Hi Friend,

Teaching the ReMembering Course is, for me, something of an artistic practice, perhaps akin to weaving, where there are many threads that I am bringing together, teasing out, tugging, unravelling, and then re-weaving. Much of the time I don't want to take any one part of the weave away from the rest of it. But every now and then, something shows up in these massive histories, a little tangled knot, that I want to tease apart, not just for current participants, for also with you, and others who might be interested.

In this case, the knots entail some of the ways that the metaphors/ theological concepts/constructs and how they influence public thought, policy, and cross-cultural settler-indigenous conversations today. In particular, the theological concepts of the Promised Land and, especially, of Paradise.

Already, you might be thinking, oh, woah, ok, those are not small topics, Sara Jolena. How long is this email going to be???

Well, to switch metaphors for a moment, I'm trying for something bite sized. OK maybe this is a few bites. A snack. Some theological "chop chop" to chew on, if you would.

(Before I do that, I want to note that in my last email I talked about ways to get an Orange Shirt for Orange Shirt Day. Well, now Krissy is selling Orange Shirts on her website! There is a limited number available, but if you are interested in them, here's the link!)

One of the many theological concepts we get into in the ReMembering Course is the role that the Promised Land and the notions of the Garden of Eden played in the imagination of the (especially) English colonizers who came to Turtle Island (what we now call the Americas).

Leaning on the works of the eco-historian Prof William Cronon and the indigenous scholar Steven Newcomb, I talked about how in the imagination of the English, the colonizers continuously referenced how Turtle Island/America was the "promised land." I might have said something like, "In so many ways America was the Paradise/Promised Land that Christendom had been looking for for generations." And then we got into how they 'paved paradise and put up a parking lot', so to speak. (Oh, thank you, Joni Mitchell!)

Just as a quick attempt to fill in a few pieces for those of you who might be less familiar with these concepts.... "Paradise" in the Bible is first referenced in the first Chapter of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve lived in Eden. Note that the Hebrew Book of Genesis does not actually call the Garden of Eden "Paradise". The original Hebrew uses the term "gan-eden", which roughly translates to garden of delights. When the Hebrew was translated to the Greek (around the 2nd century), it became "parádeisos", which itself derives from the Old Persian term for "walled garden." Over time, the translation and the usage of "paradeisos" became "paradise." (We could do a whole thing on just the difference between those words and their implications!)

"The Promised Land" refers, first, to a land that God promises his chosen people in Genesis: this is first stated in Genesis 12:1, when God says to Abrahm (later Abraham) to leave his family and lands and go to a place that God will show him. This land would be given to Abram's descendants. That land was not empty: it already had multiple peoples on it (Genesis 15 names the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.).

The concept of Paradise is not the same as the concept Promised Land, though there is some interesting overlaps between how both are understood, especially early modern Christian imaginations.

(Side note, which could also be its own course: If you have studied the lineage of Abraham at all, you will note that Abraham had two sons by two different women: Isaac, son of Sarah, and Ishmael, son of Hagar. From Isaac rises the nation of Judaism, and from Ishmael rises the nation of Islam. Thus, if we are going to take this biblical passage literally, which many people have done, this 'promised land' is given to both Jewish and Muslim peoples. It is not clear in Genesis what the other peoples already in that land are supposed to do/go/be at this stage of the story. Later, during the exodus out of Egypt, in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, the Israelites are told to enter the land of the Canaan and destroy those who are there. Which they do.... though later accounts suggest that not everyone was destroyed and many communities did survive. In case you are curious, to my knowledge, there is no archaelogical evidence that this actually happened (here's an article about that). Which in no way lessened the importance of this story several millenia later.)

While it would be very easy to focus on the role of the Promised Land in contemporary middle eastern politics, in our ReMembering Course, we focus on how these mythological stories/concepts of both Paradise and the Promised Land relate to how the English/Europeans understood and related to the land/waters of America and to the indigenous peoples who had been cultivating those lands/waters for many years.

Unquestionably, based on the early writings and letters of missionaries, colonizers, settlers, and their European colleagues, we know that both of these mythological motifs played a key role in how the Europeans conceptualized the New World.

The key phrase here is that this was important in the imagination of the colonizer.

This metaphor was not the metaphor that the indigenous peoples themselves used to describe their homeland.

Not long after our recent class conversation about this topic, I was in a context where I heard someone of European descent referring to America as "Paradise" .... to an indigenous person from America. I don't know what this particular native person thought; we didn't get a chance to discuss it, and he might not have noticed it or been bothered by it. But I inwardly cringed.

Because in doing so, the person from the dominant culture is using a metaphor/idea from their own dominant/colonizing culture to frame the land/waters that are here.

This runs the risk of continuing to impose a Christian framework onto what was a non-Christian society.

This does not invite inquiry into a whole set of questions: how do your peoples think/talk about this land? Or; are there concepts of "paradise" in your culture? Or, "how does it feel when you hear dominant culture refer to this land as "the promised land"?

Instead, it assumes that the native person can not only understand and navigate the dominant culture's framework (often true) but both can and wants to use that framework to enter into a discussion with that person. (Big assumption.)

It also takes away from both people getting curious about different ways of relating to land. And to the past. And to the future. And to the present.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that every culture has its own version of "the Promised Land" OR of "Paradise." That's just not the case.

But both of those concepts are so important in American (and in some ways in wider modern) culture - it is such a big part of so many different aspects of historical, literary, and policy-driven decisions and cultural frameworks (in the U.S. this includes concepts such as "the American Promise" which => "the American Dream"), that it is hard for people born in America to escape it.

I'd even say that for many people it plays a largely sub-conscious, somatic role in their embodied life, which comes out in all sorts of everyday discourses, as well as in critical policy choices.

When does this matter?

In general, it matters because of the overarching tendency of universalizing one culture (the dominant Christian/American culture) and assuming that those tropes, myths, etc., automatically translate and can be understood and used as a shared starting point for another culture deprives us of the nuances, complexities, and opportunities of learning and doing things differently. Part of the problematic pattern is the projection of 'our' worldview onto another culture.

For the "Promised Land" motif, it also matters because the "Chosen People" have the "god-given authority" to wipe out the local people already there. Which is exactly the reasoning that the American Christian elite used in justifying land theft, indian boarding schools, the Indian Removal Act, etc etc etc.

These ideas and their somatic embodiments of multiple forms continues to influence US policy both at home and abroad today.

Assuming that other people, especially native colleagues, necessarily share this worldview is problematic.

For the "Paradise/Eden" motif, it carries within it the assumption that the people within the Garden/Paradise/Eden are innocent/naive - they have not yet eaten of the apple of knowledge (because that's what got humans kicked out of Eden so if they are still in Eden then they clearly must still be innocent/have no shame/are indecent/have no knowledge of the nature of good and evil.) This easily lends itself to all sorts of prejudices, including that it assumes some kind of idealistic, totally harmonic life.

This is a grossly unfair and inaccurate projection. It does not recognize that indigenous peoples on this continent were not "innocent." They were then and still are people. And people are people. Which is to say they had their own problems, their own fights and conflicts and betrayals and complex political alliances that shifted and changed over time. The Native folks were no less innocent of the Europeans than the Europeans were innocent of the power of Native thought and way of life - a power that effectively challenged Europe to such an extent that both European settlers and Europeans themselves had to go through very significant cultural, political, and intellectual shifts (as detailed in that excellent though very long book, The Dawn of Everything - let me know if you want me to do a podcast specifically on that theme).

As you know: Putting anyone on a pedestal takes away their humanity and makes actual relationality very difficult.

Notice, here, that the nature of substantial theological motifs - the complex ideas that are carried within these long-standing, multi-generational concepts that have shaped and continue to shape societies - are not always understood by the people who use them. I include Church leaders in this (although I hope their theological education was substantial enough that they have a sense of them!) Lots of people use these ideas as metaphors, often very casually. That's how language, everyday discourse, and big ideas tend to work.

Thus, a person using these concept might very well be trying to say something else that isn't about universalizing their culture and projecting it onto someone else's culture.

Someone might be trying to say: "wow, the world is really messed up now, I wish we could go back to a time when the world was less messed up; when life was simpler; when humans were in harmony with creation. I'm so sad about our world. I guess I'm just longing for some kind of Eden. (etc.)" and not actually know or think or question what they are invoking with that particular metaphor.

Or they might be saying, "Wow, we (people of European descent/dominant culture) had this whole big ideological notion of Paradise and of the Promised Land. And then we arrived here, and it was as if we were arriving in the place that we had been dreaming about for thousands of years - a place that was just so abundant with life, with fish and trees and birds, that there really was enough food for everyone, and people didn't have to starve. I miss that time. I want us to go back to that time. I yearn for that world to be with us again. And I'm so angry that when we saw the "paradise" we had been dreaming of, we really f**** it up. We thought we needed to "develop" it or "improve" it in order to "own it" and to "make a profit." That just really sucks. Why oh why did we have to pave the paradise we thought we wanted in order to.... what? put up a parking lot?!?"

I think that's often what people are trying to say. They are trying to express a yearning for something that they imagine once was (some of it actually really was true) and to use a larger mythological framework to talk about that yearning. The yearning is for wholeness, connection, and abundance. Maybe even for simplicity. For a life - a world - that might have been possible today had our country's settler ancestors been able to learn from their indigenous hosts and neighbors about how to actually care for this land.

I don't know what those indigenous folks would have said, but it might have included some version of - look, so, this is not your "Garden of Eden". There are a lot of us here. We have developed our own ways to care for this land. We have been given instructions by our Creator/dieties/spirits/ancestors about how to care for this land and to live well here. We have developed particular knowledge systems and protocols and myths - many of which are very very different from what you are talking about over there. Can you suspend your myths long enough to hear what we are saying?

If any of these themes are naturally arising in your relationships between native and non-native peoples, and it seems appropriate to talk about them (which it might not!), how do you want to approach them?

There are a lot of ways. Re-interpretting the questions that we are asking one another and ourselves is a big one.

Of course, these notions are hardly limited to motifs such as Paradise and the Promised Land.They are all over the place, and they are informing us in so many ways. They are all part of the code of this culture.

And the cool thing is - we can de-code ourselves.

All of us, no matter where we come from, can ReMember ourselves into other sources; other ways of being; into a longer and larger process of rematriation.