Monday, September 30, 2024: I can’t have a relationship with Creator God, without having a relationship with God’s creation.
I can’t have a relationship with Creator God, without having a relationship with God’s creation.
That’s just one understanding that I’ve felt but had trouble putting into words before listening to Dr. Wendsler Nosie Sr. and others with Apache Stronghold. God isn’t off in some distant “heaven” in the sky. God is here in God’s creation, especially in those “thin” places that God has touched and made sacred, from Oak Flat to Mt. Sinai, from Jerusalem to Mecca to our own churches. And many other places, if we can only be open to that possibility.
The Bible begins with stories of God creating the earth and all things on the earth. As Christians, we’ve tended to think of Adam and Eve as the culmination of the creation stories, given dominion over everything God had created before humans. But being in relationship with God’s creation suggests a different interpretation.
I believe that we should view ourselves as the younger siblings, the last born, of all God’s creation. And if we view ourselves as the younger siblings, perhaps we would have more respect for all our relatives who were created before us.
If we are to have a relationship with God’s creation, the best opportunities forthat relationship occur where we are, not where we came from, decades or generations ago. One recent example for me occurred when Apache Stronghold was praying on the National Mall, and we supporters were invited to participate in the prayers.
The Washington Monument was in the background, as we were walking in a circle. I saw two dragonflies circling with us over the lawn. Dragonflies to me are sacred creatures, similar to how many Indigenous peoples view eagles. So these two dragonflies circling over the National Mall spoke to me, saying that yes, the spirits of God are with us in what we’re doing.
Wendsler often tells a story about gathering statements for an Environmental Impact Statement from 400 Apache people about their spiritual connection with Oak Flat. A White woman, who grew up in nearby Superior, Arizona, also wrote a statement about her spiritual connection with Oak Flat. When the U.S. Forest Service compiled the Environmental Impact Statement, they took her statement out. Wendsler noticed that her statement was missing, and asked why.
The Forest Service officials replied, “because she’s a White lady.”
Wendsler replied, “I know she’s a White lady, but why?”
They replied, “Because only Native people can have a spiritual connection with the land here. If someone else wants to have a spiritual connection with the land, they have to go back where they came from!”
Wendsler asks the non-Native people in his audiences, “Did you know that?! The United States government says that if you have the Bible, you can’t have a spiritual connection with the land!”
My ancestors came from somewhere in England 400 years ago, from two city-states in what later became Germany almost 200 years ago, and from Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire) 140 years ago. I’ve made brief visits to all three countries, and I did have a feeling of being “home” when I spent a couple weeks in Latvia and met distant relatives there. I didn’t feel any connection to the land in Germany or England when I visited those countries.
But am I going to have spiritual connections with the land, with Mother Earth, in Latvia, or Germany, or England? No.
I’ve had a spiritual connection with Mother Earth in upstate New York, where I grew up, and in Maine, where I worked during my career, and now in New Mexico, where my wife and I moved after I retired. How dare the U.S. Forest Service officials tell me that I have to go back to Europe to have a spiritual connection with the land!
However, my spiritual connection with Mother Earth in the places where I have lived is an expression of what I have been able to learn largely on my own. I learned only a little from my father and mother about a connection to the land where I grew up, and nothing from them since I’ve moved to other places as an adult.
In contrast, the Apache people have a spiritual connection to Mother Earth in the places where they have lived and been in relationship with the land for many generations. They have much to teach those who will listen. Our corporate-capitalist-colonial culture has so impoverished our relationship to Mother Earth that we who are non-Native need to listen to and follow the lead of Indigenous leaders whose traditions have given them a stronger and clearer understanding of what this relationship could be.
Wendsler is right. The United States is trying to strip us all of any spiritual connection to God’s creation, to Mother Earth, the better to enable multinational corporations to exploit any and all the lands through mining and drilling and other forms of extraction. The representatives of corporate-capitalist-colonial culture think they’ve already created this separation for all of us who have ancestry from other parts of the world.
And in fact, that dominant culture of the United States succeeded in stripping my father, the child of his immigrant father, of any connection to Europe, by claiming that he could only be a “real American” – “an unhyphenated American” — if he avoided any connection with the lands of his ancestors. He accepted that assimilationist ideology, so I grew up with only scanty knowledge of where my ancestors had come from and hardly any family expressions of European culture.
Apache Stronghold’s legal case is an attempt to sustain the only form of connection to the land that the United States still recognizes. The United States, in this case, is trying to eliminate even the spiritual relationship that the Apache people — and by extension other Indigenous peoples — have with the land, with Mother Earth. Because only by doing so can the United States open up all lands to exploitation and extraction.
Indigenous removal is necessary for universal exploitation. If the United States wins this case, any place could be subject to corporate takeover and exploitation. If you value your spiritual connection to land and to Mother Earth anywhere in the United States, you have a stake in the outcome of this court case!
These reflections were written in Washington, DC, on Sept. 11, 2024, immediately following the prayer gathering of Apache Stronghold and supporters in front of the Supreme Court.
Reflection at this link:
John Maddaus Is a member of the Oak Flat Committee of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, and of First Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has listened to Wendsler Nosie and other members of Apache Stronghold speak at a prayer rising at Oak Flat, at the annual meeting of the Southwest Conference of the UCC in Phoenix, at the prayer ceremony with Apache Stronghold at his church during their prayer journey to Washington, DC, online during a UCC Creation Justice webinar, and in Washington, DC, and Hyattsville, MD, when Apache Stronghold’s appeal of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in their legal case was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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