Living the Harmony Way
Randy Woodley in conversation with Emily Ling
Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, PhD is a farmer, activist/scholar, distinguished speaker, teacher and wisdom keeper who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture. Randy was raised near Detroit, Michigan and is a Cherokee descendent recognized by the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at Portland Seminary, and co-hosts the Peacing it all Together podcast with Bo Sanders. Dr. Woodley and his wife are co-sustainers of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds, a regenerative teaching center and farm in Yamhill, Oregon. You can find out more about Randy’s work as an author and teacher at https://www.randywoodley.com/, and learn more about the work of Eloheh and how to support it at https://www.eloheh.org/.
EL: Thanks so much for sharing with us, Randy. To start, for folks who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe who you are and what you're doing these days?
RW: Well recently an intern was reflecting on her time out here with us and she said to my wife, "Randy has a lot of different interests." But for me it's not a lot of different things -- it's all one. The intersections of ecology and spirituality and social justice, and my writing and my speaking on those areas, they aren't all different things. Those are all the same thing, just being expressed differently.
It’s been a journey to get where we are now. As a young student, I was an evangelical [Christian], but it never felt right to me. I decided to go to a Christian liberal arts college and that started opening my eyes, then I went to Alaska for two years as a missionary oppressor with native people and that's where I had my crisis. I said, "I can't oppress our native people. This is the same thing that happened to my ancestors and I'm a part of the problem." So, I decided that I would drive 5,000 miles from Kodiak, Alaska to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I found a seminary that I thought could help me with this aspect of my life. Of course, that was Palmer Theological Seminary, or what was then Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. They helped me not just find a more holistic way of looking at my faith, but also helped me discover how I would be able to be among my own indigenous people and not exploit them or objectify them.
After that, I hit the ground with my feet running and started causing trouble everywhere I went -- good trouble. I took on injustice in Western Oklahoma against a city, a county, and a major employer, and the police force and jail, and we were very effective out there. Eventually we were able to start a place where we practiced a more holistic approach to faith and spirituality, which was in Kentucky. We had a 50-acre farm school, a cultural center and community. But, then we lost that after a couple of years due to violent pressure from a white supremacist group and their 50-caliber machine gun. And at that point, we suffered a lot of emotional damage. My family and I lost our school because everybody was afraid to come down anymore, and we eventually had to sell the farm in 2008 - a very nice 50-acre farm - for half the appraised value in the economic downturn.
So, then I studied for my PhD and found a half-time job out here in Oregon. Eventually I became a tenured professor full time, and now after 14 years of that, I'll teach one more semester and then get back to our original plan, which was Eloheh. And at this time, this rendition is called Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds. We've been here for two and a half years, we've got all the infrastructure, and our farm is doing pretty good. However, we currently do not have a place to teach during inclement weather, and so soon we're going to be building a very simple pole barn type structure. We're going to start raising money for that, and that will be the final phase of getting things done on what has now been a 24-year vision.
EL: What a journey! I'm glad that you now have a new spot and that the long vision is coming into reality. So, the theme of this portfolio is “Entanglement and Liberation.” It came about through conversations with some folks about how the truth of our lives all being intertwined -- both human and non-human life -- sometimes complicates the more classic social justice narrative of various communities seeking liberation or freedom from any number of oppressors or unjust systems. I know from your indigenous perspective that you speak against binary views of reality, and so I was curious how you hold the idea of our inherent interconnectedness with each other alongside the idea of the necessary liberation from oppressors or freedom from different systems?
RW: Inherent in an indigenous worldview is the idea of both freedom and justice. The reason that we have a hard time putting all these things together is because of a corrupted western worldview, which we've all been affected by and that comes from the foundational fallacy of Platonic dualism. The ethereal is more privileged over the material, and anytime we create those kinds of hierarchies of reality, it's a false reality. Most of our systems are built that way in the West, in a false reality, and so it's hard to put Humpy Dumpty back together again and realize that people's freedom and justice are values that belong together. Any system, including what I call the whole community of creation -- that means humans, animals, insects, the earth itself -- all of those things are meant to live in harmony. We're meant to live in an existence of shalom, which is not a utopia, but it is a reality of this kind of harmony way. And our job as human beings is to maintain that. So, wherever we see that the system is failing, we’re called to correct it -- whether it means trying to stop the coral reefs from dying, or whether it means to stop incarcerating young Black men, or whatever sort of form that it takes. It’s all about restoring harmony to the world or some would say restoring shalom to the world. There's this reciprocal relationship between human beings and everything else on the planet, but too often we think that humans are above the rest of creation, or that laws or doctrine are above people – which is not a healthy way to think.
So, what we've been trying to do for the past three decades is to help people to deconstruct those ideas, decolonize, and then begin to indigenize into a more indigenous way of thinking. In America, North America in particular, our harmony way structure is I think the best option because it comes from the people who have been living here for around 28,000 years or longer, and who have learned how to live with each other and with the planet - not in utopia, but in a way that at least we can get good things done.
EL: It seems often that the people most engaged in social justice work - whether that's racial justice efforts or dignified labor movements – are not always that involved in environmental or ecological issues. And vice versa, some people who are on the environmental front aren't necessarily understanding of the dynamics of social justice issues. And yet, the way that we treat the land and the way that we treat people is often very much interconnected. For folks who may come to you starting from a lens of social justice, how does helping them connect with the rest of the natural world also shape how they view relationships between human communities?
RW: Well, I think one of the deficits of western theology and western thinking is the lack of understanding of place. Whether I’m talking to a group of people in Akron, Ohio, or in Miami, Florida, it doesn't seem to matter about the history of the place. And this, again, is where indigenous people can help because they preserve a long understanding of a place and the history and the spirituality of a place. We have to realize that there's a reason that things are happening unjustly toward human beings in a particular place, and it’s often connected to the ways people related to the land – from the enslavement of particular peoples, not just Black people, in order to labor to extract natural resources, to health disparities in minority communities due to pollution being directed into their air, water, and land. It's obvious, but it's not obvious because of the dualistic worldview. It also comes down to: if there isn't a place to fight for racial justice, if the earth no longer sustains us, it doesn't matter who's being treated what way because we're not going to be here to fight for it anyway.
The other thing is that we're experiencing what some people call an Anthropocene, but what I call an Europatricene. Because when we look at how we got in this ecological mess, it was not because of all people or mankind in general, no. It was a particular worldview of European men and their capitalistic yearnings in their feudal system that they spread worldwide. If you look at the way that European men have treated the earth and women and people of color, the cultural other, or who I would call the racialized other, the genderized other, etc., there's a lot of striking similarities. They extracted from all of them for their own pleasure, they objectified them, they exploited them. There are so many similarities between the exploitation and objectification of the earth and the exploitation and objectification of women and BIPOC communities. So, we have to climb out of that thing and begin to see that, hey, we're all fighting for something that's similar. We're just doing it in different way.
EL: Part of what I love about what you’re doing is that you are practitioners. You have the farm and it's not only critiquing the things that are wrong, but it’s also trying to really embody and live out the more beautiful possibilities. I think people desperately need to see that, because if we hear about all of the things that are broken but we can't point to something else that demonstrates what might be possible, then it's just so easy to get very hopeless.
RW: Yes, so, we do the farm for a number of reasons. One is to feed ourselves and to help feed our friends and family. But we also do the farm as a model for people to be inspired by, and that's why we are called a teaching farm because we also educate others on the kinds of regenerative farming practices that we use. Even if we can get somebody living in an apartment to grow a tomato plant on their balcony, we feel like they'll get a connection with creation. Then we tell them, "Hey, taste that tomato compared to the ones you buy at your supermarket, and save the seeds and share some tomatoes with your friends, and have them save their seeds." You have to get connected somewhere, and so we're trying to go all the way from the macro to the micro. That's why I wrote the book Becoming Rooted, in order to help connect people to the land in different ways.
I think we've done a little bit of everything in our lives. We have assisted houseless folks and created a place for them. We actually went to them in Oklahoma, and we said, "What do you need as a community?" They needed showers and a place to do their laundry. So, we created a place for showers and a place for laundry to be done. We had a sort of emergency program where we provided quick meals and a hotel during inclement weather. We hosted a baby needs closet so that any time your baby needed anything, you could come and we would probably have it. We led after-school tutoring in poor neighborhoods. We've done social justice work with jails, police departments, and major employers. We've done all kinds of cultural things such as Indian youth culture camp and powwows, and feeding programs.
Both the government and the church have really failed our native people and poor people. So, what we need to be doing now is taking the lessons we've learned over the years from all of our experiences and be teaching those to others. That's how Eloheh came about - because we had the vision to create a space for people to get hands-on learning. Mostly what we do right now is that we're having some camps, and we're helping people work through decolonization and the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery. We’re able to have three- to four-day camps right now during good weather because we have tipis and a yurt where people can stay, but it gets too hot in the summer for that and too cold and rainy in the winter for that here in Oregon. But once this building we are working on is built, we'll be able to continue doing these all year round.
EL: Speaking of education, you’ve had several new books come out lately. Can you share some about them?
RW: One I wrote with Bo Sanders, with whom I host the “Peacing It All Together” podcast. He and I wrote a book that was released during the Covid pandemic called Decolonizing and Evangelicalism. That came out in 2020. Then in January 2022, I had a book released called Becoming Rooted: 100 Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth, which I mentioned earlier. That one was written for the spiritual crowd in general, not for people of any one particular religion. It's about reconnecting with the earth, and there are a hundred short meditations and then an exercise at the end of each one to have readers go out and connect. That book has been doing well. It's along the lines of Braiding Sweetgrass except that it is a hundred short stories instead of one big story. Then a book came out in April 2022 called Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine. In that one is where I really lay out this whole western worldview and how it differs from an indigenous worldview. And finally, this September I released Mission and The Cultural Other: A Closer Look.
EL: In Mission and The Cultural Other, you offer a critique of Western missionary culture for its embodiment of a lot of problematic colonial values, especially its assumption of hierarchies of power that diminish the dignity in all people. In addition to the critique though, you also offer some new foundations for mission that are informed by more of an indigenous understanding of the teachings of Jesus. Could you just share one or two of those foundations that white and western-based faith communities in general need to begin to consider more if they are going to be sharing their tradition with others?
RW: Well I spend about six chapters really trying to help people understand that western mission as we know it, by which I'm talking about evangelicalism and all the parachurch ministries, is a white supremacist project. And because it is a project that was born out of a white supremacy, white supremacy is still baked in the bread of those projects. It is in that missional thinking, whether it's evangelicals or fundamentalist or particular parachurch ministries or whoever it is, because they are still going by a model that perpetuates white supremacy and that is very paternalistic. It says, “We are here to teach you. You are the object of my mission or my evangelism."
What I try to do then is begin to look at, “What is the real mission of Jesus?” Was it actually to pass along this knowledge that we give ascent to, and call that faith? In which case our job is to then tell others and live by those prescribed doctrines. That's what I would call a perversion of Jesus’ mission. Or is it a shalom-based understanding of an ancient system in Israel that parallels with a lot of other indigenous systems around the world of what we call “harmony way?” Everybody calls it something different. Israel would call it “shalom” and Jesus was trying to bring about that shalom. I'm going to use a word that's not popular, but I’d say he was trying to bring about the “shalom kingdom,” if you will. If we ever use that word kingdom, that word shalom should be used with it. And what does that mean? Well, if we look at Jesus' life, we understand what that means. It means being vulnerable. It means reaching out to those who don't have much. It means to love our neighbor. It means to want the same things for our neighbors as we have for ourselves. It's all about this “harmony way” that I described earlier. Our job is to repair the broken systems because that is what Jesus was about. That's what he was teaching and that's what he showed with his own life, and he really just didn't give a damn about doctrine. Doctrine was not a concern, but it seems we have turned it into a major concern.
At this point, we have to actually convert from a western worldview, because it really is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. So, the church finds itself in a lot of problems because it is trying to live and teach an unsustainable reality, and it's not what Jesus taught at all. We have to ask, “How do we become vulnerable?” I think God is the most vulnerable being who exists, and I think Jesus exhibited that as well or better than anyone else in history -- so how do I live my life as a life of vulnerability to others and to the whole community of creation?
Jesus said to love our enemies, and I don't think the opposite of love is hate. We sort of see those as a binary. But hate has to be fueled. It has to have some passion behind it, and so you have to really care to hate. I think in Jesus’ teaching we see the opposite of love is actually superficiality. It is to not want what is best for someone else when I have the opportunity to change that, and instead to just ignore people. It's the opposite of vulnerability. And so, for me to be a human being, I need to be vulnerable. That's my highest form of spirituality - my vulnerability. I think if we can start learning how to do that, we're going to be okay.
EL: Well, I love that you are helping show so many people how to be more vulnerable and how to be more fully human by being in healthier relationships with other humans and with all of the rest of the created world. Thank you so much.
