Sarah Augustine | Ever Present Every Moment

Augustine:

The way I’ve been taught by Indigenous elders is that you can see the Creator constantly all the time surrounding you in this abundant life. Every time the rain falls, I give thanks. What a miracle that we can continue to live here and produce food. The people that I come from, value rain so highly, and it’s a celebration, a miracle every single time it rains. For me, the Creator is ever present in every moment. What I can do is demonstrate reverence through giving thanks. Also, for acknowledging the interdependence of how these systems work together, and to be conscious of that as I’m making choices about how I am going to live on this land, on this world. Sarah Augustine, I’m the Executive Director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. You may be asking yourself, what is the doctrine of discovery? It’s a question that came to me only recently. We’ll get into more details about what it is and how its effects are being felt today. In short, the Doctrine of Discovery is a legal framework that dates back centuries that gave Christian governments the right to seize indigenous land and dominate Indigenous people. I don’t think I need to make a case for why Christians should be thinking about how to dismantle such a doctrine, but the links to science may be less obvious.

Well, we have a lot to learn from indigenous ways of thinking and knowledge about the world, particularly as it relates to the climate and environmental crisis and the place of humans in creation. The theological perspective that allowed Christians to steal land from and destroy the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous people has not been thoroughly distinguished in the extractive and colonizing tendencies that displace so many people also played a part in the ecological mess we’ve made.

Sarah Augustine shares the wisdom she’s gained in her time spent with Indigenous elders and from her own experiences as a Christian Indigenous woman about how Christian discipleship could lead us toward a very different relationship, both with the land and the people whose ancestors once called that land home. Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Sarah Augustine, welcome to the podcast. I’m glad to be talking to you.

Augustine:

Thanks so much. It’s just a pleasure to be here.

Stump:

You’re the co-founder of the organization Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. You’re the author of a book that’s called The Land Is Not Empty, and we’ll get to both of those things in a little bit. You’re also a trained sociologist. You’re a Native American woman. You’re a Mennonite. That’s a lot of intersectionality as they say. Can we hear some of the backstory of this? Give us a little autobiography, if you would.

Augustine:

Sure. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I really just grew up as a kid growing up in apartments, child of divorced parents in a big city and didn’t really have a sense of identity much. When I was in graduate school, a friend from church invited me to be part of a project he was working on in Suriname, South America where Indigenous people were at that time and continue to be poisoned as a result of mercury contamination from mining. Of course, many people know that the mining interests in Suriname are all Canadian and American. That kind of deposition of mine waste and the impact it has on the biome and the ecology of that place, that’s all legal. There are legal structures in place that make that okay.

I was exposed to this group of Indigenous people who were really trying to just navigate, first of all, displacement. Being removed from their lands as a result of mining activities and then also environmental impact, and then the impact on their communities, their bodies. I got involved in that as a social scientist. My friend, who later became my husband, Dan Peplow, is a ecologist. He was really used to managing the science of toxicology and had less experience working with humans. He asked me to come and be a part of that.

That was really my introduction to the Doctrine of Discovery. It was kind of roundabout, right? I grew up in the United States, went to high school, college, graduate school. I grew up in a state with Indigenous people as an Indigenous woman, and really started to learn about the Doctrine of Discovery because I was trying to understand how could this environmental contamination be legal and what lever do I pull to get people to say, “Oh, this isn’t right. Let’s hold parties responsible and figure out how to work through this.”

I was really trying to find solutions. How do we approach this problem that feels like a science problem, but actually the science was resolved more than 50 years ago. It’s really a human problem. How do we work through this problem effectively? That’s how I learned about the bedrock of how our legal systems are arranged in the United States and also in the world and that is rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. That’s really my origin story.

Stump:

Well, I want to come back to talking specifically about the Doctrine of Discovery, but to work up to it through another channel that I’d like to push a little further into your own background. You mentioned going to church and you mentioned being an Indigenous woman. Tell us a little bit how these two intersect. You’re a Christian, you’re a member of the Mennonite Church. How does this intersect with your Native American spirituality?

Augustine:

Yes, I also practice Native American spirituality. Well, I would say a primary identity for me, if not my primary identity is as a Mennonite. I take that very seriously. A big part of the Mennonite tradition and understanding of the gospel is discipleship. Being faithful to the call of Christ and His ministry. I take that very, very seriously and I am an Indigenous woman and practice Indigenous spirituality, which is really rooted in faithfulness to one’s people and one’s land, creation and an understanding of one’s self or myself, I guess, connected with other living beings. In fact, all other living beings. What I would consider, call a closed system, which is the earth. System theory is a physical system where there are no new inputs or outputs. The water we have on the earth today is the water that’s always been. There isn’t any more coming in, it’s no new inputs. The air we have is the air we have, and there are no outputs. If we create nuclear waste, there’s nowhere to put it. It’s going to remain here with us. That, I would say is very much part of my understanding in my native spirituality and that we are mutually dependent within that closed system.

Stump:

Can you tell us a little bit more about your people and the land that you came from, just so we can hear and identify with that part of you as much as we can?

Augustine:

You bet. This is more delving deeper into my backstory. I grew up in New Mexico, but I didn’t have much of a sense of my indigenous identity beyond just being teased about it at school and so on. Then later dealing with discrimination. I didn’t really have a connection to my people because my father in 1943 was removed from his mother and his people and put in a boy’s home in Denver, which is 300 miles away from his traditional homeland. He was a displaced person, ended up raising a family in New Mexico, but I wasn’t connected to our extended family or have an understanding of that place. That all really became important to me through this experience of working with Indigenous people in Suriname and coming to terms with the fact that as a displaced person, my experience having grown up in the underclass and dealing with homelessness at times. My parents struggles with poverty, incarceration, substance abuse. All of those things were related to an arc of a story which is a displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands. One of the largest forms of that displacement is child removal.

I started to really learn about those. It was funny about my own story, getting to know people who I’ve now known for decades in South America and digging into, “Hey, what is the process of this land claiming and removal of Indigenous peoples from lands?” That is when I started to investigate who are my people? And really found out who my own grandmother was, this young woman who lost her son, my father, and who are the people of that land, and spent time learning about that and the spirituality of that place.

I now have the great privilege of living on the homeland of the Confederated Bands and Tribes of the Yakama Nation. That is the Yakama Indian Reservation in Central Washington, not New Mexico. I live all the way at a reservation in Washington, but have grown in relationship with the Tewa people, which are my people, and in relationship with the land there and a more intimate understanding of the history, how the homeland of my people was taken by executive order during World War II to develop nuclear energy and has never been returned. There is no plan to return it. It is federal land.

Yeah, I’ve learned about that story and have taken seriously the position of myself as an Indigenous woman. Where do I stand? How do I stand with my people in a good way and with the values of the spirituality of my people, which values all of creation?

Stump:

One more question about that, and then I want to turn more specifically to some of those values and how that impacts us. Just on this theological point that I’m interested in here, just because some of the circles that I’ve been part of worry about what they call syncretism, a blending of Christian beliefs with different cultural traditions. I should acknowledge that that usually means cultural traditions that are different from the dominant Western one, of which they’re a part, as though that itself isn’t a culture too, that has been responsible for syncretism with Christianity in some sense. I wonder though, is there any different worry here for us as Christians who are trying understanding the Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus through the cultural lens of Indigenous people?

Augustine:

Okay, just a tiny little question there. No problem. Give me two or three sentences, I’ll straighten that out.

Stump:

What I’m trying to get you to speak to, Sarah, is the worry that I can hear people in our audience saying, “You’re blending your Native American, these Indigenous spiritual practices. Isn’t that somehow distorting the true Christian faith?” I say that in a way that… Again, I want to acknowledge that, of course, we all do that to some degree, right? I just want to hear you speak to that a little bit if you would.

Augustine:

Yes, I would love to talk about all of that, and I’m going to give a couple of statements in advance. The first is that I am not a theologian and theologically trained. I’m not a pastor. All the things I can talk about are just from my own point of view. By the same extension, there are many indigenous cosmologies. There are more than one. There are many Indigenous spiritualities. Spiritualities are in indigenous languages in this country, which is more than 100. I can only speak to my own point of view.

Having said that, I will say that the United States in particular, as a people and as a culture, is really firmly rooted in an understanding of individualism. I would say the way that we practice Christianity in this country is rooted in that sense of individualism. That is to say an understanding of myself in my life stream, which is a limited lifetime, and that’s really the story. I relate to God as an individual to the individual of God. It’s true that I have family and friends and community, other people I’m connected to, but the main character is me as an individual and it’s my job as a responsible person to care for myself and to take care of myself and whatever excess I have, if I share it, then I’m a good person. I’m doing my due diligence as a good person.

That is a very specific worldview that is not grounded from my point of view in reality with the capital R. That is to say it is one cultural viewpoint and that Christianity, from my point of view as a non theologian… I won’t say Christianity… the Gospel of Jesus or the Ministry of Jesus as he was practicing it was not in that worldview or lens. That is a very specific worldview that is today in contemporary in the United States.

My reading of scripture tells me that in the Old Testament, when sacrifices that were being made, the children of Israel were relating to Yahweh the creator. They were doing that as a community and when they were being corrected, they were not being corrected for individual level behavior, but as a community. The structures of society, I’m just thinking specifically of a scripture in Amos that says, “You have exacted a straw tax on the poor and for that reason.” Yahweh says, “I am not interested in your sacrifices, in your celebrations, in your feasting, any of that because of this sin, because you are oppressing the poor.” From my point of view, a very strange idea is that Christianity today, as it’s practiced in the United States, is through this individual’s lens.

It is true that I am not practicing Christianity in that way. I don’t think that necessarily-

Stump:

That’s very helpful.

Augustine:

Yeah, that’s just one way and it is the way in this country at this moment. From an indigenous… Well, I won’t say from my indigenous point of view or my cosmology as I understand it from sitting with elders, I am responsible not just for what happens in my lifetime, but I’m very much experiencing in my life, the decisions of the people that came before me and my behavior and what I do today is going to have a direct impact on the people that come after. I’m responsible for that. My job is to be really careful in making compassionate decisions and wise decisions, not just for myself, but for all of creation and for the people that are coming behind me, not just my children, but all the descendants that are coming and not just human.

It’s my responsibility to think about what impact am I having in this footprint? The goal from what I understand from my elders, is to be faithful to the Creator. How do I know how to do that? By responding to the systems that are obvious in creation, mutual dependence. What is obvious in creation. Romans 1 says that the nature of God is evidenced in creation itself and God’s divine power and nature. We can see that in the created world. I know because of the systems that are available to me in creation, that faithfulness, rain falls on the just and the unjust, right?

I don’t need to practice in a particular way in order to know that spring will return, that pollinators will return to the soil. The microbes in the soil, which we as humans still don’t really understand how those microbes work. That tiny environment is making food possible for us, that we are in the symbiotic relationship with what an elder and mentor has taught me to call the standing green nation. That is the plants that are also here. We are in a symbiotic relationship with them, that what I do matters and that faithfulness or discipleship is being accountable to that. To me, that is not at odds with the gospel of Christ and it’s possible to participate in both of those things in a good way.

Stump:

Good. Yeah. Okay, you’re transitioning very well into the next topic I wanted to talk about, which is ecology and we at BioLogos have often called creation care. It’s one of these, I think, touchpoints that we as an organization that’s primarily focused on science and faith have with your work in particular and with this indigenous understanding. In chapter nine of your book, and on a couple of episodes of your podcast, you address creation, what I’m calling creation care from a distinctly theological perspective, noting that Western religion has predominantly understood faith to be at the center of their spirituality, where Indigenous spirituality often begins with reverence. Can you keep going further down this road you’ve already started by unpacking that difference a little bit and what difference it makes for how we could approach the rest of creation?

Augustine:

You bet. From my point of view, this isn’t keeping with the people who have taken the time to sit with me and teach me, elders. The Creator is available to me constantly and at any time and in every moment in creation. I don’t have to look far. The ground itself demonstrates the faithfulness of the Creator. The Creator is in the sky where I live in this hemisphere in North America, and the sun is rising in the east. I can look out at the east pasture where I live here on this farm and that sun providing a new day, a new opportunity for me to continue to live. This amazing opportunity to experience life as a human being that is provided to me in the morning.

That is the Creator available to me, constantly, all the time. The Creator is available to me and in all of the life that is abundantly around me, that the Creator is faithful in showing faithfulness to me and to us all. I don’t have to do anything to earn that. That is the nature of faithfulness. My job is to act with reverence towards that. In the tradition that I have learned, I don’t give thanks on Sunday morning or just once in a while. I give thanks every single morning at dawn. Every morning at dawn, I face the sunrise and give thanks. My child has also been raised to do that, and our family practices that 365 days a year. If I’m sick and I miss the sunrise, as soon as I take a step outside, I’m going to give thanks because that is demonstrating reverence, my place in the family of things.

I have a role and also a responsibility. Faith is this understanding, this is the way I was raised in the Christian Church that I learned at Sunday school, that faith is a belief in something that I can’t see. The way I’ve been taught by Indigenous elders is that you can see the Creator constantly all the time surrounding you in this abundant world.

Stump:

How can you not see the Creator, right?

Augustine:

The Creator is there with you constantly and every time the rain falls, I give thanks. What a miracle that we can continue to live here and produce food. This rain, the people that I come from value rain so highly, it’s a celebration, a miracle every single time it rains. For me, the Creator is ever present in every moment. What I can do is demonstrate reverence through giving thanks, and also for acknowledging the interdependence of how these systems work together.

To be conscious of that as I’m making choices about how I am going to live on this land, on this world. If I believe that God is absent and I have faith in the absence of what I can’t see, it’s a different kind of understanding of what that relationship is. If I am practicing reverence and I understand, “Hey, God is present here and now and in every moment, and the miracle of life is surrounding me in every moment.” It is flexible and fragile. Also, it is responsive and it also is resilient, but it’s resilient to a point, right? It’s also fragile. What I do in my role makes a difference in how this is going to work. I live here on 200 acres of an organic beef ranch, and we practice water conservation. We don’t raise traditional hay. We are a grass-fed operation, and we transitioned all of our land to drought resistant grass, native grass, so that we don’t have to provide irrigation.

When you compare our impact with our predecessor, the person who farmed here before us, we can serve 26 million gallons of water every month during the irrigation season. Yeah, that’s a big impact and it’s good for a lot of reasons, but when you irrigate 24 hours a day, which is what wheel lines do, you move them across the pasture, so every square inch of soil is not getting 24 hours a day of irrigation, but some portion of the pastures always being irrigated. That’s very hard on the soil. It leeches nutrients from the soil, it exhausts soil. It makes it difficult for the microbes in the soil to regenerate themselves. Using practices that we use, we don’t experience that.

It’s just a small example of saying, “I am here caring for this place. What is the best way I can do that and be conscious of the impact not just on me and my family, but on creation itself?” On this 200 acres we have… It’s a little bit like a wildlife preserve. I’ve been living here now for 17 years, and we have ducks in our riparian area who have been there for 17 generations, right? The ducks have been there. When we go walking down to the barn on this little trail, they don’t even really startle. We are embedded in this place. You know what I’m saying? If we have-

Stump:

You’re part of creation.,

Augustine:

Yeah, we’re part of it. We have relationship with many animals that live here. By not coming in and using tractors or four wheelers to cultivate, we are creating habitat for many different species of animals to live here. We actually have a little microbiome here, ecology that we get to be a part of. I’m not saying everybody has to do that. I’m saying in our individual lives and as a society structurally at a structural level, what is our responsibility to care for not just ourselves and our households, but all of creation?

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey, Language of God listeners, if you enjoy the conversations you hear on the podcast, we just wanted to let you know about our website biologos.org, which has articles, videos, book reviews, and other resources for pastors, students and educators. We also have an active online forum. We discuss each podcast episode, but it goes far beyond that with lots of open discussions on all kinds of topics related to science and faith. Find it all at biologos.org.

Stump:

Let’s push one step further into that as you’re talking about the non-human creation as well, and what was the word your elders used? The green…

Augustine:

Standing green nation, that would be plants and trees and so on.

Stump:

We’re part of this creation. I think words are important here and prepositions here when we maybe say instead of living on the land, we are living with the land, right?

Augustine:

Yes.

Stump:

We’re part of this community. Some people may have been surprised to just hear you say you have a beef farm.

Augustine:

Yeah, that’s right.

Stump:

If you raise beef and slaughter them…

Augustine:

We do, yeah.

Stump:

How do you square this with treating with reverence? Do people wonder whether that’s somehow inconsistent to have to eat things? Or can we do that in a way that is still treating the rest of creation with reverence?

Augustine:

Yeah, and thank you. It does come up sometimes, especially when we have student groups that come and visit us here on our farm or our beef ranch. I think something that’s really important to acknowledge is that we are part of the food web, and by we, I mean human beings. We are not separate from the food web. There is no way in which we can be separate from the food web. We are part of it. We consume food so that we can continue to participate in life. That food, whether it’s animal or vegetable dies so that we can live. At a cellular level, that’s the case. Those things are being broken down so that we’re able to live and we are not alone. That’s how all animals live. You could even argue that plants require animals to break down so they can continue to live, right?

We are part of this web of life. Yes, we are indeed. I think there is some arrogance in thinking that we are somehow separate from that. Those people who choose to be vegan or vegetarian, I have a lot of respect for those decisions. There’s nothing that’s made me want to consider being a vegetarian living with animals on a daily basis, raising animals and living in relationship with animals. If I were to choose to become vegetarian, for example, and I were to raise soy here on this land, if I were going to raise wheat or corn. Those are the primary things that vegetarians would eat. I would have to destroy the ecosystem that we’ve built here, and all the animals that live here now and call this home would be removed and destroyed to make that happen.

It’s not that when you’re vegetarian, no animal dies for you to eat. Animals do die for you to eat. They do. Because we’re part of a food web. For me, one of the things we’ve chosen to do as a family is to be really intentional about how we’re going to interact with the animals that we’re raising as food. Our animals are born here, and they die here on this property with as little stress as possible. They’re never in a feedlot. They are not [inaudible] or antibiotics in order to make them grow and to be palatable. They live in a peaceful environment and a low stress environment. We see our life with them as being symbiotic. We have a symbiotic relationship.

Stump:

I want to push a little further into our relationship to these other creatures. There’s a line from your book that from the indigenous perspective, “Even the hunter, when he finds his prey, finds his brother.” Is that the way it, is that the was called?

Augustine:

Yes. This is actually a saying or wisdom from here, this land, among the Yakama people. They say, “When the hunter goes to seek his prey, he knows that it is his brother that he will find.” Right? Understanding, that the relationship between the hunter and the prey is a familial one. That animal is sacrificing its life to give you life and that animal is your relative. It’s not some abstract mindless automaton, it’s a living being that is dying so that you can live. That’s also a practice that we have. My family, every time we eat beef, we give thanks for the sacrifice, the animal that is sacrificed for the meal.

Stump:

The science of evolution confirms this, right? That all creatures are our relatives in a very literal sense. That shouldn’t take us by surprise to say that, but I wonder now, let me ask one more part of this, that Christian theology has traditionally understood the doctrine of the image of God to be an important descriptor for human beings that in some sense at least sets us apart from other creatures or maybe at least gives us a different calling, set of responsibilities toward the rest of creation. How well does that square with indigenous perspectives on being human? Maybe for you in particular as an Indigenous Christian, what do you think of this doctrine of the image of God?

Augustine:

I would go about that two ways. The first is to say we have two creation stories in Genesis. The first is in chapter one, and the second is in chapter two. They’re quite different, actually. It might be interesting to think through what the takeaway message is in each one of those. I would say I relate more to the creation story and genesis too. That would be one way of going about it, which I feel is a more holistic way. If we are made in the image of God and that image is consistent with what we know of Christ, the message in the ministry of Christ, then I don’t think these things are inconsistent at all. Jesus talked about the lowest being put up high and that being like a child is the thing that makes you first in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was not talking about a structural hierarchy where people were ranked when the disciples came to him and asked, “Hey, which of us is going to be first in the Kingdom of God?” That was a pretty silly question from his point of view. And he said, “The first in the Kingdom of God will be those that are like a little child.” When we turn to hierarchy and say, “Hey, we have a nature like God, and therefore we have the right to dominate and subdue and to overpower and control and extract for our own purposes.” That’s completely inconsistent with the message of Christ.

Stump:

Yeah. Okay. This leads to another topic that our organization has increasingly addressed, which is, what does it mean to be human? I mentioned earlier you’ve co-founded an organization called Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. Let’s address this more directly here now. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I had not heard of the Doctrine of Discovery until fairly recently. On the one hand, some might think I should be forgiven for that since it was a doctrine formulated what some 500 or 600 years ago. But on the other hand, I’ve come to learn just how wide-reaching its effects have been on our world as a whole and on Indigenous peoples more specifically. Start here if you would, by describing… When did this doctrine come about and then how does it connect specifically to this question I’ve asked of what it means to be human or at least who gets to be counted as fully human?

Augustine:

Sure. I’m going to begin that by saying that the Doctrine of Discovery is a legal doctrine in the United States today and around the world. It is a paradigm that we live in that is invisible to us because we’re living in it, but it is the state of reality in our law. It was embedded in our legal system in 1823 by a series of supreme court decisions that were written by Chief Justice Marshall. There isn’t one law about the Doctrine of Discovery. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of laws rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. That is to say, all of our institutions reflect this logic because it is so deeply ingrained in our society. What is the it that I’m talking about? Well, the Doctrine of Discovery says it was a doctrine that was created by the church at the time of when Europeans had the technology to be able to traverse oceans and go around the world and begin to expand.

The church wrote a doctrine that justified why it was not only okay, but it was God’s will that Europeans would go and subdue and dominate the whole earth and basically enslave all the peoples of earth, including Indigenous peoples. That is called the Doctrine of Discovery or the discovery doctrine. One of the main tenets of this doctrine is what’s called terra nullius. It’s another legal term. Obviously, it’s in Latin. It means empty land. What this original doctrine said, it was in a series of papal bulls, it said that if terra nullius means empty land, if European monarch or the representative came upon a land that was inhabited, it was considered empty of human beings if it was not ruled by a Christian monarch. Anyone who was non-Christian was considered to be a pagan or an infidel, and that they were something other than human. That God had ordained that the church represented God and God’s will were therefore empowered and emboldened and justified in going to all the places of earth and claiming those lands for the church.

This doctrine of discovery is enshrined in our law today. As recently as 2005, that’s the most recent supreme court decision that was based on the Doctrine of Discovery. That was the Oneida Nation that was buying back land they had lost and wanting to add it to their reservation. They didn’t want to pay taxes for that because it was trust land. They wanted land to go back into trust. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion saying, “Based on the discovery doctrine, that land does not belong to you. It is the land of the United States because of this discovery doctrine.” The discovery doctrine says those people that were discovered do not have absolute title to their lands, only the European force that came and discovered them. Our work is dismantling that doctrine.

Stump:

Good. Forgive me for continuing to try to push you into theological directions.

Augustine:

Sure, I don’t mind. That’s okay.

Stump:

My own discipline comes before I hear the questions I’m thinking of, but back on episode 115 on this podcast, we talked to African American theologian Willie James Jennings, who’s researched some of the theology that colonizers used to rationalize their conquests. I don’t think anybody today disagrees that what people did back then was horrible and absurd. You tell in the book how it became the practice that a priest coming with the conquerors to new lands would read in Latin the theological statement that the Indigenous people there must submit or be subjected to violence, and it would be their own fault if they… This is absurd, right?

Augustine:

Yep.

Stump:

I wonder, and here I’m trying to invoke perhaps some circles that would continue to feel that maybe there was something okay, not about the violence, but maybe about spreading the gospel that justifies some degree of colonization in conquest.

Augustine:

Yeah.

Stump:

What’s wrong with that view from a theological, even a biblical perspective for why, “No. That is not the way that we as Christians ought to think about these people who are indigenous.”

Augustine:

You bet. I’m going to start with the lot and then I’ll get there. In 1823 when Chief Justice Marshall was writing these decisions, he said that the Indigenous people here in the United States had been justly compensated for the loss of their land because they received two things. One is civilization and the other is Christianity. That Indigenous people in the United States were justly compensated for the loss of their lands. That is all of their wealth, all of their self-determination that they still do not have to this day that was taken away, and the compensation was Christianity and civilization. Theologically, from my point of view, Jesus states his mandate in Luke 4, Jesus has just come out of the desert where he has been fasting for 40 days. The next story is he goes into the temple and he’s reading a text from Isaiah and he says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has ordained me to bring good news to the poor.” That’s what he says.

What is that good news? The spirit of God is upon me because he has ordained me to bring good news to the poor. He had list out what those things are, freedom for the oppressed, cite for the blind, release for the prisoner, and to pronounce the year of our Lord’s favor, which is Jubilee. I would interpret Jubilee as the just reordering of human systems, Jubilee—

Stump:

Western civilization wasn’t one of those things Jesus said he was coming to proclaim into everybody.

Augustine:

This is what he said as a liberator. This is what he says is his mandate. These four things, right? He’s there to do those four things. When he senses disciples out with the Great Commission and says, “Go into all lands and all people and teach this good news.” That good news was not domination, war, dominion, enslavement, genocide, that is not the gospel of Christ. That’s the first thing I will say. Another thing I will say is that, so much of the way our society is arranged, an individualist society, is a extracting society that is to say, a refusal to acknowledge that you were embedded in a closed system of mutual dependence. I can go into a place as an individual, and if I have the money to buy it, I can strip it of all of its natural resources, I can sell those to anyone I want to.

If I have enough money, I can go into another country like Suriname or French Guiana and buy that and strip it of all the natural resources and I can’t pollute that. I can pollute the waters. We know that mining waste, the impact it goes on for centuries. The impact is profound, but through this extractive mindset where I am the center, the most important thing. All I need is money to be able to go in and do that. That extractive mindset is… Well, I would say it runs counter to the gospel of Christ. I would also say that it destroys our ability to live as a species on this planet.

I believe that we are participating extraction to the extent, we’re changing climates, we’re like a geophysical force of nature, humanity on the planet now. We don’t have the power to destroy life itself, but we can destroy our ability as human beings to live here. Yes, we can. We are on the road to doing that. When we engage in decolonization and saying, “No, we want to live a different way. We’re going to live a different way based on discipleship.” We are actually saving ourselves, right? Not just Indigenous people, not just nature. We are returning to a sense of mutuality.

Stump:

Yeah, I think it may be easy for some of us to hear you talking about these extractive technologies and companies that are doing this, and for us in the church to think, “Yeah, they’re bad. They need to stop doing that.” But I don’t want you to let us off the hook too soon here quickly either, and how we ourselves, we the church with, I hope, the best of intentions, but have contributed to this as well, so much so in fact, that you quote somebody here in chapter five of your book that I just thought was so powerful. You’re quoting Stan McKay who says this really provocative thing—

Augustine:

A pre elder from Canada.

Stump:

Okay, he’s part of the Cree—this really provocative thing that I think not many Christians will hear, but I want you to talk about this as a way that we in the church need to hear, because he said, “I feel the activity of proselytization should cease until the people of the church, both settler and Indigenous, comprehend how the Doctrine of Discovery presently influences them.” When I was saying earlier that some people are going to want to try to justify some of this colonization in terms of spreading the gospel. Here, the response is, “You know? Maybe we need to just stop that altogether until we really realize how embedded those practices have been with this Doctrine of Discovery.” Can you give us maybe a few examples of how, again, with good intentions, the missionary activity has not followed this example of Christ that you were just describing?

Augustine:

Well, missionaries are often the vanguards of economic development. Economic development in the international economy is what we say, “Hey, economic development is for the good.” Right? The UN has economic development goals, but it’s almost always the case that vulnerable people and Indigenous people among them are the people who are paying the price for that economic development. Missionaries often will come into settings, round up people and make way for economic forces to come in and begin the process of extraction that. That relationship is well documented and those two things go hand in hand. Basically, Christian missionaries come in and part of their job is to Westernize the people that they’re proselytizing to, right? It’s not just about sharing Jesus, it’s about sharing Western culture and justifying western culture as the superior culture and the morally superior culture.

That process of asking people to give up their own culture, step away from their own history and understanding of reality. Step into a Western vision, creates the opportunity to come in and exploit that place. One thing I want to say too, and I think this is really important for the church to grapple with. The largest private landowner on earth, is the church. When we’re talking about land return, you don’t have to begin with governments. You can begin with church bodies. Huge beneficiaries of colonization have been the Christian Church. A primary beneficiary of colonization is the Christian Church. Christian churches are also financially embedded in extractive industry. That is to say, retirement funds, not only 401(k)s, but also trust funds that churches have, or the wealth that churches have is invested in mining, gold mining, copper mining. It’s invested in oil extraction, natural gas, because these are the most profitable industries, right?

Just like every other major corporation, churches are invested in these without any consideration for the impact on the people who have to live in the impact zone of where that extraction is taking place. As we are trending towards a green economy and there’s a lot of emphasis on that and a push to do that. Many Christians are advocating for additional investment in copper mining, lithium mining, without any regard to the people that are living in those impact zones. Habitually, there’s this process of saying, “Oh, if we’re going to live in a green way, that doesn’t mean we want to live sustainably. We’re just going to extract a different set of resources, regardless of the consequences.”

Stump:

You had really fascinating suggestion then for those of us who really do feel the spreading the gospel mission of Christ to be something we should take seriously, that instead of going to those Indigenous communities, maybe we go to the big mining corporations, these extractive industries, the financial institutions, and be missionaries there. You’re serious about this, right?

Augustine:

I am serious. It’s not a metaphor. I really mean it. I really mean it. If you think about it. Whose immortal soul is at risk? Is it people who are living in cooperation gently on the land, or is it people who are at the helm of this earth destroying extraction? What would it mean to send missionaries to mining executives and to world leaders? To me, we would have print postcards with the pictures of the missionaries. We would say this family based in Toronto or Denver, and they would go learn the language, spend time, and witness to the people who are at the helm of the systems of death.

Stump:

Well, it’s not hard to imagine which side Jesus would be on when you put those two groups of people next to each other, right?

Augustine:

Amen.

Stump:

Well, Sarah, our time is coming to a close here. I’ve really, really appreciated your conversation in this work. I’ve mentioned your organization, Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. You also have a podcast by that title. I’ll mention the book again, which is called The Land Is Not Empty. Any other resources you’d like to point our audience toward?

Augustine:

Sure. Thank you for asking. On March 10, there will be a free webinar that’s hosted by Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It’s called Unraveling the International Law of Colonialism: The 200th Anniversary of Johnson versus M’Intosh. If you want to learn more about the Doctrine of Discovery and how it remains embedded in our legal system, please check out this webinar. It’s an all day event. I’ve sent the website to use if you want to put it in your liner notes. The other, just quick plug I will make is that Sheri Hostetler, who’s my co-host for our podcast, and I are working on a book and that will come out in the fall and it is called, So We and Our Children may Live Following Jesus and Confronting the Climate Crisis, and it will be published by Harold Press in the fall of 2023.

Stump:

Excellent. Well, perhaps when that is out, we can talk again.

Augustine:

That would be terrific.

Stump:

In closing, we like to shift gears a little bit and ask our guests what they’ve been reading lately. Anything on your list that’s interesting.

Augustine:

Something that I would really like to recommend to others is a book called Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. This is by Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, it’s called. It’s really a fabulous read. He’s a Māori from New Zealand, wonderful reading. The other one that I would suggest is called Required Reading: Climate Justice, Adaptation and Investing in Indigenous Power. This is by the NDN Collective, Required Reading. It’s also just a great collection of essays.

Stump:

Well, Super. Well, thank you again for your work, for your inspiration to us to live more consistently according to the teachings and the model of Christ. Thank you so much for talking to me today.

Augustine:

You bet. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website biologos.org where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.