My father was a man of great faith.
Whether he expressed it in traditional spiritual practices, what we
now call Wolakota, or through his Protestant Christian understanding,
faith is what guided him by a set of principles of always being
prepared.
Once, when new cable and pipes were
laid on the reservation, he clicked his tongue and explained that is
how it would all end for us: through fire. Reading Genesis, my father
accepted the Judeo-Christian belief that this world was born from
water, but that god would inevitably judge us and bring about our end
in fire.
His love of eschatology
notwithstanding, my father had a way of bringing our own lives into
the perspective of something greater. His understanding was through
theology, our generation’s understanding is through science and
culture.
As Native people, we often tout
ourselves as the previous guardians of the environment because of our
simple manners of living. But what stands out in Lakota thought and
philosophy is the concept that everything is interconnected and
related to one another. We honor the animals we use and consume, the
land we keep, the trees we shelter ourselves with and the water we
drink because we understand we all depend on one another for
continued existence; and everything has a right to exist. As human
beings – just another form of life on this planet – we are
reminded to take only what we need to survive and utilize it to its
maximum usefulness.
Along the way, through colonization
and settlement, we lost our way. We became caught up in the
consumerism and economic web of capitalism that insists we consume
for the financial wellbeing of everyone else. The message is that the
more we consume, the more money is made for others to support
themselves and what could be more Native than uplifting others.
Unfortunately, it is a perverted
understanding of our tradition, the layers of consumerism and
capitalism add barriers toward giving meaningful support of our
friends and relatives. We give money so we don’t have to pick up
trash, we pay others for the work that we can do ourselves so we can
feel good about ourselves. Our responsibility is not just to one
another, as human beings, but to our home and our relatives of the
animal nations, we are all related.
In the opening words of his
encyclical, “On Care for Our Common Home,” even Pope Francis has
touched on this responsibility as the leader of millions of Catholic
Christians, the world over.
“’LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore’ –
‘Praise be to you, my Lord.’” In the words of this beautiful
canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is
like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who
opens her arms to embrace us. ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our
Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces
various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.’”
“This sister now cries out to us
because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use
and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come
to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at
will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also
reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the
water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth
herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and
maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Rom 8:22). We have
forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our
very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we
receive life and refreshment from her waters.”
Science tells us that we must reduce
the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 400
parts per million to below 350 ppm. It seems insurmountable, but we
must begin thinking beyond our own, limited perspective. Our
self-obsession with how modern conveniences make our lives better
robs from the basic existence of future generations. Or, if we must
envision our stewardship in terms of our own comfort, we look back.
In his cover piece, Jon Lurie writes
about the closure of the Upper Saint Anthony Falls Lock, giving the
history of Owamni Yomni, the whirlpool where generations of past
Dakota people recognized the natural balance of the water ecology and
where 19th century industrialists saw only a natural
resource to plunder. By an act of Congress, it now returns to a
shadow of its former self to defend against the growing threat of
invasive carp.
By all of this, we mean to remind
ourselves as a community of Native people, that stewardship of this
planet is ours to reclaim. Whether we reclaim it by faith, as
scientists or activists, we have an absolute moral responsibility to
protect and defend the survival and prosperity of future generations.