Chapter 6 in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry is written by Ched Myers, an activist
theologian who has worked in social change movements for thirty-five
years. He is an educator who animates
Scripture and issues of faith-based peace and justice. Ched points to his solidarity work with
Indigenous peoples in and around the Pacific Basin in the 1980s as key to his
political and spiritual growth. (Information taken from biographical notes in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry). Chapter 6 is titled: “From
Garden to Tower: Genesis 1-11 as a
Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-Visioning”.
The first of the following excerpts is from
the opening of the chapter, the second from its conclusion. Though the entire middle of his chapter is
missing, my hope is that these excerpts will be helpful in capturing the
essence of his writing.
Origin stories matter. They tell us who we are, how we got this way,
and what our responsibilities are to our collective past, present, and
future. They shape meaning and help us
order life … for good or for ill. (pp
109, 110)
...
The bold, archetypal strokes of Genesis
1-11 name our settler history, however unsettling its critique may be to those
still loyal to the Promethean fables of modernity. The biblical “fall” is not so much a cosmic
moment of moral failure as a history of decline into civilization – exactly contrary to our mythic Western narrative
of Progress. As a literary expression of
resistance to empire, the primeval creation story rightly warned us of the
social pathologies and ecocidal consequences that have intensified
exponentially now for a dozen millennia.
As a result, our
generation faces a threefold crisis:
1.
The natural world has been
increasingly demystified and subjected to ever more intense technological
exploitation, to the point of collapse;
2.
Hierarchical social formation,
economic stratification, and war have proliferated to the point of perpetual
class and national conflict; and
3.
Human spiritual life and
ecological competence have atrophied, resulting in our growing alienation from
both nature and Spirit.
In light of this, the conversation
represented in this book is crucial. Our
settler churches need to learn from contemporary keepers of Indigenous wisdom –
both Christian and non-Christian – about how to re-vision creation care and
sustainable community. This includes
exploring how a “Native hermeneutic” might help us re-read our sacred
texts. But this will also mean
challenging deeply held assumptions about the congruency between “Christian
civilization” and the will of Creator for humanity and nature.
Furthermore, we Christians need to
re-center our theology and practices in real landscapes for which we take keen
responsibility. In southern California,
our educational work around what we call “bioregional discipleship” is grounded
specifically in the Ventura watershed.
We have come to understand that we can’t save what we don’t love, we
can’t love what we don’t know, and we can’t know what we haven’t learned. So, we are committed to literacy, both in the
ecology of our watershed and in the
painful history and remnant culture of the First Peoples of this place. For us, this means experimenting with Native
habitat preservation and restoration, and learning from Indigenous Chumash
traditions of relationship to this landscape and habitat.
It is impossible to argue, given today’s
ecological crisis, that the “civilized” life-ways of the last five thousand (or
five hundred, or even fifty) years are as sustainable as those of the previous
five hundred thousand. Let us settlers
heed the ancient wisdom of Genesis 1-11, which may be “all we have to fight off
illness and death”. And let us “repent”
– which is to say, struggle alongside Native communities to turn our wrong-way history around, and recover the
old ways for which we were created. (pp 119-121)
To put your hands on your own copy of Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry, contact Steve
Heinrichs at the offices of Mennonite Church, Canada. It’s a powerful read.
The blog Easy Yolk has a interesting post about Myers' work. You can read it here.
Submitted by Gareth
