Healing Our Relationships
With The Community of Life
November 22, 2020
Before we begin…there’s something I want to share with you. In every indigenous culture I know, including the Choctaw Nation of my biological father’s heritage, it is important to begin and end every address to the people, and every public prayer, with the phrase “all our relations.” It gets changed to “all my relations,” if one is praying alone. This is part of the way in which indigenous people orient themselves in the community of all life: as relatives among other equally important relatives, rather than as lords of all they survey.
So: Great Spirit of Life and Love that flows through all the universe, people of this Beloved Community, and all our relations, may my words bring healing to all hearts who hear them today.
When I was in college, in a social psychology class, I saw a documentary called “Down on the Farm.” It was all about the devastating impacts of modern agriculture on ecosystems and farm workers: the soil erosion, water and air pollution, habitat destruction, human health effects. I was galvanized! I suddenly knew my purpose in life: to develop agricultural systems that would be sustainable. That would build soil, sequester carbon, improve wildlife habitat, clean up water and air, and result in healthy human communities. Everybody eats, and I could not think of a single thing more important or useful to do than help them do it sustainably. So off I went to graduate school.
Well, after a few years of learning about ecology and farming, I had come to believe that there was no way to grow food for humans that did not have serious ecological impacts. Even small scale organic farming changed the structure and function of the landscape, and harmed wildlife populations. In places like California, where large-scale irrigation was necessary, this was doubly true. Modern humans were just bad news for ecosystems, taking all the primary productivity for ourselves and leaving nothing for the other creatures of the earth.
These were the beliefs taught by the best environmental scientists in our country, along with the idea that when Europeans arrived in the Americas, they found a vast wilderness “untrammeled by man.” Indigenous peoples had lived there in small bands of roving hunter-gatherers, but they didn’t really count, and anyway, they were all gone now. The best way to keep islands of biodiversity alive, the thinking went, was to preserve them with wilderness status. Humans were inherently rapacious and could not be trusted to take care of the land, so we should keep the untrained and undeserving out of any place we wanted to preserve. Only those who had the right knowledge and commitment—the scientists—should be allowed in.
Despite my understanding that agriculture was an inherently harmful activity, or perhaps because of it, I determined that we could at least reduce its impacts. We could at least improve its sustainability. So that was my work for 20 years. And in all that time, I carried a weight of grief and shame and fear and anger so heavy that finally it dragged me to the ground. Humans were bad for the earth, and I was a human, and no matter what I did or didn’t do, I was causing harm to some other being somewhere else. I came to a place where I lost all hope.
Now I want to pause here—we’ll come back in a moment—to say how interesting it is to me now how very like this set of beliefs is to the doctrines of sin taught by various Christian sects. The Christian doctrine of Original Sin, developed by St. Augustine in the 4th century, says that humans are born in a state of complete separation from the divine.[1] Augustine believed that Jesus was sent to save humans from this state of separation; that Jesus’ death and resurrection would restore all believers to a state of unity with God after their death, and they would go to heaven. In order to be restored, to be saved, a person had to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s important to note that not all Christians believed in this doctrine; Abelard wrote that it was a barbaric notion of God that did more damage to Christianity than any enemies of the church ever did. But the doctrine of Original Sin provided justification for the project of Empire on the part of the Church and so it was accepted by the Roman Emperor Theodosius as sound.
A few centuries later, Calvinism took the concept of Original Sin and turned it into the idea of salvation of the elect. In this doctrine, humans are understood to be entirely depraved and corrupt, with no capacity to bring good into the world—which itself was a place of nothing but evil and corruption. Only a select few humans would go to heaven after death, while the others would be damned to hell for all eternity. These so-called “elect” were chosen by God at the very beginning of time. The way to tell who was saved and who was damned was to read the “signs.” Prosperity was a sign of the elect.
Now the Puritans, who colonized New England, were Calvinists. Imagine their shock when they encountered the indigenous peoples of the eastern American coast.
These peoples understood themselves as inherently good and beautiful, living in a good and beautiful world. They understood themselves to be one kind of people among many. There were the two-legged people and the four-legged people, the winged people and the swimming people, the crawling people, the tree people, the rock people, the cloud people, the stream and river people, the lake people. Even more specifically, there were the Bear People and the Goose People and the Otter People and the maple people and the salmon people and the thunder beings… the list goes on and on. All of these peoples were part of one family, born of the union of earth and sky, and each kind of people had their own role in the family. The way to flourish in this world was to care for one’s relatives—all of the other people in one’s human family, and all of the other peoples of the larger family. To not care for one’s relatives would be to fall prey to a deadly sickness that endangered not only one’s own life, but all of life. Harmony and balance among all of the relatives was paramount, and all decisions were made with this balance in mind for the next seven generations of the two-leggeds, the beings with the longest life span.
It was understood that some of the relatives in the family, like Deer and Rabbit, Salmon and Trout, Turkey and Grouse, Corn and Melon and Beans and Squash, had agreed to give their lives to others, in exchange for great honor and respect and gratitude. Hunters and fishers knew to never kill unnecessarily, and they and farmers knew never to waste a single particle of the bodies of the other relatives. Ceremonies and dances honored the spirits of those relatives who gave their lives to others. In this way balance was kept. It was kept and it was actively loved.
Of course it’s important not to romanticize these people. They were human just like all other humans, meaning of course there was jealousy and hatred and greed and rage and lust and the lust for power among them. But these emotions were actively discouraged in children, and understood as sickness requiring treatment in adults. If a person could not be successfully treated, they were cast out. To be cast out was to be dead. So the culture of seeing beauty in the balance among all of the relatives in the family of Earth was developed to a very high degree.
Imagine how shocking this was to the Calvinist Puritans, to meet people who loved their world, who loved themselves and each other, who sang songs of praise and gratitude every hour of every day, who ornamented their faces and bodies with bright colors, who laughed and sang while they worked, who danced and feasted and joked and played games and told stories for hours and sometimes even days at a time.
It was equally shocking to the Spanish conquistadores, steeped as they were in the doctrine of Original Sin, and the priests who followed them, in the southeastern part of North America, the southwest, and on the west coast. The native peoples felt sorry for these dreary folks and treated them as if they were quite ill; how else could you explain their fever for gold? Their belief that people were not already in a state of balance and beauty? Their belief that the earth was a bad place, given with all its creatures to humans to dominate, and that pieces of it could be owned? Yes, these people must be quite ill, so the natives took them in and treated them with great hospitality and kindness. As Alice Walker has written, this turned out to be a mistake.
Now, to return to the story I began with, I was sick with the understanding that ecologically, humans could do nothing but bad. Even though theologically, I was a Unitarian Universalist and rejected the doctrines of original sin and salvation of the elect, I had lost all hope, and I could barely function.
And then I encountered an ethnobotanist named Kat Anderson. Kat spent her career studying the uses of plants by the indigenous peoples of California, with a particular focus on central California. The first time I met her, she spoke of contemporary Patwin and Miwok women crisscrossing the Central and coastal valleys on traditional routes between traditional sites, gathering supplies to make baskets. These women also cultivate traditional foods, like their grandmothers before them and their grandmothers before them. Kat showed photographs of foods and meals the women prepare, of which she was invited to partake. She said the foods are delicious, and when grown in the traditional ways, require very little water. Some, but very little. I felt a tiny stirring of hope. The native people and their lifeways were not gone from California, they were very much still here, and they knew how to make and grow everything they needed, sustainably! What’s more, they were willing to share what they know because it would help heal the world!
The next time I heard Kat speak, she spoke of research she did in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the central foothills of the Sierras, talking to tribal elders there. This particular tribe had lived in those parts for thousands of years. Their lands were not taken from them either by the Spanish or the Americans, because they were not particularly valuable for farming or grazing, and there was no gold.
The elders often lived to be over a hundred years old because they lived such a healthful life. Their main staple was acorns, but they also ate an enormous variety of other foods, from mushrooms to manzanita berries, from deer to rabbits to fish and crayfish. They worked in groups, with a ceremonial song for every activity. And here was the thing that stunned me: they intensively managed the ecosystems in which they lived.
They used controlled burning to maximize biodiversity, prevent catastrophic fires, keep big trees big, and keep forest duff from building up. They used coppicing in some kinds of oak trees to maximize their acorn yields, but left others alone to maximize theirs. As a result, their lands boasted sugar pines 6 feet in diameter, and oak trees whose branches stretched 60 feet in every direction. On the healthy forest floor, mushrooms and flowering plants grew in profusion–flowers being essential to everyone’s health and wellbeing. In riparian areas, the people managed sedges and reeds and willows and redbud for basket materials. They made a refreshing drink by running water over mashed manzanita berries. The elders described the relationship they had with the community of life in which they lived as reciprocal and profoundly intimate. They had a specific role in it, and so did all of their other relatives. They kept certain grassy areas clear of trees so the deer and elk would flourish, and in return, the deer and elk gave them a few lives so they could flourish. They tended the oak trees, and the oak trees gave them literally tons of acorns.
Once Kat was talking with an elder, and said, so the jays bury the acorns and then forget where they are, and that’s how the new trees get planted? And the woman said, laughing, “They don’t forget, that’s their job!”
In her gorgeous book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of a study in which a grad student of hers was looking at the decline of sweetgrass populations in an area of northern New England. Sweetgrass was commonly used by the local indigenous peoples for baskets and cordage. Some of the women who still gathered these grasses said it was important to harvest them in one way. Others said it was important to harvest them in a different way. The grad student compared the two methods to a control group that was not harvested at all. The botany professors on her committee said well of course the one that is left alone will do the best; everyone knows that humans just damage everything and plants grow best when left alone.
But it turned out that that both methods of harvesting produced similar results in terms of plant growth and reproduction, and both produced much better results than leaving the plants alone. Sweetgrass had co-evolved with humans; human interaction with them was essential for its survival. The plants were declining because humans had left the relationship.
When Kat Anderson was interviewing those tribal elders, one woman spoke of how sad it is that so many modern people don’t go out gathering and tending the plants. She said, “Nature loves us, and misses us.”
Nature loves us, and misses us.
The ecosystems in North America, it turns out, were not wildernesses untrammeled by man when white people arrived on this continent. They were intensively managed by humans. The people and plants and animals here co-evolved over thousands and thousands of years. Human interaction with each ecosystem was essential to its function. All of the fabulous beauty and richness and biodiversity that explorers and pioneers encountered when they arrived here were the direct result of human intelligence and understanding. But human intelligence and understanding directed to a purpose that most European Americans have never understood: the flourishing of all of the relatives in the family of beings. The thriving of the whole community of life.
Nature loves us, and misses us. Human beings can be agents of beauty and goodness. The knowledge of how to manage ecosystems sustainably has been greatly diminished because of genocide, but it still exists. The people who have this knowledge are still here. They still live in every part of this country. And they are offering us this knowledge because they know it is the key to the survival of not only our own species, but all of our relations. May we be willing to learn from them. May we be willing to change.
May it be so. All our relations. Blessed be.
[1] The concept of Original Sin is different from the concept of ordinary sin. In English, the word “sin” comes from an old archery term meaning “missing the mark.” So to be a sinner is to be a person who misses the mark, in big and little ways. In Spanish, the word translated into English as sin means something like mistake. A sinner is then someone who makes mistakes.