Seeking the Ultimate and the Intimate

Randy Woodley in conversation with Alexandria Barbera

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of speaking with Randy Woodley about his books Shalom and the Community of Creation and Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth. Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley is a public intellectual, author, activist, farmer, scholar, speaker, and wisdom keeper widely recognized for his leadership in the fields of Indigenous and Intercultural Studies, Ecology, Spirituality, Race, Theology, and Missiology. He and his wife Edith are co-creators and co-sustainers of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds, where they invite people to a deeper spirituality and new relationship with creation while modeling regenerative Earth-tending practices and Earth justice. Learn more about Dr. Woodley’s books and initiatives by visiting his website at www.randywoodley.com. 

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Alexandria Barbera: Tell us a little bit about your background.

Randy Woodley: Both my parents are mixed blood Cherokee, although assimilated. I’ve always had a native identity, and in high school I used to receive the Akwesasne Notes, which was a newspaper published by the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. It was something of an underground rag for the Indian movement. John Mohawk, the editor there, would later become a major influence in my life in terms of my intellectual journey and understanding Indigenous rights. I was a meth addict at 19. I started following Jesus at that time and was miraculously delivered from the addiction. After that the people in my church basically told me to cut my hair and get rid of my native posters—those things were all “of the flesh.” 

Without knowing it at the time, I was faced with what I came to understand years later as this Platonic dualistic dilemma. There’s this idea of a super-spiritual existence outside the flesh, and Western identity is all rolled up into that. And many of those people in that church were mixed-blood (although the were assimilated), they told me to just be “normal” because this was the “normal” way to follow Jesus. For about four or five years I tried walking that way, but I saw a lot of contradictions. It took me about five years to really acknowledge what was going on and decide to find a different spiritual path. So the next question was, well how do I do this then. I ended up being a missionary in Alaska to Inuit and Eluit kids, and that’s where I spent my two years as a “missionary oppressor.” I left there and decided that I never wanted to oppress my own people—historically that’s what was done to my own ancestors by the Christian missionaries. I then went to get my Masters of Divinity at Palmer’s Seminary. While I was there, I met many influential leaders who helped direct me through not only my own identity as a purveyor of the gospel but what that meant in the context of my social reality as well. 

Eventually, I became the Executive Director of the Anadarko Christian Center, in Anadarko, Oklahoma, which is considered the Indian Capital of the nation—we have 17 tribes within a 40 mile radius. There I was put in charge of 10 native churches, and it was then that I began to see how deep the effects of colonization really were on our people. We also suffered a lot of persecution, death threats, and people breaking up our meetings, and that set me on a trajectory which forced me to really look at the whole thing deep inside, in particular how much self-hatred we’d been taught through colonization. I came back to accepting my nativeness and the Western church had very little to offer. I felt that we were more missionaries to the church rather than missionaries from the church. After that experience I started pastoring a small culturally native church where we did many traditional things, and then I eventually did the PhD in a cohort with other Indigenous thinkers. I started writing, did my dissertation on the Harmony Way structure. 

Barbera: Was there a time you felt that your Indigenous identity was at odds with your Christian faith? How did you eventually come to understand that Christianity and Indigenous spirituality go hand in hand?

Woodley: Eventually we ditched Christianity altogether. About 12-15 years ago, my wife and I came to the conclusion that we’re not really Christians, we’re followers of Jesus. We think you can follow Jesus and be a Christian but that it’s actually pretty difficult. We don’t need the trappings of the West or the dualism of the West. One of the main influences that has helped bring me to this conclusion was the work of John Mohawk. He’s a farmer also, so it made a lot of sense to me that the way we treat corn as well as the land is all theological. Religion is all about seeking the ultimate and the intimate, and that’s where it came together for me. I read a lot of journals from Evan Jones, who wrote about how the Cherokee people are following God. And so he sort of worked as a double agent, which set up a model for me to work from as well. Some of it was through my own dream and visions I’ve had, listening to elders, who were kind enough to point me in the right direction—overall, I’d say there were several streams of influence. Where we are now has actually made my faith stronger, because I don’t see any contradictions between Indigenous teachings and the teachings of Jesus. At first it was hard to wrap our minds around this, but now it’s just so obvious. I see a polar difference in Christianity and our traditional teachings, which I believe are compatible with the teachings of Christ—wouldn’t it be nice if Christianity reflected the teachings of Jesus! We really have all been held captive by this empire religion which we need to decolonize from. 

Barbera: Both books rely heavily on story to convey their messages and arguments—what would you say is the value in this story strategy, and how can storytelling help people reconnect with the land more generally?

Woodley: Our stories are actually written in the land. They actually happen in a place. Even if it concerns stories that might not be considered “real”—events happen on some mountain or other terrain, and so that’s how stories connect us to land. It’s a better means of communicating truth than propositional truth, which is the Western way of doing things. You can’t find yourself in propositions, but you can always find yourself somewhere in a story. It’s about understanding who we are in the story, how we relate to other characters or different people we know in a story. For something that’s been around since the beginning, the West has tried through the scientific method, and things like efficiency, to find a better way—but linear, propositional truth is not a better way. It’s part of the dilemma of the Western worldview. Part of the problem is that the first thing that a Western person wants to know is did this really happen, or is this fact. But story is not for that purpose. 

If you look at Scripture it’s probably around 90 percent story. And if you can’t understand story, then you can’t possibly understand what’s going on in Scripture. So the truth of story is the truth in the story, not the imagined “real” event. Stories in the beginning of Genesis for example get interrogated for their historical accuracy, but no one who writes stories like that intend for them to be interpreted that way. But that’s how far off the West has gotten us from understanding how the world really is. And this propositional style goes all the way back to this Platonic dualism where more importance is given to the ethereal world than the material world, to our minds over our bodies—instead of understanding the whole of reality, which is all of that plus more. 

And so this propositional method developed as a result of that, so out of the Reformation the products of the mind become the most important thing. And they’re so serious about this that they’ll even kill each other and start wars over their beliefs which are propositions of the mind. That’s not the point. Jesus would never recognize that kind of faith, and if he did it was as criticism for the people in his own day who were not understanding the big picture, this whole system of what I call the Shalom-Sabbath-Jubilee construct. And so in terms of communicating, if you want someone to really get something, you tell them a story. This propositional Western worldview is a failed experiment and not sustainable; we feel it’s time to find another one. Especially in North America, we believe our Indigenous people have the wisdom to move us into the future.

Barbera: Tell us about the Harmony Way. Why is balance and harmony so important to many Indigenous worldviews?

Woodley: What I came to understand is that the teachings in our Original Instructions and the teachings of shalom are basically the same. We’re all Indigenous from somewhere. Our people learned to live with the land or else they wouldn’t have survived. Native teachings stress balance and harmony with the whole community of creation, and that’s our main job as human beings, to maintain harmony. We have this message embedded in our DNA, which is how do we live “Indigenously” with the land we find ourselves on. When I wrote Shalom, I was writing to help Christian people understand that our Harmony Way is very much in line with the big picture of the shalom message—specifically as understood by Walter Bruggeman, who is one of the world’s experts in subject. Shalom is basically the idea that nobody’s hungry, there’s no war, people know how to resolve their differences… it’s about living well, it’s about well-being. And we believe that our foundational role as human beings is to be those people who keep harmony, to keep the world in balance. To be people who can go and fix things, both through physical action and ceremony and prayer. That’s who we are, that’s our identity. 

So Israel had a particular way of doing that—what I call structured love, where a seventh of each person’s is set aside for the poor, the widowed, the orphan, the marginalized, the immigrants, etc. That’s structured, but then on top of that there’s this generosity—if you leave a bushel of wheat out in the field you should just leave it, because somebody will need it and use it. Don’t glean the edges of your field so that the people can come and feed themselves. This has to do with Sabbath too: every seventh year you set aside everything for everyone else, and then there’s Jubilee, where in the fiftieth year the big things happen. It means that nobody can become too poor or too wealthy because in fifty years it all balances back out. 

Jesus says in Luke 4 that he’s the fulfillment of this. And he doesn’t just mean that spiritually or metaphorically, he wanted to show us how we should treat the disenfranchised. I surveyed over forty-five tribal groups in the U.S. and Canada and interviewed eight spiritual leaders and elders, who spoke their own language, and everybody of all forty-five different groups had their own Harmony Way construct. They each had similar values and foregrounded generosity and hospitality. And people all over the world related to this and said well, we have a Harmony Way too. These are the Original Instructions that we’ve forgotten. In a lot of ways Jesus is just reminding us that this is something old and it’s something new in terms of how we’re supposed to relate to one another. So when Jesus talks about a kingdom, it was a shalom kingdom—it was something that he was trying to restore and help people to see again. And the rest of the New Testament is just individual people trying to live that out by solving specific problems: love one another, accept one another, be hospitable to one another, don’t complain when you take someone into your house. It’s all about explaining this shalom way that Jesus came to tell us about.

Barbera: I think a lot of Christians would think of shalom as a term for peace. Do you think ecological peace is also implied in that?

Woodley: The question is not “does shalom encompass the land.” That’s the dualistic mindset. Shalom can’t not encompass the land. This is all part of the shalom teaching where setting aside part of the land for the marginalized is intrinsically related to the land. If we understand ourselves, which is one of our values as native people, as being related to everything, or what I call the whole community of creation, and we are all part of that community. So Shalom then or the Harmony Way is for all of this. And peace is just an very anemic form of trying to describe shalom—the derivative words for shalom—shalem, mean a whole parcel of things, like repaying debt, the land producing what it should, our allegiance being to Creator, resolving conflict without wars, it means all of it, this whole construct. And I drew on Bruggeman’s understanding of shalom in my own work, and he says that land is the central theme of scripture—well, it would be if the people are Indigenous, their Indigenous to a land. So we can be separated from that land. So to even begin thinking “does this apply to the land” is to understand ourselves as separate from the land. But we are part of it, we are not separate from it. So, of course, shalom involves the land and the whole community of creation.

Barbera: You mention in the book that justice is one of the implied meanings of shalom. I think for many Westerners “justice” has more exacting or punitive overtones. How are Indigenous views of justice different from this, and how are they central to the Harmony Way?

Woodley: I think it’s a good thing to begin talking about restorative justice, because this hits the mark much closer than our American system, which is a horrible system. It is punitive, and I think that’s a very legalistic way of looking at justice. But real justice involves not only the offended but the offended community; it’s up to them to set a restorative path. Part of that may be punitive—some Native examples of that would be banishment for a period of time, until the person changed before accepting them fully back into society—but in the United States we practice this in a very wrong way. Justice is not just about punishment but restoration. You don’t fix the problem with punishment, you may feel you’ve removed it but in reality punishment creates a whole new set of problems in the process. So I think restoration has got to be the key to a shalom concept of justice.

Barbera: You write in Chapter 4 that “many traditional Indians view the story of the fall in the Genesis account as a story about Europeans.” I thought this was very powerful. Do you think there’s an unconscious acknowledgment of humanity’s Indigenous origins in the biblical creation story? Would this be a good place for settlers to start the work of re-indigenizing the Western imagination?

Woodley: We live according to our myths. It’s what we believe about ourselves and our context that we live by, as well as the mythologies that have been passed down to us. They may be correct or incorrect. So in the Western world, whether you’re religious or not, you live by this myth of original sin and the fall from the garden—this leads to the subjugation of women and so on. Anytime you adhere to a dualistic interpretation, you start having certain people positioned above others, whether it’s men over women or white folks over everybody else. All of that comes out as myth, but there are other ways of looking at that myth. If settlers want to use the original sin story and call something original sin, I would say that the original sin is the misuse of the land. The misuse of the land is to eat from a tree that Creator says not to eat from. And that’s a particular tree, the knowledge of good and evil, where all of the sudden everything is in binaries, good or evil. There’s nothing in between. We get purity culture, we get punishment. 

But life is just not binary like that, there are so many tensions that we have to live with in life. So maybe the story is teaching us that we disobey when we find ourselves in a mess. The better choice is to live with the land. That’s really the whole story there, what is the land teaching you. There are some really beautiful moments in the story that show this theme, like humans being made from the dust, from the soil. It shows our relatedness to the land right there. There’s also Adam, the first man, naming the rest of the creatures. To name them you have to get to know them—you don’t just give them arbitrary names. That’s the Western way. In the Indigenous way you have to watch their habits, you have to really understand and know the whole community of creation. Genesis and the rest of Scripture needs to be reinterpreted for the West to arrive at a non-binary, non-dualistic understanding of reality. 

Barbera: In the introduction of Becoming Rooted, you write that “we are all indigenous to some place.” Who is your intended audience for this book?

Woodley: I’d say it’s for everyone. In some of my other books I take on a theological, philosophical, historical point of view, but in this book I wanted to write for everyone of all faiths (or no faith) to help them connect with the spirituality that all people can have with the land, to make it real, and to walk along side them in a non-threatening way for an hundred days, or however many days they choose, without getting into the big theological-philosophical constructs. I also wrote it for Indigenous people, to remind ourselves of who we are. I just wanted to make this idea of becoming rooted in the land very real and very plain and very simple. At Eloheh Center for Indigenous Justice, we have people that come and are changed over the weekend, I don’t know what it is. They’re connected to the land through ceremony and story, and all of the sudden they think differently. Their worldview starts to change. So I thought, how could I do that in my writing? What’s a way to replicate that experience? One of my former students and I wrote a book after Shalom called Decolonizing Evangelicalism, and we did it as a dialogue. It was a way to get people into the story as opposed to looking at it from an objective point of view. So Becoming Rooted is my attempt to try and walk alongside people in their daily lives. I think there’s this spirituality in the land that we all sense regardless of religious affiliation.

Barbera: I was really intrigued by the line “nature is always speaking, but we are not often listening.” Besides helping us reconnect to the land, do you think listening to nature can help us solve our environmental crises? Can the Earth tell us what we need to do? 

Woodley: Yes. Mother Earth is talking to us right now through climate change. But we’re not getting the message. So you can look at this as something metaphorical or real, but my understanding is that human beings have taken the place as primary consumers of the Earth’s energy. And that’s not our job, normally we’re tertiary consumers. So we’ve begun to drain the earth of its water, its soil, all these kinds of things—we’ve literally replaced zooplankton as one of the earth’s primary energy consumers. Originally we were meant to graze that, to eat here and there, and so Mother Earth isn’t going to allow us to take this underserved place, this place where we’re out of balance. This means we need to change most of our practices at both the personal level and for our communities. I did a commencement speech at a seminary not long ago where I talked about me, my world, and the world, and I think the key is to have integrity as we address those different spheres of reality. I might be working on things from my own life and my own self, but I’m also working in my own community, whether it’s my church, my town, my county, and so on. If I’m working there first then maybe I’ll get a chance to change the world. The point is to have integrity, we all have to start working on ourselves, and we can do that while we work in our communities and organizations. It starts with the little things. What are some of the little things we can do? What should we be boycotting? What are some of the buying practices we need to adopt? It’s about personal lifestyle choices as well as structural solutions. I’m personally an advocate for organizations that support securing human rights for the planet, because I think that’s the fastest path to stopping climate change. There’s some other countries and cities in the United States that have done this as well.

Barbera: You alluded to this in Shalom as well, but many of the stories you tell in Becoming Rooted challenge the idea that Indigenous worldviews are utopian. Specifically, I’m thinking about the section on Plant Medicine which explains how disease came into the world. Why do you think settlers rely on this particular idea so often when exposed to Indigenous teaching?

Woodley: The key is living daily in harmony, which is not utopian. Neither is shalom by the way—both the Harmony Way and shalom are not utopian visions. If anything, Western Christianity is a utopian vision, because one of the sure signs of utopianism is to allow the ends to justify the means you use. So it’s really the opposite. People would rather settle for a utopian ideal, which is sort of a cynical view, than actually say we can live this here, we can live in harmony. And the way the West has gotten around this is dualism, by saying we can live in a disembodied manner while we're here. We can have our philosophical assumptions and rationalize or justify why we don’t live that way. That’s disembodied, that’s a divided reality. Indigenous people actually offer the opposite of utopianism. It’s not about perfection—that’s another false thing that Christianity has picked up, this idea of being flawless. Perfect is simply being perfect for the job you’re meant to do: in other words you’re the right fit for it. As human beings, our “right fit” is to be people who keep harmony, people who keep balance. That’s who we are. Going back to John Mohawk, he’s a Seneca elder who has now passed, but he wrote a book called Utopian Legacies where he really takes on the Western worldview and explains how utopian it really is, and how Native worldviews are not. There’s this Irish idea that I like which says that you can tell how good a Christian someone is by how you treated your milk cow. If it’s disembodied, then it’s not real. Utopianism lives in the mind, whereas the reality of embodied existence is about living the right way. It’s about all of these parts coming together, it’s about our minds, our bodies, our hands, our intuitiveness. If my reality is up in my mind, then embodied realities are going to seem unrealistic. I have to live this out? This is fantasy. It’s like The Matrix or The Truman Show, but now the lights are falling down, the stage is falling apart, and people are realizing that their reality has not, in fact, been real. And Indigenous leaders and elders have traditional views that can help get us back into reality.