Green pastures

Here's a new addition to the "Religion & Ecology" syllabus, complementing the chapter on "The Power of Place" in our textbook Grounding Religion but really showing a world-sized gap in it. (If "place" is more precious than "space," what about "land"?) The chapter introduces phenomenology, bioregionalism and cultural geography as ways of understanding "place" - valuable, but what about indigenous ways of knowing and inhabiting the land? In the light of Ojibwe writer and environmentalist Winona LaDuke's incandescent essay "In the Time of the Sacred Places" it becomes clear that all those are approaches for unsettled settler colonials, and don't come close to understanding what it is to be native to a land. LaDuke makes this clear from the get-go, with a sly reference to the time when "Christopher Columbus was discovered by indigenous peoples as he disembarked from his foreign ship and trespassed on native peoples’ land," but what really got me comes a few pages later, where she argues that the "frontier" still defines settler understandings of Turtle Island. The frontier?

Americans are also, by the social norm of the country, transient. This attitude and practice teach them the notion and enduring illusion of an American dream of greener pastures, always elsewhere. This, too, belittles a relationship to place. It does not teach responsibility, only entitlement...

I'd never thought of "greener pastures" this way, or of the American dream in those terms, but yes. We celebrate those who pick up from one place and go to another - not only without a thought to whether or not that new place is already inhabited, but also without thinking about the way relationships to land become contingent on a resident's dreams and might be put aside without a further thought should yet greener pastures beckon. My own life story is all about people moving - usually long distances across oceans and continents. And it's almost a joke in the places I have lived that next to nobody is originally "from" those places. We're all here for the time being; and though I've been fortunate to live in places where people dream of landing, who knows where life (as we say) might call any of us next? The land has next to no say in it.

How different it must be to think not of greener pastures elsewhere but of the pastures of your place as your responsibility to green! (Or watching that land despoiled, or being forced to leave it...)

Winona LaDuke, "In the Time of the Sacred Places,” Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Religion and Ecology, ed. John Hart (2017), 71-84: 71, 73