Eurocentric expressions of Christianity and choosing to worship the one true God in non-European ways (ie. contextualization).

Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas recounts the final words of Hatuey, an Indigenous leader on the island of Hispaniola who resisted the conquest: 

I had escaped from the concrete jungle one August summer day to be connected with the land once again. Every summer, it is my tradition to harvest medicines for ceremonial and spiritual practices. Being Cree, two of those medicines are sage and sweetgrass. With every medicine I took from the land, I would place tobacco down & offer my prayers. With every prayer, I acknowledged Creator’s masterpiece all around me. With every acknowledgement, I was reminded that I am a mere strand in this web of life. There I was, in the thick of this web of life, in the midst of creation, on the prairies

Looking for summer beach reads? The staff of the Christian Reformed Centre for Public Dialogue and the Office of Social Justice have done the searching for you.

I have had a pair of moosehide moccasins for five years now that I absolutely love. I love them because they remind me of how I have had the way I look at the Earth and how the way I approach Creation care has been changed by my Indigenous friends and neighbours. I love my moccasins because they remind me of a wise older First Nations woman I met at an Indigenous cultural center at the beginning of my own journey of discovering what reconciled relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people look like.

Nearly 50 authors have contributed to a new, challenging collection of reflections on how churches can engage in this framework of reconciliation. If you are somehow troubled by that history, curious about how Indigenous Christians think about this history and future, or believe it is your personal, Christian, or civic responsibility to work for reconciliation with the peoples who lived in the land before European settlers arrived, you will find in this volume thoughtful, committed contributions from church people on Indigenous rights, the role of the state and the church, what the scriptures say, relationships with the land and the church, and living into our responsibilities together.

“Climate change is affecting us all, and is especially impacting our Indigenous brothers and sisters here in North America and in most of the global south.”

These were just some of the challenging words spoke by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe spoke in her recent address at Tyndale University College and A Rocha Canada’s A Climate for Change event.

One Inuit leader said "we are human barometers of climate change."