Seek Indigenous Wisdom

At the end of the last chapter we concluded that we would need some help removing our rose-colored glasses that only allow us to see profit and prosperity in the world around us, and that help would most likely come from indigenous wisdom. Indigenous peoples have lived for millennia on their lands without overshoot and environmental collapse. It would seem logical that we could learn from them.

But that is not as easy as it sounds. First, we have colonized many indigenous peoples, stealing their land and resources, destroying their cultures, and in many cases massacring them and/or moving them onto lands (reservations) far away. Secondly, there always remains the danger that, even in our best attempts to learn from indigenous peoples, we exploit them again for our own purposes.

We must come rejecting the way of the colonizer, humbly seeking to understand what we formerly could or would not understand, ready to learn. We must be “humbled by the consequences of our shortsighted folly and longstanding arrogance, or we will not be ready to learn anything new.” (pg 106)

McLaren reminds us of Jesus’ words that the meek shall inherit the earth. “Those with indigenous wisdom, those with a wise and humble spirit, those who pursue deep communal well-being rather than shallow individual happiness will have their opportunity to live by a different vision, different values, a different story.” (pg 106)

The Bible tells that different story, especially the Hebrew Bible from which Jesus came and which was the only Bible He had. One of the stories the Bible tells over and over again is of an “indigenous people who saw what the colonizer mindset was doing to humanity, to the Earth, and to her creatures.” (pg 107) Jesus was deeply rooted in that story.

The Bible tells of those who lived in the times that various empires – colonizers - came to be, and “who wanted nothing to do with any kind of exploiting civilization and its idols.” (pg 108) When God's people resist empire thinking and empire ways they receive God’s favor and are promised a life of shalom, well-being. When they take over the values and strategies of empire – as they often did – things go very wrong for both them and the environment in which they live.

“The Bible offers little hope to the arrogant oppressors, beyond the escape clause that if they repent – if they rethink their dominating overshoot project and defect from it, if they learn to live in humble, generous harmony with one another and with the Earth, they can begin again, if they do so on time.” (pg 109) Words like “repentance”, “salvation” or “redemption” (alongside the call to personal holiness) issue “a call for the privileged and powerful to rethink the deep and unrecognized assumptions of their civilization.” (pg 109)

The themes of doom and hope are intertwined in the stories the Bible tells of empires that pursue wealth and power by exploitation, oppression, and violence to people and the Earth, and the people of God who live in those empires. Sometimes it is the empires who suffer doom; sometimes it is God’s people. Always, hope is offered for those, individuals as well as civilizations, who will give up the colonizer mindset and work for real shalom.

“This indigenous library, like all indigenous wisdom, tells victims and perpetrators, colonized and colonizers, oppressed and oppressors the same message that combines doom and hope: The end of the world as you know it is near, but the end of the world as you know it is not necessarily the end of the world itself. To the elites at the top of a civilizational pyramid, the collapse of their civilization will truly feel like the end of the space-time continuum. They cannot imagine surviving apart from it. But to those of our species and other species who suffer under our civilization’s domination, our civilization’s collapse could feel like liberation. It would be, for them, not the end of the world but their only chance for a new beginning.” (pg 110)

For all posts in this series on Life After Doom, click here.